Why do you think that's automatically a 'pork barrel' scheme?
It includes the word "Amtrak". Also, whenever you spend billions of dollars of someone else's money, you're likely to find waste, corruption and inefficiency even if it wasn't planned that way from the beginning. While technically it's not always true that "where there's smoke, there's fire" it's still pretty likely.
I'm a rail enthusiast; I really want it to work. Rail has many advantages, but it's hard to make it economically viable. (It would help if the government stopped subsidizing its competitors.) If high speed rail were profitable, it wouldn't need government money, just assistance with right of way and exemptions from local ordinances.
Also, it's far from clear that this proposal would create jobs. To determine that we would need to examine the opportunity cost of spending $13 billion.
Every time I have this discussion, people throw out alarming rhetoric like "shackling our economy." Frankly, I don't see it.
Yeah, "shackling" is hyperbole. But cap and trade (at least as proposed in the US) would increase everybody's energy costs enough to notice, and that would have a ripple effect. It wouldn't force us all to start growing vegetables in our front lawns to survive, but everybody would spend a couple hundred dollars a month more, and that adds up to a lot across the entire country.
The reality is that energy costs are going to go up anyway. The economy will recover and demand from the developing world will increase, so there is still plenty of economic incentive to develop new energy sources even without cap and trade.
If the goal is to transition to green technology as quickly as possible, it seems obvious to me that slightly slower growth heavily directed towards the exploration and refinement of low-CO2 technology is going to get us there a lot faster than a strategy of maximum, undirected growth.
"Heavily directed" research is suboptimal because nobody knows what strategies will eventually work or where they'll come from. "Maximum" is good because a smaller fraction of a larger economy can be a larger absolute expenditure. "Undirected" is good because it minimizes the harm from bad direction and maximizes the number of solutions being actively pursued.
There's some truth in there, but I think you're missing the fact that the two approaches can be tackled simultaneously. A cap and trade system would be a quick way to wring the inefficient CO2 use out of the developed economies.
I don't think they can be developed simultaneously because a cap and trade system slows economic growth, and growth funds technological development. Compound growth is so powerful that a small percentage difference adds up to a lot of resources over time. These problems won't be solved by slowing economic growth, they'll be solved by inventing replacement technologies.
Plus, the only way to create a global cap and trade system is by force, and I don't endorse going to war to convince China, India and others to participate. It is easier and more ethical to coax them to do what we want by making it profitable for them, and that will happen faster if we don't shackle our own economy.
Point in fact, military spending is and always has been acknowledged as significant economic stimulus.
For that to be true, military spending would have to increase nonmilitary GDP (which is GDP minus military spending). Spending is only stimulus if the subsequent increase in GDP is greater than the initial expenditure. In other words, spending an additional 10% to grow income by 9% is actually a loss of 1% and doesn't stimulate.
Carbon needs an internationaly agreed and enforced CAP on total emmissions in order to create an economically and environmentally sound market to TRADE it.
That will not produce a shortest path solution to the problem. The fastest, least expensive and most humane solution is to quickly get the developing world past the high-pollution stage of industrialization. There are essentially two ways to make cleaner energy sources cost-competitive with dirtier ones: make the dirty ones more expensive or make the cleaner ones less expensive. The latter will ruin fewer lives in the long run.
The fact that a lot of people are happy to selectively discount a clear majority of scientific opinion worldwide because it doesn't fit in with their world view or political standpoint never ceases to amaze me.
It's hard for me to get upset about people thinking critically or skeptically. It happens so rarely that it should be cherished and encouraged, even when they'd be better off just believing what I tell them.
Nevertheless, those who disagree with The Narrative are evil or stupid and require reeducation. It's because we're concerned for them, not because we want power. Power is a burden really, and it is only reluctantly that we shoulder it to save the planet.
What I am saying is that top democrats/leading democrats appear to have taken this "crisis" as an opportunity to push their agenda and "sell" it to the public using fear
It's kind of like having a couple of airplanes hit some building and using that as an excuse for doing whatever you want.
It is very annoying when someone (like you) responds to my posts in such a way as to frame everything in cultural relativism.
I apologize for annoying you, and for misleading you: in my experience cultural relativism is not an effective way to gain an accurate understanding of reality. I responded to your post because it seemed like we took the same hypothetical premise (the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, perfect god) to opposite conclusions. If such a being exists, it doesn't need anything, it is incapable of self-deception or of being incorrect in any way, and to not worship it makes one factually incorrect. Minus the bells and whistles, worship is simply acknowledging the existence of god.
