So, because someone resides in your state, they have the right to vote...even if they are not a citizen of the U.S.?
Good question - they probably should, but I suspect they don't. I'm sure they suffer taxation.
Does your state require you to register to vote?
Yes, but it can be at the polling place.
What happens if the people at the voting place who know you are not there? And since those at the polling place do not know the voters on sight, they allow someone else to vote in your name?
I know all of them, so it seems unlikely, but for 220 years what they did was to ask somebody to state their name. The actual incidence of voter fraud was below the error level of the voting process.
This new voter ID law came about to try to get college kids to not vote by also tying voter registration with motor vehicle registration (which means $$$ - it'll be challenged as a voting tax). The R's were in charge of the Statehouse when they put the law in place, and college kids tend to vote D, which they don't like. Under the old system a person at a polling place could challenge any voter's eligibility, so the Republicans staffed the college town voting places and challenged every young voter. IIRC the actual number of incorrectly registered voters in the last presidential election was 6 (out of about 600,000 votes cast).
And that's the whole point of this Slashdot story.
If we just accept that everybody who is not 'us' is odd, but if they're not taking away the rights of anybody else then we just leave them alone, then we'd have a much better world.
Well can you have an anti aircraft rocket then? A gun is not much use if that government has jets and rockets to bomb you...
Are those the only two options? Could it not be that the right solution is for the government to get rid of its jets and rockets and bombs and nuclear bombs, or must we always escalate to total annihilation and tyranny?
Having no environmental policy allows one person to arbitrarily impose their will on all others. That's even the antithesis of libertarianism.
Having externalities flying all over the place makes pretty much any system unreliable. Passing laws often doesn't change that.
What they've done in some African countries is to assign property rights for the elephants to some local tribes. Now, instead of helping the poachers for cash, they protect the herds from poachers and occasionally harvest an elephant for sale but at a sustainable rate (I'm not real keen on that, but the alternative is worse). Because the hunt rate is down, the elephant products are more scarce and thus more expensive. Prior to this system, there were all kind of laws, regulations, and proscribed punishments that all completely failed to address the problem of elephants trending toward extinction.
Bullshit, government regulations aren't absorbing growth, the god damned greedy, selfish rich are.
There are so few CEO's that they can't be the main problem. If you confiscate all the wealth of all the billionaires, in total, you get 2 months of government spending.
In 1970 a CEO earned 14 times as much as a janitor, now he "earns" 400 times as much. We need more regulation, not less, starting with a far higher minimum wage. Ours is pathetic compared to the rest of the industrialized world.
That's not how money works. Whatever the minimum wage is, that's the low bar. Set it to $100 an hour. What's the person who's now making $20/hr going to do? The prices in the stores have all gone up to pay $100/hr wages, so he needs to get $250/hr. All you've done is erode the value of everybody's savings.
What is true is that in 1964, the minimum wage was $1.25 an hour and gas was 25 cents a gallon. That $1.25 could be paid in five quarters of real money. That same money now has an intrinsic value of about $22. If you want to go by gas prices alone, that's $15/hr, but gas production has become much more efficient, so if you study actual gas production costs, that's really $30/hr.
After the Vietnam War bankrupted the US government, it embraced socialist money (August 1971). The real inflation rate since that time is tremendous. Not only did that leave the minimum wage behind (which is used as a political football) it meant that everybody who wanted to have savings needed to push that money to Wall Street (401(k), etc.) because local S&L interest rates never kept up with real inflation. That giant sucking sound is all the local economies crumbling because of a lack of capital for small business, which lead to the big box revolution, hedge fund domination, and the like.
If you want the poor to do worse, you'll favor ever increasing regulation. That is, after all, what the rich people who control the government continually get. And a $7 minimum wage that is insulting to humanity.
Wood stove makers will adopt new control technology to meet these standards.
That's not a fact, it's an assumption. A bad one at that, probably, because when they did this with outdoor wood boilers, most of the companies went out of business. The resulting lack of competition means that the prices are insanely high on one of the only carbon-neutral heating technologies that's readily available.
It was pretty much a gift to the oil and gas industry.
The reason the Republican lost was, firstly, because the Democrat Clinton machine bankrolled one of their major campaign contribution bundlers as a shill-candidate to run as a faux-Libertarian spoiler to suck votes away from the Republican candidate.
The fellow who ran under the LP? He took votes from the Democrat at a 5:3 ratio to the Republican - check the cross-tabs.
I like your idea of admitting the GOP as a lost cause.
