Tell that to the member of congress whose tween daughter can't get a ticket to see the latest boy-band because the resellers scooped up all the tickets in the first 30 seconds then tripled the prices.
Any politician worth their salt has enough connections to get one of the "promotional tickets". Buying tickets online and paying for them is only for peasants like you and me.
You are forgetting the atmospheric mess they release, which is not factored in to the prices. If fossil fuels included all their costs in their product they wouldn't be nearly as competitive.
No, I'm not "forgetting" that; I've looked at that data and concluded that it is already accounted for. In any case, those are not the same as "subsidies".
But feel free to try to do the calculation yourself and then try to make a compelling argument.
Is there any reply you could give to the question "why would you do that" that wouldn't make you sound kind of gay for Trump?
Why? Because the primary job of a president is to negotiate, coordinate, and manage people, not to solve differential equations. Hillary's performance in dealing with people has been dismal, even those (or in particular those) who know her personally.
Furthermore, the "friendly simpleton" and the "smart man/woman" are merely carefully constructed political personas and don't reflect actual intelligence anyway; Democrats like to present themselves as super-smart technocrats, while Republicans like to present themselves as folksy and down-to-earth. George W. Bush's SAT score (a good proxy for intelligence) seems to have been substantially higher than Bill Clinton's, for example.
Of course, since the US is all about fair competition-you know, free market and all-then we can safely remove government subsidies to other forms of power such as oil or coal as well. We wouldn't want one segment of an industry working with an unfair advantage now, would we?
Indeed, favor abolishing all energy subsidies (as well as all agricultural subsidies for that matter).
There is some disagreement about US energy subsidies. By one accounting, renewable energy is subsidized by about $7.3b, while fossil fuel is subsidized by about $3.2b, by another accounting (taking into account tax credits, a dubious proposition), fossil fuels are "subsidized" by about $72b, while renewable fuels are subsidized by about $29b. Since only about 10% of US energy comes from renewable sources, that means that renewables are subsidized between 5 and 20 times as much per unit of energy as fossil fuels.
First off the competing fossil fuels receive substantial subsidies from the government
Google is saying that "renewables are increasingly becoming the lowest cost option" taking into account current cost structures. Furthermore, fossil fuels are not, actually, very much subsidized per unit of energy.
Worse, fossil fuels do not have to pay for a large portion of the pollution (including carbon) that they create so their prices are artificially low.
Again, Google is saying that "renewables are increasingly becoming the lowest cost option" taking into account current cost structures, so even if that argument were valid, it would be irrelevant.
Only rich companies like Google can do it today and they do it as a marketing expense more than anything else.
So, in effect, you're saying that Google is lying: renewable energy is still substantially more expensive than energy from fossil fuel. Thanks for clearing that up.
To reach this goal we'll be directly buying enough wind and solar electricity annually to account for every unit of electricity our operations consume, globally. And we're focusing on creating new energy from renewable sources, so we only buy from projects that are funded by our purchases. Over the last six years, the cost of wind and solar came down 60 percent and 80 percent, respectively, proving that renewables are increasingly becoming the lowest cost option. Electricity costs are one of the largest components of our operating expenses at our data centers, and having a long-term stable cost of renewable power provides protection against price swings in energy.
Which tells you that no government incentives or actions are needed: if this is a reasonable accounting of costs, companies will switch to renewables all by themselves.
Our heads asploded when half of the country stood up and said they'd prefer the friendly simpleton over the dull smart man.
Well, that's because you are gullible enough to believe the Democrat's self-serving image as "philosopher kings". You're right about one thing: the rest of the country does prefer the friendly simpleton, or even the crude simpleton, to the "smart man/woman". I certainly do, and without apologies.
You're waiting for some colossal rage event at the election of a troll, but this is exactly what we expected from you.
And I have no idea what you mean by "expected from 'you'". I'm a former Democrat, now an independent. Until the election, I considered Clinton and Trump to be equally bad. Given what has happened since, I'm really glad that Clinton and her supporters are not in power, even though I still don't like Trump.
The pearl clutching, concern trolling, and hysteria coming from progressives and socialists after this election is just delicious. I'm just waiting for some of your heads to explode.
I had always thought that the Internet went to shit in the early-mid 90's, when the public-at-large started to use it in large numbers.
Nobody is forcing you to read Facebook, CNN, Twitter, or any of the other sites. If you want to hang out with only your half dozen best buddies online, set up your own IRC and USENET and you don't have to worry about the other couple of billion users.
I simply gave an example of the fact that Perl is not just "Python with C syntax", not an extended critique. Note merely said this affected "both efficiency and correctness of programs", not that it constantly caused problems.
The reason I switched away from Perl wasn't its poor design (after all, I still use C++), but the fact that it has been dyingslowly. That, and people like you.
I can see the reason. After all, there are a number of very good reasons why you don't want to hand out possibly blackmail-enabling information about your politicians.
