In addition to this, landlords are frequently at risk for the behavior of these temporary tenants who represent a higher risk to the property than leased and vetted tenants
And landlords ought to be free to impose restrictions on subletting in their rental contracts, and evict tenants that fail to comply with such terms.
It also doesn't matter that landlords were forbidding the practice, as people were ignoring these rules
The problem there is that the landlords cannot then take the obvious enforcement action of evicting the tenants because of so-called "tenant protection laws".
You live in a nice quiet condo tower, and then suddenly it's 24x7 party next door because the unit is being rented on Airbnb.
Condo towers are private associations; they can ban AirBnB for their association if they want. They can also assess steep fines against association members whose use of their condo disturbs the neighbors. It is exactly those kinds of neighbors that share walls and whose actions strongly affect each other that are bound together in private associations. Therefore, there is no need to impose AirBnB regulations as a matter of law to address your concerns.
Hotels are equipped for this and designed for this. Residential buildings are not. It's unfair to put this burden on neighbors just so the host and a startup can make a few bucks.
You aren't denying the startup "a few bucks", you are denying your neighbors a lot of money. Now, within a condo association that is perfectly fine if you pass such restrictions according to its CC&Rs with the majority agreement of the other association members; that's what associations exist for.
But trying to impose such restrictions on other condo buildings that you aren't part of and don't share interior walls with just isn't justified.
Personally, as a home owner in a downtown location who actually lives at the property, I am glad our association agreement banned them.
And you ought to be free to make such decisions for your private associations. You ought not to be free to impose such restrictions on other property owners.
Censoring people is preventing them from saying anything
What do you think censors do other than suppressing the publication of news stories and book? How would traditional censors ever have "prevented people from saying anything"? Cut out their tongues? Censorship is about manipulating mass communication, not interpersonal communications. In societies with censorship, people can still "say anything" to each other, and they do. It's how people behind the iron curtain retained their sanity and knew what was going on.
There is a section on trending stories, which has been accused of being pro-Clinton, and may well be so, but that isn't censorship.
That is exactly what censorship is: manipulation of mass communication.
That's opinion, like you'll find pretty much everywhere in media. If you want to call that manipulation, then every media player I know of manipulates, and the word loses meaning.
You're mixing up levels of description there. Even if every single newspaper censors information based on their biases, the press as a whole doesn't censor as long as the newspapers hold politically diverse biases.
The reason Facebook censorship matters is because it dominates the social networking market; furthermore, Twitter, Google+, and other US media companies share the same biases, so they tend to all suppress the same information. That is what makes the US media as a whole increasingly censorious. Media in other countries have a much better balance between support for different political parties than US media.
Self reporting is still interesting, it just tells you a different thing than if it was decided by a metric
TFA talks about "rich people", which the publication had nothing to do with; that is TFA was biased and tendentious.
The researchers should not have added two "upper class" individuals to the study, because they only add noise. The fact that they did add these two people suggests that the researchers had an agenda and a bias, which calls the whole study into question.
Finally, "class" and "self-reported class" are such complicated concepts in themselves that correlating them with anything is pretty much worthless: the whole thing may be interesting for people to speculate on, but there are no rational or scientific conclusions you can draw from it.
Even more shocking: people who think they are 'upper class' are more self absorbed.
Yes, all two of them! Which of course is an entirely adequate sample to extrapolate from the relative performance of self-identified lower and middle class people to self-identified upper class people... if you are a social science major with no understanding of statistics or the scientific method.
The study only had two nominally "upper class" individuals in it, meaning the study has too few samples to say anything about "upper class". The only thing you might infer is that middle class people pay less attention than lower class people.
But the class assignment is based on self-reports. A lot of rich people consider themselves middle class, and some middle class people by income consider themselves upper class. So, the study really says that people who consider themselves to be of a higher class pay less attention.
But wait, that's still not right. What they actually measured is "dwell time". The differences in dwell time are small and they recorded only 1 minute of video or used images on monitors. In addition, they didn't control for other factors that vary with socioeconomic status, such as level of education and IQ.
So, the study says nothing about "rich people" and next to nothing about "upper class people". And what it says about lower vs middle class may have nothing to do with attention or class.
All I see is you repeating what you said, over and over, waving away any the research that disagrees with you and never citing any of your own - just more flat declarations that we're supposed to take on faith.
Apparently, you don't understand the difference between a citation and a link, and between a peer-reviewed research publication and web articles and position papers. You have cited no research at all.
