We might cut the future increases, but cutting to half of current levels? I don't see that happening, you'd need FAR more than a carbon tax to make that happen.
The modest carbon tax in British Columbia has cut emissions in that province by 16% while emissions grew in the rest of Canada by 3% (a rate that likely would have grown higher still if Ontario and Quebec weren't also working to reduce emissions). A carbon tax, by itself, might not reach a 50% reduction, but it could spur changes in consumer behavior. For instance, now that gas prices have fallen again, sales of SUVs are increasing again after declining during our last period of high prices. That's probably a missed opportunity to reduce emissions.
Without a carbon tax, the United States is aiming at (and currently looks like it will hit) a target of 20% below 2005 levels. If a carbon tax had been added to the policy, the United States might have been able to hit 40% below 2005 levels, which is not that far from 50%.
The problem arises when 95% of the population is fooled into voting for a single party with two wings, both of which are working against them.
Frankly, I doubt you understand politics. Despite your claims the parties are different entities although with very similar goals (power and control). In some areas, the policies of the parties are indistinguishable because they are appealing to same people for funding and trying to get same people to vote for them. Both parties need a majority of votes to win so they are by necessity fighting over the same people in the American center.
Frankly, in the current American system, large differences are not sustainable because if the difference loses votes, it will be abandoned and if it gains votes it will be copied or mirrored by the other party. The American system, whether by design or by accident, generates nearly identical parties.
It's not that the parties are the same organization, because they clearly are not, it's that the American political system is so poorly designed that serving the people brings few benefits when compared to playing internal politics for advantages and begging money from sponsors to fund election campagins.
Maybe I should have clipped the quote shorter, to make my meaning clearer. I was making an observation that every organization tries to claim power because it's human nature to seek power. Virtually everyone is part of "those who want to consolidate power in their own hands". While people seek power for different reasons, some good, some bad, there are very few people who want to be powerless.
So by my reading of Dredd's claims that makes all organizations the same. I have to admit that does make for a very simple world view, which is perfect for those with very simple minds.
Libertarianism has never been fully implemented anywhere.
Oh, but it has in a few places, most of them last less than a year before they are destroyed by a neighbour or internal struggles. Although, I hear that the government of Honduras is fond of libertarianism, and it's working out quite well, if you are either rich and can afford your own private army, or have your own guns and want to work in a private army...
So, those that denounce the skeptics are the ones actually being "anti-science".
I guess you must be anti-science too, since you are denouncing the people who are skeptical of the skeptics...
When you start attacking people that disagree with you, all you are left with is dogma, which is more dangerous and harmful than debating an evolving science.
So why are you attacking the people who are skeptical of the self-proclaimed skeptics?
Here is a graph showing human factors versus natural factors over the last 50-65 years. By themselves, the natural factors would have the earth cooling, which it has actually been doing since the end of the last ice age. So global warming is actually slightly more than 100% anthropogenic.
for yourself or you can look at a pretty graph that summarizes the findings.
What can we do about it if so?
There are a variety of strategies that we could try but the simplest, easiest, and cheapest solution is to apply a price to carbon emissions. Any economist can tell you that charging for emissions will reduce them.
What does that cost?
Very little, many of the economies with carbon emission taxes are outperforming their neighbours, who don't have emission taxes.
What does it cost to adapt to it rather than try and change it the other way?
Generally speaking, estimates of adaptation costs that have them running around 2-4 times as much as mitigation are considered to be low-balling the costs.
But that's a largely irrelevant question. The relevant questions are: what is going to happen in the future, what are the costs and benefits, can we intervene, how risky is intervention, and should we intervene. The science related to those questions is highly uncertain, and many of those questions are primarily about values, preferences, and economics, not climate.
The libertarians (among others) are very, very scared of having an honest discussion about those issues, which is why they continually attempt to deny that climate change exists or has an anthropogenic cause. That is why we keep having the same moronic debate about whether climate change is real. We can talk about what we're going to do about it, when half of the people are listening to professional liars who are paid to sideline that debate for their sponsors, who are pretty happy with the status quo and afraid of change.
