Thinks anyone with their own business didn't do it themselves and worse, thinks everyone is stupid as him.
Try not to be an obvious idiot, it's clear from the context that Obama thinks that "anyone with their own business" didn't build the roads and bridges that lead to the business. When someone deliberately misunderstands and misrepresents the truth, it just makes them look unreliable and stupid. Do you really want to be the crazy guy ranting on the corner?
Hate speech laws aren't supposed to cover making someone uncomfortable, they're supposed to cover "I'm not telling you to lynch them, but everyone knows (group) are all child-raping murderers, and if someone doesn't do something about them right now they will rape and kill again".
it shouldn't be a crime unless someone is harmed physically, or property is destroyed by the person doing the speaking!
So the boss is fine as long as it's just his minions and/or dupes doing the murdering, raping, pillaging and burning?
It often depends on where the organic and convention produce is grown and when they're picked and what variety they are. A locally grown organic strawberry, for example, should taste much better than a convention one shipped from 1,000 miles away. As I understand it, that's because the local strawberries are allowed to ripen before being picked while the conventional strawberries ripen after being picked while being transported in a refrigerated box. The difference is that strawberries that ripened before being picked continue to produce sugars while the ones in that ripen after being picked stop producing sugars when they're picked.
Where I live this is usually the case, the conventional strawberries are almost always from California and the local strawberries are only available for a few weeks. But the local strawberries have a stronger and sweeter taste than the California ones which are often nearly tasteless (California is far away).
In my experience, it's generally local produce that tastes better, rather than organics. Although some organic food could taste better than the conventional food if the conventional food has been bred to prioritize other characteristics over taste. For example, size, longevity and bruise resistance could contribute to the lack of taste that I've found in California strawberries. Of course, that difference is going to be case-dependant because conventional produce could be prioritize taste over other traits and actually produce better tasting produce than an organic grower, particular if the conventional and organic farms are equidistant from the purchaser.
It sounds like you are not familiar with the common definition of a two-party system. According to the common definition, the U.S. has a two party system because it is dominated by two parties, reagardless of the number of additional powerless parties that exist. For the U.S. to stop being a two-party system a third party needs to have a substancial pressence in congress.
Factually speaking, a vote for a Libertarian, Green or other minor party in the United States takes a vote away from which ever of the two major parties you would prefer to win. It's a well known flaw in first-past-the-post voting. If you disagree you can take it up with Duverger.
The GP, however, is also incorrect, a vote for a libertarian is only some times equivalent to a vote for the incumbent. Specifically only when the voter would not have otherwise voted for the incumbent. This has nothing to do with emotions, but simple mathematics. In first-past-the-post voting, subtracting one vote for your preferred front-runner candidate is equivalent to adding one vote to your least preferred front-runner candidate. Of course, in the long run, voting for additional parties is probably the only way to break out of a two party system. However, this is probably least likely to occur during times of crisis (unless the government is overthrown).
Isn't that kind of dumb? It's like there's a guy standing at the edge of an overflowing swimming pool with a running garden hose and he claims "you can't prove that it's *my* water spilling out of the pool, therefore I don't have to turn the hose off".
That's rich. I point out that the Republicans aren't known for cooperating with Obama and you call me a knee-jerking sheep who can't think independently or use reason and is ruining America and you think I'm the one who's fanatical about political views?
Do you amuse people by being this clueless in real life too?
Is it ironic that you claim that people who don't automatically agree with you are "not thinking independently" and "sheep"? I think you'll find it difficult to convince anyone of anything as long as you continue write like a petulant teenager.
Well, you're supposed to actually use them in order and I haven't actually seen many people using the soap, ballot, or jury box to make a difference.
Generally speaking, politicians don't do things they think will be unpopular (unless they think they won't get caught). If you want politicians to end some policy that gives them more power, you really should try to make it unpopular enough that the politicians will vote against it. That's the "soap" box. Posting to Slashdot isn't going to make that happen. Get a million people to march in Washington against warrantless wiretapping and you can bet that suddenly the issue will become "an important political divide" between the parties.
Obama likely lobbied for it, because Congress usually doesn't bother authorizing something that the president doesn't actually want to do.
Oh, I see, you're saying that the Republicans are more amenable to doing what Obama lobbies then to do than the Democrats. That seems an entirely reasonable and clearly not insanely wrong point of view.
Personally, I would think the Republicans voted for it because they think their guy is going to be president in a few months and they want to keep the powers available to him.
If you don't like Walmart or its policies, don't shop there. If you don't like Obama's policies, don't pay your taxes and maybe go to jail or have the IRS take the money anyway. One way you choose, the other you don't.
