Also, laws here are tighter around competition and privacy than in the US, so obviously US companies are going to fall foul of them more often because they are not stopped at home.
Sure, privacy and competition are more limited in Europe. What's your point?
If you knew anything outside your little patriotic bubble you'd know the EU
It's because of my "patriotic bubble" in Europe that I emigrated to the US. Imagine that.
Ah so you've resorted to moving the goalposts. Well played. *clap* *clap*.
I'm afraid you moved the goalposts. I said that government-run banks were involved in creating the crises. You then responded that private banks needed to be bailed out. Of course, you probably don't understand the difference between the two statements, understandable given your educational background.
Basically you're a typical Euroskeptic
Actually, I'm quite the atypical Euroskeptic, because I actually voted with my feet.
And this is why I think the leave campaign is full of shit because it is nothing but deflection, lies and wishful thinking.
Frankly, whether the UK leaves or doesn't leave the EU makes little difference; Europe is so close, it will drag it down either way.
The british banks went bust just fine without government ownership, so I'm really not sure what the hell you're talking about.
I'm sure lots of private individuals, corporations, and independent banks suffered as the result of a crisis originally created by government policies.
I see you chose not to dispute my dispute of your claim that the UK is Germany.
I made no such claim. Are you off your meds and hallucinating again?
You mean the uncompetitive companies like BP, Shell, Philips, Siemens, AB Inbev, Heineken, Mercedes, Volvo, Volkswagen, Nestle, Unilever,... (You might even figure out why they are grouped like they are)
I know English is a tough language, but you could at least try! "Uncompetitive European corporations are trying..." doesn't mean "all European corporations are uncompetitive". In fact, even you might be able to figure out which uncompetitive European corporations particularly dislike Google. Hint: it's not beer or car manufacturers.
And through political machinations where e.g. the US companies just poor NO money into politics and lobbying and what not, right?
Ah, what a wonderful Tu Quoque fallacy. Indeed, they do. And when they do, I criticize them for that as well.
And many of these companies have been caught attention of the EU laws. Mosy learned to play nice.
If by "play nice" you mean that the join the club of European corporations that screw people like you over and then have you say "thank you, I LIKED it" because you don't know any better, then you're right.
Don't kid yourself: tools like Margrethe Vestager exist for two simple reasons. First, wounded European pride, namely the fact that Europe is far behind the US in innovation and high tech. Second, uncompetitive European corporations are trying to win through political machinations when they can't win in the market.
You know if the brits leave the EU, that's a good thing.
It's a great thing, both for Britain and the rest of the EU. In particular, the rest of the EU will have to learn to be more responsible, rather than relying on the UK to bail them out.
They were the major stopgap hindering to get real work done against the banks in the late 00's banking crisis.
You mean the banking crisis that was mostly created by government-run banks making loans based on political pressure?
He's missing the point, though. Porn shouldn't be illegal even if it was harmful to view it voluntarily. By engaging in debates over whether porn is or isn't harmful, you're already implicitly conceding the point that it should matter.
Conservatives used to declare things to be "immoral" and they could mess with people's lives to their hearts' content. That doesn't work anymore. But the left came up with something much better: declare something a "health crisis", and all of a sudden anything goes. As a bonus, many feminists have the same screwed up views of pornography as Mormons.
As to accusations of crony capitalism, how is not pricing fossil fuels for the actual costs they incur anything but handing fossil fuel companies probably the largest set of financial subsidies in human history?
In what universe? Fossil fuels are heavily taxed already.
Do you think continue to allow people like the Kochs to profit massively off of an energy source that is heating the planet
The Koch brothers' profit or profit margin doesn't change much if the US government imposes additional taxes on oil and gas; they just pass those costs on to consumers. And if they really thought solar was a threat to their business, they'd just invest in it.
Furthermore, the Koch brothers are MIT-educated engineers and billionaires in the 70s; the idea that they take political positions because of future profits is laughable, in particular given their long history of support for libertarian causes, often opposing both Republicans and Democrats (including gay marriage and abortion rights, opposition to the war on drugs, opposition to the Iraq war).
If the market was able to produce a solution on its own, it would have been now. The market is going to need a kick in the nuts, and that kick in the nuts is making fossil fuels more expensive.
