Old, run-down, inefficient, low-density housing stock is replaced with modern, energy efficient, clean, high-density townhouses and condos. People should be happy about this.
The problem is wealthy f*cks like Reifman and his "let them eat cake" attitude. Hey, he got his multi-million dollar home; why doesn't everybody else get one too, instead of destroying those quaint neighborhoods that he likes to perambulate through. And he wants to be admired for his socially responsible views. He doesn't care about money, to him, money is simply something you have and don't think about.
Grover Norquist's web site used to have a position paper where he proposed to run the US government debt so high that there would be no budget left for anything but the military and debt servicing.
That's not a "proposal", that's where we are heading. Observing that is hardly radical. Neither is saying that we need to do something about it by cutting spending. In fact, I think you'll find that's pretty much a majority opinion in the US.
The effect would be to reduce the US government to the size where he "could drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the tub."
You mean like we had for more than half of US history? I don't think that's all that radical either.
They're generally not actual conservatives, either.
Norquist and the Kochs are widely denounced as conservatives and right wing by the left, and they consider themselves conservatives. And "conservative" means "American conservative", not the kinds of monarchists or facists or theocrats you find in Europe under the label "conservative", since "conserving" means something different in US history than in European history. If you don't know that or don't understand that, the problem is with you.
And agreeing with common thinking won't get you funding. If your grant proposal reads like litany of what's already believed, you'll get no funding because you aren't doing anything new.
You have a very superficial view of how grant proposals work. Grant proposals aren't for proving or disproving some great theory. Grant proposals usually are for minute building blocks of an overall theory because they are usually only for a few grad students. They cover small pieces of big models, various kinds of measurements or observations. Increasingly, they are about mitigation and the effects of intervention. In your proposal, you have to relate in detail how your proposed work relates to what other people in the field are doing. If you are proposing to do work that contradicts the work of your reviewers, chances are they are going to reject it. If you are proposing to do work that provides further evidence for the work of your grant reviewers, chances are they are going to rate it favorably.
I don't know of a better way of giving out government grants in the sciences than by peer review; but we should be under no illusion that it's a lousy system that encourages conformity and discourages innovation and dissent. It's a different mechanism from a conspiracy, but it has some similar effects.
Newmans points is:- let Australia keep digging up coal and selling it to China, As with all idiots like this, they are aligned with the fossil industry in some way.
Of course he is "aligned" with the fossil fuel industry, as is everybody who opposes limitations on fossil fuel; that's what the word "aligned" means.
It doesn't mean that he (or I) are "associated with" or "paid off" by the fossil fuel industry. I certainly am not. Nor does it mean that he or I want to keep wasting fossil fuel or continue a wasteful lifestyle; chances are that my carbon footprint is a lot lower than yours. It simply means that we disagree with the policies climate change activists propose because we believe they are wrong and harmful.
Now stop the ad hominems, and if you have an argument to make, make it.
Well, as the climate change policies have only been proposed, it seems a bit ludicrous to ask for scientific evidence they won't achieve their goals.
Not at all. The concern over climate change is based on models and predictions, and those same models tell us that the steps proposed by the UN and national governments are not effective.
However, science is here to deliver you from ignorance. You do not have to *believe* in man induced climate change in order to figure out dumping a lot of extra CO2 into the atmosphere is a bad move. The oceans are acidifying because of the CO2. You recall the ocean from grade school, yes? Base of the food chain? Ring a bell? Just a hunch, screwing up the base of the food chain probably won't end well...maybe you require scientific evidence for this as well.
I have no idea what increasing ocean acidification will do, nor does anybody else. What is clear is that atmospheric carbon has been much higher than today and the oceans and life were doing well.
Your belief that climate change or ocean acidification are grade school level science only demonstrates your own complete ignorance of the subject.
He's alleging (even if indirectly) that thousands of academics the world over are deliberately suppressing the truth about climate change and producing a common story about what is happening to the climate and why.
A "conspiracy" is a "secret plan by a group to do something harmful". He isn't alleging that there is anything "secret".
Even though it may look like it, 1980's hair or 1960's bell bottom pants weren't a "secret plan" to inflict ugliness on the world, they simply happened because people follow fashion trends and cave in to peer pressure. There is a long line of such fashions in politics as well. For example, McCarthyism, the banning of DDT, acid rain, mandatory minimum sentencing, electronic surveillance, and low fat diets were all government policies inspired by a kernel of truth exaggerated into utter political mass hysteria.
