Except that all the other candidates ON BOTH SIDES want this exact same thing.
That's nonsense. Sanders campaigns for a massive expansion of federal power and spending, far greater than other candidates. He is a self-declared socialist; go look up what that actually means.
You may be cynical and say that they all end up doing the same thing, but if you look through history, that's not true either: there are substantial differences between presidential candidates.
Finally, "vote for Sanders, he is no worse than the other guys" is hardly a good proposition.
The corporate influence problem could be attacked by increasing regulation OR...it could be attacked by cutting back on the regulations that were put in place to serve corporations.
It can never be solved by increasing regulation because of regulatory capture. That's what economics tells us, and it's also what happens in practice again and again.
That's not what happened historically over the last 239 years.
Of course it's not. But you cited the Founding Fathers as authority for your belief for expanded federal government powers, and I was pointing out how idiotically wrong your example was.
You can't have limited government in a large country, especially with a population estimated to hit 400+ million in 2050.
We're not talking about "limited government" in general, we are talking about limited federal government, that is, the government of a federation of states. And a large degree of autonomy and self-government of states and counties inside a larger federation works just fine.
The author of that cartoon has fallen prey to the lie that the TPP is about "free trade". How exactly is expanding copyrights or extending drug patents about "free trade"? There is a lot of other bullshit in that cartoon.
The TPP is a very bad deal, dominated by massive rent seeking and crony capitalism. But most of the critics of TPP are themselves tools for other rent seekers and crony capitalists, including the author of that cartoon.
They "work" only in the sense that if you give people enough money, they temporarily don't meet the financial criteria for poverty. But that's not "working" in any useful sense. In reality, the poverty rate in the US was steadily declining until the war on poverty started. Since then, the poverty rate has fluctuated between 10-15%, with no further overall decline. At the same time, means-tested welfare spending has risen sharply (in constant dollars), meaning that these anti-poverty programs require more and more spending just to maintain the status quo, and that spending is largely financed by borrowing and can't be sustained in the long term.
Anti-poverty programs have been an utter failure. Giving people more and more money doesn't work in meaningfully reducing poverty; all it does is alleviate some of the symptoms of poverty.
I don't know about you, but 90% of the things I buy to live (Food, Toiletries, shelter) are owned and made by 13 companies.
That makes no sense. There are thousands of home builders and a hundred million home owners. There are hundreds of thousands of people selling you food, from farmers and small restaurants to corporate fast food and prepackaged foods, and food is about 10% of household spending. Toiletries, clothing, and other essentials are a few percent of household spending, and again, you have thousands of companies to choose from.
A few big corporations have a large market share. That's because they are actually pretty good and pretty cheap. That's why a lot of people buy their stuff. But if you don't like what they provide, or if you want to save some extra money, there are plenty of other sources to get your housing, food, toiletries, and clothing from and save some money.
Yes, because the solution to political lies and distortions is to ensure that only government-approved corporate media have the right to talk politics! Good going, Democrats!
This kind of shit always has big bipartisan support.
Maybe this "shit" has bipartisan support. But Obama ran on a platform, and was elected, to end this "shit", and as a liberal, progressive, biracial constitutional law professor and community organizer, he had about the best possible credentials for the job.
The lesson to be learned is not that America needs an even better leader than Obama or that Obama was insufficiently liberal/progressive/socialist. The lesson to be learned is that you can't fix crony capitalism and corruption by electing strong leaders that pass laws that end up just being more handouts to lobbies and special interests. The only way to address "this kind of shit" is to limit the power of government.
That quote actually came from a German diplomat citing a Russian describing Russia. Given Russia's history, such a system doesn't seem to work too well in practice.
Yes, the government does screw over the people. And your solution to that is to vote for someone who wants to give the government even more power to screw over the people?
Sanders wants to institute massive expansions in taxes and government regulation of corporations. Even if Sanders were competent, strong, and honest, how do you think a successor is going to use these expanded powers?
Trying to fix government by electing a strong leader that fixes government misconduct doesn't work. Nations have tried that approach again and again and it ends in disaster. The only way to address government misconduct is to limit it, by limiting government itself.
It's amazing how much money the liberal states provide the to republican "pull yourself up by your boot straps" welfare states. http://visualeconomics.creditl...
It's not so amazing once you realize that a lot of that money is for useless crap that, in many cases, the federal government imposes on those states.
Furthermore, while I disagree with the current system of taxation and government handouts, as long as it is the law of the land, I am certainly going to maximize the amount of money I get out of it.
Unless your family already has money but yes, generally I agree.