If you were god, you could not say "this person who rejects me is OK" because that would be lying to yourself. This seems to me to be the same as "requiring worship".
If I were a god that "invented" the universe and the humans within it, I certainly would not "require", "want", or "need" any kind of worship whatsoever.
How do you know? If I were a "god" that "invented" the universe and the "scare quotes" within it I would be very different from how I am now, and I think you would be too.
I am surprised that people still believe you can redefine the size of a tab from 8 without causing chaos. I work on two code bases in parallel. One was written with TAB misconfigured as 4, and I have to edit my ~/.emacs and start two copies to work with them at once. Reindenting would be impolite, since that would break version control.
I do it all the time (to work around my coworkers' goofy combination of tabs and 4 spaces, and to deal with code that is nested way too much). I primarily use vi and kate, though, so running multiple copies of the same program is no big deal.
It sounds like using indent would help in your situation as long as you remembered to also use indent to return it to its original form before making commits. That could be scripted.
What I really want is an editor that will change how the white space is displayed without changing the indentation style of the underlying file.
and the recommended practice, BTW, is not to use tabs at all for indentation, only spaces
Recommended by some, perhaps, but I do not understand why they think it is a superior technical solution. Every good IDE and editor can change the displayed indentation size of tabs, allowing the tab-indented file to automatically conform to each user's preference without changing the source.
It's both fascinating and sad how technology and warfare has been intertwined from the very dawn of man.
I think it's a good thing, because I am on the side of civilization. If the farmers and city-dwellers didn't have technology, the much tougher barbarians would win. Either way we have conflict, but this way we also have the internet.
War is unfortunate, but isn't it wonderful that technology makes it possible for a small number of people to defend the rest of us?
In general that's good advice, but at this particular moment in time, it is best to be cautious about the prospect of buying a house. If you can afford it, great; there will probably be better deals this time next year though.
And if they are unemployed, maybe you can make them a little more happy by giving them a job, even if it isn't ideal so instead of handing them an unemployment check every month you hand them a paycheck.
Where do jobs come from? Not one-time stimulus packages, but profitable companies and small businesses.
If you're willing to spend about twice as much money, you could eliminate payroll taxes. That would directly help individuals and businesses, across the board, and would have the added advantage of moving social security and medicare directly into the federal budget.
Here's one solution: for a third of the cost of this particular stimulus bill, we could eliminate corporate income taxes entirely. Suddenly the US would become a tax haven country that foreign corporations would relocate to. This would most help two kinds of companies: those making money, and small businesses (which are disproportionately burdened by government paperwork.) Even companies that aren't doing well would benefit, because they wouldn't need to spend as much avoiding paying taxes. The results would be job creation and economic growth.
true. no matter what we do, no matter how far our technology goes (unless it allows us to expand into space), if our population keeps growing we are all doomed. eventually we'll need to stabilize our population, and preferably shrink it.
In the West this is already occurring. Europeans and their cousins in N. America are already reproducing below replacement levels, to the point that some countries now have financial incentives for having babies. Therefore, it is plausible to me that we are not in danger of reaching the point where there are too many people for this one planet to support. (Population growth in the United States is due to immigration, and growth in Europe is due to immigration and immigrant cultural groups.)
Unfortunately, western-style social welfare programs as currently structured depend on a large ratio of workers to retirees, and moving the retirement age back is not a panacea (and, in addition, is very difficult to achieve politically.)
The theory of evolution is the only plausible model we have to explain/understand the diversity of life.
Plausibility is subjective, and the case for the existence of the supernatural relies on it. If the supernatural is assumed (as some do), then other plausible explanations for the diversity of life exist. God created the world, or Moloch pooped out the world, or whatever.
Sorry, but that was already covered under existing FISA law.
Then it should be easy to imagine, shouldn't it?
FWIW, I think retroactive warrants (and rubber-stamp courts for that matter) are a bad idea.
No, the NSA wiretapping was about monitoring everyones communications.
That's the impression that carefully worded opinion pieces masquerading as news articles try to convey, but that's not what the "warrantless wiretapping" controversy is actually about. In any case, the claim I responded to was about the existence of any legitimate situation where the government might spy on a citizen without getting a warrant first.
I can't imagine any valid reason for spying on our citizens without a warrant, personally.
