I'm missing how your comment is connected to why the EPA should or should not unlawfully hide their analysis projecting benefits and costs of their proposed regulation.
Does "mercury is special" mean the public shouldn't be allo d to know that this regulation kills 10,000 people every year vs alternatives: https://slashdot.org/comments....
> As near as I can tell the real world implication of what Obummer did saves way more in aggregate healthcare costs borne by OTHERS even when applying a generous 100% discount on intangible cost of human suffering far in excess of some 10 billion spent on scrubbers.
You're guessing the benefits are several thousand times higher than what the EPA analysis predicted. Do you have any evidence, any reason to think that?
What (Obama's) EPA analysia found was $10 billion a year in costs would have $20 million / year in benefits, including "human suffering". (You see why they didn't want to release their analysis).
You might wonder how the heck one can measure health problems, or "human suffering" as you put it, in dollars. That seems counterintuitive. Yet there's actually a really simple way to convert between dollars and health outcomes, for policy questions. There are plenty of studies about seatbelts and airbaga. We know about how much airbags have reduced traffic deaths, and various injuries. We know how much they cost. Simple division shows that seatbelts and airbags cost $500,000 per life saved. We know that CPC and OSHA regulations cost about $100,000 for every life saved. We've measured the cost and benefits of nutrition education, we know that $X spent on nutrition education reduces diabetes cases by Y%. EPA programs vary from $1 million to $10 million per life saved.
Our country has limited resources, of course. We can't spend $100 trillion / year on safety, because we don't have $100 trillion. So the question when making policy is which of these to put our resources toward: Should we spend $10 million of workplace safety through OSHA and save 100 lives? Should we spend that $10 million on traffic safety through DOT and save ten lives? Should we instead spend that $10 million on benzene regulation through the EPA and save only one life?
We can save a life by spending a million dollars. Spending $10 billion on one thing means we don't have that $10 billion to spend on traffic safety or workplace safety. We lose the opportunity to save 10,000 lives. So *from a public policy perspective* that's the cost / value of a life - about a million dollars, because spending a million here means not spending that million somewhere else to save someone's life.
> But you seem to be implying Obama intentionally attacked the coal industry
I don't think White House VIP is Obama. So no, nothing to do with Obama. The identity of VIP isn't publicly known, but probably most people familiar with the evidence in the case think it's Hillary. Doesn't really matter now, what matters is that the government should follow the law they create for the rest of us to follow.
> no safe level of mercury exposure. It builds up in the body over time. It's why pregnant women aren't supposed to eat fish.
And yet you're not wearing a biohazard suit to protect yourself from mercury in the world. You've (quite reasonably) decided to expose yourself to mercury and a lot of other much more dangerous things. Pros and cons. You've made a reasonable decision that it's not worth it. You could also spend $50,000 sealing up your house to keep mercury out, but that would be silly because if you were going to spend $50,000 being safer, you'd spend it on a safer car, more smoke detectors, etc. You want to avoid mercury, and you've already done the reasonable things - like not using mercury oral thermometers. Spending half your salary every year to be even safer from mercury would be unreasonable, in your analysis.
> Based on what I know about mercury (albeit not a huge amount) I'm with Obama on this one.
Not knowing much about mercury isn't a problem in this discussion. You can decide this without knowing anything about mercury, because there is no question about mercury up for discussion. The question is whether the government should follow the law and reveal what they know. The EPA knows about mercury, they did a big analysis of studies about mercury. The question a whether they should unlawfully hide that analysis when the results aren't pleasing to White House VIP, whoever that is.
You asked for a citation. To start with, here's the Supreme Court ruling saying what the EPA did was unlawful.
The SCOTUS ruling talks a lot about law, and specifically the specific point of law that SCOTUS chose to address, after the trial court and appeals court handled other issues of law. Issues of fact are handled by the trial court. You can use the case title to find the documents from the trial court for further information on the facts.
Nobody is saying the EPA can't regulate mercury emissions. The law says that when they regulate something, they have to release their analysis, which has to at least arguably show three things, all the while giving the EPA the benefit of the doubt (the law assumes the EPA is right if the analysis shows it's debatable). The EPA has to show that: They considered the benefits of the proposed regulation The considered the costs The proposed regulation could be reasonably be expected to accomplish a lawful goal of the agency
After releasing their analysis they then have to have a comment period in which the public may comment on the analysis, pointing out any major flaws such as if it missed the primary costs, pointing better wording that would be more effective, etc. It's illegal for them to put a regulation in place and say "we don't care what the costs are, and we're not going to give anyone a chance to see our analysis or comment on it. Someone from the White House wants this, so they're going to get it - scientific analysis and the law be damned". That's not legal.