Ah, the "kick in the nuts" theory of economics! How could I not know? Unfortunately, the real world doesn't work that way.
What's needed in order to replace fossil fuels with, say, solar cells is a decrease in the cost of solar cells; that requires lots of incremental improvements to technology. Those improvements have been happening since 1980. Solar cells aren't competitive with fossil fuels yet because innovation actually takes time. Kicking scientists and engineers in the nuts will not speed up innovation.
In fact, artificially increasing the cost of fossil fuels has the opposite effect on innovation: it encourages and subsidizes the production of inefficient solar cells and discourages innovation because, after all, innovation isn't needed to compete. At the same time, it makes consumer poorer (by taking away their money) and transfers their money to politically favored corporations. That's what's been happening.
For chrissakes, even the Saudis know the days of oil as a major energy source are numbered,
I also think that oil's days as a major energy source are numbered; however, if we adopt the "kick in the nuts" policies you favor, a transition from a fossil-fuel economy to a post fossil-fuel economy might be delayed by decades.
In any case, as far as climate change is concerned, any of that makes little difference: we are looking at 2-4C warming no matter what (even according to the IPCC), and for people like you to pretend that we can avert that if we just adopt the right governmental policy is either ignorant or simply dishonest.
Yes, it's getting warmer. Humans may be contributing. Whether that's a bad thing is unclear.
The main thing is: nobody has made any kind of realistic proposal for stopping it anyway. Right now, all the proposed political solutions amount to nothing more than ineffective, thinly disguised crony capitalism. And idiots like you cheer it on. Why? Terminal stupidity? Who knows.
That doesn't follow at all. Different conclusions would be unexpected given the existing evidence, but are hardly "forbidden".
Most of these grants are for showing that "C causes D", and that's what you need to spend your grant money on. If you instead spend it on gathering evidence that "C" doesn't exist, you have failed to fulfilled your part of the research grant. Furthermore, it is easy to work on "C causes D" even if "C" actually doesn't occur in the real world. When you publish papers on "C causes D", those papers will be counted by people like those in the TFA as "supportive of C". Finally, if you select your "C causes D" research grant topics where "D" is mostly negative, it will further bias the conclusions.
Funding yet more research into the fundamental question of [something that contradicts dogma] may be considered a waste at this late stage,
And there you have it: that's why scientists don't look at questions that contradict dogma, because the presumption would be that they wasted their research funding. As a result, they would have a hard time getting new funding, they would likely not get tenure, and they might be accused of misuse of funds.
I didn't claim that governments have less power than the fossil fuel industries, but I did point out (with citations) that the only evidence of abuses of this power, by either side, have been to restrict genuine scientific research when it found AGW was happening, and to spread misinformation about those conclusions.
And the example you gave was wrong on several counts. Exxon's original work didn't prove that AGW "was happening", but merely suggested it "could happen". Second, many objections to climate change policies are unrelated to whether AGW is happening or not, but to the inability of government to do something about it even if it is. Third, and most importantly, governments
Third, and most importantly, the US government has a long history of propaganda and misrepresentation of facts in response to lobbying by special interests, and a long history of hurting people through such propaganda.
The rest of your comment is just fact-free opinions. You're welcome to those, but they're unconvincing to others.
The question of whether governmental climate change programs are going to be effective is necessarily rooted in opinion, not fact. But given the numerous failures caused by similar attempts of governments to intervene in markets and human behavior, you better have a good answer for why climate change policy would work and how you would actually manage to implement it globally. So far, the policies that the US government has put in place have been ineffective and crony capitalist. The only two factors that have substantially reduced carbon emissions have been market innovations (shale gas) and the economic slowdown.
Or what will happen is you get a bunch of people who don't know what they're doing replacing people who do, then sooner or later you're going to go in for a broken arm and come out with a rectal exam.
You already get that, with high frequency. And paying Dr. Lexus or his IT department twice as much money won't fix it.
The reason Shkreli could raise the price like that is because the government granted him a monopoly.
Okay, so you're insane. Good to know.