Furthermore, if you actually did cite something in support of an argument, it isn't sufficient to say "I'm right because Smith says so", you need to relate the citation to your actual argument.
That same report also says:
Apart from the fact that the IPCC represents opinion, not fact, and that it is internally not consistent, you are pointing to the 2007 report!
I heard you the first time, and you still haven't provided any reason for me to believe you. Whereas adopting policies that restrict and phase out fossil fuels absolutely will greatly slow atmospheric CO2 level rises
No, you still aren't listening: the issue is not whether phasing out fossil fuels will slow atmospheric CO2 increases, the question is whether governmental intervention is better and faster at making that happen than simply leaving it to the market. That's an assumption you're making without any justification.
And how do you think people can switch to renewables when they have no choice about their electricity source?
The same way I have been doing for years: putting solar cells on the roof and buying electricity from renewable sources.
Government intervention would not be required if the market were actually free, but it will never be free as long as carbon emitters don't have to pay for the costs of their emissions.
The existence of externalities a century from now has little to do with whether a market is free or not.
and never citing any of your own - just more flat declarations that we're supposed to take on faith
So far, you haven't made your case, and you haven't cited any research. And arguments and science are about reasoning, not about digging up a piece of text on the web that agrees with you. And you don't even bother reading the IPCC properly (the only even remotely relevant document you point to). For example, under IPCC, even for RCP8.5, sea level rise by 2100 will likely stay below 3 ft, yet you conjure up disaster scenarios.
Your clear example of cherry-picking the one quote you want to hear just highlights your own agenda.
No, you simply don't want to face the facts, namely that your economic argument doesn't work even under the already questionable IPCC assumptions, and that's why you engage in all this obfuscation and misdirection. Furthermore, as I was saying, given that the cost of prevention is about the same as the damages in absolute dollars according to the IPCC, that means that the cost of prevention must be much higher than the properly discounted damages, making any other arguments irrelevant; if you don't understand what I'm saying, go read up on it.
But, no, you are not supposed to take anything on faith, you are supposed to use your head for what it is meant for and actually think, and then engage in a rational argument. If you think the discount argument is wrong, respond to it. If you think that climate policy can effectively reduce CO2 emissions without wrecking the economy, make an actual argument to that effect. That's what rational discussions are about. They are not about pulling some web links out of your ass that happen to agree with you.
Rapid changes in global temperatures can absolutely cause mass extinctions [theconversation.com].
Even the poorly written article you point to doesn't actually claim that, it claims that they are sometimes "associated with", which is true: events that cause mass extinctions (meteor strikes, volcanic eruptions, etc.) can also cause changes in global temperatures. However, there have been many rapid changes in global temperatures that have not caused mass extinctions. Furthermore, if "changes" in global temperatures lead to extinctions, it is cooling and glaciation, not warming. In fact, we are currently in an ice age that, without human emissions, would deepen further and further; ending it through carbon emissions may well be a good thing.
Rising sea levels are "easy" to adapt to for us - but not cheap
Sea levels rise at a speed of a few feet per century; the exact global average temperature makes little difference because it is not the rate limiting step.
and billion-dollar floods from storm surges will only get more common
A few feet a century is only a few feet a century.
As for food production, the research shows both positives and negatives up until about 3K warming
When you say "the research shows", what you actually mean is "a bunch of people with an agenda guess that".
Who gets stuck with that bill, the taxpayers? Owners of private homes who can no longer insure them?
Private home owners in coastal areas already have their insurance paid for largely by tax payers; it's an outrage, actually: regular taxpayers subsidize luxury beach homes. Those homes should never have been built there in the first place.
Rising sea levels are not so easy to adapt to for the hundreds of millions in less-developed countries, where e.g. tens of millions of people depend on river delta farmland that will get flooded [grida.no] with salt water
Again, the analysis is wrong. River deltas are created by sediments, they don't have a fixed level. In fact, Bangladesh is currently gaining land area despite rising sea levels.
Sure we're stuck at 400ppm and probably higher, but we can still avoid far larger increases by phasing out fossil carbon as soon as practical.
You really aren't very good at reading. I said that it will do so independent of any policies we adopt. Do you understand the difference between the two statements? Think it over.
ut it will certainly get far worse (and far more expensive) if we stick our heads in the sand.