Even if you "have" money, you don't magically get money simply because you exist or have a degree. Instead, the value you contribute to society is to make choices where to put that money. If your choices are good, you end up with more money. If your choices are bad, you will lose your money fairly quickly.
You mean like the Founding Fathers who cobble together 13 colonies into a federal government to speak with one voice to the [world], set the laws and decide court cases for the entire country?
But that's not what they did. Although the Founding Fathers created a federal government that provided diplomatic representation, could pass laws, and could decide court cases, they sharply limited the areas in which that federal government could do anything. That is, according to the Constitution, the federal government can pass and decide some law, but most law remained in the hands of the states and localities.
You mean like European Union, a collection of nation states with individual educational, economic, and defense policies?
We can't have 50 states marching to a different drummer,
Sure we can. Even better, we might have 25000 high schools each marching to a different drummer, with parents making the decision where their kids should go. Among other things, that's a good idea because we have 15 million high school students, each marching to his own drummer, and with their individual needs, interests, and abilities, that are best met by offering a wide variety of different school environments and curricula.
especially when we have a political culture that values ignorance over intelligence.
And the solution you see to that is to give that same political culture complete control over our educational system???
"It's that the San Francisco and Silicon Valley communities have gotten themselves into a trap where preservationists and local politics have basically guaranteed buying a house will cost at least $1 million. Already in Seattle, it costs half-a-million, so we're well on our way."
Seattle mayor Ed Murray says he wants to keep the working-class roots of Seattle, a city with a major port, fishing fleet and even a steel mill. After taking office last year, Murray made the minimum-wage increase a priority, [...] and has set a goal of creating 50,000 homes — 40 percent of them affordable for low-income residents
Sounds to me like Seattle is following in San Francisco's footsteps, with "preservationists and local politics" doing pretty much the same things they did in San Francisco.
I just wish they'd stop blaming the "tech boom" or software developers for their failed policies.
You should be able to answer your own question based on what I said: does the certifying entity stand to lose large amounts of money if the thing they are certifying fails? Can you figure it out?
It doesn't make sense for renewable energy to continuously generate more power than possible "under ideal conditions". And, in fact, actual capacity factors for renewables are somewhere between 5% and 35%, as the reference I gave you shows.
In any case, you introduced "capacity factors" and then did an analysis assuming that your power output stays in the high double digits with high probability. That's, of course, bullshit. Solar and wind frequently generate zero power, no matter what their peak output or capacity factor. Your introduction of "capacity factors" was a red herring.
The track record should be self evident. Financials and insurance are good measures because they reflect the confidence of investors and insurance risk estimators, people who have actual money at stake when a plane crashes and hence have an incentive to make correct risk assessments.
In this post you are claiming to believe that we live in a universe where inspections are fundamentally impossible of providing any value or accomplishing anything in any way.
Some inspections are very valuable, namely the inspections where the inspector and his organization faces stiff personal and corporate liabilities and hence have a strong economic incentive to assess risks correctly. Accountants and insurance companies perform those kinds of inspections.
Government regulators and government inspection programs generally lack these incentives, and that makes their inspections pretty much worthless.
I was responding to AmiMoJo's comment, where he was wrongly implying that setting high lower limit for transit wouldn't help privacy:
Even if the rule was "no aircraft under 300m over private property", the cost of cameras that can capture clear images of your nude sunbathing is falling rapidly.
In fact, increasing the lower limit for third party transit over private property to 1000 ft or higher would greatly increase privacy; it's one reason (among many) why the FAA should change its rules.
The requirement you allude to has nothing to do with privacy, it has to do with keeping drones out of the hair of GA pilots, who hate the things, who believe that everything above 500 ft is their playground, and who are a powerful lobby at the FAA.
A rational, modern policy would limit GA transit to above 2000 ft, drone transit to above 1000 ft, and give property owners complete control over the airspace below.
Let's say you travel to some country where government health certification is voluntary. Would you rather eat in a dirty restaurant that got bad Yelp reviews but has a government certification, or eat in a restaurant that looks spotlessly clean and has excellent Yelp reviews but you don't see a government certification sticker?
Government health certificates for restaurants are pretty much useless, just like taxi licensing schemes.
My new airline is really cheap. I skip things like a 100 hour inspections, 135 certs, opspecs, and all the other things that make running an airline a huge PITA. I have a plane, what more do you want?
I really don't give a f*ck about your "100 hour inspections" or your "135 certs"; those are meaningless theater, something you can easily cheat on if you want to and that doesn't make me one iota safer.