You defend climate policies because you have heard that they are a good thing from a lot of sources, not because you deeply understand the climate change models. And because you defend them, you bias many of your friends to do the same thing. I don't believe you're part of a conspiracy, yet you contribute to the spread of the belief in climate change policies, despite (presumably) making no substantive scientific contributions.
Claiming that your opponents in a political debate are conspiracy theorists is simply a debating strategy and a straw man; it calls into question your honesty and your objectivity, not theirs.
Small government and free market conservatives frequently are not socially conservative. For example, Grover Norquist is on the board of GOProud (LGBT Republicans) and David Koch signed an amicus brief to SCOTUS supporting gay marriage (something he has supported for a long time).
As for "science", Newman's primary points are that the climate change policies proposed by the UN and national governments are ineffective at achieving their goals. Can you provide any scientific evidence to the contrary?
He isn't alleging a conspiracy. And while those three academics don't agree on academic issues, they do agree on what the next "hot topic" is: curing cancer, social media, whatever. They simply disagree on what the "right" way of addressing it. Both their agreement on a common topic and their disagreement on a solution are highly effective in securing funding.
Newman didn't say climate change was a "hoax"; the term "hoax" implies deliberate deception and conspiracy. What politicians are doing is taking advantage of existing circumstances and a kernel of truth, exaggerating it, fabricating a crisis out of it, and using it to increase their powers and funnel massive amounts of money to their financial backers. And what managers are doing, including managers at the UN, is come up with justifications for why their budget and staff should increase, and why they are doing a good job.
All of that works best for all involved if they all agree on some crises to address: fighting pollution, fighting cancer, fighting human trafficking, whatever. Some of those crises are real, some aren't. For large numbers of people to agree in this way requires no conspiracy, just like building an iPhone or a toaster is accomplished by thousands of people and suppliers who don't know anything about each other. A few people pick some crises, latch on to it, an if it works well for them, others join in. It's like a free market, just in crises and bad ideas.
The hysteria over climate change is no different from the hysteria over terrorism, where politicians pass privacy-invading legislation to further their ends. Terrorism isn't a "hoax" either, after all it does occasionally happen, but its significance is blown out of all proportion.
Yes, humans are causing climate change (I didn't see Newman denying that, but it really doesn't matter where he stands on the matter). It isn't clear that that's a bad thing in the first place. But even if it is, all governmental proposals attempting to prevent climate change clearly are utterly ineffective. The amount of economic disruption caused by actually stopping the increase in atmospheric carbon right now would cause would simply not be tolerated by voters. And the economic disruptions caused by the current token gestures ("at least we're doing something") likely will delay a switch to renewables. What security theater is to terrorism, climate change policies are to climate change.
If we hope to see a company die each time they make a mistake then the only companies left will be the ones that are still working on their first big mistake.
I don't "hope" anything. I'm pointing out that your entire chain of reasoning is bogus, because it is premised on the idea that somehow it's a bad thing when people lose a job. If the company goes out of business, then it's because somehow it wasn't needed anymore, and the employees are then better off working somewhere else.
That is not the case here, Keurig's DRM scheme may have driven up the price of a cup of coffee but nobody lost anything substantial as a result.
So what? If Keurig ties up labor and resources making shitty products, that in itself constitutes substantial harm to society and to its employees.
You reason as if labor were abundant and that jobs are this delicate arrangement that needs to be protected. In fact, labor is scarce and precious, and any labor that gets tied up in useless pursuits is a drain on society.
The reason why you think that way is pretty clear: losing a job is scary at an individual level and in the short term. And we are creating more and more obstacles to labor mobility. Those trends are what we need to reverse.
It never ceases to amaze me how unforgiving people can be. It might make you feel good to say Keurig should die but there are hundreds (thousands?) of people working at Keurig that had nothing to do with this decision and it seems kind of heartless to say they should all lose their jobs because a few executives made a bad decision later changed their mind.
So you think it's better for those thousands of people to continue working at a badly managed, boring company instead of working for some better managed new company?
In the case of Keurig nobody has lost their job or their retirement savings because of this, it's just a cup of coffee.
Why would the company going out of business result in anybody losing their retirement savings?
Coffee and espresso pods have been around since the 1950's. Keurig has brought nothing to the table other than marketing as far as I can tell. It's not clear their patent should even have been granted in the first place.
