Corporations can engage in free speech, even on political issues. What they can't do is give money to politicians or their campaign organizations, or contribute to advertising that promotes candidates or parties.
And-- repeating aagin what I said back at the very beginning of this thread--the thing about corporations is that they have lawyers. Lawyers are very good at finding loopholes. The loophole in that "corporations can't fund candidates" is that corporations can fund Political Action Committees.
Which, it turns out, is a very effective way of funding a campaign.
To the contrary, companies have plenty of political power. What we've discovered in the 20th century is that the money to run political campaigns is power.
Corporations in the US cannot "run political campaigns"; they can't even contribute to political campaigns.
They can and they do.
That's what the Citizen's United decision was all about: the right of corporations to contribute to political campaigns.
By the way, your post simultaneously says "corporations cannot contribute to political campaigns" and "corporations can contribute to political campaigns because of the first amendment rights of the owners." Which? Can they, or can't they?
Cheap anything fuels the economy. There is an economic effect called "resource substitution"-- an economy will tend to find ways to use the resources that are cheap in order to use less of resources that are more expensive. You are both right: cheap energy encourages wasteful usage, and also when energy is cheap, people use energy (or things made with high energy content) to substitute for more expensive resources.
The reverse is also true: if energy is more expensive, an economy will tend to find substitute ways to do the same thing with less use of energy.
and economic success is the key to addressing environmental issues. Countries that find themselves struggling economically cannot invest in clean power.
True, and insightful. So, it's a trade-off: you want to make people rich, but you don't want to damage the ecology to do it.
Many things are trade-offs. Fortunately, engineering trade offs are something that engineers are good at.
Even then, green houses are warmer due to thermal radiance from the sun captured by the enclosed structure.
Bingo. Visible light in. IR blocked on the way out.
Some slight misunderstandings here.
A physical greenhouse-- the kind made with glass-- works by the principle of the glass admitting light, but suppressing loss of heat via convection. The "greenhouse effect"-- in the atmosphere-- works by the principle of the atmosphere transparent in the visible admits light, but the loss of heat is suppressed by outgoing IR being absorbed by trace gasses. The two work by different mechanisms.
So the first statement ("green houses are warmer due to thermal radiance from the sun captured by the enclosed structure") is right, but the second statement ("Visible light in. IR blocked on the way out.") is true for the atmosphere, but not for a greenhouse.
Although glass is opaque to IR, blocking IR isn't important in the operation of real greenhouses, since convection is a much more important heat transfer mechanism than radiation at the surface.
You should know that the term Green House was coined by the AGW crowd as a way to explain to the great unwashed masses why the are destroying the earth.
The term "greenhouse effect" to describe atmospheric heating from IR absorption by trace gasses predates the discovery of anthropogenic global warming-- the metaphor was in use by the late 1800s, and term "greenhouse effect" itself was apparently coined in 1907 by Pointing (discussing the calculation of planetary surface temperatures, not the effect of anthropogenic gasses on the Earth's atmosphere: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi....)
I tend to agree that conspiracy theories usually are more easily explained by other less sinister factors, but I have to point out that none of the points you make seem to hold up on examination.
It's easy to reach that conclusion. However there are some important facts to consider that the conclusion conveniently passes on.
One, opiod prescription rates are down significantly in nearly all states, largely due to new regulations that are meant to discourage their use.
No: The research quoted in TFA says that prescriptions for painkillers and other classes of drugs fell compared with states that did not have a medical-marijuana law. This is a comparison study, not a "opiod use dropped, therefore it must be medical marijuana" correlation=causation study.
Two, opiods are often amongst the smallest and easiest to synthesize molecules in pharma today. A lot of companies can easily make them, which makes them cheap and low-profit.
Faulty thinking: "cheap to make" means high profit, not low. The highest profits come from objects cheap to make, but regulated in sales so that competitors can't undercut you on price.
Three, big pharma could make lots of money selling pot if they wanted to. There are plenty of people who would prefer to be able to buy it in a way that does not require smoking it.