The very IPCC report you point to, in fact, says that the cost of dealing with climate change and the cost of avoiding it are about the same. However, that is using undiscounted costs; with discounted costs, the cost of avoiding climate change today is much, much higher than dealing with it later. In different words, economic growth today makes the cost of dealing with the consequences of climate change so cheap that it isn't worth worrying about.
The business-as-usual case is likely to see 3.7 to 4.5 degrees this century - much higher than the 2.0-2.5 we're hoping we can keep it to.
Those predictions are based on the incorrect assumption that without government intervention, people won't switch to renewables. In fact, the adoption of renewables likely no slower without government intervention. And the more government tries to intervene, the more harm it does to the economy, and the less money people have available for conversion to renewables and for adapting to climate change.
Free market advocates talk about conditions under which the most gifted and skilled in working in the market succeed, reap rewards, and have offspring, while those less gifted or business-savvy get fewer resources and fewer children
That reasoning is completely divorced from reality, for the simple reason that "the most gifted and skilled" and the most "successful" actually have significantly fewer children than those less gifted and skilled. That is why progressives embarked on a government program of eugenics and Social Darwinism and wanted to sterilize people of low socioeconomic status. The arguments are clearly spelled out by the great progressives of the early 20th century; go read up on it.
In fact, that reasoning doesn't apply even to biological evolution; both biological evolution and markets don't even select at the level of individuals in the simplistic sense in which progressives and Social Darwinists reason about evolution.
The argument classical liberals make about free markets have nothing to do with utility or improving society or making people richer; rather, the right to free association and the right to private property are fundamental human rights, and any society that interferes in a free market infringes on those fundamental human rights. That is, to classical liberals the argument for free markets is fundamentally a moral argument about human rights, not a utilitarian argument.
It's a lucky coincidence that free markets also happen to produce the best known economic outcomes, not just for society as a whole, but also for individuals. Progressives don't believe in basic human rights (they may pay lip service to them, but they abandon them as soon as some other goal overrides them), so classical liberals usually don't even bother making a moral argument to progressives; that's why classical liberals usually skip the moral argument for free markets (which is what motivates us) and jump right into the utilitarian argument (which is the only one progressives understand).
Government per se doesn't cause cheating and competition-killing oligopolies..
Yes, government per se does, because the only way politicians can stay in power is by selling out to powerful special interests and corporations. Those laws linking political and economic power are pretty much as inevitable as the Second Law of thermodynamics: in theory, all particles in a room could jump to one side of the room by pure chance, but in practice, entropy increases without fail.
Facebook has had impartiality problems with its "Trending" section. If you have evidence that people who favor Trump and do not otherwise offend have been silenced, please post.
I didn't say Facebook "silenced" people, I said it "censored and manipualted". You just agreed with that.
As a "centrist-progressive", I find you characterization of "progressive" completely off. But that's probably a long and winding debate best for another medium.
The meaning of "progressive" is defined by the history of progressivism, not your ignorance of that history.
Hogwash. I've worked for multiple companies, big and small, where I was paid by them to cheat and mislead customers.
And the reason they could get away with that and stay in business is that (1) government has limited competition and (2) government has limited the ability of customers to sue those companies.
Sorry, but I'll believe my own eyes over your pet theories.
There is no contradiction between your observation and my statement. Companies cheat because they know they can get away with it; they can get away with it because government protects them from the consequences they would suffer in a free market.
Solar output has increased about 30% over 4.5 billion years. The PETM was about 50 million years ago and likely had levels above 1000 ppm. Levels were probably 2000 ppm 100 million years ago. I leave it for you to do the math and compare it to radiative forcing from CO2.
Fuck the Russians, and the Americans, and the defense departments,
Well, the US became a major military power because Europeans kept dragging it into wars. Europe is only peaceful and democratic today because the US occupied Western Europe and threatened the USSR with nuclear retaliation.
So, fuck the Europeans, their imperialism, their socialism, their fascism, and their war mongering. And you should thank the US for keeping Europeans both safe and under control for the past half century.
Don't expect this to last forever, though, because US tax payers are getting really tired paying for this arrangement.
I don't know who originated the concept, but the Ayn Rand types have currently embraced it.
If by "Ayn Rand types", you mean advocates of free markets, that's bullshit. People who advocate for free markets advocate for a world of mutually beneficial, voluntary relationships. Free markets operate at the level of groups, organizations, and relationships, not individuals, and free markets are decidedly non-zero-sum.