The problem here is that if you're in the United States, then you are being served by the United States. The military acts in your interests, the police investigate and punish crime, the fire fighters show up if your house is on fire. People often bring out the "don't pay your taxes and go to jail" canard but it's the same thing that happens if you refuse to pay for the food you're taking from Walmart or refuse to pay your other bills. For some reason libertarians seem to believe that stealing from a group of people is noble while stealing from any of the individuals in that group is abhorrent.
I'm sorry, but you're just spewing idiotic libertarian claims. Most everything you've said is fundamentally wrong, but it's just not worth my time to write corrections that you will ignore.
- Orwellian double speak. Delaying the gov't from doing anything is not delaying investments, gov't doesn't invest. It's delaying more growth of spending.
I don't think you understand what I'm talking about. Private business prefers a stable predictable government, uncertainty delays investment. When the government is deadlocked and looks like it couldn't take serious action on any matter, it undermines business confidence and delays private investment in economic activity.
There's no difference between a government employee at a power plant and a private sector employee at a power plant.
2. All government jobs are spending jobs, they are all welfare checks paid to people to do absolutely nothing useful in the economy
That's obviously false. The rest of your rant is lost in the obvious error of your premise. For example, if the government operated factories they could reduce the trade deficit. I'm not sure if you're aware that there are government operated factories in other countries, and those factories produce goods which impact their respective trade deficits or surpluses just like private sector goods do. In western liberal democracies we generally limit government economic activities to services that can not be adequately or reliably supplied by private sector companies. You aren't going to have much of an economy without roads or electricity. So it's far from "nothing useful", but rather nothing you are personally willing to measure or acknowledge.
Also Keynesian economics to Austrian school (real economics) is what astrology is to astronomy.
You can't really do that because the economy was in free fall when it became Obama's responsibility. It's like having the copilot take over because the plane is in a nose dive and then when he pulls the plane out of the dive and levels off, you immediately blame the copilot for the loss of altitude. Much like a plane or a car, economic policy can't instantly change direction and speed, it has inertia (which a casino paradigm fails to acknowledge). However, if we count from the beginning of Obama's first major economic policy move (his stimulus bill), the U.S. has net positive job growth under Obama.
It's not great job growth, but respectable economists credit Obama's economic policies with preventing the loss of an additional million jobs (which likely would have occurred under McCain's stated policies) and recovering a million jobs lost under Bush's economic policies.
Some people consider that the employment issue might be larger than the United States and the President. Europe is in recession, China's economy is slowing, and the U.S. is muddling along. Some economists even blame the Republicans in congress for a large portion of the United States specific problem. The theory is that their intransigence is undermining business confidence in the United States and delaying economic investments. A cynical man might conclude that Republicans have a policy of defeating Obama no matter what and are perfectly willing to sacrifice average Americans if they think it might get them an inch closer to the White House. There's plenty of evidence to support such accusations, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's true.
It doesn't do you any good to create jobs if they are destroyed at a far greater rate. It really doesn't do you any good to create jobs that have no hope of growing the economy (government jobs only pull from the economy).
That's demonstrably false. Government jobs are jobs like any other. There's no difference between a government employee at a power plant and a private sector employee at a power plant. For example, Greece's economy ticked along quite well with far too many government employees.
The real problem with government jobs isn't that they don't grow the economy, it's that they are dependent on tax revenues and thus they can become an amplifying feedback into the system. Keynesian economics advocate running counter to the business cycles to minimize the troughs, however, Greece (and a number of other countries, including the U.S. under Bush) ended up running in synch with the business cycles, amplifying both the highs and the lows. This recovery is dragging along because foolish countries (like the U.S. and Greece) allowed themselves to accumulate so much debt during the good times, that they can't afford to spend to ameliorate the bad times.
For example, the stimulus spending tried to jump start a 14 trillion dollar economy with around $300 million in spending (plus $300 million in ineffective tax cuts (Republican) and $300 million in mandatory spending (Unemployment Insurance). Frankly, 2% of GDP is a probably a bit low to trigger a big economic recovery. I think the recommended amount is closer to 10%.
I think his point was that a few uber rich people are dictating the policies that maintain that CO2 footprint.
For example, you might be surprised at how much the Koch brothers (behind Tea Party opposition to climate change) and Rupert Murdoch (behind Fox News opposition to climate change) promote the idea that climate change isn't happening and wouldn't be a problem even it were happening. If they can prevent action on the issue through fearmongering campaigns, they effectively control the discourse over the public policy.