So you're suggesting that because it's been the law for a long time, that makes it okay for your favorite president to violate the law? His administration only has to follow *recent" law?
I guess that kind of goes along with his reasoning "since Congress refused to give me the changes to immigration law I wanted, I am therefore empowered to unilaterally make up new laws myself". The EPA / coal thing probably didn't have anything to do with Obama, though. We don't know for sure who "White House VIP" is, but we do know one senior official at the time who was pretty public about wanting to punish coal-producing states, and we know that official has a decades-long record of being conniving, and they've admitted on TV that they make it a point to avoid putting things in writing due to open records requests. They would therefore only be known as White House VIP, since they made a point of not writing their name on things they could be confronted with later.
"Did you keep a lot of notes?", the interviewer asked. "Oh heavens no! They could be subpoenaed!", our favorite official answers on television. That's not Obama.
What you are referring to is a different issue entirely. This isn't about personal data.
In this case, someone at the White House asked the EPA to put forth some new regulations on coal that would be hard to comply with. Reducing mercury levels by another 90% would be difficult and expensive ($10 billion / year, according to the EPA under Obama), so that's what the White House person asked the EPA to do. Before making that rule, the EPA is legally required to release the results of their analysis of the costs and benefits of mercury reduction at those levels.
It turns out, the EPA analysis found that further mercury reduction wasn't the best way to improve public health - not by a long shot. It would be far better to reduce the levels of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulates, the EPA analysis found. That presented a problem for the EPA. Particulates can be reduced with a simple passive filter - they are literally particles. That wasn't what the White House VIP* wanted, but if the EPA released their analysis about mercury levels as required it would make their new regulation look stupid. So the EPA had a problem - release their study and look stupid, or not issue the regulation and piss off White House VIP.
Their solution was to draft an analysis of the cost of mercury reduction and the benefits of reducing particulates, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury. Less than 10% of the expected benefits were from reducing mercury, which was what the new regulation required.
This went to court in 2015 and the court ruled that the law says the EPA has to release their analysis of mercury levels. They aren't allowed to obscure the facts they came up with by mixing in benefits if particulates were also reduced, and sulfur dioxide, etc. When they issue a regulation saying mercury has to be reduced by 90%, they are legally required to release their analysis of what benefits and costs reduced mercury levels would have.
* If you thought about who in the White House was trying to punish coal-producing states and guessed that White House VIP was expected to become the next president, you've made the same guess a lot of people have.
That's exactly the problem, we don't get clear air and water. We get dirtier, more dangerous emissions when the EPA, under political pressure, lies / distorts the facts about which regulations would best provide clean air and water at a given cost.
Had the EPA released the data as required, some environmentalists, such as those working at environmental action groups, would have read the study and seen that the EPA study said X would help the environment, but instead the EPA did Y. They would point this out and many laypersons who care about the environment would then demand that the EPA put in place the regulations that would actually make a significant improvement.
The public doesn't win by lying about which regulations will do a lot of good and which will not.
Btw of you read up on the case, you will also find that they *knew* that what they were doing was unlawful and improper, but they did so at the insistence of a White House VIP.
If you really want to argue that the EPA administrators are wrong, that they only thought it was wrong to intentionally obscure legally required disclosures based on political pressure, I suppose you can try to make some logical argument why that's the right thing to do. Until you do so, I'm inclined to believe the people who did it, who should be experts at their job, when they decided this was improper so they should avoid mentioning the name of the White House VIP in any written correspondence. The judge who saw all of the evidence indicated it was not only unlawfully done, but knowingly unlawful.
I'll be happy to read any reasoned argument you have to make to the contrary, or view any evidence. Do you perhaps have some evidence that the court didn't see, suggesting that anyone involved thought that hiding the data was proper or even legal?
They CAN publish ancillary possible benefits that could happen with additional regulation, but they are legally REQUIRED to publish their study of mercury levels. It's *illegal* for them to promulgate a regulation without publishing the data they used for that regulation, in this case their study related to mercury levels. That's why the court ordered them to release it and they eventually did so.
Just curious, how is having the EPA publish their scientific data, as already required by law, anti-intellectual?
The court ruled when the Obama EPA lumped totally unrelated things together in a deliberate effort to obscure the results their study, that was hiding the scientific facts. To me, that's what seems anti-intellectual.
I'm not sure if you read the summary vs just the clickbait headline, but this makes no changes to mercury emissions. What has changed is that in the future, the EPA will comply with the law, as ordered by court order from 2015 regarding how they document the reasons for their decisions.
The proposed change is that in the future the EPA will publish certain data (as already required by law), rather than obscuring the data by lumping unrelated things together.