The ideas of Social Darwinism and market interventions related to it are misconceptions of the left and the progressive movements, which tend to view the economy as a zero sum game and tend to reason in terms of winners and losers. Progressives explicitly advocated creating conditions under which the "most gifted" and skilled individuals would succeed, reap rewards, and have offspring, while the "less gifted" would get fewer resources and fewer children.
Socialists and progressives conceptualize society as a fixed pie (or maybe one that can be grown through government intervention) and people as fighting over who gets the biggest slice. Free market advocates understand that this is completely wrong, and that the best way for everybody to win and maximize their absolute wealth and well-being is to have the freedom to engage in voluntary, peaceful, non-coercive economic transactions.
Getting rid of gov't doesn't stop sneakiness and cheating and competition-killing oligopolies. If anything, it increases it.
I didn't propose "getting rid of government"; government is a necessary evil, but it ought to be limited.
However, you need to realize that government is pretty much the only source of "cheating and competition-killing oligopolies", and the more power you give to government, the more "cheating and competition-killing oligopolies" you are going to get.
O my yes. The Democrats are responsible for every crime ever committed, and the Republicans are pure angels, sent to us from God himself, to set the world aright.
I'm sorry, I keep forgetting I need to spell things out with you. We're talking specifically about Wikileaks here, not whether people of some political affiliation commit crimes or are nice.
For Clinton, Podesta, and the Democratic Party, the leaked E-mails contradict their desired public image of rational government and opposition to money in politics. They show a well-oiled political machinery that uses carefully tuned propaganda campaigns, tells different stories to voters and donors, and simply confirms massive corruption and dishonesty by Hillary Clinton.
For Trump, Priebus, and the Republicans, there is likely not much to leak: Trump's political machinery is dysfunctional, his "propaganda machine" consists of making outrageous and inflammatory statements, he couldn't dissemble like Clinton if his life depended on it, and he doesn't have the decades-long string of scandals hanging over him or lies to cover them up. There are plenty of reasons to dislike and reject Trump as a candidate, but few of them can be related to Wikileaks.
Therefore, accusing Assange of political partisanship because he leaks damaging information from the Clinton campaign but not from the Trump campaign is stupid. There is little reason to believe that there is damaging, secret, internal information on the Trump campaign; the Trump campaign shouts its damaging information at anybody willing to listen quite freely; they don't need Assange to do it for them.
Anyhow, and just sayin' the leaks and the hacks are being done by people who hate the United States, and who would be happy to see us toppled. Support them if you wish, but that allows me to make a decision about your allegiances, comrade.
Exposing corruption, dishonesty, and incompetence in a major political candidate, in particular one that runs on a pretense of being an experienced and rational politician, is a benefit to the US. The identity of the people exposing this information, and their motives, don't matter as long as the information is correct, which it seems to be.
Furthermore, I see Russia's interests aligned with ours in this case: they don't want a war-mongering, incompetent kleptocrat with a history of foreign policy disasters (like Clinton) in the White House, because it is likely to lead to instability and more war. Neither do I. Your preferences may, of course, differ.
Bringing a pesky os for PCs into a mobile device is not, in my opinion, going mobile.
You don't know what you're talking about. Windows CE wasn't a "pesky os for PCs", it was a different OS from Windows for desktops, specifically aimed at consumer electronics, embedded systems PDAs, and phones.
Those experiments by MS were just that: experiments. And failing ones.
Windows CE was big; it had nearly half of the smartphone market for a while and showed up in numerous embedded and portable applications.
We may biologically survive 1000ppm with only chronic nausea and headache,
Bullshit. We're currently at 0.04% atmospheric CO2. There is no detectable effect at 1% atmospheric CO2.
Now, you've made progress having advanced to Stages 4 and 5 of Climate Denial ("we can't solve it" and "its too late, so why bother doing anything").
No, honey, I have always said that there is no effective government intervention against climate change, and furthermore, that it simply isn't harmful.
To reiterate: -We can solve it. -And even if it's too late for us, or even our grandchildren, we can still solve it for their children or grandchildren.
To reiterate: you are scientifically illiterate and you make stuff up. You're an ignorant political partisan.
India and China get some of their water from rivers that go across their borders. If these rivers are affected, many millions of people will be affected.
Yes, affected in the sense that they would likely get a bit more precipitation and a bit more fresh water. That's bad... how?
