Well, since the amount a bank is permitted to loan (which contributes to the money supply) is based on its reserves, which are based on the value of its assets, if the value of a whole bunch of assets shrinks dramatically, the money supply also shrinks dramatically.
Will never happen. Using your factional example. Say the government increases the money supply either by lowering the factions I need to maintain in my bank or by 'buying' some of my loans off of me. I immediately turn around and lend out the extra money I have. To shrink the supply the gov. can either raise the fraction I need or sell my back my loans. If I'm fully loaned out I can't do either. The money supply in turn doesn't shrink.
Even more egregious is when the gov. buys its own debt. They are doing this with 300B-400B. Red flags should be going off all over because it means China/Japan have basically turned us down. They don't want anymore of our worthless treasuries. So the gov. writes the treasuries and sells them to fed who just prints up some money to buy them. Brilliant!
It is funny how people focus on the $165 million, but not on the $173 BILLION that was essentially paid to AIG's gambling clients. And one of those, Goldman, has a lot of their people in the treasury - Henry Paulson being one example.
Exactly! We're worrying about bonuses that were 1/10 of 1% of the entire package that we gave AIG. The whole thing was clearly a smokescreen to pull the publics eyes away from all the money being given to other people and the announcement made on Wed. that the fed is printing ANOTHER $1.15T. I sure wish I could purchase my own debt...talk about circular reasoning.
1) Reprocessing is more expensive, and greatly raises the per-kilowatt costs pro-nuclear peeps sling about.
Reprocessing does add cost. Some of that cost would be offset by the byproducts of the reprocessing that you could sell. Canada sells us our medicinal isotopes now and I doubt they are selling them us at a loss. Reprocessing also lowers the amount of long-term storage space needed since we would end up with less overall waste. I don't know exact numbers, but that would also offset the cost. Also, what do you mean by 'greatly'? Is it more than coal? Maybe. More than wind/solar? I seriously doubt it. Per-kilowatt cost is always a relative measure.
2) Is it ethical to rely on reprocessing, when we start talking invasion when our geopolitical enemies try to do it?
Huh? We generally don't want any of our enemies to have any sort of nuclear technology. Besides, if you read the article, reprocessing to weapons grade nuclear material is an entirely different ball game.
3) Regarding stupid regulations: since most of the pro-nuclear crowd is drawn from the Right, why are they so eager to demand reliance on a source of energy that basically requires huge amounts of government meddling? I would think that solar and wind -- which can be harnessed by anyone -- would tickle their fancy more.
A few points. It's not the Right, but more of the pragmatic people who think nuclear is a direction we should be exploring. France isn't exactly Right and they generate much of their energy from nuclear power.
All power creation (not brokering a la Enron) has been and always will be highly regulated because of national security and potential for pollution. Even if we could move to all wind today it would remain highly regulated because the power grid is so important to national security. The government will never get its hands out of the power creation. Additionally the only way we will ever get to wind/solar/other alternative is through government regulation. They are so expensive that the government will have to make them more attractive either through incentives or taxes.
Also, what you're proposing is a false dichotomy. No where has anyone said alternative fuels are dead and that they shouldn't be explored. It's not one or the other. You can do nuclear while continuing to research everything else.
4) Or is the goal to get nuclear power in a big way, then deregulate the hell out of it? Be honest, do you think Americans would be eager to see that come to pass?
Nice strawman. Power creation will always be heavily regulated regardless of the technology used.
The goal is to switch the US to a cleaner more efficient fuel without destroying the economy cap and trade style. Wind and solar is great, but if you sat down and did the math about how much power they can actually provide you'd see that they will always be secondary sources. They just can't produce enough KW to be viable as a complete replacement. At that point you're left with a fossil fuel or nuclear.
The law went into place in 1977, so what happened prior to then (that was caused by reprocessing) that we are still cleaning up? Even if something did happen over 30 years ago the rest of the world seems to have figured out the reprocessing issue just fine. The US likes to call itself leaders in technology so lets lead. In that timeframe the rest of the world has also come up even more efficient nuclear reactors that are designed in such a way that you can't have a meltdown.
Your arguing for something that I actually think is a good idea. Clean nuclear fuel would be ideal (see the link I posted above), but the technology isn't quite ready yet.