The summary hints at what's actually going on when the summary says:
-- President Trump's new proposal does not repeal the regulation, known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards....
a key legal justification for the measure. The long-term impact would be significant: It would weaken the ability of the E.P.A. to impose new regulations in the future [without publishing their data regarding the new regulation they made up] ---
Here's what happened. Under the Obama administration, certain people in the White House asked the EPA to put new regulations on coal. By law, when making new regulations, the EPA has to publish an analysis of the week benefits and costs. Their analysis concluded that further reducing mercury emissions would cost $9.6 billion and the benefits would be - minimal. Oops, that's a problem. It would be much more effective to spend $9.6 billion on nutritional education, anti-smoking, or any of many other choices, if you wanted to improve public health. Instead of having the coal plants pay $10 billion for mercury filters, it would have worked a heck a lot better to make them pay $10 billion for other, more effective, health related programs, Obama's EPA found.
But the White House wanted regulations on coal, not breastfeeding related programs or anything else that would have been more effective, get more bang for the buck. So what's the EPA to do? Issue the regulation while attaching their studies showing that their regulation was stupid?
The way the EPA dealt with this problem is they guessed that if they required more mercury reduction, coal plants *might* ALSO make drastic reductions to other emissions, including particulates and many others. The EPA study said that if the plants greatly reduced all of these other things, that would be good for public health. These other possible benefits that have nothing whatsoever to do with mercury would be significant, far greater than the minimal benefit related to mercury. So the EPA published numbers showing a) the cost of mercury reduction and b) the total benefits of greatly reducing particulates, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, etc. They didn't publish their numbers for mercury because they were embarrassingly low.
In 2015 the court ruled that the EPA hadn't followed the law. If they are going to make a regulation on mercury emissions, they have to publish their estimates of the cost and benefits of mercury emissions reduction. They can't hide it by adding in a bunch of unrelated stuff and lumping it all together, the court ruled.
The EPA now proposes to follow the law, as they have been to ordered by the court, and publish their estimates for the costs and benefits of any new regulations - and only for the regulation, not a lump sum assuming a bunch of other new regulations.
More specifically, John Kelly, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security had that decision to make and refused to increase it under quite a bit of pressure from Congresscritters such as Senator Heidi Heitkamp (Democrat, North Dakota). As Heitkamp kept up the pressure, Kelly eventually capitulated ad raised the cap. Not doubled, but increased it.
Btw, you'll find that gross ineffeciencies tend to end up badly. That's the case pretty reliably.
It's a frequent pattern that someone will propose something to make things more fair* (fair meaning having the same results from vastly different actions), and someone else will point out that the proposal is grossly inefficient - it wastes a lot. The person making the original proposal may concede that it's inefficient, or it may just be plainly obvious that it's wasteful, but proponents will say that the increase in fairness* is worth the waste.
In such cases, if you actually work through all the costs you'll almost always find that gross inefficiency, being wasteful, has a stronger effect that the balancing "fairness" aspect, such that the people whom the proposal was supposed to help are actually harmed.
-- * Distinguishing two different views of fairness. Consider yesterday my daughter ate some Christmas stocking candy which she had saved. She chose not to eat it all on Christmas because she wanted to have some for later. Her cousin are all of hers immediately. Some people would forcibly take her candy my daughter and give it to her cousin, because it's "not fair" that my daughter still has hers, while the cousin no longer has any. Others would say taking it is very unfair. My daughter should be able to enjoy the benefits of her earlier sacrifice, they say.
Back when we had medical insurance, you'd pay the doctor $20 to cover the cost of keeping the lights on for the 20 you were there, and that was it.
Now, you first pay the health plan $1,000 / month, then you pay the doctor $20 copay, which they use to pay the full-time employee they need to handle insurance paperwork.
So basically, you would claim that people not going to the doctor for an ear ache before was because they couldn't afford $20 for the doctor, but now that it's $1,000/month plus $20 for the visit they can more easily afford it?
Not saying I agree or disagree with that arithmetic just want to make sure I fully understand what you are saying.
Insurance is for unusual events you can't budget to pay cash for. Home insurance covers if your house gets destroyed by a tornado, not replacing the $5 flapper valve in the toilet. Car insurance is for when your car gets totalled, not for oil changes.
Can you imagine if you had to deal with insurance companies and their forms every time you replaced a toilet flapper or painted a wall? It would easily triple the cost. (Insurance company employees have to get paid to deal with this stuff.)
Taking a kid to the doctor every now and and again for something like an ear infection is normal, expected, and affordable. A bilteral cleft palate is neither normal nor affordable. We used to have "major medical insurance" for unexpected medical costs you couldn't slap in your monthly budget. It was affordable. For an ear infection, you handed to the doctor a 20 dollar bill and that was it - no insurance company bureaucracy adding expense.