Dubious. They can't patent it, so they'll be up against the low cost competitors. Bayer still make aspirin... but it's not much of a profit center any more.
Where are big pharma's recreational drugs? The ones they engineer from the ground up to provide a pleasant, short-term euphoria with designed-in features to prevent overdose, mitigate overconsumption and abuse, and cheap enough that they could be priced lower than mass-produced marijuana?
Drug manufacturers have a poor track record on that.
In the 1800s, they noticed that opium worked as an analgesic, but had people using it simply for pleasure. So they engineered a new drug to just have the analgesic properties, and named it "morphine."
That didn't work. It had a bad side effect: people who took opium or morphine experienced a side effect where they started craving it, called "opium appetite". So, pharmacies thought, well, we need to find a deliver it without the people eating it-- it could be delivered directly to the body, so people wouldn't have the craving (how could you have a craving for something you don't even taste?) So they invented needle injection to solve the opium appetite problem.
That didn't work. Opium and morphine both turned out to be addictive, so they developed a new drug to solve that. This one they name it "heroin".
That turned out to be even worse. So they went completely synthetic to make a new painkiller which didn't trace to the opium flower: Oxycodone.
Companies don't have "political power"; they can't vote, they can't serve in Congress.
To the contrary, companies have plenty of political power. What we've discovered in the 20th century is that the money to run political campaigns is power.
Companies simply inherit the right to free speech from their owners;
Yes, that's the basis for the Supreme Court "Citizens United" decision. It is on questionable logical grounds however: corporations are not citizens, and while the people composing a corporation have first-amendment rights, it is not at all clear that the corporations themselves do. The belief that an object inherits the properties of the pieces composing it is one of the logical fallacies: this is the fallacy of composition.
The alternative would be to say that the people themselves have the right to donate to political campaigns, but if they want to do so, they must do so personally, and not from the corporations. This is also perfectly reasonable: corporations are legal entities, not persons, and can be subject to different laws then people.
Yes, that's the biggest loophole: the Political Action Committee ("PAC"). It's "supposed" to be to "communicate issues". Every candidate has one.
"Political contributions, which used to go directly to candidates, now often flow to Super PACs, independent organizations that can raise money to either help or defeat a political candidate. Historically, traditional political action committees have been prohibited from accepting donations from unions and companies. However, following rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals, Super PACs are now allowed to accept unlimited donations from unions and companies, provided the money does not go directly to the campaign.
The rise of the Super PAC has opened the door to a new generation of fundraising, changing how money is used to elect candidates and increasing the amount candidates need to raise to be competitive as they seek office. (source: http://247wallst.com/special-r... )
So, are you going to start massively censoring speech by companies? How exactly is that going to work? Does "company" include the New York Times, or only companies you don't like?
A start would be a law mandating that money donated to political action committees has to be disclosed: if you're funding political campaigns, you have to do it openly, not secretly. This wouldn't even require overturning the Citizen's United decision: the Supreme court already said that this would be legal.
What materially changed since 1939 that prevents war? (correct answer is nothing)
Correct answer is the fact that mainland China now has a single unified government (not a patchwork of semi-independent warlords and factions) with a large mliitary that is very, very well equipped by the standards of 1939.
I really don't think Japan can walk in and declare Manchuria a client state anymore.
Are they going to force Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla to add in British-government-controlled certificate authorities to their browsers distributed in the UK? Or force hardware vendors to provide access to decrypted data on end-users' machines? I don't think they've thought through how little control over the process CSPs have.
The Russians have declared that they are going to be doing it. So, sure, why not the Brits?
(of course, we used to point to the Russians as the poster example of "no freedom." But that was then, this is now, and I guess that's changed, right? No more commies, so they must be free!)
I'm also wondering - does the financial sector get a pass from these directives? If not, good luck keeping London as the de-facto headquarters for the financial sector in Europe. If so, I wonder how they plan to restrict encryption to only the financial center?