We already have cleaner nuclear fuel through the ability to reprocess the waste. The problem is that we have antiquated laws from the 1970s prevents us from being able to do so. Hell, we have to import our medicinal isotopes from Canada because we are not allowed to refine them here. Good read here.
That, and the problem of waste that's hazardous for 10,000 years....
You mean waste that is mostly because of stupid regulations from the late 1970s?
From the article:
France, which completely reprocesses its recyclable material, stores all the unused remains -- from 30 years of generating 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy -- beneath the floor of a single room at La Hague.
If we could actually reprocess the spent nuclear material we would end up with very little real waste.
Sounds like Dr. House for developers. People think because they are smart and/or great at their craft they can basically do anything they want. This ties back to the/. article about the younger generation being more narcissistic than ever. Shows like 'House' glorify it and apparently make people think it is okay to be an asshole as long as you get the job done.
I agree with you about the politifact site. I made a post last week about the 'No Earmarks' promise where they gave him a 'Compromise' rating. Um, Obama has signed 2 major spending bills full of earmarks. How is that a compromise? It's a fail to keep.
IFF Obama focus on getting the economy GOING, and once going focuses on balancing the budget with a balanced budget amendment ( the anti-neo-con or anti-republican amendment)
ROFL, you mean that would be an anti-politician amendment. Here's the thing. Politicians want power. The quickest way to gain that power is to forcibly take your constituents money and give it to someone else. Growing the government is a power grab and balanced budgets and shrinking government do not fit in that scenario.
The clearest example of this is lowering the tax break for charity giving. All charities (liberal, conservative, etc...) are up in arms about it. The government is saying don't worry, you'll get that money back from us through government spending. So now the government has removed the power from the original charity giver and shifted it to some politicians in DC. So now charities have to pander (ie, lobby, ie GIVE MONEY) to some politician in order to get the same amount of charity money they used to receive before from individuals. What a great system.
Have you ever tried to do your own taxes....unassisted? The American tax code is an absolute nightmare at the present.
I used to handwrite my tax forms. It's really not that hard if you track stuff properly during the year and have a reference for the current code.
Here's the thing though. Geitner is supposed to be the best of the best, the smartest financial guy out there and he can't do his taxes? No, he was clearly avoiding paying his taxes. I wonder how many people are sitting jail for doing what he did? Where was the IRS? Why didn't they go after him and levy all the threats they do against anyone else who 'can't figure out the tax code'? It's clear as day hypocrisy, but that's no surprise given the rest of the Obama administration.
And? How does that make her any different than previous Speakers, or for that matter, #4 in line?
This plan was put in place by Bush and Rove post 9/11. They decided that the Speaker of the House was important enough to have fly in his/her own plane in case of another coordinated attack.
The choice of plane (a 757) seems excessive, but it's reportedly the only one readily available that can fly non-stop from DC to her home in California.
And she has to make this commute daily? Weekly? Monthly? How often? Certainly not often enough that justifying a half-hour stop over somewhere to refuel can't be justified.
This I agree with. The plane she currently flies is in fact a military owned plane. The problem is that she has to stop part way to refuel and she doesn't like doing it. She needs to suck it up, but instead rails against CEOs all day while doing the same stuff herself.
BTW, most congress people commute back to their districts every weekend. They work 4 days/week, fly home on Fri. and we pay them ~130k/year + all the extras + extras they get when they leave office. And, they have the nerve to criticize business people? ROFL.
What exactly was Daschle doing for the firm as a non-lawyer and non-lobbyist that he was paid 2 million plus perks?
Exactly. He was most likely lobbying on behalf of the law firm. The reason they want to keep it somewhat under wraps is because it's perfectly legal. Who do you think comes up with bills nowadays? Client goes to law firm and says they want a bill that will help them. Law firm draws it up then calls Daschle to figure out who they can get to present it. Then he trades favors for support of said bill (or provision tied to another bill etc...). What a great system we have.
That sight you list is partisan and very pro-Obama. How can they mark 'no earmarks' as a compromise?
No. 512: Go "line by line" over earmarks to make sure money being spent wisely "And, absolutely, we need earmark reform. And when I'm president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely.
I thought it was going to be a good sight to follow until I started seeing things like the above.
