But European social democratic parties are not left wing, except by US standards. Communist and socialist and (theoretically) anarchist parties are left wing.
They are socialists, by definition and program: "Social democracy is a political ideology that considers itself to be a form of reformist democratic socialism" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
Neither defined benefit, nor defined contribution plan distributions are taxed via capital gains. It's all ordinary income. That's one of the trade-offs for tax free growth pre-distribution phase.
Sorry, I was spacing out and didn't put that right. What I was trying to say was that a lot of people's retirement funds are bound up in investments that are taxed by capital gains (since 401k's are so limited anyway). Furthermore, the benefits of other retirement plans are effectively determined by this rate; i.e., defined benefit plans only have to give you as much return as you would get from investing the money yourself and paying capital gains. Furthermore, increasing capital gains taxes will increase the dependency of individuals on employer benefits, which is the wrong direction to go in if you follow how those have worked out in the past.
A society in which one day you have 100% employment and X production, is no more productive the day after 20% of the workers are laid off
Not right away, but a year or two later, when those 20% of the workers have started new businesses, it is more productive: because 80% of the original workforce are doing the original work, and the 20% that were fired are now producing something else.
I'd say that their 'products' (physical or non-physical) have lower quality due to their lack of employees, so their production value has probably gone down in real terms.
And you are welcome to buy from companies that have more service, more employees, and higher prices. Companies like Apple or AT&T seem to employ vast numbers of well-coiffed people in their stores that do nothing useful for me. That's why Chinese mail order Android phones and cut-rate web-only self-service mobile phone services are so much cheaper: they don't have the people or overhead. I prefer the latter and more and more people seem to be coming around to my kind of view. And as they do, corporate America fires employees.
We do not have a left wing in US. We have a moderate-right wing and a far-far-right wing.
That's a common belief but false. On many issues, US Democrats are as left wing as many European social democratic parties.
Congress is supposed to regulate war, actually. The only reason Obama goes on with wars/drone strikes is because Congress is staying out of it - uniformly so on both R-side and D-side.
If Congress is "staying out of it", then he has no authority to do it. The fact that Congress isn't doing anything about it doesn't grant him implicit authority to do so.
Also, Obama cannot spend or regulate or even violate civil liberties -- just about every one of those things (except for "kill list") had passed through Congress.
Congress has given him the authority to do so to some degree; Obama is under no obligation to use that authority. He can spend less, regulate less, and intrude into people's personal lives less if he so chooses. And in some of these areas, he is exceeding his authority, but Congress is not in a mood to hold him responsible for it, because that's hard.
They must want something (and they should be willing to give something in return). If their offer is "here's what we want to do and there is no room for compromise", why should Democrats bargain with them? Would you?
Republicans and independents want less federal government and lower federal taxes. All of Obama's proposals amount to higher taxes and more government. So, the best thing for his opponents to do is to stall as much as possible because that achieves what they want. If Obama wants to get some law passed, he has to give up something else of greater value. Want to pass a carbon tax? Repeal Obamacare. Want to raise taxes? Make big cuts in entitlements. That's the kind of deals he can get. Other "deals" are simply not interesting to his political opponents, and why should they be?
And meanwhile the millionaires on Wall Street bitch and moan about how awful it is that they might soon have to pay 20% taxes instead of just 15%
You'll bitch and moan too, because your retirement benefits are taxed with the same tax: higher capital gains taxes means less money for you, whether you have a defined benefit plan or a 401k.
Why would they want to start hiring again when they're getting along just fine as is?
Who cares? What kind of twisted view of our society do you have in which everybody is a corporate slave and in which lower productivity should be the goal? If corporations manage to produce the same stuff with less labor, that's a good thing. The labor that they don't hire is labor that can go off and do something new and useful. As far as I can tell, many US corporations still have far too many employees who do nothing productive.
Do you see any change in the rate of sea level rise since 1900 there?
Sea level rise, temperatures, and even carbon emissions have done nothing unexpected; they behave just like you'd expect for the level of emissions we have.
I'll move to higher ground, and you do whatever you like. But I'm not going to be happy if I have to pay to relocate people who were too short-sighted to handle it themselves.