I can: in the course of valid spying activities, some government agency might incidentally gather information on a citizen. For example, imagine that the NSA is tapping the phone of a known terrorist living in another country, and someone uses that phone to call an American citizen in the US. In this scenario the NSA didn't know that the phone call would go to a US citizen until it was too late to get a warrant. In another example, an FBI team following a known foreign terrorist in the United States takes note of everyone the terrorist visits. Lots of legitimate police activities that could be considered "spying" do not require a warrant.
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It includes the word "Amtrak". Also, whenever you spend billions of dollars of someone else's money, you're likely to find waste, corruption and inefficiency even if it wasn't planned that way from the beginning. While technically it's not always true that "where there's smoke, there's fire" it's still pretty likely.
I'm a rail enthusiast; I really want it to work. Rail has many advantages, but it's hard to make it economically viable. (It would help if the government stopped subsidizing its competitors.) If high speed rail were profitable, it wouldn't need government money, just assistance with right of way and exemptions from local ordinances.
Also, it's far from clear that this proposal would create jobs. To determine that we would need to examine the opportunity cost of spending $13 billion.
Every time I have this discussion, people throw out alarming rhetoric like "shackling our economy." Frankly, I don't see it.
Yeah, "shackling" is hyperbole. But cap and trade (at least as proposed in the US) would increase everybody's energy costs enough to notice, and that would have a ripple effect. It wouldn't force us all to start growing vegetables in our front lawns to survive, but everybody would spend a couple hundred dollars a month more, and that adds up to a lot across the entire country.
The reality is that energy costs are going to go up anyway. The economy will recover and demand from the developing world will increase, so there is still plenty of economic incentive to develop new energy sources even without cap and trade.
If the goal is to transition to green technology as quickly as possible, it seems obvious to me that slightly slower growth heavily directed towards the exploration and refinement of low-CO2 technology is going to get us there a lot faster than a strategy of maximum, undirected growth.
"Heavily directed" research is suboptimal because nobody knows what strategies will eventually work or where they'll come from. "Maximum" is good because a smaller fraction of a larger economy can be a larger absolute expenditure. "Undirected" is good because it minimizes the harm from bad direction and maximizes the number of solutions being actively pursued.
There's some truth in there, but I think you're missing the fact that the two approaches can be tackled simultaneously. A cap and trade system would be a quick way to wring the inefficient CO2 use out of the developed economies.
I don't think they can be developed simultaneously because a cap and trade system slows economic growth, and growth funds technological development. Compound growth is so powerful that a small percentage difference adds up to a lot of resources over time. These problems won't be solved by slowing economic growth, they'll be solved by inventing replacement technologies.
Plus, the only way to create a global cap and trade system is by force, and I don't endorse going to war to convince China, India and others to participate. It is easier and more ethical to coax them to do what we want by making it profitable for them, and that will happen faster if we don't shackle our own economy.
Point in fact, military spending is and always has been acknowledged as significant economic stimulus.
For that to be true, military spending would have to increase nonmilitary GDP (which is GDP minus military spending). Spending is only stimulus if the subsequent increase in GDP is greater than the initial expenditure. In other words, spending an additional 10% to grow income by 9% is actually a loss of 1% and doesn't stimulate.
Carbon needs an internationaly agreed and enforced CAP on total emmissions in order to create an economically and environmentally sound market to TRADE it.
That will not produce a shortest path solution to the problem. The fastest, least expensive and most humane solution is to quickly get the developing world past the high-pollution stage of industrialization. There are essentially two ways to make cleaner energy sources cost-competitive with dirtier ones: make the dirty ones more expensive or make the cleaner ones less expensive. The latter will ruin fewer lives in the long run.
The fact that a lot of people are happy to selectively discount a clear majority of scientific opinion worldwide because it doesn't fit in with their world view or political standpoint never ceases to amaze me.
It's hard for me to get upset about people thinking critically or skeptically. It happens so rarely that it should be cherished and encouraged, even when they'd be better off just believing what I tell them.
Nevertheless, those who disagree with The Narrative are evil or stupid and require reeducation. It's because we're concerned for them, not because we want power. Power is a burden really, and it is only reluctantly that we shoulder it to save the planet.
How much time do people spend praying to 2+2=4 each week?
I don't know, but I acknowledge the truth of 2+2=4 anyway.
THEREFORE, the relative importance of global warming is of the utmost relevance.
This is the most sensible position. How can we use our limited efforts to minimize risk?
Exactly! Why don't more people see that?