If they wanted to mitigate the risk of disease the medical exception would not be in there. They are just as dangerous if not more so (often it's compromised immune system as the medical reason so they pick up things easily). This bill is coercion by the state for parents to comply, it has no apparent medical effect if it leaves one class of unvaccinated children in school but not others.
Just like a $5 dollar discount coupon has no effect, since I still have to pay the rest of the bill?
The rate of medical exemptions is reasonable stable and small, and as long as the rate of people who had special exemptions was similarly low it was an acceptable risk, however, thanks to vaccine paranoia and the frauds who peddle it, the rate of unvaccinated children with special exemptions has rise dramatically, and no longer falls into "acceptable risk". So the exemptions are going away, and the parents of these children will have to find a different way to be ignorant and dangerous.
You have to be very careful with Penn and Teller, they have a strong libertarian bent and they seem to frequently fail when researching issues that involve their politics. I wouldn't trust them on issues like second hand smoke that they are likely to view as "government interference". It tends to make them derp out and present a weak one-sided case as if there were no valid counter-arguments. Personally, I stopped watching "Bullshit" after a few too many political shows where they left me disappointed with their half-assed, one-sided, "facts".
By spending $5 on something, you would be telling Valve that you're a paying customer and not a freeloader who's actively working to destroy their system?
But I may be biased, because this will cost me nothing because I have already paid more than $5 to buy some cheap games during the summer and winter sales. I would imagine that for the vast majority of Steam's customers it will also cost them nothing because they are actually customers and have spent some money with Steam at some point in the past. You represent a corner case, a rare exception, a freeloader who legitimately (by your claim) uses Steam's services without ever paying Valve anything.
I'm telling Valve that I'm willing to pay additional money for a service that was supposed to already have been paid for with my purchase of the initial game.
I've seen this claim before (probably from you), but I'm don't know what game you bought that you think entitles you to permanent and unlimited access to all the services of Steam in perpetuity.
You could always splurge and spend $5 to get access to the services you want. There are so very many games on Steam it's hard to believe that you wouldn't be able to find a single thing there that you'd want.
A) You're not important enough for them to mess with specifically.
B) The fact you "trust them with your business" might be influencing your understanding of the charges against them.
For one the post you replied to was about what Microsoft would have done if it had been "as evil" as Google. Re-read it.
On the topic of your other claim, Microst didn't not just provide "their web browser as a default with their OS". That's just part of one of the tricks that they played. They provided Internet Explorer for the sole purpose of preventing and delaying the development of web-based alternatives to Windows and Office. They licensed Internet Explorer (guaranteeing Spyglass a percentage of every copy sold) and provided it for free to cut off Netscape's money supply (screwing Spyglass over as well in the process). Mind you, Netscape wasn't even a competitor of Microsoft's until it made the deal with Spyglass. Microsoft was scared of the power of the Internet and the Web and purposely engaged in a campaign to sabotage the development of software that was operating system independent and subvert the internet, if they could.
They also forced manufacturers to sign deals where if they wanted to be able to sell any computers with Windows on them, they had to agree to ship them with Internet Explorer and only Internet Explorer.
Furthermore, they then tied Internet Explorer into the operating system and spread it's code across other system DLLs so it couldn't be removed easily without breaking Windows. They made it load on boot so it would load faster then competitors, and used undocumented APIs that were faster than the standard ones to give themselves an advantage. When competitors tried to use those same undocumented APIs, Microsoft would introduce changes to sabotage their competitor's products while simultaneously updates for IE that worked around the newly introduced bugs.
However, once Netscape had been destroyed and the threat of "operating system-less software" was gone, Microsoft essentially dropped Internet Explorer into a deep dark hole. They barely touched it for almost 9 years, which just goes to show that it was all about destroying a potential threat to the monopoly. Sure when you say they gave something away for free it doesn't sound bad, but it is actually an anti-competitive practice called flooding the market and it is evil and illegal when you have a dominant position in one market and use that tactic to extend your dominance into another area.