I did the math and that 59 seconds/8 miles just on my way to and from work would save me about 20 days worth of time over my working lifetime (30 years). Seems like a pretty good idea to me!
What are you talking about? Your rights stop where my rights start. You have every right to sit in the street in front of my house and picket or yell at me. As soon as you post a sign in my front yard (or in this case Nortons forum servers), I can take that sign and toss it in the trash.
Why don't you post your home address and let everyone come by and put up "I love goatse" signs around your front yard. Of course if you take them down can I call you Kim Il Jung Jr and say you're taking away my innate human right to express my opinion?
McAfee is okay. It's what IT pushes to all of my work desktops and servers. The on-access scanner did a good job at stopping the recent downadup worm from spreading.
I don't know. The history that I've read on the situation makes it seem like the Japanese people were not ever going to surrender. Normal citizens were preparing to fight in the streets with pitchforks and hunting rifles if necessary. Given that honor played and still plays a very big part in Japanese culture it's not that hard to believe.
That's true, but you also need to add historical perspective. At the time we employed the 'enemy of my enemy is my friend' tactic. We were fighting a global war against the USSR (and thus communism) on many fronts through intermediaries. Afghanistan was just one of those fronts. Do we go back and not fund the afghan rebels and instead possibly let the USSR take over? How would that have changed history then?
Murder generally requires a willful act, and if a mother forces a miscarriage I believe she can be charged with a crime as it stands now depending on how far along she was.
Some people have already been charged and convicted for killing an unborn child through physical harm to the mother.
And I said that's fine. I left out the word 'clean' maybe that made it confusing. Most rational, logical people would be fine paying for the whole costs of burning fossil fuels with a tax on fossil fuels.
The problems are what I outlined above. The tax would not be used to for cleaning things up, it would not go up and down depending on said costs to clean things up, and it would simply be used as yet another stick for the feds to force states to do things they don't want to do.
The whole point, here, is to expose the consumer to the full, complete cost of fossil fuels. If you did that, green technologies (which don't get shadow subsidies in the form of negative externalities) would suddenly look highly competitive.
I'm not so sure. When people talk about green tech they often leave out a lot of the environmental impact costs. Look at the many of the green cars that through their manufacturing (mainly the batteries, some of the light weight materials) leave the environment in worse shape than a standard gas power engine car running for years.
If the to government said it was only going to tax gas as much as it took to keep the environment and research alternative fuels I think many people would be okay with that. The problem is we all know that's not how it would work. First, the money would get diverted to all sorts of non-related projects. Second, the federal government would use it as a power play against the states the way it uses the highway funds now.
Look at cap & trade. The government is licking its chops at this huge potential source of new revenue to add to its *general* budget. It's going to skyrocket costs for energy (and thus all products made in the US), but who cares as long as we are not adding any new 'taxes' to people making under 250k.
It's definitely about the money. City/County/State budgets are tight and Obama isn't taxing businesses fast enough so why not just sue business directly.
I think I've actually heard in CA, they are considering full blown (no pun intended) legalization to bring in tax revenue in this economic tough period.
I think it is Mendencino county in CA where they estimate 2/3s of the counties GDP is tied to pot production (somewhere in the billions iirc). CA politicians want their cut much the same way the mob always gets their cut.
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Will never happen. Using your factional example. Say the government increases the money supply either by lowering the factions I need to maintain in my bank or by 'buying' some of my loans off of me. I immediately turn around and lend out the extra money I have. To shrink the supply the gov. can either raise the fraction I need or sell my back my loans. If I'm fully loaned out I can't do either. The money supply in turn doesn't shrink.
Even more egregious is when the gov. buys its own debt. They are doing this with 300B-400B. Red flags should be going off all over because it means China/Japan have basically turned us down. They don't want anymore of our worthless treasuries. So the gov. writes the treasuries and sells them to fed who just prints up some money to buy them. Brilliant!
Exactly! We're worrying about bonuses that were 1/10 of 1% of the entire package that we gave AIG. The whole thing was clearly a smokescreen to pull the publics eyes away from all the money being given to other people and the announcement made on Wed. that the fed is printing ANOTHER $1.15T. I sure wish I could purchase my own debt...talk about circular reasoning.