I've used one of the old Keurigs for a while, but honestly, it's not that great to begin with: you pay a lot for coffee that is at best mediocre. If you're going to go the machine route, consider some of the other machines: Tassimo, Nespresso, Verismo, or Senseo. I think they all beat Keurig along some dimensions (price, quality, convenience). Or use the original, ESE Pods in a real espresso machine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Depends on how you define "unpleasant". If you are one of the 80%+ of people on earth who will find their house under water, it is highly "unpleasant"... others may enjoy their new beachfront property.
A 50-60m sea level rise would take about 1000-2000 years even in the worst case; the polar ice caps simply can't melt any faster than that, no matter how much carbon we emit into the air. And that's the worst case. At current rates, it would take about 15000 years for sea levels to rise that much.
Those time scales are far longer than normal human migration and building patterns. So, nobody would "find their house under water" and adapting to that kind of sea level rise would cost nothing because it would happen as part of normal turnover.
As long as the Federal Government is underwriting flood insurance while not collecting enough to cover the costs it is the government's business. Why should the rest of us pay for other peoples recklessness.
Get rid of the flood insurance. In fact, Congress already tried, but then caved in, as did Obama:
So, you're basically chiming in here to agree with the global climate models.
In the sense that there is anthropogenic warming, yes. However, they seem quantitatively wrong because according to them, the Cretaceous probably should have been hotter.
Of course, the planet didn't have any ice caps then, and a lot of what we call "farmland" they called "shallow ocean".
No, not at all. Sea levels have risen about 120m over the past 20000 years; they can only rise about another 50-60m. Unpleasant, to be sure, but no threat to farmland. If anything, there was more arable land during the Cretaceous, due to warmer and wetter conditions.
If you're concerned about the future, going back to the climate that existed 20000 years ago should be at the top of your list, because it covered much of Europe and North America in thick ice sheets. Compared to a little bit of warming, that would really be a problem. And without anthropogenic warming, we'd be heading back towards colder temperatures.
Yeah, that's how I found out that this stuff is a known carcinogen. Maybe you should try using google, have you heard of it?
Yes, it's a known carcinogen in rodents and at high concentrations. This may be of concern for you, given your mouse brain, but it doesn't apply to humans: "OSHA does not regulate 2-butoxyethanol as a carcinogen."
Because when you just swallow the first story you read, you're kind of a fucking moron. Do you fellate every corporation that promises you a better tomorrow?
I fellate whoever I want, and that's none of your business. Are you just a homophobic jerk that you have a problem with that?
As for corporations, I like cheap energy, energy independence, and low carbon emissions, all of which fracking helps with.
To use your own phrase "I know this is hard to grasp for people like you" but orders are speech; thus to criminalise orders is to criminalise speech.
That's like saying that shooting someone is the same as twitching a finger, so making shooting someone illegal means making twitching a finger illegal.
In reality, while orders may involve speech, it's not the speech that is being made illegal, it is the order. In the case of Stalin and Hitler, the orders for which they are considered guilty of mass murder were, in fact, even written and signed.
If your flawed rant about civil justice had any validity, it would still fail to explain why harm caused by physical violence should be 'criminal' but harm caused by threats or verbal abuse should be covered by 'civil' law.
Where did I say that harm caused by physical violence couldn't be handled by civil law? In fact, I have no strong opinion on that either way. All I pointed out is that when it comes to speech, we don't need to criminalize it to protect people from harm resulting from it.
As for the second part of your statement, your premise is wrong: neither threats or "verbal abuse" cause harm by themselves.
But my question is - how much cheaper is it than other, perhaps safer (or even just safer-sounding) materials.
I don't know what you would replace it with that would be cheaper. Executives for oil companies have drunk fracking liquid, and that's the stuff that goes into the ground; it's vastly more diluted even if it makes it into someone's well.
That's where regulations are supposed to come in - to make sure that the trade-offs between maximum profitability and public safety are forced rather than counting on industry to make them out of, oh, concern for safety.
There is no concern for public safety from these chemicals. Even if there were hypothetically, it would still be economically far more rational for fracking companies to pay home owners to shut down their wells and get municipal drinking water than to stop fracking.
I imagine some of you will start from an assumption that any regulation is going to be excessive and unnecessary. So let me call bullshit in advance.
That's because you don't understand the alternative to regulation. The alternative to regulation isn't a free-for-all, it is strict civil liability. See, you misunderstand environmental regulations as protection from evil corporations; but what environmental regulations really are are a license to pollute for corporations up to some limit. Those limits are too lenient in some cases and too strict in others.