It's the lowest extent on record. We didn't have satellites before 1979, unless you have a time machine we can't change that. Proxy reconstructions estimates it's the lowest level in at least 8000 years and maybe the lowest level since Homo Sapiens evolved. It helps if you read everything, not just the stuff you agree with.
There's no way the planet got to where it was without a cooling mechanism.
Technically speaking, the major cooling mechanism is probably sequestration of carbon. So all the oil, natural gas, and coal we've been burning may represent the results of three most important cooling mechanisms. Given that we're approaching the halfway point of undoing a billion years of work by those cooling mechanisms, I wouldn't be too optimistic about how quickly that cooling can be repeated.
More cloud cover is likely one. More heat means more evaporation means more clouds.
Net cloud feedback is likely to be weakly positive, meaning additional clouds will probably accelerate warming.
The ice caps don't cool the planet, they help keep the temperature stable.
Actually, white ice reflects more energy than water or land (that are darker). The effect is called albedo.
Again, don't get me wrong, I do my best to minimise my own impact on the environment, but is man's impact really large enough to melt all the arctic ice?
We're releasing about 30 Gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per year. It's small compared to the natural cycle, with is around 750 Gigatonnes, but we put more into the system every year. Any person who can do multiplication should be able to see that at the current rate it only takes about 25 years of emissions to equal all of the Carbon already in the cycle.
It's like leaving a hose running into a swimming pool, the hose is tiny and the pool is big, but even a small hose running constantly will eventually fill the pool up and then cause it to overflow.
Don't worry. His Noodlyness is not so easily destroyed. All you need to do is release the sacred pasta into a pot of holy (boiling) water and he shall be reborn anew and you can once more eat of his flesh and blood. Much like the Catholics do, but with less cannibalism.
Given that we're on track to end 2.4 million years of northern hemisphere glaciers and given that we know the gross mechanisms that are changing the climate, and we know those mechanisms are being activated by human activity, and given that we know the natural trend was going in the opposite direction until human activity overwhelmed it, it seems highly unlikely that it's "a natural cycle".
Slashdot Mirror
Ignoring all of the other crazy Morman stuff for the moment, Mormans also have magic underwear.
They're probably no more crazy than any other religious fundamentalists, but that is a really low bar.
Thinks anyone with their own business didn't do it themselves and worse, thinks everyone is stupid as him.
Try not to be an obvious idiot, it's clear from the context that Obama thinks that "anyone with their own business" didn't build the roads and bridges that lead to the business. When someone deliberately misunderstands and misrepresents the truth, it just makes them look unreliable and stupid. Do you really want to be the crazy guy ranting on the corner?
Hate speech laws aren't supposed to cover making someone uncomfortable, they're supposed to cover "I'm not telling you to lynch them, but everyone knows (group) are all child-raping murderers, and if someone doesn't do something about them right now they will rape and kill again".
it shouldn't be a crime unless someone is harmed physically, or property is destroyed by the person doing the speaking!
So the boss is fine as long as it's just his minions and/or dupes doing the murdering, raping, pillaging and burning?
It often depends on where the organic and convention produce is grown and when they're picked and what variety they are. A locally grown organic strawberry, for example, should taste much better than a convention one shipped from 1,000 miles away. As I understand it, that's because the local strawberries are allowed to ripen before being picked while the conventional strawberries ripen after being picked while being transported in a refrigerated box. The difference is that strawberries that ripened before being picked continue to produce sugars while the ones in that ripen after being picked stop producing sugars when they're picked.
Where I live this is usually the case, the conventional strawberries are almost always from California and the local strawberries are only available for a few weeks. But the local strawberries have a stronger and sweeter taste than the California ones which are often nearly tasteless (California is far away).
In my experience, it's generally local produce that tastes better, rather than organics. Although some organic food could taste better than the conventional food if the conventional food has been bred to prioritize other characteristics over taste. For example, size, longevity and bruise resistance could contribute to the lack of taste that I've found in California strawberries. Of course, that difference is going to be case-dependant because conventional produce could be prioritize taste over other traits and actually produce better tasting produce than an organic grower, particular if the conventional and organic farms are equidistant from the purchaser.
It sounds like you are not familiar with the common definition of a two-party system. According to the common definition, the U.S. has a two party system because it is dominated by two parties, reagardless of the number of additional powerless parties that exist. For the U.S. to stop being a two-party system a third party needs to have a substancial pressence in congress.
Factually speaking, a vote for a Libertarian, Green or other minor party in the United States takes a vote away from which ever of the two major parties you would prefer to win. It's a well known flaw in first-past-the-post voting. If you disagree you can take it up with Duverger.