Didn't you hear? The Brits voted to give up on having London as the financial center for Europe. That's what Brexit accomplishes, since there's no chance in hell that the Europeans will give Britain the financial access to European markets if Britain leaves.
Looks like Google made about 6 billion dollars on Youtube last year, so something like 17% of what they make goes to the people whose actual content is being played.
(Reference: http://www.businessinsider.com... ).
Of course, the people who write and perform got only a tiny fraction of that. They'd probably prefer a model where they actually get paid, instead of google giving away their performances for free and then raking off a few cents for advertising, of which the performers get a fraction.
Nevermind that JUNO was co-funded by multiple countries at that.
Sort of. The US funded the mission itself-- the launch, the spacecraft, the operations. Several European countries contributed science instruments (to be fair, since it's a science mission, the science instruments are the whole point of the mission.)
But trying to get people to investigate it is 15 years?
1. Anonymous didn't "get people to investigate." This was a feature story in the New York Times, and subsequently spread across newspapers across the US.
2. Sixteen years is the maximum possible sentence, if the hacker were convicted on all counts and for some reason the judge gave them the maximum sentence and made the sentences consecutive. That's not the way real sentences happen. More likely, since it's a first offence on a non-violent crime, would be a short sentence of a few months at most, followed by probation. Check the sentencing guidelines here: http://www.sentencing.us/
3. The sentence for the rapists was relatively low because they were under juvenile sentencing guidelines. The law has an odd belief that when a crime is committed by somebody under 18, they should not be put in jail for decades.
One or two years for rape, 16 years for embarrassing politicians into taking action on said rape. The priories of our "justice" system never cease to amaze me.
Anonymous did not "embarrass politicians into taking action on said rape." The New York Times did that, with their investigative reporting resulting in a two-page feature story on the case, and the subsequent spreading of the story by hundreds of newspapers in the U.S.. (The New York Times story is, in fact, where Anonymous learned about it. Their investigation consisted of reading the newspaper.) Anonymous did, as far as I can tell, pretty much nothing useful. They stole some files which the prosecutors already had in evidence (and thank goodness they did! If they hadn't already had them, stolen files would have been useless as evidence.)
Really, give the New York Times some credit here. It was their work--not Anonymous-- that brought the case out of the shadows.
I was going to post that trucks are not cars, so the price of pickup trucks shouldn't be included in the average price of new cars, but then I checked the link to the text, and the link was in fact to the "estimated average transaction price (ATP) for light vehicles", so, yep, you're right.
We already had this discussion. If you want a long (but informative) rant about why that is utter nonsense - here's mine.
In short - the best they are pulling off today is 36 W, they hope to someday, with the help of magic elves and such, make 52 W. Only tests they made of using their panels for testing required 72 W.
Since you can't even bother to figure out what the right units are-- Watts per what?-- this rant is a fail.
So the MoDOT is the first large party to be scammed by this project!
It's really hard to say without looking exactly at what is in the proposal.
The highway right-of-way is much wider than the actual road travelled; you could put a lot of solar roadway on the parts of the road that aren't routinely driven upon nor snowplowed.
Your list is a good example of the "No true Scotsman" fallacy, in that you come up with an excuse for the many cases of no reelection to justify your statement "whoever becomes president is almost certainly going to be re-elected in 2020".
In fact, of the presidents eligible for reelection in the last 50 years, four weren't reelected, five were. Makes it about fifty-fifty.
Nope.
Thinking about moving your arm is in one part of the brain. Actually moving your arm is in a different part of the brain.
It's like in a robot, if you're looking at electrical signals in the servo motor controller, it doesn't matter whether there are signals in the processor core.
Slashdot Mirror
How well do you think this [groworganic.com] blocks convection? It has holes in it.
Yes, polytunnels are often vented. Do you know why? Because if you don't vent them, they get too hot.
Corporations can engage in free speech, even on political issues. What they can't do is give money to politicians or their campaign organizations, or contribute to advertising that promotes candidates or parties.