If you're a free market evangelist, everything in business is self correcting. And when it doesn't self-correct? That's the fault of government interference. So until all government is abolished, you always have an excuse why capitalism isn't perfect.
The point of laissez-faire free markets isn't "perfection", it is freedom: you can't have a free society unless people are free from compulsion in economic matters.
It is lucky that free markets are also utilitarian, that is, that they provide better (though far from perfect) economic outcomes than progressive, socialist, fascist, or communist approaches to running the economy. But even if free markets didn't work better than some other approach, they would still be the only feasible choice if we want to live in a free society.
Oh come on, they're not even in the same league as George W Bush and his friends.
No, they are far worse. But at least had some plausible reason to start the wars he did, and he got Congressional approval. Obama just goes out and kills people.
They are calling for a better understanding of the waste water management fo fracking fluids.
"We can't show that there is anything wrong. And there are no plausible health effects. But, hey, if you give us a lot more money to study is, maybe we can find something"
But hey why don't drink the fracking fluids and tell us how safe it is.
The fracking fluid injected into the ground is already pretty harmless, and the miniscule dilutions that may reach the water table have no effect at all.
Moron.
Hint: your personal signature goes below the double line.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this. I guess the question is, are you getting paid to tell this lie? Cosmetics are full of known toxics, just like perfumes.
Why don't you just read the f*cking article? You know, the blue underlined thingy in the message you responded to? It's called a "hyperlink". Have you heard of it?
Slashdot Mirror
Old, run-down, inefficient, low-density housing stock is replaced with modern, energy efficient, clean, high-density townhouses and condos. People should be happy about this.
The problem is wealthy f*cks like Reifman and his "let them eat cake" attitude. Hey, he got his multi-million dollar home; why doesn't everybody else get one too, instead of destroying those quaint neighborhoods that he likes to perambulate through. And he wants to be admired for his socially responsible views. He doesn't care about money, to him, money is simply something you have and don't think about.
That's not a "proposal", that's where we are heading. Observing that is hardly radical. Neither is saying that we need to do something about it by cutting spending. In fact, I think you'll find that's pretty much a majority opinion in the US.
You mean like we had for more than half of US history? I don't think that's all that radical either.
Norquist and the Kochs are widely denounced as conservatives and right wing by the left, and they consider themselves conservatives. And "conservative" means "American conservative", not the kinds of monarchists or facists or theocrats you find in Europe under the label "conservative", since "conserving" means something different in US history than in European history. If you don't know that or don't understand that, the problem is with you.
You have a very superficial view of how grant proposals work. Grant proposals aren't for proving or disproving some great theory. Grant proposals usually are for minute building blocks of an overall theory because they are usually only for a few grad students. They cover small pieces of big models, various kinds of measurements or observations. Increasingly, they are about mitigation and the effects of intervention. In your proposal, you have to relate in detail how your proposed work relates to what other people in the field are doing. If you are proposing to do work that contradicts the work of your reviewers, chances are they are going to reject it. If you are proposing to do work that provides further evidence for the work of your grant reviewers, chances are they are going to rate it favorably.
I don't know of a better way of giving out government grants in the sciences than by peer review; but we should be under no illusion that it's a lousy system that encourages conformity and discourages innovation and dissent. It's a different mechanism from a conspiracy, but it has some similar effects.
Of course he is "aligned" with the fossil fuel industry, as is everybody who opposes limitations on fossil fuel; that's what the word "aligned" means.
It doesn't mean that he (or I) are "associated with" or "paid off" by the fossil fuel industry. I certainly am not. Nor does it mean that he or I want to keep wasting fossil fuel or continue a wasteful lifestyle; chances are that my carbon footprint is a lot lower than yours. It simply means that we disagree with the policies climate change activists propose because we believe they are wrong and harmful.
Now stop the ad hominems, and if you have an argument to make, make it.
Not at all. The concern over climate change is based on models and predictions, and those same models tell us that the steps proposed by the UN and national governments are not effective.
I have no idea what increasing ocean acidification will do, nor does anybody else. What is clear is that atmospheric carbon has been much higher than today and the oceans and life were doing well.
Your belief that climate change or ocean acidification are grade school level science only demonstrates your own complete ignorance of the subject.
I think the adjectives "creepy" and "disturbing" come to mind long before "unproductive" when hearing of "spider farming".