I understand that some people are too short sighted, too stupid, or too libertarian to understand why this was important, but this is just one of many campaigns of reckless destruction that Microsoft has engaged in to protect their cash cows.
This whole "Microsoft is evil and Google isn't" is really pretty childish.
You know, it could be childish and true... Microsoft has a long and sordid history of going far beyond what "*every* business does" to compete. Whether or not they're evil, they have proven over and over again that they can't be trusted.
Do tell me why, then, an Information Service was even defined if nothing was supposed to be classified under it.
Who says there would be nothing classified under Title 1? As far as I understand we're talking about reclassifying internet connections as Title 2, everything else that ISPs do (like email service, web hosting, etc.) would remain Title 1.
Then what do you do when, despite having the monopoly, they don't provide universal coverage and provide universally lousy service, such that a super-majority of people in the district are willing to vote to have their taxes increased to set up some competition?
Naturally, you become a libertarian and claim that everyone who disagrees with you is a lazy parasite.
Then perhaps the right path to that is to get the benefits divorced from what many believe to be a religious institution.
That's a great idea, let the stupid decide what the laws should be. Marriage isn't a religious institution, it's a legal institution. It's a contract and it always has been. The religious ceremony literally means nothing legally. You can be married without a ceremony and you can be not married despite having the ceremony. The ceremony is the fluff, the marriage certificate you sign during (or after) the ceremony is the actual important part. Marriage is civil law.
Furthermore, in America marriage has never been solely the province of religion, and can never be so. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" is the very first amendment of your constitution. If marriage is a religious institution then government has no business making any laws about it. So anyone who believes that marriage is a religious institution and thus gays shouldn't be allowed to get married is wrong, because either it's not religious and the government has no obligation to bow to the views of some Christians or it is and the government is legally prohibited from doing so by it's own constitution.
Additionally, please note that some churches are perfectly happy to marry gay couples and preventing them from doing would be an actual infringement on their religious liberties unlike the bullshit argument that not allowing you to prevent a gay couple from getting married is somehow restricting your liberty.
jcr has a point. If [Mississippi] is as racist as as [South Africa], then how many have been killed?
This whole [Mississippi] thing has been noting but bullying on the left's part. "[Civil Rights]" [are] nothing more than a ploy to force acceptance on people who have serious religious object to [blacks] and supporting such [people]. If this were not the case why is it that people who believed that a "we don't need a piece of paper to prove we're married." All of a sudden, that piece of paper is so important because [mixed race couples] are the ones with traditional views of marriage.
I'm done with Democrats and the left. A bunch of hypocrites. And the right isn't much better.
I knew I'd seen your argument before. People before you believed that blacks didn't need to be married because they weren't really people, and then they opposed mixed race marriages because black and whites shouldn't mix that way. Most likely, 20 years from now you will vehemently deny that you were ever this homophobic.
What is worse? Someone refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding, or cutting someone's head off because they are gay?
The latter, of course, but you are engaging in the same bullshit as Fiorina. Has it ever occurred in your sorry excuse for a brain that Tim Cook might oppose both activities? When will you navel-gazing idiots learn that "somebody else did something worse" is never a good reason for tolerating injustice?
Of course, the former wasn't happening in the first place. It was a drummed up story by the left. But don't let actual facts get in the way.
Then why pass a law to enable anti-gay people to break contracts with gay people? It certainly wasn't "the left" that passed the law. Get a clue before you spout your ignorant nonsense.
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We might cut the future increases, but cutting to half of current levels? I don't see that happening, you'd need FAR more than a carbon tax to make that happen.
The modest carbon tax in British Columbia has cut emissions in that province by 16% while emissions grew in the rest of Canada by 3% (a rate that likely would have grown higher still if Ontario and Quebec weren't also working to reduce emissions). A carbon tax, by itself, might not reach a 50% reduction, but it could spur changes in consumer behavior. For instance, now that gas prices have fallen again, sales of SUVs are increasing again after declining during our last period of high prices. That's probably a missed opportunity to reduce emissions.