And what does it matter anyway? Climate change is going to happen, period. Get used to it.
No, "we're" not fine. Life on Earth can certainly weather it, but many organisms will not
High average global temperatures have generally not been shown to be the cause of mass extinctions, and primates were doing just fine at much higher CO2 concentrations.
and human civilization will certainly have massive problems as such high concentrations would have huge repurcussions for sea levels
They'll rise at a few feet per century... easy to adapt to.
rain belts, where arable land appears and where it disappears
Generally, the climate will become milder and wetter; that causes lots of arable land to appear and not much to disappear.
potentially leaving hundreds of millions or even billions in a position where they have no good place to live and no food to eat
No evidence of that. That's simple FUD.
In any case, it doesn't matter what it causes, since it is going to happen no matter what policies we adopt.
What's the alternative? Giant corporations would then replace all the functions done by government, and be mega slimy and dishonest.
No, they wouldn't.
In China one milk company poisoned infants to save a buck. What would stop them otherwise?
Yeah, that is the kinds of delusions progressives always have; they then proceed to create oppressive governments and massive crony capitalism.
Mass social Darwinism?
Social Darwinism was something advocated by progressives.
It would then be 3-eyed Mad Max's with gated communities.
That I don't have a problem with.
You deserve an Enron power supply and a Comcast doctor.
Both, incidentally, corporations and oligopolies created by big government, with deep and corrupt ties to both Democrats and Republicans. You know, the way you like it.
Global CO2 Concentration Passes Threshold of 400 ppm -- and That's Bad for the Climate
There is no "threshold" at 400ppm; it's just an arbitrary number. In terms of earth's climate history, global CO2 concentrations can go above 1000ppm and we're still fine; arguably, we'd actually be better off. None of that matters, though, because...
The carbon dioxide concentration is unlikely to dip below the 400 ppm mark for at least several decades, even with aggressive efforts to reduce global carbon emissions, according to the WMO report
It's not "unlikely to dip below the 400 ppm mark", it is impossible for it to dip below the 400 ppm mark for decades even if every human on the planet killed themselves tomorrow. No amount of mitigation or climate change policy or taxes or international treaties is going to change that. And the policies that are being negotiated and proposed are utterly useless; they won't even significantly slow the increase. That's why people who advocate governmental action on climate change are liars and crooks.
Get used to it: the only option we have for dealing with climate change is that humans adapt to it. You can be an optimist about it (like myself) or a pessimist.
But you are a climate change denier if you deny that climate change is inevitable at this point.
Slashdot Mirror
And landlords ought to be free to impose restrictions on subletting in their rental contracts, and evict tenants that fail to comply with such terms.
The problem there is that the landlords cannot then take the obvious enforcement action of evicting the tenants because of so-called "tenant protection laws".
Condo towers are private associations; they can ban AirBnB for their association if they want. They can also assess steep fines against association members whose use of their condo disturbs the neighbors. It is exactly those kinds of neighbors that share walls and whose actions strongly affect each other that are bound together in private associations. Therefore, there is no need to impose AirBnB regulations as a matter of law to address your concerns.
You aren't denying the startup "a few bucks", you are denying your neighbors a lot of money. Now, within a condo association that is perfectly fine if you pass such restrictions according to its CC&Rs with the majority agreement of the other association members; that's what associations exist for.
But trying to impose such restrictions on other condo buildings that you aren't part of and don't share interior walls with just isn't justified.
And you ought to be free to make such decisions for your private associations. You ought not to be free to impose such restrictions on other property owners.
What do you think censors do other than suppressing the publication of news stories and book? How would traditional censors ever have "prevented people from saying anything"? Cut out their tongues? Censorship is about manipulating mass communication, not interpersonal communications. In societies with censorship, people can still "say anything" to each other, and they do. It's how people behind the iron curtain retained their sanity and knew what was going on.
That is exactly what censorship is: manipulation of mass communication.
You're mixing up levels of description there. Even if every single newspaper censors information based on their biases, the press as a whole doesn't censor as long as the newspapers hold politically diverse biases.
The reason Facebook censorship matters is because it dominates the social networking market; furthermore, Twitter, Google+, and other US media companies share the same biases, so they tend to all suppress the same information. That is what makes the US media as a whole increasingly censorious. Media in other countries have a much better balance between support for different political parties than US media.
TFA talks about "rich people", which the publication had nothing to do with; that is TFA was biased and tendentious.