And-- repeating aagin what I said back at the very beginning of this thread--the thing about corporations is that they have lawyers. Lawyers are very good at finding loopholes. The loophole in that "corporations can't fund candidates" is that corporations can fund Political Action Committees.
Which, it turns out, is a very effective way of funding a campaign.
I said that greenhouses work by suppressing convection, and you reply by showing an image of using plastic to suppress convection. Thanks.
Corporations in the US cannot "run political campaigns"; they can't even contribute to political campaigns.
They can and they do.
That's what the Citizen's United decision was all about: the right of corporations to contribute to political campaigns.
By the way, your post simultaneously says "corporations cannot contribute to political campaigns" and "corporations can contribute to political campaigns because of the first amendment rights of the owners." Which? Can they, or can't they?
Cheap energy encourages wasteful usage....
Cheap energy also fuels the economy,
Cheap anything fuels the economy. There is an economic effect called "resource substitution"-- an economy will tend to find ways to use the resources that are cheap in order to use less of resources that are more expensive. You are both right: cheap energy encourages wasteful usage, and also when energy is cheap, people use energy (or things made with high energy content) to substitute for more expensive resources.
The reverse is also true: if energy is more expensive, an economy will tend to find substitute ways to do the same thing with less use of energy.
and economic success is the key to addressing environmental issues. Countries that find themselves struggling economically cannot invest in clean power.
True, and insightful. So, it's a trade-off: you want to make people rich, but you don't want to damage the ecology to do it.
Many things are trade-offs. Fortunately, engineering trade offs are something that engineers are good at.
Bingo. Visible light in. IR blocked on the way out.
Some slight misunderstandings here.
A physical greenhouse-- the kind made with glass-- works by the principle of the glass admitting light, but suppressing loss of heat via convection. The "greenhouse effect"-- in the atmosphere-- works by the principle of the atmosphere transparent in the visible admits light, but the loss of heat is suppressed by outgoing IR being absorbed by trace gasses. The two work by different mechanisms.
So the first statement ("green houses are warmer due to thermal radiance from the sun captured by the enclosed structure") is right, but the second statement ("Visible light in. IR blocked on the way out.") is true for the atmosphere, but not for a greenhouse.
Although glass is opaque to IR, blocking IR isn't important in the operation of real greenhouses, since convection is a much more important heat transfer mechanism than radiation at the surface.
You should know that the term Green House was coined by the AGW crowd as a way to explain to the great unwashed masses why the are destroying the earth.
The term "greenhouse effect" to describe atmospheric heating from IR absorption by trace gasses predates the discovery of anthropogenic global warming-- the metaphor was in use by the late 1800s, and term "greenhouse effect" itself was apparently coined in 1907 by Pointing (discussing the calculation of planetary surface temperatures, not the effect of anthropogenic gasses on the Earth's atmosphere: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi... .)
A corporation does not inherently have rights. You still do.
It's easy to reach that conclusion. However there are some important facts to consider that the conclusion conveniently passes on. One, opiod prescription rates are down significantly in nearly all states, largely due to new regulations that are meant to discourage their use.
No: The research quoted in TFA says that prescriptions for painkillers and other classes of drugs fell compared with states that did not have a medical-marijuana law. This is a comparison study, not a "opiod use dropped, therefore it must be medical marijuana" correlation=causation study.
Two, opiods are often amongst the smallest and easiest to synthesize molecules in pharma today. A lot of companies can easily make them, which makes them cheap and low-profit.
Faulty thinking: "cheap to make" means high profit, not low. The highest profits come from objects cheap to make, but regulated in sales so that competitors can't undercut you on price.
Three, big pharma could make lots of money selling pot if they wanted to. There are plenty of people who would prefer to be able to buy it in a way that does not require smoking it.
Dubious. They can't patent it, so they'll be up against the low cost competitors. Bayer still make aspirin... but it's not much of a profit center any more.