Are you serious? Pyrimethamine itself costs a few cents per pill to manufacture, and there are dozens of manufacturers around the world. Why would someone spend $16000 for a drug if they can just mail order it overseas for a few dollars? Why isn't anybody making and selling those pills for $1/pill in the US, still making a handsome profit? There is only one reason: there are laws against it, laws whose only function is to create monopolies for big political donors. And who is responsible for creating those laws and regulations? The FDA and Congress.
Medicare could easily negotiate prices, it just chooses not to because government is in bed with drug companies and insurance companies.
Medicate can NOT negotiate drug prices, as a matter of law. It is illegal for them to do so.
So you agree then: when a government run program by law cannot negotiate drug prices, the fault is with government.
Oh it lowers costs for companies, that will never pass those cost reductions on to you the customer.
They pass it on to customers in competitive markets because they have to: if they don't, they won't be selling stuff. They don't pass it on in government regulated markets (cable, agriculture, healthcare, etc.) because they don't have to.
Oh I wish I weren't an atheist so I could call you a God damn loon with more emotional meaning!
You are a religious nut, you just don't know it. And like all religious nuts, facts and reason don't reach you.
Do you think it's the workers who "forced" Martin Shkreli to raise the price of Daraprim 5,556 percent?
The reason Shkreli could raise the price like that is because the government granted him a monopoly.
Do you think it's the workers who paid congress to ensure Medicare can't negotiate drug prices?
Medicare could easily negotiate prices, it just chooses not to because government is in bed with drug companies and insurance companies.
it's not the workers who are causing it
Replacing expensive US workers with cheaper foreign workers when possible certainly does lower costs for companies. And why are US workers so expensive? Largely because government mandates make it so.
it's the selfish profiteering CEO's and the expectations of a stock market that stopped caring about investment over absurd ROI expectations of day traders and microsecond traders.
The beauty about free markets is that selfishness and greed are checked by competition. The reason that isn't happening in the health care market is because government has eliminated competition, by granting artificial monopolies, socializing costs, and standardizing the product.
So, you're right: workers are not to blame, bad government and selfish and greedy politicians are.
Well yeah, that was firmly established long ago. It's been taken for granted in the science community for ages (hence TFA),
I.e. scientists who get funding must reach a pre-determined conclusion. QED
Granted, for funding you may have to look outside mainstream sources
I.e. no funding from the government. QED
Now, the rest is simply you putting up straw men that weren't originally under discussion. And it's the usual nonsense:
Right, because the government would devote trillions to overblowing a crisis so that they could put a price on carbon/s.
You implied that there was a financial and power imbalance. I point out correctly that it goes the other way: the US government and politicians are at the head of an organization whose annual spending go into the trillions, far in excess of the entire fossil fuel industry. As to the second implied point, of course politicians overblow crises to advance agendas; members of the Obama administration have publicly admitted as much.
But the fossil fuel industry's very existence is at stake. They really are risking trillions [cleantechnica.com], so their motive for pushing back is huge.
These companies have rebranded themselves "energy companies" and diversified long ago. Ultimately, they don't really care that much whether the world is powered by fossil fuel, cow farts, or hamsters on treadmills.
All they've been doing the whole time is attempting to cast doubt on the reams of evidence that the climatologists have produced over the last forty years. That is the very definition of FUD. You might be one of the rarer people who accepts AGW yet thinks the consequences aren't so bad, but the evidence [www.ipcc.ch] is overwhelmingly against that too.
There is nothing "rare" about people like me, except in the straw men people like you put up. And the IPCC report doesn't say what you think it does.
But that isn't even the main issue. The main issue is that government policy on climate change is ineffective and likely simply going to worsen the problem, similar to the "war on drugs", the "war on poverty", etc. Political action on climate change is mostly just another way for justifying crony capitalism.
Why not, the company is acting antagonistically against them. The only people who benefit if the workers remain quiet is the company.
Actually, the primary people who benefit when expensive workers are replaced by cheaper workers are customers. That should be of particular concern in health care, where costs are through the roof.
Again, without H1-B reform, this will continue to be the "norm".
This will continue to be the norm with and without H1-B "reform". The primary driver for outsourcing is that labor costs in other countries are lower. Prohibiting foreign labor to come to the US temporarily for training isn't going to change that. (And in this case, another driver is that we're trying to lower health care costs.)