We've confused routine healthcare with catastrophic illness, and in the process we've greatly increased the cost of the routine stuff by adding ridiculous amounts of bureaucracy.
> It's amazing that you know more about their needs than they do. Or, the alternative, that their preferences are different from what you would expect to prefer.
Quite the opposite. I'm assuming (knowing) that different people have different needs and preferences. People prefer different screen sizes, battery life, value price differently, etc. "Everyone should get an iPhone" would assume everyone is exactly the same.
> agree with you about the lack of iPhone merits are voting you up
Actually my numbers have the iPhone being best for 37.5 times as many people as the average phone model.
I'm assuming that iPhones are 37X "better" than the average smartphone.
OpenSignal reports that their app has been installed on 24,000 different models of smartphone. About 20 of those are iPhones.
*All other things being equal* (they're not), each phone model would be the best match for 0.00416667% of people. Multiplied by 20 iPhone models, 0.083333% of people would be best matched by an iPhone.
Since some phones aren't the best for *anyone*, some photos are objectively better, we can reasonably (but debateably) assert that iPhone models are much, much better than average. Instead of being the best match for only 0.08% of people, as the arithmetic suggests, if we multiply the iPhones desirability by 37.5 times, we get 3% of people who would be best served by an iPhone.
I just walked through the electronics section of a general merchandise store and there are no fewer than 30 different phone models available within 10 feet of me right now. At least 27 of those have headphone jacks. Most of them are available at a much lower price than the iPhone. Rationally, people with different needs and desires would choose different phones. This LG on my left is probably the best choice for 3% of buyers, the more expensive LG two feet away is probably the rational choice for 2% of buyers, the iPhone is probably the best for 2% of people, etc. The difference between the 2% of people who *should* buy iPhones and the number who *actually* buy iPhones is the number of irrational iPhone purchases.
> Your argument that an OS shouldn't have deep browser hooks is ridiculous, unless you don't believe Chrome OS or FireFox OS are valid OS'... > obviously Google and Firefox thought this was a good idea).
Just so I understand, your argument is that ChromeOS and FirefoxOS are the best operating systems, and every operating system should try to be like FirefoxOS, because it worked so well?
> It does however not mean that every security bug in IE is a Windows bug.
Right, every week when there's another IE bug you don't know whether it provides the attacker access to exploit the kernel or system shell. Some do, some don't.
Contrast a Firefox bug. That's going to affect Firefox. Never the operating system.
I said "during the primaries, only Trump polled lower than Clinton". He replied "you're so full of shit - Clinton polled better than Trump, you moron".
He said I was totally wrong, while stating that what I said was exactly right. He argued/agreed with me. He argued.
One every thirty seconds, if you believe the extrapolation they did with their AI. (Why AI instead of simple arithmetic?) Anyway, hmm. I bet there are more negative tweets about Trump than than only two per minute.
We do have a lot of negativity in our society. I'd like to discuss disagreement more civilly. Attempting to divide us men vs women, or cast females as victims, isn't going to bring us together and help make things more polite, or increase our desire to understand each other. It's just trying to stoke controversy.
It's a PR puff piece, of course, so you can filter through the hype to get the information. The summary of that is: Existing ActiveX controls (previously known as COM components) which were created desktop applications are now supported in IE.
Here's an article that Microsoft added to MSDN in 1995. The second half of the article covers iDispatch, a style of COM interface. https://web.archive.org/web/20...
Here's the 1996 Microsoft announcement officially announcing the ActiveX name and their strategy for presenting it as a web technology, in which they say "ActiveX controls (formerly COM components)". The Microsodt announcement says thousands of COM/ActiveX components were already available, but could now be used in the web browser (IE 3.0). According to Microsoft's announcement, ActiveX controls" were formerly called "COM components". According to their announcement, many companies had already been making them, as "COM" for desktop software, prior to IE 3.0 supporting them and the change to the ActiveX branding.
One reason I remember this so clearly is that I was one of the people making COM components at the time it was rebranded ActiveX. I know I didn't have to change my software in order to make my existing COM components, including a styleable linear "slider" control I designed, into ActiveX components - the only change was the branding.
You are correct that Active Desktop was September 1997.
Slashdot Mirror
> > it would have worked a heck a lot better to make them pay $10 billion for other, more effective, health related programs, Obama's EPA found.
> What? In what world would that make sense?
In a world where you don't want people to get sick and die, even if they disagree with you politically?
This particular regulation kills 10,000 people every year vs the alternatives. Personally, I think killing thousands of people is a bad thing.