Well, then you should push for political change that abolishes federal flood insurance and restricts what FEMA and USACE can do. As long as you vote for people who push for these programs, you are subsidizing people who make poor housing choices. In fact, you are subsidzing a lot of rich people's beach houses and a lot of big developers who snap up cheap land in flood planes and turn it into pretty mansions that they can sell because the tax payer pays for rebuilding.
The position here is -- If GOP were to ever compromise, even a little bit, they would show weakness and embolden Obama. So the solution is, clearly, to block everything and let the country burn.
Your view that doing nothing amounts to "letting the country burn" is itself a very left wing political view. In fact, as far as many conservatives and independents are concerned, we don't need new laws, new taxes, new bailouts, new stimuli, or new regulations. Obama can spend less, regulate less, withdraw the military, stop engaging in wars or drone strikes, and stop violating civil liberties all on his own without any help from Congress. So from the point of view of his political opponents, stopping him at every turn isn't "letting the country burn", it is preventing legislation that would harm the country. If Obama wants to negotiate over this, he needs to bring something to the table that his political opponents want, and there is very little that he can offer.
People like you should be barred from voting and procreating.
People like you have already tried in many places in the world, in the most extreme forms in places like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
In the US, we have checks and balances, which means that the president will frequently run into a brick wall trying to push through his policies. As far as I'm concerned, that's a good thing. To blind ideologues like you, of course, it is a disaster.
So how many jobs lost with Medicare cut? How many with military cut? Who's going to hire them? Have you factored those numbers in. It's not so simple when you realize that a huge amount of so called private industry is actually funded directly through government spending.
The majority of Americans used to work in agriculture. When agriculture became more efficient and these jobs disappeared, was the consequence massive unemployment? Of course not.
Obviously, any changes have to be gradual to allow people to adapt. But if you phase in these changes over 5-10 years, these people will find other employment, employment that is more productive and is paid according to what they actually contribute to society.
The alternative to austerity is that you keep borrowing money. But people only let you borrow money if they expect you to pay it back with interest. That means you need to invest the money into something that has a return on investment. High pensions and high-end medical care don't have a return on investment, they are luxuries, and nobody is going to give you money for that.
As for the US economy, it has always been healthier than Europe's, due to lower taxes, more economic freedoms, and less regulation. Obama's limp "stimulus" did nothing other than waste a lot of tax dollars and make our debt worse.
You think corporate profits are going through the roof? Great! Buy some stock. Of course, if you look at valuations, you'll see that investors think this was a short-lived anomaly, making up for the prior stagnation.
As for Obamacare, you're right that it's not destroying the economy. It is, however, a continuation of government handouts to the medical and insurance industry. You don't like big corporations, yet you favor a program that forces you to buy overpriced products you don't need from big corporations.
Steady-state inflation is really irrelevant because the markets just incorporate it into contracts and interest. The only thing that makes a difference is if you borrow in a low-inflation regime and switch to a high-inflation regime, but that's a one time deal.
You are right that people with tons of money are manipulating government, but not so much through inflation, and more through simple rent seeking. And Obama has been even more eager to please these people than Bush.
f the GOP in the house is willing to meet Obama part way, then the situation will improve.
I don't see why. If the GOP meets Obama part way, Obama will just push the envelope even further, with carbon taxes and more economic tinkering. The problem is Obama's bad economic policies, a continuation of Bush's bad economic policies. No amount of compromise is going to fix that. And Romney wouldn't have been any better either. Our major presidential the last few times around have really sucked.
Really? An investigation never reaches an inaccurate conclusion?
That's an error, not a "fuck up". This difference is, in fact, legally recognized when it comes to libel: should you have known better or was your error reasonable?
Well, it's happening to them one (or more) at a time, so we'll see how many it happens to, and then we can make our determinations. It ain't over.
So, when confronted with facts and scientific expert opinion, you just wave your hands. The fact is that although AGW clearly exists and leads to sea level rise, that is intrinsically a slow process, on the scale of centuries, because melting of ice caps and warming of oceans just are slow processes. Neither you nor I will live long enough to see any significant deviation from the slow, steady sea level rise we have experienced for a century. And that means that using sea level rise as a justification for political or economic policies is wrong.
How do you plan to ensure that nobody, in a planet with about 7Billion people, that nobody fucks it up?
If you're a journalist, you talk to the accused first and hear their side before you go on the air. If there are any issues raised, you investigate them before broadcasting.