Reprocessing does add cost. Some of that cost would be offset by the byproducts of the reprocessing that you could sell. Canada sells us our medicinal isotopes now and I doubt they are selling them us at a loss. Reprocessing also lowers the amount of long-term storage space needed since we would end up with less overall waste. I don't know exact numbers, but that would also offset the cost. Also, what do you mean by 'greatly'? Is it more than coal? Maybe. More than wind/solar? I seriously doubt it. Per-kilowatt cost is always a relative measure.
Huh? We generally don't want any of our enemies to have any sort of nuclear technology. Besides, if you read the article, reprocessing to weapons grade nuclear material is an entirely different ball game.
A few points. It's not the Right, but more of the pragmatic people who think nuclear is a direction we should be exploring. France isn't exactly Right and they generate much of their energy from nuclear power.
All power creation (not brokering a la Enron) has been and always will be highly regulated because of national security and potential for pollution. Even if we could move to all wind today it would remain highly regulated because the power grid is so important to national security. The government will never get its hands out of the power creation. Additionally the only way we will ever get to wind/solar/other alternative is through government regulation. They are so expensive that the government will have to make them more attractive either through incentives or taxes.
Also, what you're proposing is a false dichotomy. No where has anyone said alternative fuels are dead and that they shouldn't be explored. It's not one or the other. You can do nuclear while continuing to research everything else.
Nice strawman. Power creation will always be heavily regulated regardless of the technology used.
The goal is to switch the US to a cleaner more efficient fuel without destroying the economy cap and trade style. Wind and solar is great, but if you sat down and did the math about how much power they can actually provide you'd see that they will always be secondary sources. They just can't produce enough KW to be viable as a complete replacement. At that point you're left with a fossil fuel or nuclear.
The law went into place in 1977, so what happened prior to then (that was caused by reprocessing) that we are still cleaning up? Even if something did happen over 30 years ago the rest of the world seems to have figured out the reprocessing issue just fine. The US likes to call itself leaders in technology so lets lead. In that timeframe the rest of the world has also come up even more efficient nuclear reactors that are designed in such a way that you can't have a meltdown.
We already have cleaner nuclear fuel through the ability to reprocess the waste. The problem is that we have antiquated laws from the 1970s prevents us from being able to do so. Hell, we have to import our medicinal isotopes from Canada because we are not allowed to refine them here. Good read here.
You mean waste that is mostly because of stupid regulations from the late 1970s?
From the article:
If we could actually reprocess the spent nuclear material we would end up with very little real waste.
Sounds like Dr. House for developers. People think because they are smart and/or great at their craft they can basically do anything they want. This ties back to the /. article about the younger generation being more narcissistic than ever. Shows like 'House' glorify it and apparently make people think it is okay to be an asshole as long as you get the job done.
I agree with you about the politifact site. I made a post last week about the 'No Earmarks' promise where they gave him a 'Compromise' rating. Um, Obama has signed 2 major spending bills full of earmarks. How is that a compromise? It's a fail to keep.
ROFL, you mean that would be an anti-politician amendment. Here's the thing. Politicians want power. The quickest way to gain that power is to forcibly take your constituents money and give it to someone else. Growing the government is a power grab and balanced budgets and shrinking government do not fit in that scenario.
The clearest example of this is lowering the tax break for charity giving. All charities (liberal, conservative, etc...) are up in arms about it. The government is saying don't worry, you'll get that money back from us through government spending. So now the government has removed the power from the original charity giver and shifted it to some politicians in DC. So now charities have to pander (ie, lobby, ie GIVE MONEY) to some politician in order to get the same amount of charity money they used to receive before from individuals. What a great system.
I used to handwrite my tax forms. It's really not that hard if you track stuff properly during the year and have a reference for the current code.
Here's the thing though. Geitner is supposed to be the best of the best, the smartest financial guy out there and he can't do his taxes? No, he was clearly avoiding paying his taxes. I wonder how many people are sitting jail for doing what he did? Where was the IRS? Why didn't they go after him and levy all the threats they do against anyone else who 'can't figure out the tax code'? It's clear as day hypocrisy, but that's no surprise given the rest of the Obama administration.
This plan was put in place by Bush and Rove post 9/11. They decided that the Speaker of the House was important enough to have fly in his/her own plane in case of another coordinated attack.