By whom? I was under the impression that more fiscally conservative voters valued members of city council who run a city like a business.
Again, your statement is full of erroneous assumptions. In fact...
(1) Fiscally conservative voters tend not to live in cities in the first place.
(2) Fiscally conservative voters tend to be a small minority in cities, so they have limited political influence.
(3) City council members that run on fiscally conservative platforms aren't necessarily fiscally conservative.
(4) Even if city council members are fiscally conservative, they are constrained by powerful administrators, lobbyists and special interests.
(5) Businesses are profit maximizers; they are not "fiscally conservative". So, "running a city like a business" is not a fiscally conservative thing to do.
No, you are simply terrible at using Google to check some simple, basic facts for yourself. I suggest you do (as long as you still can access Google, of course).
t's almost as if you are just angry that the EU is pointing out some messed-up stuff done by US companies, and your patriotism is getting you all angry.
Yes, my patriotism for the country I was born in makes me angry, because after WWII, Europeans had a chance to create a free and prosperous society and they have been pissing it away.
It's so cute!
What's not so cute is that, as Europe is slowly spiraling down the drain, the US has to foot the bill.
By whom? I was under the impression that Republican voters valued a mayor who runs a city like a business.
You apparently are just chock full of wrong impressions and naive beliefs. You actually seem to believe that mayors have the power to cut spending over the wishes of administrators and unions, or that what voters want matters to politicians of either party.
Stop seeing politics through your stupid and narrow-minded Republican-vs-Democrat lens. The biggest political affiliation in the US is "independent", and that's because politicians of either party screw voters and the people in similar ways.
British Airways said its engineers inspected the Airbus Group SE A320 airliner, found no damage, and cleared the plane to continue operating.
So, there is no evidence that it struck a drone; it might have been a bird or a balloon or hail. And whatever it struck caused no damage. And therefore... drones are dangerous???
But nothing says those grants must reach a pre-decided conclusion. It's purely an assumption that these academics would not get grants to study other aspects of the climate, should global warming be disproved.
That's not an "assumption" at all. For example, all the EPA grants on climate change research already presume that it is happening and that it needs to be stopped: https://www.epa.gov/climate-re...
In fact, I have no idea what "disproving global warming" is even supposed to mean. Climate change activists have a never-ending barrage of supposed disaster scenarios that are going to happen that there aren't enough scientists in the world to check scientifically.
You know what would cause that even faster than your grant not being renewed? Getting caught lying about your results, or showing consistent bias.
Quite the opposite: people who don't agree with the party line on climate change find it almost impossible to publish, get academic positions, or get research grants. This is nothing new either; the same bullshit was happening with governmental dietary guidelines, which have been unraveling the last few years, but not after causing millions of people to become sick unnecessary.
Again, I find it amazing that people simply refuse to see the distorting influence of such large sums of money on the public debate, despite the oil and coal industry demonstrating it for decades.
We aren't talking about "the public debate" here, we are talking about the credibility and bias of academics and scientists, and the pressures they are under. Furthermore, the idea that oil companies are somehow able to buy more publicity or influence the debate significantly compared to thousands of government employees, a president that merely needs to fart in order to be on the news, and government budgets that run into the trillions is laughable. In addition, most people speaking out against the AGW FUD have nothing to do with the fossil fuel industry.
Let me be clear about it: human CO2 emissions cause the planet to warm moderately; Exxon knew that, and there is good evidence for that, but that fact is nearly irrelevant to climate change activism, and it's not what we are talking about here.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, privacy and competition are more limited in Europe. What's your point?
It's because of my "patriotic bubble" in Europe that I emigrated to the US. Imagine that.
I'm afraid you moved the goalposts. I said that government-run banks were involved in creating the crises. You then responded that private banks needed to be bailed out. Of course, you probably don't understand the difference between the two statements, understandable given your educational background.
Actually, I'm quite the atypical Euroskeptic, because I actually voted with my feet.
Frankly, whether the UK leaves or doesn't leave the EU makes little difference; Europe is so close, it will drag it down either way.
I'm sure lots of private individuals, corporations, and independent banks suffered as the result of a crisis originally created by government policies.