Except for nostalgia for the hardware itself, I don't see why anybody would buy these. You can get excellent emulators for pretty much any of these calculators on both Android and iPhone. And their interfaces actually work well on phones too. Even the phone hardware is often cheaper than these calculators.
In the near term, we are much better adapted to survive on a warmer planet rather than a colder one, so if we believe we are so powerful that we can affect the climate, shouldn't we be trying to make it warmer?
Well, reasonable climatologists make arguments that AGW may be strong enough eventually to break out of the glaciation cycles, whereas if we didn't interfere with the climate, it might remain stable for another few centuries or millennia before getting colder. It's a reasonable hypothesis, but very speculative. Even if true, breaking out of the cycle now and living with melting of all ice may still be a better choice than the near certainty of glaciation in the future, because glaciation is just so much worse.
The clathrate gun isn't my hypothesis, and there is some decent evidence for it happening at least once and maybe thrice in the past.
Just to be perfectly clear about this: you are taking scientific hypotheses about possible events in the distant past and misapplying it to current climate issues. That is worse than merely being uninformed or expressing a religious belief, because you attempt to claim scientific credibility and in the process drag science through the mud.
So, the company did the right thing in terms of offering two factor authentication (I wish my bank would do that). They made it optional and made free apps available so that people aren't forced to use it. All of that is good.
This lawsuit is frivolous, and the guy should not only lose, but have to pay court and defense costs.
[Over the past several million years, we have been through many warm periods warmer than today and no clathrate methane release occurred] It's called global warming, not global warmed. We're still heating up.
The world has been cycling back and forth between deep glaciation and interglacial warming periods for millions of years, with a period of about 100ky. We have been in an interglacial warming period for about 20000 years. As long as this interglacial warming period isn't any hotter than the past ones, there is no reason to believe that anything different is going to happen this time around. And even with AGW, we're still quite a ways away from the peak temperatures of past interglacial warming periods.
The clathrate gun isn't my hypothesis, and there is some decent evidence for it happening at least once and maybe thrice in the past.
Yes, about 250 million years ago and maybe 55 million years ago, when there already were no polar ice caps and when global temperatures and CO2 concentrations were much higher than even projected under AGW. Of course, there is no actual evidence for this kind of event, it is merely a plausible explanation for observed isotope ratios.
Furthermore, if enough clathrate has actually accumulated that this is a real risk, it will inevitably get released sooner or later anyway. One could still argue about whether it would be prudent policy to delay its release, but climate change from a "clathrate gun" isn't a man-made climate catastrophe, it's an event that restores the planet to its usual (warmer) climate after long cold periods.
Really, you are the climate equivalent of a young earth creationist: you seem to think that the world is largely the way humans experienced it for the past 6000 years. We're adapted to the current climate, but the current climate is an unusual state to begin with; it will inevitably either get much colder or much warmer in the long run. And warmer is definitely better than colder.
That has yet to be determined. Some believe it will happen faster; not overnight, but over a period of less than a decade.
Some people believe that the earth is 6000 years old. That doesn't make their beliefs real. The scenarios that I was talking about are the scenarios worked out by experts and written down in the IPCC report, not the wild fantasies of some nutcase.
Or who knows, it's now considered to be fairly unlikely, but there is still evidence that there has been a methane clathrate gun [wikipedia.org] event in the past, and we know there's deposits down there now, which means it's not entirely impossible either, and should be added to that worst-case scenario:)
The clathtrate gun hypothesis is speculation; there is little evidence for it. Over the past several million years, we have been through many warm periods warmer than today and no clathrate methane release occurred. And even if such an event were to happen, it would still take centuries for the oceans to warm and the polar ice caps to melt to the point that major flooding of coastal cities were to occur. And on those time scales, fear of flooding isn't meaningful because cities and people easily and naturally move over those time scales.
Global warming is real, and so is the possibility of "rapid" warming due to feedback loops. But your kind of alarmism, as well as this report, are dangerous pseudo-science and are in the same league as the kinds of superstitions that the religious right subscribes to.
The worst-case predictions for global warming include the long-period flooding of all coastal cities. You think that's going to be little more than a rounding error if it happens?