What i care about is: (1) what is your track record, (2) what are your financials, and (3) what is your insurance.
That still doesn't mean that you have to add the cost of a gas plant to a wind plant.
It means that if you need another 1MW of reliable power, you cannot satisfy that need with wind or solar; you need to build a "dispatchable plant", like gas, nuclear, or coal. Wind is an add-on to that, justified only if the fuel savings are bigger than the amortized cost of the wind power plant per MWh, and they are not.
Well, yes, you need to adjust expected savings by the discount rate you use.
Even under the most optimistic wind energy scenarios, at best you break even per MWh compared to cheap fossil fuel plants. That means that the capital investment you made into the wind energy plant is giving you zero return on investment, which is a lot worse than you can get from pretty safe investments; you take a substantial net loss. So, the "expected savings" are zero, and any "discount rate" translates into a loss.
Slashdot Mirror
Twitter provides such a useful service, sucking up celebrities, politicians, journalists, SJWs, and all sorts of other unsavory characters.
If Twitter ever closes its doors, these uncivilized hordes will wreak havoc on the rest of the world.
That's nonsense. Sanders campaigns for a massive expansion of federal power and spending, far greater than other candidates. He is a self-declared socialist; go look up what that actually means.
You may be cynical and say that they all end up doing the same thing, but if you look through history, that's not true either: there are substantial differences between presidential candidates.
Finally, "vote for Sanders, he is no worse than the other guys" is hardly a good proposition.
It can never be solved by increasing regulation because of regulatory capture. That's what economics tells us, and it's also what happens in practice again and again.
The only solution is to cut back regulations.
Of course it's not. But you cited the Founding Fathers as authority for your belief for expanded federal government powers, and I was pointing out how idiotically wrong your example was.
We're not talking about "limited government" in general, we are talking about limited federal government, that is, the government of a federation of states. And a large degree of autonomy and self-government of states and counties inside a larger federation works just fine.
Really? Where has that ever worked?
The author of that cartoon has fallen prey to the lie that the TPP is about "free trade". How exactly is expanding copyrights or extending drug patents about "free trade"? There is a lot of other bullshit in that cartoon.
The TPP is a very bad deal, dominated by massive rent seeking and crony capitalism. But most of the critics of TPP are themselves tools for other rent seekers and crony capitalists, including the author of that cartoon.
They "work" only in the sense that if you give people enough money, they temporarily don't meet the financial criteria for poverty. But that's not "working" in any useful sense. In reality, the poverty rate in the US was steadily declining until the war on poverty started. Since then, the poverty rate has fluctuated between 10-15%, with no further overall decline. At the same time, means-tested welfare spending has risen sharply (in constant dollars), meaning that these anti-poverty programs require more and more spending just to maintain the status quo, and that spending is largely financed by borrowing and can't be sustained in the long term.
Anti-poverty programs have been an utter failure. Giving people more and more money doesn't work in meaningfully reducing poverty; all it does is alleviate some of the symptoms of poverty.
That makes no sense. There are thousands of home builders and a hundred million home owners. There are hundreds of thousands of people selling you food, from farmers and small restaurants to corporate fast food and prepackaged foods, and food is about 10% of household spending. Toiletries, clothing, and other essentials are a few percent of household spending, and again, you have thousands of companies to choose from.
A few big corporations have a large market share. That's because they are actually pretty good and pretty cheap. That's why a lot of people buy their stuff. But if you don't like what they provide, or if you want to save some extra money, there are plenty of other sources to get your housing, food, toiletries, and clothing from and save some money.
Yes, because the solution to political lies and distortions is to ensure that only government-approved corporate media have the right to talk politics! Good going, Democrats!
Maybe this "shit" has bipartisan support. But Obama ran on a platform, and was elected, to end this "shit", and as a liberal, progressive, biracial constitutional law professor and community organizer, he had about the best possible credentials for the job.
The lesson to be learned is not that America needs an even better leader than Obama or that Obama was insufficiently liberal/progressive/socialist. The lesson to be learned is that you can't fix crony capitalism and corruption by electing strong leaders that pass laws that end up just being more handouts to lobbies and special interests. The only way to address "this kind of shit" is to limit the power of government.
That quote actually came from a German diplomat citing a Russian describing Russia. Given Russia's history, such a system doesn't seem to work too well in practice.
Yes, the government does screw over the people. And your solution to that is to vote for someone who wants to give the government even more power to screw over the people?
Sanders wants to institute massive expansions in taxes and government regulation of corporations. Even if Sanders were competent, strong, and honest, how do you think a successor is going to use these expanded powers?