Frankly, most people replacing a 20 year old HVAC system with a new 16 SEER unit would probably find that a 10 year low interest loan would cost the same or less than the reduction in their monthly electric bill, making it a "free" upgrade.
Your economics is spot on, but your social policy is off. Getting these folks into more debt is not the right solution.
Allow me to tweak that a bit: First, form a nonprofit. This nonprofit can take assignment of a homeowner's utility bills. For the sake of simplicity, let's say it's just a fuel oil bill and that costs $2200 per year. The nonprofit can take that that cost and bill it out in 12 installments of $200/mo if mutually agreeable to the homeowner. Now, the nonprofit can go in and replace the existing furnace with a furnace that runs on $1200 of oil per year. The cost of the new furnace and install is $5000. The homeowner continues to pay $200/mo for at least five years*, at which point the new furnace becomes their property.
* the major competing factors among these nonprofits would be customer service, management fee, and the length of the term. Some may choose 6 or 7 years; homeowners would be free to match up with the one they like the best.
This is an example of why I say have a Libertarian bent, but am emphatically not a Libertarian.
That's a silly thing to say - most libertarians would not advocate everybody suing everybody else for everything, because that's a crummy liberty position for all, and even from a utilitarian perspective, American courts do not recognize strong air property rights, so such a lawsuit would probably not get anywhere anyway.
On the other hand there are market-based approaches that could deal with situations like these, now that we've got an Internet that require neither prior restraints on liberty nor hyperlitigiousness.
Why the government? Because my other option (if we remove government) is to come over to your house and shoot you. I don't think we want to live in THAT world.
Of course not, but that's what called a false dilemma fallacy. For just one narrow slice of the private law alternatives, look into any of the innumerable proposals of books from the Rothbardians. You can probably find hundreds of academic lectures on YouTube for free (here's the first hit on my search results).
Requiring that you demonstrate that you actually HAVE the right to vote is not the same as taking the right away from people. But then I guess you think it should be OK if people vote three and four times, as long as they vote the right way.
The right-wing nuts here passed a voter ID law, and now the people who all know me at the voting place can't let me vote without showing government papers. If I don't show them those government papers, they can let me vote provisionally, but then I have to mail in those papers. If I don't mail those papers in, I'm charged with a felony. Screw all that - the risk is not worthwhile, nor is the hassle - I haven't voted since the law was passed.
Our state constitution says the right to vote is inherent in residency, not in the ability to produce papers. The State is acting illegally and I won't abet them.
The effects of particulate matter, especially PM2.5, are well understood. Denying the overwhelming scientific and medical evidence is just dumb.
Denying that most people who have wood furnaces don't have increased particulates in their indoor air is just as dumb.
I've actually found that the draft created by a clean woodstove greatly improves indoor air quality - when we heated with propane, before spring the indoor air would be pretty acrid, loaded up with all sorts of cooking smoke from the heating season. With a woodstove there are more air changes per hour than even an EHRV provides, and when loading it, there's always positive pressure into the combustion chamber, making sure the smoke goes away from the living space, not towards it.
If we were talking about people cooking over an open hearth here, the points may be valid, though I don't actually know about lung cancer and asthma rates from the pre-industrial period (though I would have guessed they were lower).
Funny, at my office we get exhaust from the building next door's oil burner and it makes me nauseous. There's a central boiler in our building with no thermostats in each room, so windows control the temperature (I know, stupid design and the landlord won't upgrade; we're leaving).
But the point is, any combustion source creates noxious exhaust - the causitive issue for where that smoke goes is actually how high the chimney is - too low relative to the roofline and the pressures go all wrong and the smoke does not go up.
What you're actually arguing for here is electrical heating, which is a separate issue. If I *had* to choose between inhaling wood smoke and #2 heating fuel smoke (same as diesel), the choice is, hands-down, wood smoke.
With regards to the burners, we heat our house with a wood stove, and once it gets hot (and stays there throughout the winter), the catalytic converter kicks in and the smoke gets reburned, leaving no detectable smoke coming out the chimney, and greatly expanding the amount of heat from a cord of wood. I've never seen anything like that on an oil burner - apparently oil users must hate their neighbors, right? Speaking of which, our house is on 32 acres of woodlands, so we bother no neighbors and our home heating carbon footprint is negative. Nobody goes to war for our fuel source, and the geoopolitics over forestry here is usually about whether Stihl or Husqvarna has better local dealers.
Wood is way more expensive than natural gas unless you grow your own
What sort of figures are you using? Up here it costs $2600 to heat our house with propane and $400 for cord wood (two cords, seasoned). Propane is about 2.5x as expensive as natural gas these days so it would cost us about $1000 to heat with natural gas (were it available - our house is on 32 acres of forest land).