Where are big pharma's recreational drugs? The ones they engineer from the ground up to provide a pleasant, short-term euphoria with designed-in features to prevent overdose, mitigate overconsumption and abuse, and cheap enough that they could be priced lower than mass-produced marijuana?
Drug manufacturers have a poor track record on that.
In the 1800s, they noticed that opium worked as an analgesic, but had people using it simply for pleasure. So they engineered a new drug to just have the analgesic properties, and named it "morphine."
That didn't work. It had a bad side effect: people who took opium or morphine experienced a side effect where they started craving it, called "opium appetite". So, pharmacies thought, well, we need to find a deliver it without the people eating it-- it could be delivered directly to the body, so people wouldn't have the craving (how could you have a craving for something you don't even taste?) So they invented needle injection to solve the opium appetite problem.
That didn't work. Opium and morphine both turned out to be addictive, so they developed a new drug to solve that. This one they name it "heroin".
That turned out to be even worse. So they went completely synthetic to make a new painkiller which didn't trace to the opium flower: Oxycodone.
That turned out to be even more addictive...
Companies don't have "political power"; they can't vote, they can't serve in Congress.
To the contrary, companies have plenty of political power. What we've discovered in the 20th century is that the money to run political campaigns is power.
Companies simply inherit the right to free speech from their owners;
Yes, that's the basis for the Supreme Court "Citizens United" decision. It is on questionable logical grounds however: corporations are not citizens, and while the people composing a corporation have first-amendment rights, it is not at all clear that the corporations themselves do. The belief that an object inherits the properties of the pieces composing it is one of the logical fallacies: this is the fallacy of composition.
(Or see: Logically Fallacious: Fallacy of composition.)
The alternative would be to say that the people themselves have the right to donate to political campaigns, but if they want to do so, they must do so personally, and not from the corporations. This is also perfectly reasonable: corporations are legal entities, not persons, and can be subject to different laws then people.
Companies in the US already have strong restrictions on "political donations".
They may have "restrictions"-- but they find ways to donate anyway. Nice thing about corporations; they have lawyers to find the loopholes.
Here's the top contributors list from OpenSecrets.org: https://www.opensecrets.org/or...
What they can do is communicate on issues.
Yes, that's the biggest loophole: the Political Action Committee ("PAC"). It's "supposed" to be to "communicate issues". Every candidate has one.
"Political contributions, which used to go directly to candidates, now often flow to Super PACs, independent organizations that can raise money to either help or defeat a political candidate. Historically, traditional political action committees have been prohibited from accepting donations from unions and companies. However, following rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals, Super PACs are now allowed to accept unlimited donations from unions and companies, provided the money does not go directly to the campaign.
The rise of the Super PAC has opened the door to a new generation of fundraising, changing how money is used to elect candidates and increasing the amount candidates need to raise to be competitive as they seek office.
(source: http://247wallst.com/special-r... )
So, are you going to start massively censoring speech by companies? How exactly is that going to work? Does "company" include the New York Times, or only companies you don't like?
A start would be a law mandating that money donated to political action committees has to be disclosed: if you're funding political campaigns, you have to do it openly, not secretly. This wouldn't even require overturning the Citizen's United decision: the Supreme court already said that this would be legal.
What materially changed since 1939 that prevents war? (correct answer is nothing)
Correct answer is the fact that mainland China now has a single unified government (not a patchwork of semi-independent warlords and factions) with a large mliitary that is very, very well equipped by the standards of 1939.
I really don't think Japan can walk in and declare Manchuria a client state anymore.
Are they going to force Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla to add in British-government-controlled certificate authorities to their browsers distributed in the UK? Or force hardware vendors to provide access to decrypted data on end-users' machines? I don't think they've thought through how little control over the process CSPs have.
The Russians have declared that they are going to be doing it. So, sure, why not the Brits?
(of course, we used to point to the Russians as the poster example of "no freedom." But that was then, this is now, and I guess that's changed, right? No more commies, so they must be free!)
I'm also wondering - does the financial sector get a pass from these directives? If not, good luck keeping London as the de-facto headquarters for the financial sector in Europe. If so, I wonder how they plan to restrict encryption to only the financial center?