The researchers should not have added two "upper class" individuals to the study, because they only add noise. The fact that they did add these two people suggests that the researchers had an agenda and a bias, which calls the whole study into question.
Finally, "class" and "self-reported class" are such complicated concepts in themselves that correlating them with anything is pretty much worthless: the whole thing may be interesting for people to speculate on, but there are no rational or scientific conclusions you can draw from it.
Yes, all two of them! Which of course is an entirely adequate sample to extrapolate from the relative performance of self-identified lower and middle class people to self-identified upper class people... if you are a social science major with no understanding of statistics or the scientific method.
The study only had two nominally "upper class" individuals in it, meaning the study has too few samples to say anything about "upper class". The only thing you might infer is that middle class people pay less attention than lower class people.
But the class assignment is based on self-reports. A lot of rich people consider themselves middle class, and some middle class people by income consider themselves upper class. So, the study really says that people who consider themselves to be of a higher class pay less attention.
But wait, that's still not right. What they actually measured is "dwell time". The differences in dwell time are small and they recorded only 1 minute of video or used images on monitors. In addition, they didn't control for other factors that vary with socioeconomic status, such as level of education and IQ.
So, the study says nothing about "rich people" and next to nothing about "upper class people". And what it says about lower vs middle class may have nothing to do with attention or class.
Apparently, you don't understand the difference between a citation and a link, and between a peer-reviewed research publication and web articles and position papers. You have cited no research at all.
Furthermore, if you actually did cite something in support of an argument, it isn't sufficient to say "I'm right because Smith says so", you need to relate the citation to your actual argument.
Apart from the fact that the IPCC represents opinion, not fact, and that it is internally not consistent, you are pointing to the 2007 report!
No, you still aren't listening: the issue is not whether phasing out fossil fuels will slow atmospheric CO2 increases, the question is whether governmental intervention is better and faster at making that happen than simply leaving it to the market. That's an assumption you're making without any justification.
The same way I have been doing for years: putting solar cells on the roof and buying electricity from renewable sources.
The existence of externalities a century from now has little to do with whether a market is free or not.
So far, you haven't made your case, and you haven't cited any research. And arguments and science are about reasoning, not about digging up a piece of text on the web that agrees with you. And you don't even bother reading the IPCC properly (the only even remotely relevant document you point to). For example, under IPCC, even for RCP8.5, sea level rise by 2100 will likely stay below 3 ft, yet you conjure up disaster scenarios.
No, you simply don't want to face the facts, namely that your economic argument doesn't work even under the already questionable IPCC assumptions, and that's why you engage in all this obfuscation and misdirection. Furthermore, as I was saying, given that the cost of prevention is about the same as the damages in absolute dollars according to the IPCC, that means that the cost of prevention must be much higher than the properly discounted damages, making any other arguments irrelevant; if you don't understand what I'm saying, go read up on it.
But, no, you are not supposed to take anything on faith, you are supposed to use your head for what it is meant for and actually think, and then engage in a rational argument. If you think the discount argument is wrong, respond to it. If you think that climate policy can effectively reduce CO2 emissions without wrecking the economy, make an actual argument to that effect. That's what rational discussions are about. They are not about pulling some web links out of your ass that happen to agree with you.
Even the poorly written article you point to doesn't actually claim that, it claims that they are sometimes "associated with", which is true: events that cause mass extinctions (meteor strikes, volcanic eruptions, etc.) can also cause changes in global temperatures. However, there have been many rapid changes in global temperatures that have not caused mass extinctions. Furthermore, if "changes" in global temperatures lead to extinctions, it is cooling and glaciation, not warming. In fact, we are currently in an ice age that, without human emissions, would deepen further and further; ending it through carbon emissions may well be a good thing.
Sea levels rise at a speed of a few feet per century; the exact global average temperature makes little difference because it is not the rate limiting step.
A few feet a century is only a few feet a century.
When you say "the research shows", what you actually mean is "a bunch of people with an agenda guess that".
Private home owners in coastal areas already have their insurance paid for largely by tax payers; it's an outrage, actually: regular taxpayers subsidize luxury beach homes. Those homes should never have been built there in the first place.
Again, the analysis is wrong. River deltas are created by sediments, they don't have a fixed level. In fact, Bangladesh is currently gaining land area despite rising sea levels.
You really aren't very good at reading. I said that it will do so independent of any policies we adopt. Do you understand the difference between the two statements? Think it over.