Many folks around here have those automated pellet stoves - one local installer has a giant hopper with a vacuum feed that can completely automate the season other than a once-a-month ash clean-out.
With even bigger forests and burying with sequestration, it could even remove CO2.
Forests build up the soil (e.g. pine needles, leaves) and even foresters only take out the trunks and heaviest of limbs for firewood. The brush is usually left to decompose (become soil, aka sequestered).
The amount of fuel needed to harvest needs to be subtracted, but in general trees are an excellent solar energy capture and storage device.
it does not draw on our past carbon bank to add to the mix
which is the entire point.
but it sets back reforestation
no, it promotes reforestation. Rapidly growing trees consume lots of CO2, old trees just a little. Some of it gets harvested again, but lots of it becomes the forest floor. Besides that, only market demand for wood causes forests to be planted. Paper recycling has actually cut into forest planting at this point.
and "counts" existing growth and its carbon sink:-(
Every freaking Windows peripheral requires a driver install - people are conditioned. If the Android device comes with a driver disk that happens to implement ext4 or ZFS or whatever on Windows, nobody will know the difference.
$2B/yr could write a lovely ext driver for Windows.
I just happen to be researching my next device in another tab - I use a Verizon MVNO - the Galaxy S4 looks like the contender if I can find an unlocked CDMA version of it. I've already accepted the need for a bluetooth mini keyboard and an external battery pack to replace my Droid 3.
Then this came up so I followed links to links to specs. "Ah, I could support CyanogenMod. I don't really need 4G for anything. I'm always in it for the underdog".
But, "oh, no microSD slot."
If anybody has links for how to use an unlocked S4 on Verizon prepaid, much appreciated.
Slashdot Mirror
agreed - some of the less beholden sites would run it as an op-ed.
I guess you only read part of my comment. Give it a go again. The test was run in NH by the Republicans and we have hard numbers.
So, because someone resides in your state, they have the right to vote...even if they are not a citizen of the U.S.?
Good question - they probably should, but I suspect they don't. I'm sure they suffer taxation.
Does your state require you to register to vote?
Yes, but it can be at the polling place.
What happens if the people at the voting place who know you are not there? And since those at the polling place do not know the voters on sight, they allow someone else to vote in your name?
I know all of them, so it seems unlikely, but for 220 years what they did was to ask somebody to state their name. The actual incidence of voter fraud was below the error level of the voting process.
This new voter ID law came about to try to get college kids to not vote by also tying voter registration with motor vehicle registration (which means $$$ - it'll be challenged as a voting tax). The R's were in charge of the Statehouse when they put the law in place, and college kids tend to vote D, which they don't like. Under the old system a person at a polling place could challenge any voter's eligibility, so the Republicans staffed the college town voting places and challenged every young voter. IIRC the actual number of incorrectly registered voters in the last presidential election was 6 (out of about 600,000 votes cast).
You actually frighten me.
And that's the whole point of this Slashdot story.
If we just accept that everybody who is not 'us' is odd, but if they're not taking away the rights of anybody else then we just leave them alone, then we'd have a much better world.
Peace & tolerance.
Well can you have an anti aircraft rocket then? A gun is not much use if that government has jets and rockets to bomb you...
Are those the only two options? Could it not be that the right solution is for the government to get rid of its jets and rockets and bombs and nuclear bombs, or must we always escalate to total annihilation and tyranny?
Having no environmental policy allows one person to arbitrarily impose their will on all others. That's even the antithesis of libertarianism.
Having externalities flying all over the place makes pretty much any system unreliable. Passing laws often doesn't change that.
What they've done in some African countries is to assign property rights for the elephants to some local tribes. Now, instead of helping the poachers for cash, they protect the herds from poachers and occasionally harvest an elephant for sale but at a sustainable rate (I'm not real keen on that, but the alternative is worse). Because the hunt rate is down, the elephant products are more scarce and thus more expensive. Prior to this system, there were all kind of laws, regulations, and proscribed punishments that all completely failed to address the problem of elephants trending toward extinction.
Bullshit, government regulations aren't absorbing growth, the god damned greedy, selfish rich are.
There are so few CEO's that they can't be the main problem. If you confiscate all the wealth of all the billionaires, in total, you get 2 months of government spending.
In 1970 a CEO earned 14 times as much as a janitor, now he "earns" 400 times as much. We need more regulation, not less, starting with a far higher minimum wage. Ours is pathetic compared to the rest of the industrialized world.