I'm missing how your comment is connected to why the EPA should or should not unlawfully hide their analysis projecting benefits and costs of their proposed regulation.
Does "mercury is special" mean the public shouldn't be allo d to know that this regulation kills 10,000 people every year vs alternatives:
https://slashdot.org/comments....
> As near as I can tell the real world implication of what Obummer did saves way more in aggregate healthcare costs borne by OTHERS even when applying a generous 100% discount on intangible cost of human suffering far in excess of some 10 billion spent on scrubbers.
You're guessing the benefits are several thousand times higher than what the EPA analysis predicted. Do you have any evidence, any reason to think that?
What (Obama's) EPA analysia found was $10 billion a year in costs would have $20 million / year in benefits, including "human suffering". (You see why they didn't want to release their analysis).
You might wonder how the heck one can measure health problems, or "human suffering" as you put it, in dollars. That seems counterintuitive. Yet there's actually a really simple way to convert between dollars and health outcomes, for policy questions. There are plenty of studies about seatbelts and airbaga. We know about how much airbags have reduced traffic deaths, and various injuries. We know how much they cost. Simple division shows that seatbelts and airbags cost $500,000 per life saved. We know that CPC and OSHA regulations cost about $100,000 for every life saved. We've measured the cost and benefits of nutrition education, we know that $X spent on nutrition education reduces diabetes cases by Y%. EPA programs vary from $1 million to $10 million per life saved.
Our country has limited resources, of course. We can't spend $100 trillion / year on safety, because we don't have $100 trillion. So the question when making policy is which of these to put our resources toward:
Should we spend $10 million of workplace safety through OSHA and save 100 lives?
Should we spend that $10 million on traffic safety through DOT and save ten lives?
Should we instead spend that $10 million on benzene regulation through the EPA and save only one life?
We can save a life by spending a million dollars. Spending $10 billion on one thing means we don't have that $10 billion to spend on traffic safety or workplace safety. We lose the opportunity to save 10,000 lives. So *from a public policy perspective* that's the cost / value of a life - about a million dollars, because spending a million here means not spending that million somewhere else to save someone's life.
I'm not the one who came up with the name White House VIP.
That's what the EPA bureaucrats called the person.
> But you seem to be implying Obama intentionally attacked the coal industry
I don't think White House VIP is Obama. So no, nothing to do with Obama. The identity of VIP isn't publicly known, but probably most people familiar with the evidence in the case think it's Hillary. Doesn't really matter now, what matters is that the government should follow the law they create for the rest of us to follow.
> no safe level of mercury exposure. It builds up in the body over time. It's why pregnant women aren't supposed to eat fish.
And yet you're not wearing a biohazard suit to protect yourself from mercury in the world. You've (quite reasonably) decided to expose yourself to mercury and a lot of other much more dangerous things. Pros and cons. You've made a reasonable decision that it's not worth it. You could also spend $50,000 sealing up your house to keep mercury out, but that would be silly because if you were going to spend $50,000 being safer, you'd spend it on a safer car, more smoke detectors, etc. You want to avoid mercury, and you've already done the reasonable things - like not using mercury oral thermometers. Spending half your salary every year to be even safer from mercury would be unreasonable, in your analysis.
> Based on what I know about mercury (albeit not a huge amount) I'm with Obama on this one.
Not knowing much about mercury isn't a problem in this discussion. You can decide this without knowing anything about mercury, because there is no question about mercury up for discussion. The question is whether the government should follow the law and reveal what they know. The EPA knows about mercury, they did a big analysis of studies about mercury. The question a whether they should unlawfully hide that analysis when the results aren't pleasing to White House VIP, whoever that is.
You asked for a citation. To start with, here's the Supreme Court ruling saying what the EPA did was unlawful.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/o...
The SCOTUS ruling talks a lot about law, and specifically the specific point of law that SCOTUS chose to address, after the trial court and appeals court handled other issues of law. Issues of fact are handled by the trial court. You can use the case title to find the documents from the trial court for further information on the facts.
Nobody is saying the EPA can't regulate mercury emissions. The law says that when they regulate something, they have to release their analysis, which has to at least arguably show three things, all the while giving the EPA the benefit of the doubt (the law assumes the EPA is right if the analysis shows it's debatable). The EPA has to show that:
They considered the benefits of the proposed regulation
The considered the costs
The proposed regulation could be reasonably be expected to accomplish a lawful goal of the agency
After releasing their analysis they then have to have a comment period in which the public may comment on the analysis, pointing out any major flaws such as if it missed the primary costs, pointing better wording that would be more effective, etc. It's illegal for them to put a regulation in place and say "we don't care what the costs are, and we're not going to give anyone a chance to see our analysis or comment on it. Someone from the White House wants this, so they're going to get it - scientific analysis and the law be damned". That's not legal.