It is very annoying when someone (like you) responds to my posts in such a way as to frame everything in cultural relativism.
I apologize for annoying you, and for misleading you: in my experience cultural relativism is not an effective way to gain an accurate understanding of reality. I responded to your post because it seemed like we took the same hypothetical premise (the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, perfect god) to opposite conclusions. If such a being exists, it doesn't need anything, it is incapable of self-deception or of being incorrect in any way, and to not worship it makes one factually incorrect. Minus the bells and whistles, worship is simply acknowledging the existence of god.
If you were god, you could not say "this person who rejects me is OK" because that would be lying to yourself. This seems to me to be the same as "requiring worship".
How do you know? If I were a "god" that "invented" the universe and the "scare quotes" within it I would be very different from how I am now, and I think you would be too.
I do it all the time (to work around my coworkers' goofy combination of tabs and 4 spaces, and to deal with code that is nested way too much). I primarily use vi and kate, though, so running multiple copies of the same program is no big deal.
It sounds like using indent would help in your situation as long as you remembered to also use indent to return it to its original form before making commits. That could be scripted.
What I really want is an editor that will change how the white space is displayed without changing the indentation style of the underlying file.
Recommended by some, perhaps, but I do not understand why they think it is a superior technical solution. Every good IDE and editor can change the displayed indentation size of tabs, allowing the tab-indented file to automatically conform to each user's preference without changing the source.
That's exactly right. It is up to the senior network administrator to decide who is qualified to hear the passwords.
I think it's a good thing, because I am on the side of civilization. If the farmers and city-dwellers didn't have technology, the much tougher barbarians would win. Either way we have conflict, but this way we also have the internet.
War is unfortunate, but isn't it wonderful that technology makes it possible for a small number of people to defend the rest of us?
No offense to people like you and me, but I'd prefer to get my news from people who know what they are talking about.
Me too, but what does that have to do with the AP?
In general that's good advice, but at this particular moment in time, it is best to be cautious about the prospect of buying a house. If you can afford it, great; there will probably be better deals this time next year though.
Where do jobs come from? Not one-time stimulus packages, but profitable companies and small businesses.
If you're willing to spend about twice as much money, you could eliminate payroll taxes. That would directly help individuals and businesses, across the board, and would have the added advantage of moving social security and medicare directly into the federal budget.
Here's one solution: for a third of the cost of this particular stimulus bill, we could eliminate corporate income taxes entirely. Suddenly the US would become a tax haven country that foreign corporations would relocate to. This would most help two kinds of companies: those making money, and small businesses (which are disproportionately burdened by government paperwork.) Even companies that aren't doing well would benefit, because they wouldn't need to spend as much avoiding paying taxes. The results would be job creation and economic growth.
No, it didn't. Each dollar spent on the war returned $0.80 in GDP.
In the West this is already occurring. Europeans and their cousins in N. America are already reproducing below replacement levels, to the point that some countries now have financial incentives for having babies. Therefore, it is plausible to me that we are not in danger of reaching the point where there are too many people for this one planet to support. (Population growth in the United States is due to immigration, and growth in Europe is due to immigration and immigrant cultural groups.)
Unfortunately, western-style social welfare programs as currently structured depend on a large ratio of workers to retirees, and moving the retirement age back is not a panacea (and, in addition, is very difficult to achieve politically.)
Plausibility is subjective, and the case for the existence of the supernatural relies on it. If the supernatural is assumed (as some do), then other plausible explanations for the diversity of life exist. God created the world, or Moloch pooped out the world, or whatever.
Then it should be easy to imagine, shouldn't it?
FWIW, I think retroactive warrants (and rubber-stamp courts for that matter) are a bad idea.
That's the impression that carefully worded opinion pieces masquerading as news articles try to convey, but that's not what the "warrantless wiretapping" controversy is actually about. In any case, the claim I responded to was about the existence of any legitimate situation where the government might spy on a citizen without getting a warrant first.
I can: in the course of valid spying activities, some government agency might incidentally gather information on a citizen. For example, imagine that the NSA is tapping the phone of a known terrorist living in another country, and someone uses that phone to call an American citizen in the US. In this scenario the NSA didn't know that the phone call would go to a US citizen until it was too late to get a warrant. In another example, an FBI team following a known foreign terrorist in the United States takes note of everyone the terrorist visits. Lots of legitimate police activities that could be considered "spying" do not require a warrant.
This group is actually the majority. Fortunately they have different churches.