Trying to fix government by electing a strong leader that fixes government misconduct doesn't work. Nations have tried that approach again and again and it ends in disaster. The only way to address government misconduct is to limit it, by limiting government itself.
It's not so amazing once you realize that a lot of that money is for useless crap that, in many cases, the federal government imposes on those states.
Furthermore, while I disagree with the current system of taxation and government handouts, as long as it is the law of the land, I am certainly going to maximize the amount of money I get out of it.
Even if you "have" money, you don't magically get money simply because you exist or have a degree. Instead, the value you contribute to society is to make choices where to put that money. If your choices are good, you end up with more money. If your choices are bad, you will lose your money fairly quickly.
But that's not what they did. Although the Founding Fathers created a federal government that provided diplomatic representation, could pass laws, and could decide court cases, they sharply limited the areas in which that federal government could do anything. That is, according to the Constitution, the federal government can pass and decide some law, but most law remained in the hands of the states and localities.
You mean like European Union, a collection of nation states with individual educational, economic, and defense policies?
Sure we can. Even better, we might have 25000 high schools each marching to a different drummer, with parents making the decision where their kids should go. Among other things, that's a good idea because we have 15 million high school students, each marching to his own drummer, and with their individual needs, interests, and abilities, that are best met by offering a wide variety of different school environments and curricula.
And the solution you see to that is to give that same political culture complete control over our educational system???
Sounds to me like Seattle is following in San Francisco's footsteps, with "preservationists and local politics" doing pretty much the same things they did in San Francisco.
I just wish they'd stop blaming the "tech boom" or software developers for their failed policies.
You should be able to answer your own question based on what I said: does the certifying entity stand to lose large amounts of money if the thing they are certifying fails? Can you figure it out?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It doesn't make sense for renewable energy to continuously generate more power than possible "under ideal conditions". And, in fact, actual capacity factors for renewables are somewhere between 5% and 35%, as the reference I gave you shows.
In any case, you introduced "capacity factors" and then did an analysis assuming that your power output stays in the high double digits with high probability. That's, of course, bullshit. Solar and wind frequently generate zero power, no matter what their peak output or capacity factor. Your introduction of "capacity factors" was a red herring.
The track record should be self evident. Financials and insurance are good measures because they reflect the confidence of investors and insurance risk estimators, people who have actual money at stake when a plane crashes and hence have an incentive to make correct risk assessments.
Some inspections are very valuable, namely the inspections where the inspector and his organization faces stiff personal and corporate liabilities and hence have a strong economic incentive to assess risks correctly. Accountants and insurance companies perform those kinds of inspections.
Government regulators and government inspection programs generally lack these incentives, and that makes their inspections pretty much worthless.
I was responding to AmiMoJo's comment, where he was wrongly implying that setting high lower limit for transit wouldn't help privacy:
In fact, increasing the lower limit for third party transit over private property to 1000 ft or higher would greatly increase privacy; it's one reason (among many) why the FAA should change its rules.
The requirement you allude to has nothing to do with privacy, it has to do with keeping drones out of the hair of GA pilots, who hate the things, who believe that everything above 500 ft is their playground, and who are a powerful lobby at the FAA.
A rational, modern policy would limit GA transit to above 2000 ft, drone transit to above 1000 ft, and give property owners complete control over the airspace below.
Let's say you travel to some country where government health certification is voluntary. Would you rather eat in a dirty restaurant that got bad Yelp reviews but has a government certification, or eat in a restaurant that looks spotlessly clean and has excellent Yelp reviews but you don't see a government certification sticker?
Government health certificates for restaurants are pretty much useless, just like taxi licensing schemes.
I really don't give a f*ck about your "100 hour inspections" or your "135 certs"; those are meaningless theater, something you can easily cheat on if you want to and that doesn't make me one iota safer.
What i care about is: (1) what is your track record, (2) what are your financials, and (3) what is your insurance.
It means that if you need another 1MW of reliable power, you cannot satisfy that need with wind or solar; you need to build a "dispatchable plant", like gas, nuclear, or coal. Wind is an add-on to that, justified only if the fuel savings are bigger than the amortized cost of the wind power plant per MWh, and they are not.
Even under the most optimistic wind energy scenarios, at best you break even per MWh compared to cheap fossil fuel plants. That means that the capital investment you made into the wind energy plant is giving you zero return on investment, which is a lot worse than you can get from pretty safe investments; you take a substantial net loss. So, the "expected savings" are zero, and any "discount rate" translates into a loss.