The very IPCC report you point to, in fact, says that the cost of dealing with climate change and the cost of avoiding it are about the same. However, that is using undiscounted costs; with discounted costs, the cost of avoiding climate change today is much, much higher than dealing with it later. In different words, economic growth today makes the cost of dealing with the consequences of climate change so cheap that it isn't worth worrying about.
Those predictions are based on the incorrect assumption that without government intervention, people won't switch to renewables. In fact, the adoption of renewables likely no slower without government intervention. And the more government tries to intervene, the more harm it does to the economy, and the less money people have available for conversion to renewables and for adapting to climate change.
That reasoning is completely divorced from reality, for the simple reason that "the most gifted and skilled" and the most "successful" actually have significantly fewer children than those less gifted and skilled. That is why progressives embarked on a government program of eugenics and Social Darwinism and wanted to sterilize people of low socioeconomic status. The arguments are clearly spelled out by the great progressives of the early 20th century; go read up on it.
In fact, that reasoning doesn't apply even to biological evolution; both biological evolution and markets don't even select at the level of individuals in the simplistic sense in which progressives and Social Darwinists reason about evolution.
The argument classical liberals make about free markets have nothing to do with utility or improving society or making people richer; rather, the right to free association and the right to private property are fundamental human rights, and any society that interferes in a free market infringes on those fundamental human rights. That is, to classical liberals the argument for free markets is fundamentally a moral argument about human rights, not a utilitarian argument.
It's a lucky coincidence that free markets also happen to produce the best known economic outcomes, not just for society as a whole, but also for individuals. Progressives don't believe in basic human rights (they may pay lip service to them, but they abandon them as soon as some other goal overrides them), so classical liberals usually don't even bother making a moral argument to progressives; that's why classical liberals usually skip the moral argument for free markets (which is what motivates us) and jump right into the utilitarian argument (which is the only one progressives understand).
Yes, government per se does, because the only way politicians can stay in power is by selling out to powerful special interests and corporations. Those laws linking political and economic power are pretty much as inevitable as the Second Law of thermodynamics: in theory, all particles in a room could jump to one side of the room by pure chance, but in practice, entropy increases without fail.
I didn't say Facebook "silenced" people, I said it "censored and manipualted". You just agreed with that.
The meaning of "progressive" is defined by the history of progressivism, not your ignorance of that history.
And the reason they could get away with that and stay in business is that (1) government has limited competition and (2) government has limited the ability of customers to sue those companies.
There is no contradiction between your observation and my statement. Companies cheat because they know they can get away with it; they can get away with it because government protects them from the consequences they would suffer in a free market.
Solar output has increased about 30% over 4.5 billion years. The PETM was about 50 million years ago and likely had levels above 1000 ppm. Levels were probably 2000 ppm 100 million years ago. I leave it for you to do the math and compare it to radiative forcing from CO2.
Well, the US became a major military power because Europeans kept dragging it into wars. Europe is only peaceful and democratic today because the US occupied Western Europe and threatened the USSR with nuclear retaliation.
So, fuck the Europeans, their imperialism, their socialism, their fascism, and their war mongering. And you should thank the US for keeping Europeans both safe and under control for the past half century.
Don't expect this to last forever, though, because US tax payers are getting really tired paying for this arrangement.
If by "Ayn Rand types", you mean advocates of free markets, that's bullshit. People who advocate for free markets advocate for a world of mutually beneficial, voluntary relationships. Free markets operate at the level of groups, organizations, and relationships, not individuals, and free markets are decidedly non-zero-sum.
The ideas of Social Darwinism and market interventions related to it are misconceptions of the left and the progressive movements, which tend to view the economy as a zero sum game and tend to reason in terms of winners and losers. Progressives explicitly advocated creating conditions under which the "most gifted" and skilled individuals would succeed, reap rewards, and have offspring, while the "less gifted" would get fewer resources and fewer children.
Socialists and progressives conceptualize society as a fixed pie (or maybe one that can be grown through government intervention) and people as fighting over who gets the biggest slice. Free market advocates understand that this is completely wrong, and that the best way for everybody to win and maximize their absolute wealth and well-being is to have the freedom to engage in voluntary, peaceful, non-coercive economic transactions.
I didn't propose "getting rid of government"; government is a necessary evil, but it ought to be limited.