Without a carbon tax, the United States is aiming at (and currently looks like it will hit) a target of 20% below 2005 levels. If a carbon tax had been added to the policy, the United States might have been able to hit 40% below 2005 levels, which is not that far from 50%.
The problem arises when 95% of the population is fooled into voting for a single party with two wings, both of which are working against them.
Frankly, I doubt you understand politics. Despite your claims the parties are different entities although with very similar goals (power and control). In some areas, the policies of the parties are indistinguishable because they are appealing to same people for funding and trying to get same people to vote for them. Both parties need a majority of votes to win so they are by necessity fighting over the same people in the American center.
Frankly, in the current American system, large differences are not sustainable because if the difference loses votes, it will be abandoned and if it gains votes it will be copied or mirrored by the other party. The American system, whether by design or by accident, generates nearly identical parties.
It's not that the parties are the same organization, because they clearly are not, it's that the American political system is so poorly designed that serving the people brings few benefits when compared to playing internal politics for advantages and begging money from sponsors to fund election campagins.
Maybe I should have clipped the quote shorter, to make my meaning clearer. I was making an observation that every organization tries to claim power because it's human nature to seek power. Virtually everyone is part of "those who want to consolidate power in their own hands". While people seek power for different reasons, some good, some bad, there are very few people who want to be powerless.
So by my reading of Dredd's claims that makes all organizations the same. I have to admit that does make for a very simple world view, which is perfect for those with very simple minds.
Libertarianism has never been fully implemented anywhere.
Oh, but it has in a few places, most of them last less than a year before they are destroyed by a neighbour or internal struggles. Although, I hear that the government of Honduras is fond of libertarianism, and it's working out quite well, if you are either rich and can afford your own private army, or have your own guns and want to work in a private army...
They are the "Janus" party... two faces of the same organization -- those who want to consolidate power in their own hands.
That pretty much describes every organization everywhere in every country and every time period.
So, those that denounce the skeptics are the ones actually being "anti-science".
I guess you must be anti-science too, since you are denouncing the people who are skeptical of the skeptics...
When you start attacking people that disagree with you, all you are left with is dogma, which is more dangerous and harmful than debating an evolving science.
So why are you attacking the people who are skeptical of the self-proclaimed skeptics?
Here is a graph showing human factors versus natural factors over the last 50-65 years. By themselves, the natural factors would have the earth cooling, which it has actually been doing since the end of the last ice age. So global warming is actually slightly more than 100% anthropogenic.
Allow me to quote from your link:
"Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal. - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change"
Ok, great... how much of that is man-made change?
You could read the report
for yourself or you can look at a pretty graph that summarizes the findings.
What can we do about it if so?
There are a variety of strategies that we could try but the simplest, easiest, and cheapest solution is to apply a price to carbon emissions. Any economist can tell you that charging for emissions will reduce them.
What does that cost?
Very little, many of the economies with carbon emission taxes are outperforming their neighbours, who don't have emission taxes.
What does it cost to adapt to it rather than try and change it the other way?
Generally speaking, estimates of adaptation costs that have them running around 2-4 times as much as mitigation are considered to be low-balling the costs.
But that's a largely irrelevant question. The relevant questions are: what is going to happen in the future, what are the costs and benefits, can we intervene, how risky is intervention, and should we intervene. The science related to those questions is highly uncertain, and many of those questions are primarily about values, preferences, and economics, not climate.
The libertarians (among others) are very, very scared of having an honest discussion about those issues, which is why they continually attempt to deny that climate change exists or has an anthropogenic cause. That is why we keep having the same moronic debate about whether climate change is real. We can talk about what we're going to do about it, when half of the people are listening to professional liars who are paid to sideline that debate for their sponsors, who are pretty happy with the status quo and afraid of change.
The government has no business forcing people to get any medical treatment or discriminating against those who do not.
Why? Why should you be allowed to endanger the health of your fellow citizens and their families?