A "conspiracy" is a "secret plan by a group to do something harmful". He isn't alleging that there is anything "secret".
Even though it may look like it, 1980's hair or 1960's bell bottom pants weren't a "secret plan" to inflict ugliness on the world, they simply happened because people follow fashion trends and cave in to peer pressure. There is a long line of such fashions in politics as well. For example, McCarthyism, the banning of DDT, acid rain, mandatory minimum sentencing, electronic surveillance, and low fat diets were all government policies inspired by a kernel of truth exaggerated into utter political mass hysteria.
You defend climate policies because you have heard that they are a good thing from a lot of sources, not because you deeply understand the climate change models. And because you defend them, you bias many of your friends to do the same thing. I don't believe you're part of a conspiracy, yet you contribute to the spread of the belief in climate change policies, despite (presumably) making no substantive scientific contributions.
Claiming that your opponents in a political debate are conspiracy theorists is simply a debating strategy and a straw man; it calls into question your honesty and your objectivity, not theirs.
There is no indication that Maurice Newman has any strong Christian views: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Small government and free market conservatives frequently are not socially conservative. For example, Grover Norquist is on the board of GOProud (LGBT Republicans) and David Koch signed an amicus brief to SCOTUS supporting gay marriage (something he has supported for a long time).
As for "science", Newman's primary points are that the climate change policies proposed by the UN and national governments are ineffective at achieving their goals. Can you provide any scientific evidence to the contrary?
He isn't alleging a conspiracy. And while those three academics don't agree on academic issues, they do agree on what the next "hot topic" is: curing cancer, social media, whatever. They simply disagree on what the "right" way of addressing it. Both their agreement on a common topic and their disagreement on a solution are highly effective in securing funding.
Newman didn't say climate change was a "hoax"; the term "hoax" implies deliberate deception and conspiracy. What politicians are doing is taking advantage of existing circumstances and a kernel of truth, exaggerating it, fabricating a crisis out of it, and using it to increase their powers and funnel massive amounts of money to their financial backers. And what managers are doing, including managers at the UN, is come up with justifications for why their budget and staff should increase, and why they are doing a good job.
All of that works best for all involved if they all agree on some crises to address: fighting pollution, fighting cancer, fighting human trafficking, whatever. Some of those crises are real, some aren't. For large numbers of people to agree in this way requires no conspiracy, just like building an iPhone or a toaster is accomplished by thousands of people and suppliers who don't know anything about each other. A few people pick some crises, latch on to it, an if it works well for them, others join in. It's like a free market, just in crises and bad ideas.
The hysteria over climate change is no different from the hysteria over terrorism, where politicians pass privacy-invading legislation to further their ends. Terrorism isn't a "hoax" either, after all it does occasionally happen, but its significance is blown out of all proportion.
Yes, humans are causing climate change (I didn't see Newman denying that, but it really doesn't matter where he stands on the matter). It isn't clear that that's a bad thing in the first place. But even if it is, all governmental proposals attempting to prevent climate change clearly are utterly ineffective. The amount of economic disruption caused by actually stopping the increase in atmospheric carbon right now would cause would simply not be tolerated by voters. And the economic disruptions caused by the current token gestures ("at least we're doing something") likely will delay a switch to renewables. What security theater is to terrorism, climate change policies are to climate change.
I don't "hope" anything. I'm pointing out that your entire chain of reasoning is bogus, because it is premised on the idea that somehow it's a bad thing when people lose a job. If the company goes out of business, then it's because somehow it wasn't needed anymore, and the employees are then better off working somewhere else.
So what? If Keurig ties up labor and resources making shitty products, that in itself constitutes substantial harm to society and to its employees.
You reason as if labor were abundant and that jobs are this delicate arrangement that needs to be protected. In fact, labor is scarce and precious, and any labor that gets tied up in useless pursuits is a drain on society.
The reason why you think that way is pretty clear: losing a job is scary at an individual level and in the short term. And we are creating more and more obstacles to labor mobility. Those trends are what we need to reverse.
So you think it's better for those thousands of people to continue working at a badly managed, boring company instead of working for some better managed new company?
Why would the company going out of business result in anybody losing their retirement savings?
Coffee and espresso pods have been around since the 1950's. Keurig has brought nothing to the table other than marketing as far as I can tell. It's not clear their patent should even have been granted in the first place.