That's not how money works. Whatever the minimum wage is, that's the low bar. Set it to $100 an hour. What's the person who's now making $20/hr going to do? The prices in the stores have all gone up to pay $100/hr wages, so he needs to get $250/hr. All you've done is erode the value of everybody's savings.
What is true is that in 1964, the minimum wage was $1.25 an hour and gas was 25 cents a gallon. That $1.25 could be paid in five quarters of real money. That same money now has an intrinsic value of about $22. If you want to go by gas prices alone, that's $15/hr, but gas production has become much more efficient, so if you study actual gas production costs, that's really $30/hr.
After the Vietnam War bankrupted the US government, it embraced socialist money (August 1971). The real inflation rate since that time is tremendous. Not only did that leave the minimum wage behind (which is used as a political football) it meant that everybody who wanted to have savings needed to push that money to Wall Street (401(k), etc.) because local S&L interest rates never kept up with real inflation. That giant sucking sound is all the local economies crumbling because of a lack of capital for small business, which lead to the big box revolution, hedge fund domination, and the like.
If you want the poor to do worse, you'll favor ever increasing regulation. That is, after all, what the rich people who control the government continually get. And a $7 minimum wage that is insulting to humanity.
Wood stove makers will adopt new control technology to meet these standards.
That's not a fact, it's an assumption. A bad one at that, probably, because when they did this with outdoor wood boilers, most of the companies went out of business. The resulting lack of competition means that the prices are insanely high on one of the only carbon-neutral heating technologies that's readily available.
It was pretty much a gift to the oil and gas industry.
The reason the Republican lost was, firstly, because the Democrat Clinton machine bankrolled one of their major campaign contribution bundlers as a shill-candidate to run as a faux-Libertarian spoiler to suck votes away from the Republican candidate.
The fellow who ran under the LP? He took votes from the Democrat at a 5:3 ratio to the Republican - check the cross-tabs.
I like your idea of admitting the GOP as a lost cause.
Frankly, most people replacing a 20 year old HVAC system with a new 16 SEER unit would probably find that a 10 year low interest loan would cost the same or less than the reduction in their monthly electric bill, making it a "free" upgrade.
Your economics is spot on, but your social policy is off. Getting these folks into more debt is not the right solution.
Allow me to tweak that a bit: First, form a nonprofit. This nonprofit can take assignment of a homeowner's utility bills. For the sake of simplicity, let's say it's just a fuel oil bill and that costs $2200 per year. The nonprofit can take that that cost and bill it out in 12 installments of $200/mo if mutually agreeable to the homeowner. Now, the nonprofit can go in and replace the existing furnace with a furnace that runs on $1200 of oil per year. The cost of the new furnace and install is $5000. The homeowner continues to pay $200/mo for at least five years*, at which point the new furnace becomes their property.
* the major competing factors among these nonprofits would be customer service, management fee, and the length of the term. Some may choose 6 or 7 years; homeowners would be free to match up with the one they like the best.
This is an example of why I say have a Libertarian bent, but am emphatically not a Libertarian.
That's a silly thing to say - most libertarians would not advocate everybody suing everybody else for everything, because that's a crummy liberty position for all, and even from a utilitarian perspective, American courts do not recognize strong air property rights, so such a lawsuit would probably not get anywhere anyway.
On the other hand there are market-based approaches that could deal with situations like these, now that we've got an Internet that require neither prior restraints on liberty nor hyperlitigiousness.
Why the government? Because my other option (if we remove government) is to come over to your house and shoot you. I don't think we want to live in THAT world.
Of course not, but that's what called a false dilemma fallacy. For just one narrow slice of the private law alternatives, look into any of the innumerable proposals of books from the Rothbardians. You can probably find hundreds of academic lectures on YouTube for free (here's the first hit on my search results).
Requiring that you demonstrate that you actually HAVE the right to vote is not the same as taking the right away from people. But then I guess you think it should be OK if people vote three and four times, as long as they vote the right way.
The right-wing nuts here passed a voter ID law, and now the people who all know me at the voting place can't let me vote without showing government papers. If I don't show them those government papers, they can let me vote provisionally, but then I have to mail in those papers. If I don't mail those papers in, I'm charged with a felony. Screw all that - the risk is not worthwhile, nor is the hassle - I haven't voted since the law was passed.
Our state constitution says the right to vote is inherent in residency, not in the ability to produce papers. The State is acting illegally and I won't abet them.
The effects of particulate matter, especially PM2.5, are well understood. Denying the overwhelming scientific and medical evidence is just dumb.
Denying that most people who have wood furnaces don't have increased particulates in their indoor air is just as dumb.