However, you need to realize that government is pretty much the only source of "cheating and competition-killing oligopolies", and the more power you give to government, the more "cheating and competition-killing oligopolies" you are going to get.
I'm sorry, I keep forgetting I need to spell things out with you. We're talking specifically about Wikileaks here, not whether people of some political affiliation commit crimes or are nice.
For Clinton, Podesta, and the Democratic Party, the leaked E-mails contradict their desired public image of rational government and opposition to money in politics. They show a well-oiled political machinery that uses carefully tuned propaganda campaigns, tells different stories to voters and donors, and simply confirms massive corruption and dishonesty by Hillary Clinton.
For Trump, Priebus, and the Republicans, there is likely not much to leak: Trump's political machinery is dysfunctional, his "propaganda machine" consists of making outrageous and inflammatory statements, he couldn't dissemble like Clinton if his life depended on it, and he doesn't have the decades-long string of scandals hanging over him or lies to cover them up. There are plenty of reasons to dislike and reject Trump as a candidate, but few of them can be related to Wikileaks.
Therefore, accusing Assange of political partisanship because he leaks damaging information from the Clinton campaign but not from the Trump campaign is stupid. There is little reason to believe that there is damaging, secret, internal information on the Trump campaign; the Trump campaign shouts its damaging information at anybody willing to listen quite freely; they don't need Assange to do it for them.
Exposing corruption, dishonesty, and incompetence in a major political candidate, in particular one that runs on a pretense of being an experienced and rational politician, is a benefit to the US. The identity of the people exposing this information, and their motives, don't matter as long as the information is correct, which it seems to be.
Furthermore, I see Russia's interests aligned with ours in this case: they don't want a war-mongering, incompetent kleptocrat with a history of foreign policy disasters (like Clinton) in the White House, because it is likely to lead to instability and more war. Neither do I. Your preferences may, of course, differ.
How about iTunes for Android TV, Android, and Chromecast? You know, so that people can enjoy the movies they paid for?
You don't know what you're talking about. Windows CE wasn't a "pesky os for PCs", it was a different OS from Windows for desktops, specifically aimed at consumer electronics, embedded systems PDAs, and phones.
Windows CE was big; it had nearly half of the smartphone market for a while and showed up in numerous embedded and portable applications.
Bullshit. We're currently at 0.04% atmospheric CO2. There is no detectable effect at 1% atmospheric CO2.
No, honey, I have always said that there is no effective government intervention against climate change, and furthermore, that it simply isn't harmful.
To reiterate: you are scientifically illiterate and you make stuff up. You're an ignorant political partisan.
Yes, affected in the sense that they would likely get a bit more precipitation and a bit more fresh water. That's bad... how?
And what does it matter anyway? Climate change is going to happen, period. Get used to it.
High average global temperatures have generally not been shown to be the cause of mass extinctions, and primates were doing just fine at much higher CO2 concentrations.
They'll rise at a few feet per century... easy to adapt to.
Generally, the climate will become milder and wetter; that causes lots of arable land to appear and not much to disappear.
No evidence of that. That's simple FUD.
In any case, it doesn't matter what it causes, since it is going to happen no matter what policies we adopt.
No, they wouldn't.
Yeah, that is the kinds of delusions progressives always have; they then proceed to create oppressive governments and massive crony capitalism.
Social Darwinism was something advocated by progressives.
That I don't have a problem with.
Both, incidentally, corporations and oligopolies created by big government, with deep and corrupt ties to both Democrats and Republicans. You know, the way you like it.
Why should there be conflicts about "water supplies"? Climate change generally leads to more precipitation and a greening of deserts.
http://news.nationalgeographic...
They can both be used as trays for serving drinks?
There is no "threshold" at 400ppm; it's just an arbitrary number. In terms of earth's climate history, global CO2 concentrations can go above 1000ppm and we're still fine; arguably, we'd actually be better off. None of that matters, though, because...
It's not "unlikely to dip below the 400 ppm mark", it is impossible for it to dip below the 400 ppm mark for decades even if every human on the planet killed themselves tomorrow. No amount of mitigation or climate change policy or taxes or international treaties is going to change that. And the policies that are being negotiated and proposed are utterly useless; they won't even significantly slow the increase. That's why people who advocate governmental action on climate change are liars and crooks.
Get used to it: the only option we have for dealing with climate change is that humans adapt to it. You can be an optimist about it (like myself) or a pessimist.
But you are a climate change denier if you deny that climate change is inevitable at this point.