So you're suggesting that because it's been the law for a long time, that makes it okay for your favorite president to violate the law? His administration only has to follow *recent" law?
I guess that kind of goes along with his reasoning "since Congress refused to give me the changes to immigration law I wanted, I am therefore empowered to unilaterally make up new laws myself". The EPA / coal thing probably didn't have anything to do with Obama, though. We don't know for sure who "White House VIP" is, but we do know one senior official at the time who was pretty public about wanting to punish coal-producing states, and we know that official has a decades-long record of being conniving, and they've admitted on TV that they make it a point to avoid putting things in writing due to open records requests. They would therefore only be known as White House VIP, since they made a point of not writing their name on things they could be confronted with later.
"Did you keep a lot of notes?", the interviewer asked.
"Oh heavens no! They could be subpoenaed!", our favorite official answers on television. That's not Obama.
What you are referring to is a different issue entirely.
This isn't about personal data.
In this case, someone at the White House asked the EPA to put forth some new regulations on coal that would be hard to comply with. Reducing mercury levels by another 90% would be difficult and expensive ($10 billion / year, according to the EPA under Obama), so that's what the White House person asked the EPA to do. Before making that rule, the EPA is legally required to release the results of their analysis of the costs and benefits of mercury reduction at those levels.
It turns out, the EPA analysis found that further mercury reduction wasn't the best way to improve public health - not by a long shot. It would be far better to reduce the levels of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulates, the EPA analysis found. That presented a problem for the EPA. Particulates can be reduced with a simple passive filter - they are literally particles. That wasn't what the White House VIP* wanted, but if the EPA released their analysis about mercury levels as required it would make their new regulation look stupid. So the EPA had a problem - release their study and look stupid, or not issue the regulation and piss off White House VIP.
Their solution was to draft an analysis of the cost of mercury reduction and the benefits of reducing particulates, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury. Less than 10% of the expected benefits were from reducing mercury, which was what the new regulation required.
This went to court in 2015 and the court ruled that the law says the EPA has to release their analysis of mercury levels. They aren't allowed to obscure the facts they came up with by mixing in benefits if particulates were also reduced, and sulfur dioxide, etc. When they issue a regulation saying mercury has to be reduced by 90%, they are legally required to release their analysis of what benefits and costs reduced mercury levels would have.
* If you thought about who in the White House was trying to punish coal-producing states and guessed that White House VIP was expected to become the next president, you've made the same guess a lot of people have.
That's exactly the problem, we don't get clear air and water.
We get dirtier, more dangerous emissions when the EPA, under political pressure, lies / distorts the facts about which regulations would best provide clean air and water at a given cost.
Had the EPA released the data as required, some environmentalists, such as those working at environmental action groups, would have read the study and seen that the EPA study said X would help the environment, but instead the EPA did Y. They would point this out and many laypersons who care about the environment would then demand that the EPA put in place the regulations that would actually make a significant improvement.
The public doesn't win by lying about which regulations will do a lot of good and which will not.
Btw of you read up on the case, you will also find that they *knew* that what they were doing was unlawful and improper, but they did so at the insistence of a White House VIP.
If you really want to argue that the EPA administrators are wrong, that they only thought it was wrong to intentionally obscure legally required disclosures based on political pressure, I suppose you can try to make some logical argument why that's the right thing to do. Until you do so, I'm inclined to believe the people who did it, who should be experts at their job, when they decided this was improper so they should avoid mentioning the name of the White House VIP in any written correspondence. The judge who saw all of the evidence indicated it was not only unlawfully done, but knowingly unlawful.
I'll be happy to read any reasoned argument you have to make to the contrary, or view any evidence. Do you perhaps have some evidence that the court didn't see, suggesting that anyone involved thought that hiding the data was proper or even legal?
They CAN publish ancillary possible benefits that could happen with additional regulation, but they are legally REQUIRED to publish their study of mercury levels. It's *illegal* for them to promulgate a regulation without publishing the data they used for that regulation, in this case their study related to mercury levels. That's why the court ordered them to release it and they eventually did so.
Just curious, how is having the EPA publish their scientific data, as already required by law, anti-intellectual?
The court ruled when the Obama EPA lumped totally unrelated things together in a deliberate effort to obscure the results their study, that was hiding the scientific facts. To me, that's what seems anti-intellectual.
Unless you mean anti pseudo-intellectual?
I'm not sure if you read the summary vs just the clickbait headline, but this makes no changes to mercury emissions. What has changed is that in the future, the EPA will comply with the law, as ordered by court order from 2015 regarding how they document the reasons for their decisions.