I've actually found that the draft created by a clean woodstove greatly improves indoor air quality - when we heated with propane, before spring the indoor air would be pretty acrid, loaded up with all sorts of cooking smoke from the heating season. With a woodstove there are more air changes per hour than even an EHRV provides, and when loading it, there's always positive pressure into the combustion chamber, making sure the smoke goes away from the living space, not towards it.
If we were talking about people cooking over an open hearth here, the points may be valid, though I don't actually know about lung cancer and asthma rates from the pre-industrial period (though I would have guessed they were lower).
Funny, at my office we get exhaust from the building next door's oil burner and it makes me nauseous. There's a central boiler in our building with no thermostats in each room, so windows control the temperature (I know, stupid design and the landlord won't upgrade; we're leaving).
But the point is, any combustion source creates noxious exhaust - the causitive issue for where that smoke goes is actually how high the chimney is - too low relative to the roofline and the pressures go all wrong and the smoke does not go up.
What you're actually arguing for here is electrical heating, which is a separate issue. If I *had* to choose between inhaling wood smoke and #2 heating fuel smoke (same as diesel), the choice is, hands-down, wood smoke.
With regards to the burners, we heat our house with a wood stove, and once it gets hot (and stays there throughout the winter), the catalytic converter kicks in and the smoke gets reburned, leaving no detectable smoke coming out the chimney, and greatly expanding the amount of heat from a cord of wood. I've never seen anything like that on an oil burner - apparently oil users must hate their neighbors, right? Speaking of which, our house is on 32 acres of woodlands, so we bother no neighbors and our home heating carbon footprint is negative. Nobody goes to war for our fuel source, and the geoopolitics over forestry here is usually about whether Stihl or Husqvarna has better local dealers.
I'm talking about something simple and inherently non-toxic, stored kinetic energy and rotation of heavy balanced cylinders in a near-vacuum.
Sounds more complex than pumping water uphill.
I vote fewer that are really big rather than many. Hoover Dam tech.
Have you considered Hoover Dam tech?
Wood is way more expensive than natural gas unless you grow your own
What sort of figures are you using? Up here it costs $2600 to heat our house with propane and $400 for cord wood (two cords, seasoned). Propane is about 2.5x as expensive as natural gas these days so it would cost us about $1000 to heat with natural gas (were it available - our house is on 32 acres of forest land).
Many folks around here have those automated pellet stoves - one local installer has a giant hopper with a vacuum feed that can completely automate the season other than a once-a-month ash clean-out.
With even bigger forests and burying with sequestration, it could even remove CO2.
Forests build up the soil (e.g. pine needles, leaves) and even foresters only take out the trunks and heaviest of limbs for firewood. The brush is usually left to decompose (become soil, aka sequestered).
The amount of fuel needed to harvest needs to be subtracted, but in general trees are an excellent solar energy capture and storage device.
Consumes forests, emits CO2....
On about a 40-year cycle.
it does not draw on our past carbon bank to add to the mix
which is the entire point.
but it sets back reforestation
no, it promotes reforestation. Rapidly growing trees consume lots of CO2, old trees just a little. Some of it gets harvested again, but lots of it becomes the forest floor. Besides that, only market demand for wood causes forests to be planted. Paper recycling has actually cut into forest planting at this point.
and "counts" existing growth and its carbon sink :-(
what?
I'm deadset against woodburning energy
You should learn more about it.
Possibly even salvageable for the museums!
Googled since I was curious:
There are no hazardous materials aboard like the hydrazine propellants used on many spacecraft.
So, have fun with your new mancave decoration.
Every freaking Windows peripheral requires a driver install - people are conditioned. If the Android device comes with a driver disk that happens to implement ext4 or ZFS or whatever on Windows, nobody will know the difference.
$2B/yr could write a lovely ext driver for Windows.
I just happen to be researching my next device in another tab - I use a Verizon MVNO - the Galaxy S4 looks like the contender if I can find an unlocked CDMA version of it. I've already accepted the need for a bluetooth mini keyboard and an external battery pack to replace my Droid 3.
Then this came up so I followed links to links to specs. "Ah, I could support CyanogenMod. I don't really need 4G for anything. I'm always in it for the underdog".
But, "oh, no microSD slot."
If anybody has links for how to use an unlocked S4 on Verizon prepaid, much appreciated.
Wonderful, thanks for the info!
Good call. Imma go adjust my score modifiers now.
No, they want to do away with all government regulation of corporations.
You're simply wrong - corporations are government creations, and not founded in the principles of liberty.
But if you want to put up a straw man, have fun.