Yeah, it's so much better when only the prime minister can obtain "blackmail-enabling information", because he, of course, would never abuse such information to pressure members of the opposition party! Oh, no, not the prime minister!
It had to introduce millions of people to the wonders of 3D printing, and then convince them to shell out more than $1,000 for a machine. It also had to develop the technology fast enough to keep its customers happy. Those two tasks were too much for the fledgling company
3D printing just isn't there yet. You can make small plastic objects out of one or two materials, the surfaces are rough, and that's if you're lucky and the print doesn't fail (MakerBot is worse than many others in that way). It's also expensive and slow. And 3D printed objects are competing with $0.02 mass produced plastic stuff from China.
So, it's not that MakerBot somehow wasn't up to the task, it's that the technology that isn't ready for mass market use yet.
There is something profoundly weird about Perl fanatics. All I did was point out an actual difference between the Perl and Python type system, and you spew lots of bullshit. I think the shittiest part about Perl isn't its type system but its user community and their lousy attitudes.
I've been a perl programmer for decades, and the number of hours I've spent debugging issues with automatic type conversion are in the single digits, and the number of problems I've encountered with string-to-numeric conversion is literally zero
How nice for you. You must not be writing very interesting or complex software.
and if you were burned by something like that in production, I'd ask you why you weren't writing tests.
I am writing tests; I just prefer writing as few tests as possible. The more the compiler and runtime check for me automatically, the fewer tests I have to write.
There's something profoundly weird about perl critics, they continuously just *make shit up* to fit their narrative...
I was using Perl for two decades. I wouldn't go back.
I didn't approve of the specific groups the SPLC "others". I'm simply pointing out that even self-righteous social justice organizations like the SPLC are "othering" groups they don't like.
Perl can always be viewed as Python with C syntax. Why are some people so negative?
No, unfortunately not. Perl has a much weaker type system, allowing expressions like (3 + "3"). That affects both efficiency and correctness of programs.
."radical" Muslims are Muslims and "radical" Christians are Christians.
Yes, radical Muslims are a subset of all Muslims. And it is radical Muslims, not all Muslims, that I want the FBI to keep track of, just like I want them to keep track of radical Christians, radical socialists, and radical neo-Nazis. And for immigration purposes, we also have a long and justified tradition of treating people differently based on their beliefs: communists and fascists are excluded, and we certainly can do the same for specific forms of political Islam.
Deciding who is and isn't "radical" is how the whole power grab works you ignorant fuck.
I agree. However, that's the way our society currently works: the state essentially has a monopoly on fighting crime and terrorism, and it needs the tools to do that. That decision didn't start with radical Islam; federal agencies have been keeping files on dangerous individuals in the country for at least a century. And they have abused that power again and again, too. But until someone comes up with a better system, that's the system we have to live with.
Wait... How the fuck did you thing you were going to be able to leave Christians out of it and get away with it? You can't argue for a national database of Muslims without arguing for a national database of Christians.
You need to have your eyes checked. I didn't argue for a "national database of Muslims".
See what happens when you lump categorize people you "dumb motherfucker"* * Ironically, a valid category of which were really need a national database
Well, you'd be at the top of the list of that one.
The FBI should track radical Islamists and their meeting places, just like they track neo-Nazis and radical leftists. That's pretty much what Trump is saying, and it's what any reasonable public police force does in a Western democracy.
All this talk about "we should try to understand" and "who do you blame" is just irrelevant drivel and an attempt at obfuscation. Understanding radical Islam and hate groups is the job of professionals that get paid to do that sort of thing.
IBM famously helped Nazi Germany computerize the Holocaust
And, incidentally, Germany today still has government databases containing the religious affiliation of every citizen (not just police databases of radical Muslims; it has those too).
Slashdot Mirror
Any politician worth their salt has enough connections to get one of the "promotional tickets". Buying tickets online and paying for them is only for peasants like you and me.
It will still come loaded with lots of Samsung's crapware.
No, I'm not "forgetting" that; I've looked at that data and concluded that it is already accounted for. In any case, those are not the same as "subsidies".
But feel free to try to do the calculation yourself and then try to make a compelling argument.
Why? Because the primary job of a president is to negotiate, coordinate, and manage people, not to solve differential equations. Hillary's performance in dealing with people has been dismal, even those (or in particular those) who know her personally.
Furthermore, the "friendly simpleton" and the "smart man/woman" are merely carefully constructed political personas and don't reflect actual intelligence anyway; Democrats like to present themselves as super-smart technocrats, while Republicans like to present themselves as folksy and down-to-earth. George W. Bush's SAT score (a good proxy for intelligence) seems to have been substantially higher than Bill Clinton's, for example.
Indeed, favor abolishing all energy subsidies (as well as all agricultural subsidies for that matter).