The IPCC report has a set of scenarios for the 21st century: the worst case scenario is a few percent of GDP.
Anybody who claims that we need to do this or that because of imminent flooding of all coastal cities is either a liar or the climate equivalent of a young earth creationist.
Most people will agree with that statement. However, they are just like you, too narrow minded to realize that those costs would not come 100% from "within" as you suggest.
As long as they pay for it through city taxes, it comes "from within". Those taxes are accounted for by a higher cost of doing business in NYC, and that will eventually make other places more competitive. It only becomes a problem if state and federal taxes are used to pay for this, directly or indirectly, because then people outside NYC are subsidizing bad choices.
but the sort of really wacky social dysfunction that can be reasonably expected in the large areas of the world where people enjoy limited mobility, paltry incomes, and a somewhat tenuous record of liking us.
The world has many centuries of experience with famine, natural disaster, and disease, and victims of those calamities rarely if ever turn into terrorists. Terrorism is based on ideology and inferiority complexes, not rational behavior, and you can't combat it by taking rational action. If people want to blame the US, they will blame the US regardless of whether the US is actually responsible (objectively, it is still Europe, not the US, who is responsible for the largest part of global warming).
Furthermore, the policies advocated for combating global warming are going to perpetuate suffering and poverty across the world. If you want to minimize the social consequences of global warming, forget about trying to stop the unstoppable, and instead invest in economic development across the world. For developed nations, even the worst case predictions for global warming amount to little more than a rounding error in the GNP; the more nations we help to develop rapidly economically (mainly through free trade and open markets), the fewer people will suffer significant consequences from global warming.
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They are socialists, by definition and program: "Social democracy is a political ideology that considers itself to be a form of reformist democratic socialism" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
Sorry, I was spacing out and didn't put that right. What I was trying to say was that a lot of people's retirement funds are bound up in investments that are taxed by capital gains (since 401k's are so limited anyway). Furthermore, the benefits of other retirement plans are effectively determined by this rate; i.e., defined benefit plans only have to give you as much return as you would get from investing the money yourself and paying capital gains. Furthermore, increasing capital gains taxes will increase the dependency of individuals on employer benefits, which is the wrong direction to go in if you follow how those have worked out in the past.
Not right away, but a year or two later, when those 20% of the workers have started new businesses, it is more productive: because 80% of the original workforce are doing the original work, and the 20% that were fired are now producing something else.
And you are welcome to buy from companies that have more service, more employees, and higher prices. Companies like Apple or AT&T seem to employ vast numbers of well-coiffed people in their stores that do nothing useful for me. That's why Chinese mail order Android phones and cut-rate web-only self-service mobile phone services are so much cheaper: they don't have the people or overhead. I prefer the latter and more and more people seem to be coming around to my kind of view. And as they do, corporate America fires employees.
That's a common belief but false. On many issues, US Democrats are as left wing as many European social democratic parties.
If Congress is "staying out of it", then he has no authority to do it. The fact that Congress isn't doing anything about it doesn't grant him implicit authority to do so.
Congress has given him the authority to do so to some degree; Obama is under no obligation to use that authority. He can spend less, regulate less, and intrude into people's personal lives less if he so chooses. And in some of these areas, he is exceeding his authority, but Congress is not in a mood to hold him responsible for it, because that's hard.
Republicans and independents want less federal government and lower federal taxes. All of Obama's proposals amount to higher taxes and more government. So, the best thing for his opponents to do is to stall as much as possible because that achieves what they want. If Obama wants to get some law passed, he has to give up something else of greater value. Want to pass a carbon tax? Repeal Obamacare. Want to raise taxes? Make big cuts in entitlements. That's the kind of deals he can get. Other "deals" are simply not interesting to his political opponents, and why should they be?
You'll bitch and moan too, because your retirement benefits are taxed with the same tax: higher capital gains taxes means less money for you, whether you have a defined benefit plan or a 401k.
Who cares? What kind of twisted view of our society do you have in which everybody is a corporate slave and in which lower productivity should be the goal? If corporations manage to produce the same stuff with less labor, that's a good thing. The labor that they don't hire is labor that can go off and do something new and useful. As far as I can tell, many US corporations still have far too many employees who do nothing productive.