Didn't you hear? The Brits voted to give up on having London as the financial center for Europe. That's what Brexit accomplishes, since there's no chance in hell that the Europeans will give Britain the financial access to European markets if Britain leaves.
Looks like Google made about 6 billion dollars on Youtube last year, so something like 17% of what they make goes to the people whose actual content is being played. (Reference: http://www.businessinsider.com... ).
Of course, the people who write and perform got only a tiny fraction of that. They'd probably prefer a model where they actually get paid, instead of google giving away their performances for free and then raking off a few cents for advertising, of which the performers get a fraction.
Nevermind that JUNO was co-funded by multiple countries at that.
Sort of. The US funded the mission itself-- the launch, the spacecraft, the operations. Several European countries contributed science instruments (to be fair, since it's a science mission, the science instruments are the whole point of the mission.)
Details here:
http://www.europlanet-eu.org/juno-europe/
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=49003
It is so hard to get a technician out to perform a hardware reboot if they accidentally brick the thing.
But trying to get people to investigate it is 15 years?
1. Anonymous didn't "get people to investigate." This was a feature story in the New York Times, and subsequently spread across newspapers across the US.
2. Sixteen years is the maximum possible sentence, if the hacker were convicted on all counts and for some reason the judge gave them the maximum sentence and made the sentences consecutive. That's not the way real sentences happen. More likely, since it's a first offence on a non-violent crime, would be a short sentence of a few months at most, followed by probation. Check the sentencing guidelines here: http://www.sentencing.us/
3. The sentence for the rapists was relatively low because they were under juvenile sentencing guidelines. The law has an odd belief that when a crime is committed by somebody under 18, they should not be put in jail for decades.
One or two years for rape, 16 years for embarrassing politicians into taking action on said rape. The priories of our "justice" system never cease to amaze me.
Anonymous did not "embarrass politicians into taking action on said rape." The New York Times did that, with their investigative reporting resulting in a two-page feature story on the case, and the subsequent spreading of the story by hundreds of newspapers in the U.S.. (The New York Times story is, in fact, where Anonymous learned about it. Their investigation consisted of reading the newspaper.) Anonymous did, as far as I can tell, pretty much nothing useful. They stole some files which the prosecutors already had in evidence (and thank goodness they did! If they hadn't already had them, stolen files would have been useless as evidence.)
Really, give the New York Times some credit here. It was their work--not Anonymous-- that brought the case out of the shadows.
I was going to post that trucks are not cars, so the price of pickup trucks shouldn't be included in the average price of new cars, but then I checked the link to the text, and the link was in fact to the "estimated average transaction price (ATP) for light vehicles", so, yep, you're right.
Rule of thumb: never try to learn science from youtubes.
If somebody had something useful to say, they wouldn't have tried to say it on a youtube.
We already had this discussion. If you want a long (but informative) rant about why that is utter nonsense - here's mine. In short - the best they are pulling off today is 36 W, they hope to someday, with the help of magic elves and such, make 52 W. Only tests they made of using their panels for testing required 72 W.
Since you can't even bother to figure out what the right units are-- Watts per what?-- this rant is a fail.
So the MoDOT is the first large party to be scammed by this project!
It's really hard to say without looking exactly at what is in the proposal.
The highway right-of-way is much wider than the actual road travelled; you could put a lot of solar roadway on the parts of the road that aren't routinely driven upon nor snowplowed.
Your list is a good example of the "No true Scotsman" fallacy, in that you come up with an excuse for the many cases of no reelection to justify your statement "whoever becomes president is almost certainly going to be re-elected in 2020".
In fact, of the presidents eligible for reelection in the last 50 years, four weren't reelected, five were. Makes it about fifty-fifty.
It's like in a robot, if you're looking at electrical signals in the servo motor controller, it doesn't matter whether there are signals in the processor core.
Nice to see the IRS doing something smart, contrary to all stereotypes and expectations.