The proposed change is that in the future the EPA will publish certain data (as already required by law), rather than obscuring the data by lumping unrelated things together.
The summary hints at what's actually going on when the summary says:
-- ...
President Trump's new proposal does not repeal the regulation, known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards.
a key legal justification for the measure. The long-term impact would be significant: It would weaken the ability of the E.P.A. to impose new regulations in the future [without publishing their data regarding the new regulation they made up]
---
Here's what happened. Under the Obama administration, certain people in the White House asked the EPA to put new regulations on coal. By law, when making new regulations, the EPA has to publish an analysis of the week benefits and costs. Their analysis concluded that further reducing mercury emissions would cost $9.6 billion and the benefits would be - minimal. Oops, that's a problem. It would be much more effective to spend $9.6 billion on nutritional education, anti-smoking, or any of many other choices, if you wanted to improve public health. Instead of having the coal plants pay $10 billion for mercury filters, it would have worked a heck a lot better to make them pay $10 billion for other, more effective, health related programs, Obama's EPA found.
But the White House wanted regulations on coal, not breastfeeding related programs or anything else that would have been more effective, get more bang for the buck. So what's the EPA to do? Issue the regulation while attaching their studies showing that their regulation was stupid?
The way the EPA dealt with this problem is they guessed that if they required more mercury reduction, coal plants *might* ALSO make drastic reductions to other emissions, including particulates and many others. The EPA study said that if the plants greatly reduced all of these other things, that would be good for public health. These other possible benefits that have nothing whatsoever to do with mercury would be significant, far greater than the minimal benefit related to mercury. So the EPA published numbers showing a) the cost of mercury reduction and b) the total benefits of greatly reducing particulates, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, etc. They didn't publish their numbers for mercury because they were embarrassingly low.
In 2015 the court ruled that the EPA hadn't followed the law. If they are going to make a regulation on mercury emissions, they have to publish their estimates of the cost and benefits of mercury emissions reduction. They can't hide it by adding in a bunch of unrelated stuff and lumping it all together, the court ruled.
The EPA now proposes to follow the law, as they have been to ordered by the court, and publish their estimates for the costs and benefits of any new regulations - and only for the regulation, not a lump sum assuming a bunch of other new regulations.
More specifically, John Kelly, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security had that decision to make and refused to increase it under quite a bit of pressure from Congresscritters such as Senator Heidi Heitkamp (Democrat, North Dakota). As Heitkamp kept up the pressure, Kelly eventually capitulated ad raised the cap. Not doubled, but increased it.
Btw, you'll find that gross ineffeciencies tend to end up badly. That's the case pretty reliably.
It's a frequent pattern that someone will propose something to make things more fair* (fair meaning having the same results from vastly different actions), and someone else will point out that the proposal is grossly inefficient - it wastes a lot. The person making the original proposal may concede that it's inefficient, or it may just be plainly obvious that it's wasteful, but proponents will say that the increase in fairness* is worth the waste.
In such cases, if you actually work through all the costs you'll almost always find that gross inefficiency, being wasteful, has a stronger effect that the balancing "fairness" aspect, such that the people whom the proposal was supposed to help are actually harmed.
--
* Distinguishing two different views of fairness.
Consider yesterday my daughter ate some Christmas stocking candy which she had saved. She chose not to eat it all on Christmas because she wanted to have some for later. Her cousin are all of hers immediately. Some people would forcibly take her candy my daughter and give it to her cousin, because it's "not fair" that my daughter still has hers, while the cousin no longer has any. Others would say taking it is very unfair. My daughter should be able to enjoy the benefits of her earlier sacrifice, they say.
Back when we had medical insurance, you'd pay the doctor $20 to cover the cost of keeping the lights on for the 20 you were there, and that was it.
Now, you first pay the health plan $1,000 / month, then you pay the doctor $20 copay, which they use to pay the full-time employee they need to handle insurance paperwork.
So basically, you would claim that people not going to the doctor for an ear ache before was because they couldn't afford $20 for the doctor, but now that it's $1,000/month plus $20 for the visit they can more easily afford it?
Not saying I agree or disagree with that arithmetic just want to make sure I fully understand what you are saying.
Insurance is for unusual events you can't budget to pay cash for. Home insurance covers if your house gets destroyed by a tornado, not replacing the $5 flapper valve in the toilet. Car insurance is for when your car gets totalled, not for oil changes.
Can you imagine if you had to deal with insurance companies and their forms every time you replaced a toilet flapper or painted a wall? It would easily triple the cost. (Insurance company employees have to get paid to deal with this stuff.)