Reasonable precautions to prevent epidemics seems like "promoting the general welfare" which is the very foundation of government.
If they wanted to mitigate the risk of disease the medical exception would not be in there. They are just as dangerous if not more so (often it's compromised immune system as the medical reason so they pick up things easily). This bill is coercion by the state for parents to comply, it has no apparent medical effect if it leaves one class of unvaccinated children in school but not others.
Just like a $5 dollar discount coupon has no effect, since I still have to pay the rest of the bill?
The rate of medical exemptions is reasonable stable and small, and as long as the rate of people who had special exemptions was similarly low it was an acceptable risk, however, thanks to vaccine paranoia and the frauds who peddle it, the rate of unvaccinated children with special exemptions has rise dramatically, and no longer falls into "acceptable risk". So the exemptions are going away, and the parents of these children will have to find a different way to be ignorant and dangerous.
How can supposedly technical people be (a) so anti science, (b) so gorssly and intentionally uninformed and (c) so fucking stupid.
Libertarianism.
You have to be very careful with Penn and Teller, they have a strong libertarian bent and they seem to frequently fail when researching issues that involve their politics. I wouldn't trust them on issues like second hand smoke that they are likely to view as "government interference". It tends to make them derp out and present a weak one-sided case as if there were no valid counter-arguments. Personally, I stopped watching "Bullshit" after a few too many political shows where they left me disappointed with their half-assed, one-sided, "facts".
S. Petry could be the poster child for the Dunning Kruger effect.
By spending $5 on something, you would be telling Valve that you're a paying customer and not a freeloader who's actively working to destroy their system?
However, with your rant you are telling me that you're a paranoid drama queen.
But I may be biased, because this will cost me nothing because I have already paid more than $5 to buy some cheap games during the summer and winter sales. I would imagine that for the vast majority of Steam's customers it will also cost them nothing because they are actually customers and have spent some money with Steam at some point in the past. You represent a corner case, a rare exception, a freeloader who legitimately (by your claim) uses Steam's services without ever paying Valve anything.
I'm telling Valve that I'm willing to pay additional money for a service that was supposed to already have been paid for with my purchase of the initial game.
I've seen this claim before (probably from you), but I'm don't know what game you bought that you think entitles you to permanent and unlimited access to all the services of Steam in perpetuity.
You could always splurge and spend $5 to get access to the services you want. There are so very many games on Steam it's hard to believe that you wouldn't be able to find a single thing there that you'd want.
A) You're not important enough for them to mess with specifically.
B) The fact you "trust them with your business" might be influencing your understanding of the charges against them.
I don't think you understand as much as you think you do.
For one the post you replied to was about what Microsoft would have done if it had been "as evil" as Google. Re-read it.
On the topic of your other claim, Microst didn't not just provide "their web browser as a default with their OS". That's just part of one of the tricks that they played. They provided Internet Explorer for the sole purpose of preventing and delaying the development of web-based alternatives to Windows and Office. They licensed Internet Explorer (guaranteeing Spyglass a percentage of every copy sold) and provided it for free to cut off Netscape's money supply (screwing Spyglass over as well in the process). Mind you, Netscape wasn't even a competitor of Microsoft's until it made the deal with Spyglass. Microsoft was scared of the power of the Internet and the Web and purposely engaged in a campaign to sabotage the development of software that was operating system independent and subvert the internet, if they could.
They also forced manufacturers to sign deals where if they wanted to be able to sell any computers with Windows on them, they had to agree to ship them with Internet Explorer and only Internet Explorer.
Furthermore, they then tied Internet Explorer into the operating system and spread it's code across other system DLLs so it couldn't be removed easily without breaking Windows. They made it load on boot so it would load faster then competitors, and used undocumented APIs that were faster than the standard ones to give themselves an advantage. When competitors tried to use those same undocumented APIs, Microsoft would introduce changes to sabotage their competitor's products while simultaneously updates for IE that worked around the newly introduced bugs.