That's because you listen to people with a political agenda who deliberately distort the facts. You can look at the data yourself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Recent_Sea_Level_Rise.png
Do you see any change in the rate of sea level rise since 1900 there?
Sea level rise, temperatures, and even carbon emissions have done nothing unexpected; they behave just like you'd expect for the level of emissions we have.
Well, then you should push for political change that abolishes federal flood insurance and restricts what FEMA and USACE can do. As long as you vote for people who push for these programs, you are subsidizing people who make poor housing choices. In fact, you are subsidzing a lot of rich people's beach houses and a lot of big developers who snap up cheap land in flood planes and turn it into pretty mansions that they can sell because the tax payer pays for rebuilding.
Your view that doing nothing amounts to "letting the country burn" is itself a very left wing political view. In fact, as far as many conservatives and independents are concerned, we don't need new laws, new taxes, new bailouts, new stimuli, or new regulations. Obama can spend less, regulate less, withdraw the military, stop engaging in wars or drone strikes, and stop violating civil liberties all on his own without any help from Congress. So from the point of view of his political opponents, stopping him at every turn isn't "letting the country burn", it is preventing legislation that would harm the country. If Obama wants to negotiate over this, he needs to bring something to the table that his political opponents want, and there is very little that he can offer.
People like you have already tried in many places in the world, in the most extreme forms in places like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
In the US, we have checks and balances, which means that the president will frequently run into a brick wall trying to push through his policies. As far as I'm concerned, that's a good thing. To blind ideologues like you, of course, it is a disaster.
The majority of Americans used to work in agriculture. When agriculture became more efficient and these jobs disappeared, was the consequence massive unemployment? Of course not.
Obviously, any changes have to be gradual to allow people to adapt. But if you phase in these changes over 5-10 years, these people will find other employment, employment that is more productive and is paid according to what they actually contribute to society.
The alternative to austerity is that you keep borrowing money. But people only let you borrow money if they expect you to pay it back with interest. That means you need to invest the money into something that has a return on investment. High pensions and high-end medical care don't have a return on investment, they are luxuries, and nobody is going to give you money for that.
As for the US economy, it has always been healthier than Europe's, due to lower taxes, more economic freedoms, and less regulation. Obama's limp "stimulus" did nothing other than waste a lot of tax dollars and make our debt worse.
You think corporate profits are going through the roof? Great! Buy some stock. Of course, if you look at valuations, you'll see that investors think this was a short-lived anomaly, making up for the prior stagnation.
As for Obamacare, you're right that it's not destroying the economy. It is, however, a continuation of government handouts to the medical and insurance industry. You don't like big corporations, yet you favor a program that forces you to buy overpriced products you don't need from big corporations.
These days, the transaction costs for buying gold (or any other asset) are nearly zero, so if you want to buy gold, knock yourself out.
Steady-state inflation is really irrelevant because the markets just incorporate it into contracts and interest. The only thing that makes a difference is if you borrow in a low-inflation regime and switch to a high-inflation regime, but that's a one time deal.
You are right that people with tons of money are manipulating government, but not so much through inflation, and more through simple rent seeking. And Obama has been even more eager to please these people than Bush.
I don't see why. If the GOP meets Obama part way, Obama will just push the envelope even further, with carbon taxes and more economic tinkering. The problem is Obama's bad economic policies, a continuation of Bush's bad economic policies. No amount of compromise is going to fix that. And Romney wouldn't have been any better either. Our major presidential the last few times around have really sucked.
That's an error, not a "fuck up". This difference is, in fact, legally recognized when it comes to libel: should you have known better or was your error reasonable?
So, when confronted with facts and scientific expert opinion, you just wave your hands. The fact is that although AGW clearly exists and leads to sea level rise, that is intrinsically a slow process, on the scale of centuries, because melting of ice caps and warming of oceans just are slow processes. Neither you nor I will live long enough to see any significant deviation from the slow, steady sea level rise we have experienced for a century. And that means that using sea level rise as a justification for political or economic policies is wrong.
If you're a journalist, you talk to the accused first and hear their side before you go on the air. If there are any issues raised, you investigate them before broadcasting.
Works every time.
Except for nostalgia for the hardware itself, I don't see why anybody would buy these. You can get excellent emulators for pretty much any of these calculators on both Android and iPhone. And their interfaces actually work well on phones too. Even the phone hardware is often cheaper than these calculators.