The GP, however, is also incorrect, a vote for a libertarian is only some times equivalent to a vote for the incumbent. Specifically only when the voter would not have otherwise voted for the incumbent. This has nothing to do with emotions, but simple mathematics. In first-past-the-post voting, subtracting one vote for your preferred front-runner candidate is equivalent to adding one vote to your least preferred front-runner candidate. Of course, in the long run, voting for additional parties is probably the only way to break out of a two party system. However, this is probably least likely to occur during times of crisis (unless the government is overthrown).
Isn't that kind of dumb? It's like there's a guy standing at the edge of an overflowing swimming pool with a running garden hose and he claims "you can't prove that it's *my* water spilling out of the pool, therefore I don't have to turn the hose off".
That's rich. I point out that the Republicans aren't known for cooperating with Obama and you call me a knee-jerking sheep who can't think independently or use reason and is ruining America and you think I'm the one who's fanatical about political views?
Do you amuse people by being this clueless in real life too?
Is it ironic that you claim that people who don't automatically agree with you are "not thinking independently" and "sheep"? I think you'll find it difficult to convince anyone of anything as long as you continue write like a petulant teenager.
Well, you're supposed to actually use them in order and I haven't actually seen many people using the soap, ballot, or jury box to make a difference.
Generally speaking, politicians don't do things they think will be unpopular (unless they think they won't get caught). If you want politicians to end some policy that gives them more power, you really should try to make it unpopular enough that the politicians will vote against it. That's the "soap" box. Posting to Slashdot isn't going to make that happen. Get a million people to march in Washington against warrantless wiretapping and you can bet that suddenly the issue will become "an important political divide" between the parties.
Obama likely lobbied for it, because Congress usually doesn't bother authorizing something that the president doesn't actually want to do.
Oh, I see, you're saying that the Republicans are more amenable to doing what Obama lobbies then to do than the Democrats. That seems an entirely reasonable and clearly not insanely wrong point of view.
Personally, I would think the Republicans voted for it because they think their guy is going to be president in a few months and they want to keep the powers available to him.
If you look at the role, 95% of the Republicans and 39% of the Democrats voted for it.
That should probably answer your question.
If you don't like Walmart or its policies, don't shop there. If you don't like Obama's policies, don't pay your taxes and maybe go to jail or have the IRS take the money anyway. One way you choose, the other you don't.
The problem here is that if you're in the United States, then you are being served by the United States. The military acts in your interests, the police investigate and punish crime, the fire fighters show up if your house is on fire. People often bring out the "don't pay your taxes and go to jail" canard but it's the same thing that happens if you refuse to pay for the food you're taking from Walmart or refuse to pay your other bills. For some reason libertarians seem to believe that stealing from a group of people is noble while stealing from any of the individuals in that group is abhorrent.
I'm sorry, but you're just spewing idiotic libertarian claims. Most everything you've said is fundamentally wrong, but it's just not worth my time to write corrections that you will ignore.
delaying economic investments
- Orwellian double speak. Delaying the gov't from doing anything is not delaying investments, gov't doesn't invest. It's delaying more growth of spending.
I don't think you understand what I'm talking about. Private business prefers a stable predictable government, uncertainty delays investment. When the government is deadlocked and looks like it couldn't take serious action on any matter, it undermines business confidence and delays private investment in economic activity.
There's no difference between a government employee at a power plant and a private sector employee at a power plant.
2. All government jobs are spending jobs, they are all welfare checks paid to people to do absolutely nothing useful in the economy
That's obviously false. The rest of your rant is lost in the obvious error of your premise. For example, if the government operated factories they could reduce the trade deficit. I'm not sure if you're aware that there are government operated factories in other countries, and those factories produce goods which impact their respective trade deficits or surpluses just like private sector goods do. In western liberal democracies we generally limit government economic activities to services that can not be adequately or reliably supplied by private sector companies. You aren't going to have much of an economy without roads or electricity. So it's far from "nothing useful", but rather nothing you are personally willing to measure or acknowledge.
Also Keynesian economics to Austrian school (real economics) is what astrology is to astronomy.
Of course, the Keynesians would say "Austrian economics lacks scientific rigor, rejects the scientific method, and rejects the use of empirical data". That sounds a lot like pseudo-science to me.
Of course not, you wouldn't vote for them if they told you the unvarnished truth.
You can't really do that because the economy was in free fall when it became Obama's responsibility. It's like having the copilot take over because the plane is in a nose dive and then when he pulls the plane out of the dive and levels off, you immediately blame the copilot for the loss of altitude. Much like a plane or a car, economic policy can't instantly change direction and speed, it has inertia (which a casino paradigm fails to acknowledge). However, if we count from the beginning of Obama's first major economic policy move (his stimulus bill), the U.S. has net positive job growth under Obama.