Taking a kid to the doctor every now and and again for something like an ear infection is normal, expected, and affordable. A bilteral cleft palate is neither normal nor affordable. We used to have "major medical insurance" for unexpected medical costs you couldn't slap in your monthly budget. It was affordable. For an ear infection, you handed to the doctor a 20 dollar bill and that was it - no insurance company bureaucracy adding expense.
We've confused routine healthcare with catastrophic illness, and in the process we've greatly increased the cost of the routine stuff by adding ridiculous amounts of bureaucracy.
> It's amazing that you know more about their needs than they do. Or, the alternative, that their preferences are different from what you would expect to prefer.
Quite the opposite. I'm assuming (knowing) that different people have different needs and preferences. People prefer different screen sizes, battery life, value price differently, etc. "Everyone should get an iPhone" would assume everyone is exactly the same.
> agree with you about the lack of iPhone merits are voting you up
Actually my numbers have the iPhone being best for 37.5 times as many people as the average phone model.
I'm assuming that iPhones are 37X "better" than the average smartphone.
OpenSignal reports that their app has been installed on 24,000 different models of smartphone. About 20 of those are iPhones.
*All other things being equal* (they're not), each phone model would be the best match for 0.00416667% of people. Multiplied by 20 iPhone models, 0.083333% of people would be best matched by an iPhone.
Since some phones aren't the best for *anyone*, some photos are objectively better, we can reasonably (but debateably) assert that iPhone models are much, much better than average. Instead of being the best match for only 0.08% of people, as the arithmetic suggests, if we multiply the iPhones desirability by 37.5 times, we get 3% of people who would be best served by an iPhone.
I just walked through the electronics section of a general merchandise store and there are no fewer than 30 different phone models available within 10 feet of me right now. At least 27 of those have headphone jacks. Most of them are available at a much lower price than the iPhone. Rationally, people with different needs and desires would choose different phones. This LG on my left is probably the best choice for 3% of buyers, the more expensive LG two feet away is probably the rational choice for 2% of buyers, the iPhone is probably the best for 2% of people, etc. The difference between the 2% of people who *should* buy iPhones and the number who *actually* buy iPhones is the number of irrational iPhone purchases.
> Your argument that an OS shouldn't have deep browser hooks is ridiculous, unless you don't believe Chrome OS or FireFox OS are valid OS'. ..
> obviously Google and Firefox thought this was a good idea).
Just so I understand, your argument is that ChromeOS and FirefoxOS are the best operating systems, and every operating system should try to be like FirefoxOS, because it worked so well?
> It does however not mean that every security bug in IE is a Windows bug.
Right, every week when there's another IE bug you don't know whether it provides the attacker access to exploit the kernel or system shell. Some do, some don't.
Contrast a Firefox bug. That's going to affect Firefox. Never the operating system.
That should be:
He argued/agreed with me. He agrued.
In this post, AlanObject agrued with me:
https://slashdot.org/comments....
I said "during the primaries, only Trump polled lower than Clinton". He replied "you're so full of shit - Clinton polled better than Trump, you moron".
He said I was totally wrong, while stating that what I said was exactly right. He argued/agreed with me. He argued.
Or maybe it's just a typo. :)
One every thirty seconds, if you believe the extrapolation they did with their AI. (Why AI instead of simple arithmetic?) Anyway, hmm. I bet there are more negative tweets about Trump than than only two per minute.
We do have a lot of negativity in our society. I'd like to discuss disagreement more civilly. Attempting to divide us men vs women, or cast females as victims, isn't going to bring us together and help make things more polite, or increase our desire to understand each other. It's just trying to stoke controversy.
I forgot to include the second link.
https://news.microsoft.com/199...
It's a PR puff piece, of course, so you can filter through the hype to get the information. The summary of that is:
Existing ActiveX controls (previously known as COM components) which were created desktop applications are now supported in IE.
Here's an article that Microsoft added to MSDN in 1995.
The second half of the article covers iDispatch, a style of COM interface.
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
Here's the 1996 Microsoft announcement officially announcing the ActiveX name and their strategy for presenting it as a web technology, in which they say "ActiveX controls (formerly COM components)". The Microsodt announcement says thousands of COM/ActiveX components were already available, but could now be used in the web browser (IE 3.0).
According to Microsoft's announcement, ActiveX controls" were formerly called "COM components". According to their announcement, many companies had already been making them, as "COM" for desktop software, prior to IE 3.0 supporting them and the change to the ActiveX branding.
One reason I remember this so clearly is that I was one of the people making COM components at the time it was rebranded ActiveX. I know I didn't have to change my software in order to make my existing COM components, including a styleable linear "slider" control I designed, into ActiveX components - the only change was the branding.
You are correct that Active Desktop was September 1997.