Well, reasonable climatologists make arguments that AGW may be strong enough eventually to break out of the glaciation cycles, whereas if we didn't interfere with the climate, it might remain stable for another few centuries or millennia before getting colder. It's a reasonable hypothesis, but very speculative. Even if true, breaking out of the cycle now and living with melting of all ice may still be a better choice than the near certainty of glaciation in the future, because glaciation is just so much worse.
Just to be perfectly clear about this: you are taking scientific hypotheses about possible events in the distant past and misapplying it to current climate issues. That is worse than merely being uninformed or expressing a religious belief, because you attempt to claim scientific credibility and in the process drag science through the mud.
So, the company did the right thing in terms of offering two factor authentication (I wish my bank would do that). They made it optional and made free apps available so that people aren't forced to use it. All of that is good.
This lawsuit is frivolous, and the guy should not only lose, but have to pay court and defense costs.
The world has been cycling back and forth between deep glaciation and interglacial warming periods for millions of years, with a period of about 100ky. We have been in an interglacial warming period for about 20000 years. As long as this interglacial warming period isn't any hotter than the past ones, there is no reason to believe that anything different is going to happen this time around. And even with AGW, we're still quite a ways away from the peak temperatures of past interglacial warming periods.
Yes, about 250 million years ago and maybe 55 million years ago, when there already were no polar ice caps and when global temperatures and CO2 concentrations were much higher than even projected under AGW. Of course, there is no actual evidence for this kind of event, it is merely a plausible explanation for observed isotope ratios.
Furthermore, if enough clathrate has actually accumulated that this is a real risk, it will inevitably get released sooner or later anyway. One could still argue about whether it would be prudent policy to delay its release, but climate change from a "clathrate gun" isn't a man-made climate catastrophe, it's an event that restores the planet to its usual (warmer) climate after long cold periods.
Really, you are the climate equivalent of a young earth creationist: you seem to think that the world is largely the way humans experienced it for the past 6000 years. We're adapted to the current climate, but the current climate is an unusual state to begin with; it will inevitably either get much colder or much warmer in the long run. And warmer is definitely better than colder.
Some people believe that the earth is 6000 years old. That doesn't make their beliefs real. The scenarios that I was talking about are the scenarios worked out by experts and written down in the IPCC report, not the wild fantasies of some nutcase.
The clathtrate gun hypothesis is speculation; there is little evidence for it. Over the past several million years, we have been through many warm periods warmer than today and no clathrate methane release occurred. And even if such an event were to happen, it would still take centuries for the oceans to warm and the polar ice caps to melt to the point that major flooding of coastal cities were to occur. And on those time scales, fear of flooding isn't meaningful because cities and people easily and naturally move over those time scales.
Global warming is real, and so is the possibility of "rapid" warming due to feedback loops. But your kind of alarmism, as well as this report, are dangerous pseudo-science and are in the same league as the kinds of superstitions that the religious right subscribes to.
The IPCC report has a set of scenarios for the 21st century: the worst case scenario is a few percent of GDP.
Anybody who claims that we need to do this or that because of imminent flooding of all coastal cities is either a liar or the climate equivalent of a young earth creationist.
As long as they pay for it through city taxes, it comes "from within". Those taxes are accounted for by a higher cost of doing business in NYC, and that will eventually make other places more competitive. It only becomes a problem if state and federal taxes are used to pay for this, directly or indirectly, because then people outside NYC are subsidizing bad choices.
The world has many centuries of experience with famine, natural disaster, and disease, and victims of those calamities rarely if ever turn into terrorists. Terrorism is based on ideology and inferiority complexes, not rational behavior, and you can't combat it by taking rational action. If people want to blame the US, they will blame the US regardless of whether the US is actually responsible (objectively, it is still Europe, not the US, who is responsible for the largest part of global warming).
Furthermore, the policies advocated for combating global warming are going to perpetuate suffering and poverty across the world. If you want to minimize the social consequences of global warming, forget about trying to stop the unstoppable, and instead invest in economic development across the world. For developed nations, even the worst case predictions for global warming amount to little more than a rounding error in the GNP; the more nations we help to develop rapidly economically (mainly through free trade and open markets), the fewer people will suffer significant consequences from global warming.