This I agree with. The plane she currently flies is in fact a military owned plane. The problem is that she has to stop part way to refuel and she doesn't like doing it. She needs to suck it up, but instead rails against CEOs all day while doing the same stuff herself.
BTW, most congress people commute back to their districts every weekend. They work 4 days/week, fly home on Fri. and we pay them ~130k/year + all the extras + extras they get when they leave office. And, they have the nerve to criticize business people? ROFL.
Exactly. He was most likely lobbying on behalf of the law firm. The reason they want to keep it somewhat under wraps is because it's perfectly legal. Who do you think comes up with bills nowadays? Client goes to law firm and says they want a bill that will help them. Law firm draws it up then calls Daschle to figure out who they can get to present it. Then he trades favors for support of said bill (or provision tied to another bill etc...). What a great system we have.
That sight you list is partisan and very pro-Obama. How can they mark 'no earmarks' as a compromise?
I thought it was going to be a good sight to follow until I started seeing things like the above.
I did the math and that 59 seconds/8 miles just on my way to and from work would save me about 20 days worth of time over my working lifetime (30 years). Seems like a pretty good idea to me!
Watch "Lord of War" sometime if you haven't already seen it :)
What are you talking about? Your rights stop where my rights start. You have every right to sit in the street in front of my house and picket or yell at me. As soon as you post a sign in my front yard (or in this case Nortons forum servers), I can take that sign and toss it in the trash.
Why don't you post your home address and let everyone come by and put up "I love goatse" signs around your front yard. Of course if you take them down can I call you Kim Il Jung Jr and say you're taking away my innate human right to express my opinion?
McAfee is okay. It's what IT pushes to all of my work desktops and servers. The on-access scanner did a good job at stopping the recent downadup worm from spreading.
I don't know. The history that I've read on the situation makes it seem like the Japanese people were not ever going to surrender. Normal citizens were preparing to fight in the streets with pitchforks and hunting rifles if necessary. Given that honor played and still plays a very big part in Japanese culture it's not that hard to believe.
That's true, but you also need to add historical perspective. At the time we employed the 'enemy of my enemy is my friend' tactic. We were fighting a global war against the USSR (and thus communism) on many fronts through intermediaries. Afghanistan was just one of those fronts. Do we go back and not fund the afghan rebels and instead possibly let the USSR take over? How would that have changed history then?
Murder generally requires a willful act, and if a mother forces a miscarriage I believe she can be charged with a crime as it stands now depending on how far along she was.
Some people have already been charged and convicted for killing an unborn child through physical harm to the mother.
And I said that's fine. I left out the word 'clean' maybe that made it confusing. Most rational, logical people would be fine paying for the whole costs of burning fossil fuels with a tax on fossil fuels.
The problems are what I outlined above. The tax would not be used to for cleaning things up, it would not go up and down depending on said costs to clean things up, and it would simply be used as yet another stick for the feds to force states to do things they don't want to do.
I'm not so sure. When people talk about green tech they often leave out a lot of the environmental impact costs. Look at the many of the green cars that through their manufacturing (mainly the batteries, some of the light weight materials) leave the environment in worse shape than a standard gas power engine car running for years.
If the to government said it was only going to tax gas as much as it took to keep the environment and research alternative fuels I think many people would be okay with that. The problem is we all know that's not how it would work. First, the money would get diverted to all sorts of non-related projects. Second, the federal government would use it as a power play against the states the way it uses the highway funds now.
Look at cap & trade. The government is licking its chops at this huge potential source of new revenue to add to its *general* budget. It's going to skyrocket costs for energy (and thus all products made in the US), but who cares as long as we are not adding any new 'taxes' to people making under 250k.
It's definitely about the money. City/County/State budgets are tight and Obama isn't taxing businesses fast enough so why not just sue business directly.
ROFL...you fallen into the trap of believing anything a stripper tells you. I'm sure they said that they love you and think you're cute too haha...
It's all about money. If you show up with the cash you can buy anything you want. Period.
I think it is Mendencino county in CA where they estimate 2/3s of the counties GDP is tied to pot production (somewhere in the billions iirc). CA politicians want their cut much the same way the mob always gets their cut.