It's not great job growth, but respectable economists credit Obama's economic policies with preventing the loss of an additional million jobs (which likely would have occurred under McCain's stated policies) and recovering a million jobs lost under Bush's economic policies.
Some people consider that the employment issue might be larger than the United States and the President. Europe is in recession, China's economy is slowing, and the U.S. is muddling along. Some economists even blame the Republicans in congress for a large portion of the United States specific problem. The theory is that their intransigence is undermining business confidence in the United States and delaying economic investments. A cynical man might conclude that Republicans have a policy of defeating Obama no matter what and are perfectly willing to sacrifice average Americans if they think it might get them an inch closer to the White House. There's plenty of evidence to support such accusations, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's true.
It doesn't do you any good to create jobs if they are destroyed at a far greater rate. It really doesn't do you any good to create jobs that have no hope of growing the economy (government jobs only pull from the economy).
That's demonstrably false. Government jobs are jobs like any other. There's no difference between a government employee at a power plant and a private sector employee at a power plant. For example, Greece's economy ticked along quite well with far too many government employees.
The real problem with government jobs isn't that they don't grow the economy, it's that they are dependent on tax revenues and thus they can become an amplifying feedback into the system. Keynesian economics advocate running counter to the business cycles to minimize the troughs, however, Greece (and a number of other countries, including the U.S. under Bush) ended up running in synch with the business cycles, amplifying both the highs and the lows. This recovery is dragging along because foolish countries (like the U.S. and Greece) allowed themselves to accumulate so much debt during the good times, that they can't afford to spend to ameliorate the bad times.
For example, the stimulus spending tried to jump start a 14 trillion dollar economy with around $300 million in spending (plus $300 million in ineffective tax cuts (Republican) and $300 million in mandatory spending (Unemployment Insurance). Frankly, 2% of GDP is a probably a bit low to trigger a big economic recovery. I think the recommended amount is closer to 10%.
I think his point was that a few uber rich people are dictating the policies that maintain that CO2 footprint.
For example, you might be surprised at how much the Koch brothers (behind Tea Party opposition to climate change) and Rupert Murdoch (behind Fox News opposition to climate change) promote the idea that climate change isn't happening and wouldn't be a problem even it were happening. If they can prevent action on the issue through fearmongering campaigns, they effectively control the discourse over the public policy.
It's the lowest extent on record. We didn't have satellites before 1979, unless you have a time machine we can't change that. Proxy reconstructions estimates it's the lowest level in at least 8000 years and maybe the lowest level since Homo Sapiens evolved. It helps if you read everything, not just the stuff you agree with.
Hi Namarrgon, Skeptical Science now has an Arctic Ice Escalator graph too.
There's no way the planet got to where it was without a cooling mechanism.
Technically speaking, the major cooling mechanism is probably sequestration of carbon. So all the oil, natural gas, and coal we've been burning may represent the results of three most important cooling mechanisms. Given that we're approaching the halfway point of undoing a billion years of work by those cooling mechanisms, I wouldn't be too optimistic about how quickly that cooling can be repeated.
More cloud cover is likely one. More heat means more evaporation means more clouds.
Net cloud feedback is likely to be weakly positive, meaning additional clouds will probably accelerate warming.
The ice caps don't cool the planet, they help keep the temperature stable.
Actually, white ice reflects more energy than water or land (that are darker). The effect is called albedo.
Again, don't get me wrong, I do my best to minimise my own impact on the environment, but is man's impact really large enough to melt all the arctic ice?
Yes, it is.
We're releasing about 30 Gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per year. It's small compared to the natural cycle, with is around 750 Gigatonnes, but we put more into the system every year. Any person who can do multiplication should be able to see that at the current rate it only takes about 25 years of emissions to equal all of the Carbon already in the cycle.
It's like leaving a hose running into a swimming pool, the hose is tiny and the pool is big, but even a small hose running constantly will eventually fill the pool up and then cause it to overflow.
Don't worry. His Noodlyness is not so easily destroyed. All you need to do is release the sacred pasta into a pot of holy (boiling) water and he shall be reborn anew and you can once more eat of his flesh and blood. Much like the Catholics do, but with less cannibalism.
Given that we're on track to end 2.4 million years of northern hemisphere glaciers and given that we know the gross mechanisms that are changing the climate, and we know those mechanisms are being activated by human activity, and given that we know the natural trend was going in the opposite direction until human activity overwhelmed it, it seems highly unlikely that it's "a natural cycle".