I made no such claim. Are you off your meds and hallucinating again?
I know English is a tough language, but you could at least try! "Uncompetitive European corporations are trying..." doesn't mean "all European corporations are uncompetitive". In fact, even you might be able to figure out which uncompetitive European corporations particularly dislike Google. Hint: it's not beer or car manufacturers.
Ah, what a wonderful Tu Quoque fallacy. Indeed, they do. And when they do, I criticize them for that as well.
If by "play nice" you mean that the join the club of European corporations that screw people like you over and then have you say "thank you, I LIKED it" because you don't know any better, then you're right.
Many European banks are part government owned and have been for a long time.
You mean like yourself?
Don't kid yourself: tools like Margrethe Vestager exist for two simple reasons. First, wounded European pride, namely the fact that Europe is far behind the US in innovation and high tech. Second, uncompetitive European corporations are trying to win through political machinations when they can't win in the market.
It's a great thing, both for Britain and the rest of the EU. In particular, the rest of the EU will have to learn to be more responsible, rather than relying on the UK to bail them out.
You mean the banking crisis that was mostly created by government-run banks making loans based on political pressure?
Which part of "allows phone manufacturers/carriers to change the default search engine or browser" did you not understand?
Users on Android can change both the search engine and the browser if they like.
He's missing the point, though. Porn shouldn't be illegal even if it was harmful to view it voluntarily. By engaging in debates over whether porn is or isn't harmful, you're already implicitly conceding the point that it should matter.
Conservatives used to declare things to be "immoral" and they could mess with people's lives to their hearts' content. That doesn't work anymore. But the left came up with something much better: declare something a "health crisis", and all of a sudden anything goes. As a bonus, many feminists have the same screwed up views of pornography as Mormons.
In what universe? Fossil fuels are heavily taxed already.
The Koch brothers' profit or profit margin doesn't change much if the US government imposes additional taxes on oil and gas; they just pass those costs on to consumers. And if they really thought solar was a threat to their business, they'd just invest in it.
Furthermore, the Koch brothers are MIT-educated engineers and billionaires in the 70s; the idea that they take political positions because of future profits is laughable, in particular given their long history of support for libertarian causes, often opposing both Republicans and Democrats (including gay marriage and abortion rights, opposition to the war on drugs, opposition to the Iraq war).
Ah, the "kick in the nuts" theory of economics! How could I not know? Unfortunately, the real world doesn't work that way.
What's needed in order to replace fossil fuels with, say, solar cells is a decrease in the cost of solar cells; that requires lots of incremental improvements to technology. Those improvements have been happening since 1980. Solar cells aren't competitive with fossil fuels yet because innovation actually takes time. Kicking scientists and engineers in the nuts will not speed up innovation.
In fact, artificially increasing the cost of fossil fuels has the opposite effect on innovation: it encourages and subsidizes the production of inefficient solar cells and discourages innovation because, after all, innovation isn't needed to compete. At the same time, it makes consumer poorer (by taking away their money) and transfers their money to politically favored corporations. That's what's been happening.
I also think that oil's days as a major energy source are numbered; however, if we adopt the "kick in the nuts" policies you favor, a transition from a fossil-fuel economy to a post fossil-fuel economy might be delayed by decades.
In any case, as far as climate change is concerned, any of that makes little difference: we are looking at 2-4C warming no matter what (even according to the IPCC), and for people like you to pretend that we can avert that if we just adopt the right governmental policy is either ignorant or simply dishonest.
Yes, it's getting warmer. Humans may be contributing. Whether that's a bad thing is unclear.
The main thing is: nobody has made any kind of realistic proposal for stopping it anyway. Right now, all the proposed political solutions amount to nothing more than ineffective, thinly disguised crony capitalism. And idiots like you cheer it on. Why? Terminal stupidity? Who knows.
Most of these grants are for showing that "C causes D", and that's what you need to spend your grant money on. If you instead spend it on gathering evidence that "C" doesn't exist, you have failed to fulfilled your part of the research grant. Furthermore, it is easy to work on "C causes D" even if "C" actually doesn't occur in the real world. When you publish papers on "C causes D", those papers will be counted by people like those in the TFA as "supportive of C". Finally, if you select your "C causes D" research grant topics where "D" is mostly negative, it will further bias the conclusions.