There is some disagreement about US energy subsidies. By one accounting, renewable energy is subsidized by about $7.3b, while fossil fuel is subsidized by about $3.2b, by another accounting (taking into account tax credits, a dubious proposition), fossil fuels are "subsidized" by about $72b, while renewable fuels are subsidized by about $29b. Since only about 10% of US energy comes from renewable sources, that means that renewables are subsidized between 5 and 20 times as much per unit of energy as fossil fuels.
Google is saying that "renewables are increasingly becoming the lowest cost option" taking into account current cost structures. Furthermore, fossil fuels are not, actually, very much subsidized per unit of energy.
Again, Google is saying that "renewables are increasingly becoming the lowest cost option" taking into account current cost structures, so even if that argument were valid, it would be irrelevant.
So, in effect, you're saying that Google is lying: renewable energy is still substantially more expensive than energy from fossil fuel. Thanks for clearing that up.
Which tells you that no government incentives or actions are needed: if this is a reasonable accounting of costs, companies will switch to renewables all by themselves.
Well, that's because you are gullible enough to believe the Democrat's self-serving image as "philosopher kings". You're right about one thing: the rest of the country does prefer the friendly simpleton, or even the crude simpleton, to the "smart man/woman". I certainly do, and without apologies.
The "colossal rage events" have been happening.
And I have no idea what you mean by "expected from 'you'". I'm a former Democrat, now an independent. Until the election, I considered Clinton and Trump to be equally bad. Given what has happened since, I'm really glad that Clinton and her supporters are not in power, even though I still don't like Trump.
The pearl clutching, concern trolling, and hysteria coming from progressives and socialists after this election is just delicious. I'm just waiting for some of your heads to explode.
Nobody is forcing you to read Facebook, CNN, Twitter, or any of the other sites. If you want to hang out with only your half dozen best buddies online, set up your own IRC and USENET and you don't have to worry about the other couple of billion users.
we must destroy it!
I simply gave an example of the fact that Perl is not just "Python with C syntax", not an extended critique. Note merely said this affected "both efficiency and correctness of programs", not that it constantly caused problems.
The reason I switched away from Perl wasn't its poor design (after all, I still use C++), but the fact that it has been dying slowly. That, and people like you.
Yeah, it's so much better when only the prime minister can obtain "blackmail-enabling information", because he, of course, would never abuse such information to pressure members of the opposition party! Oh, no, not the prime minister!
Wikileaks will leak their browsing history once it will be captured as mandated by law.
I'm looking forward to perusing it.
3D printing just isn't there yet. You can make small plastic objects out of one or two materials, the surfaces are rough, and that's if you're lucky and the print doesn't fail (MakerBot is worse than many others in that way). It's also expensive and slow. And 3D printed objects are competing with $0.02 mass produced plastic stuff from China.
So, it's not that MakerBot somehow wasn't up to the task, it's that the technology that isn't ready for mass market use yet.
There is something profoundly weird about Perl fanatics. All I did was point out an actual difference between the Perl and Python type system, and you spew lots of bullshit. I think the shittiest part about Perl isn't its type system but its user community and their lousy attitudes.
How nice for you. You must not be writing very interesting or complex software.
I am writing tests; I just prefer writing as few tests as possible. The more the compiler and runtime check for me automatically, the fewer tests I have to write.
I was using Perl for two decades. I wouldn't go back.
I didn't approve of the specific groups the SPLC "others". I'm simply pointing out that even self-righteous social justice organizations like the SPLC are "othering" groups they don't like.
No, unfortunately not. Perl has a much weaker type system, allowing expressions like (3 + "3"). That affects both efficiency and correctness of programs.
Yes, radical Muslims are a subset of all Muslims. And it is radical Muslims, not all Muslims, that I want the FBI to keep track of, just like I want them to keep track of radical Christians, radical socialists, and radical neo-Nazis. And for immigration purposes, we also have a long and justified tradition of treating people differently based on their beliefs: communists and fascists are excluded, and we certainly can do the same for specific forms of political Islam.
I agree. However, that's the way our society currently works: the state essentially has a monopoly on fighting crime and terrorism, and it needs the tools to do that. That decision didn't start with radical Islam; federal agencies have been keeping files on dangerous individuals in the country for at least a century. And they have abused that power again and again, too. But until someone comes up with a better system, that's the system we have to live with.
You need to have your eyes checked. I didn't argue for a "national database of Muslims".
Well, you'd be at the top of the list of that one.
The FBI should track radical Islamists and their meeting places, just like they track neo-Nazis and radical leftists. That's pretty much what Trump is saying, and it's what any reasonable public police force does in a Western democracy.
All this talk about "we should try to understand" and "who do you blame" is just irrelevant drivel and an attempt at obfuscation. Understanding radical Islam and hate groups is the job of professionals that get paid to do that sort of thing.
And, incidentally, Germany today still has government databases containing the religious affiliation of every citizen (not just police databases of radical Muslims; it has those too).
The FBI almost certainly has a database of radical Muslims, which is what this debate is all about.