However, once Netscape had been destroyed and the threat of "operating system-less software" was gone, Microsoft essentially dropped Internet Explorer into a deep dark hole. They barely touched it for almost 9 years, which just goes to show that it was all about destroying a potential threat to the monopoly. Sure when you say they gave something away for free it doesn't sound bad, but it is actually an anti-competitive practice called flooding the market and it is evil and illegal when you have a dominant position in one market and use that tactic to extend your dominance into another area.
I understand that some people are too short sighted, too stupid, or too libertarian to understand why this was important, but this is just one of many campaigns of reckless destruction that Microsoft has engaged in to protect their cash cows.
This whole "Microsoft is evil and Google isn't" is really pretty childish.
You know, it could be childish and true... Microsoft has a long and sordid history of going far beyond what "*every* business does" to compete. Whether or not they're evil, they have proven over and over again that they can't be trusted.
Do tell me why, then, an Information Service was even defined if nothing was supposed to be classified under it.
Who says there would be nothing classified under Title 1? As far as I understand we're talking about reclassifying internet connections as Title 2, everything else that ISPs do (like email service, web hosting, etc.) would remain Title 1.
Ah, the Libertarian ideal... Do everything yourself so the other bastards can't screw you over. It warms the cockles of my heart.
Then what do you do when, despite having the monopoly, they don't provide universal coverage and provide universally lousy service, such that a super-majority of people in the district are willing to vote to have their taxes increased to set up some competition?
Naturally, you become a libertarian and claim that everyone who disagrees with you is a lazy parasite.
Then perhaps the right path to that is to get the benefits divorced from what many believe to be a religious institution.
That's a great idea, let the stupid decide what the laws should be. Marriage isn't a religious institution, it's a legal institution. It's a contract and it always has been. The religious ceremony literally means nothing legally. You can be married without a ceremony and you can be not married despite having the ceremony. The ceremony is the fluff, the marriage certificate you sign during (or after) the ceremony is the actual important part. Marriage is civil law.
Furthermore, in America marriage has never been solely the province of religion, and can never be so. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" is the very first amendment of your constitution. If marriage is a religious institution then government has no business making any laws about it. So anyone who believes that marriage is a religious institution and thus gays shouldn't be allowed to get married is wrong, because either it's not religious and the government has no obligation to bow to the views of some Christians or it is and the government is legally prohibited from doing so by it's own constitution.
Additionally, please note that some churches are perfectly happy to marry gay couples and preventing them from doing would be an actual infringement on their religious liberties unlike the bullshit argument that not allowing you to prevent a gay couple from getting married is somehow restricting your liberty.
jcr has a point. If [Mississippi] is as racist as as [South Africa], then how many have been killed?
This whole [Mississippi] thing has been noting but bullying on the left's part. "[Civil Rights]" [are] nothing more than a ploy to force acceptance on people who have serious religious object to [blacks] and supporting such [people]. If this were not the case why is it that people who believed that a "we don't need a piece of paper to prove we're married." All of a sudden, that piece of paper is so important because [mixed race couples] are the ones with traditional views of marriage.
I'm done with Democrats and the left. A bunch of hypocrites. And the right isn't much better.
I knew I'd seen your argument before. People before you believed that blacks didn't need to be married because they weren't really people, and then they opposed mixed race marriages because black and whites shouldn't mix that way. Most likely, 20 years from now you will vehemently deny that you were ever this homophobic.
What is worse? Someone refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding, or cutting someone's head off because they are gay?
The latter, of course, but you are engaging in the same bullshit as Fiorina. Has it ever occurred in your sorry excuse for a brain that Tim Cook might oppose both activities? When will you navel-gazing idiots learn that "somebody else did something worse" is never a good reason for tolerating injustice?
Of course, the former wasn't happening in the first place. It was a drummed up story by the left. But don't let actual facts get in the way.
Then why pass a law to enable anti-gay people to break contracts with gay people? It certainly wasn't "the left" that passed the law. Get a clue before you spout your ignorant nonsense.