I've used one of the old Keurigs for a while, but honestly, it's not that great to begin with: you pay a lot for coffee that is at best mediocre. If you're going to go the machine route, consider some of the other machines: Tassimo, Nespresso, Verismo, or Senseo. I think they all beat Keurig along some dimensions (price, quality, convenience). Or use the original, ESE Pods in a real espresso machine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
A 50-60m sea level rise would take about 1000-2000 years even in the worst case; the polar ice caps simply can't melt any faster than that, no matter how much carbon we emit into the air. And that's the worst case. At current rates, it would take about 15000 years for sea levels to rise that much.
Those time scales are far longer than normal human migration and building patterns. So, nobody would "find their house under water" and adapting to that kind of sea level rise would cost nothing because it would happen as part of normal turnover.
Get rid of the flood insurance. In fact, Congress already tried, but then caved in, as did Obama:
http://www.insurancejournal.co...
Probably the only real solution is to grandfather in existing owners but not provide insurance on sales and new construction.
A much better solution is to stop government bailouts of both individuals and companies making bad decisions.
Given that they are a relatively recent phenomenon, that shouldn't be too hard.
And given that they tend to metastasize into more and more areas, we have to stop them anyway, because we simply can't afford them.
In the sense that there is anthropogenic warming, yes. However, they seem quantitatively wrong because according to them, the Cretaceous probably should have been hotter.
No, not at all. Sea levels have risen about 120m over the past 20000 years; they can only rise about another 50-60m. Unpleasant, to be sure, but no threat to farmland. If anything, there was more arable land during the Cretaceous, due to warmer and wetter conditions.
If you're concerned about the future, going back to the climate that existed 20000 years ago should be at the top of your list, because it covered much of Europe and North America in thick ice sheets. Compared to a little bit of warming, that would really be a problem. And without anthropogenic warming, we'd be heading back towards colder temperatures.
Yes, it's a known carcinogen in rodents and at high concentrations. This may be of concern for you, given your mouse brain, but it doesn't apply to humans: "OSHA does not regulate 2-butoxyethanol as a carcinogen."
I fellate whoever I want, and that's none of your business. Are you just a homophobic jerk that you have a problem with that?
As for corporations, I like cheap energy, energy independence, and low carbon emissions, all of which fracking helps with.
That's like saying that shooting someone is the same as twitching a finger, so making shooting someone illegal means making twitching a finger illegal.
In reality, while orders may involve speech, it's not the speech that is being made illegal, it is the order. In the case of Stalin and Hitler, the orders for which they are considered guilty of mass murder were, in fact, even written and signed.
Where did I say that harm caused by physical violence couldn't be handled by civil law? In fact, I have no strong opinion on that either way. All I pointed out is that when it comes to speech, we don't need to criminalize it to protect people from harm resulting from it.
As for the second part of your statement, your premise is wrong: neither threats or "verbal abuse" cause harm by themselves.
I don't know what you would replace it with that would be cheaper. Executives for oil companies have drunk fracking liquid, and that's the stuff that goes into the ground; it's vastly more diluted even if it makes it into someone's well.
There is no concern for public safety from these chemicals. Even if there were hypothetically, it would still be economically far more rational for fracking companies to pay home owners to shut down their wells and get municipal drinking water than to stop fracking.
That's because you don't understand the alternative to regulation. The alternative to regulation isn't a free-for-all, it is strict civil liability. See, you misunderstand environmental regulations as protection from evil corporations; but what environmental regulations really are are a license to pollute for corporations up to some limit. Those limits are too lenient in some cases and too strict in others.
The point of laissez-faire free markets isn't "perfection", it is freedom: you can't have a free society unless people are free from compulsion in economic matters.
It is lucky that free markets are also utilitarian, that is, that they provide better (though far from perfect) economic outcomes than progressive, socialist, fascist, or communist approaches to running the economy. But even if free markets didn't work better than some other approach, they would still be the only feasible choice if we want to live in a free society.
No, they are far worse. But at least had some plausible reason to start the wars he did, and he got Congressional approval. Obama just goes out and kills people.
"We can't show that there is anything wrong. And there are no plausible health effects. But, hey, if you give us a lot more money to study is, maybe we can find something"
People have already done it: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
The fracking fluid injected into the ground is already pretty harmless, and the miniscule dilutions that may reach the water table have no effect at all.
Hint: your personal signature goes below the double line.
Why don't you just read the f*cking article? You know, the blue underlined thingy in the message you responded to? It's called a "hyperlink". Have you heard of it?