And there you have it: that's why scientists don't look at questions that contradict dogma, because the presumption would be that they wasted their research funding. As a result, they would have a hard time getting new funding, they would likely not get tenure, and they might be accused of misuse of funds.
And the example you gave was wrong on several counts. Exxon's original work didn't prove that AGW "was happening", but merely suggested it "could happen". Second, many objections to climate change policies are unrelated to whether AGW is happening or not, but to the inability of government to do something about it even if it is. Third, and most importantly, governments
Third, and most importantly, the US government has a long history of propaganda and misrepresentation of facts in response to lobbying by special interests, and a long history of hurting people through such propaganda.
The question of whether governmental climate change programs are going to be effective is necessarily rooted in opinion, not fact. But given the numerous failures caused by similar attempts of governments to intervene in markets and human behavior, you better have a good answer for why climate change policy would work and how you would actually manage to implement it globally. So far, the policies that the US government has put in place have been ineffective and crony capitalist. The only two factors that have substantially reduced carbon emissions have been market innovations (shale gas) and the economic slowdown.
You already get that, with high frequency. And paying Dr. Lexus or his IT department twice as much money won't fix it.
Are you serious? Pyrimethamine itself costs a few cents per pill to manufacture, and there are dozens of manufacturers around the world. Why would someone spend $16000 for a drug if they can just mail order it overseas for a few dollars? Why isn't anybody making and selling those pills for $1/pill in the US, still making a handsome profit? There is only one reason: there are laws against it, laws whose only function is to create monopolies for big political donors. And who is responsible for creating those laws and regulations? The FDA and Congress.
So you agree then: when a government run program by law cannot negotiate drug prices, the fault is with government.
They pass it on to customers in competitive markets because they have to: if they don't, they won't be selling stuff. They don't pass it on in government regulated markets (cable, agriculture, healthcare, etc.) because they don't have to.
You are a religious nut, you just don't know it. And like all religious nuts, facts and reason don't reach you.
The reason Shkreli could raise the price like that is because the government granted him a monopoly.
Medicare could easily negotiate prices, it just chooses not to because government is in bed with drug companies and insurance companies.
Replacing expensive US workers with cheaper foreign workers when possible certainly does lower costs for companies. And why are US workers so expensive? Largely because government mandates make it so.
The beauty about free markets is that selfishness and greed are checked by competition. The reason that isn't happening in the health care market is because government has eliminated competition, by granting artificial monopolies, socializing costs, and standardizing the product.
So, you're right: workers are not to blame, bad government and selfish and greedy politicians are.
I.e. scientists who get funding must reach a pre-determined conclusion. QED
I.e. no funding from the government. QED
Now, the rest is simply you putting up straw men that weren't originally under discussion. And it's the usual nonsense:
You implied that there was a financial and power imbalance. I point out correctly that it goes the other way: the US government and politicians are at the head of an organization whose annual spending go into the trillions, far in excess of the entire fossil fuel industry. As to the second implied point, of course politicians overblow crises to advance agendas; members of the Obama administration have publicly admitted as much.
These companies have rebranded themselves "energy companies" and diversified long ago. Ultimately, they don't really care that much whether the world is powered by fossil fuel, cow farts, or hamsters on treadmills.
There is nothing "rare" about people like me, except in the straw men people like you put up. And the IPCC report doesn't say what you think it does.
But that isn't even the main issue. The main issue is that government policy on climate change is ineffective and likely simply going to worsen the problem, similar to the "war on drugs", the "war on poverty", etc. Political action on climate change is mostly just another way for justifying crony capitalism.
Whether I am "the product" or not is irrelevant; I pay for my healthcare, and if it gets more expensive, I pay more for it.
Yes, with my money. Because of low information voters like you.
Actually, the primary people who benefit when expensive workers are replaced by cheaper workers are customers. That should be of particular concern in health care, where costs are through the roof.
This will continue to be the norm with and without H1-B "reform". The primary driver for outsourcing is that labor costs in other countries are lower. Prohibiting foreign labor to come to the US temporarily for training isn't going to change that. (And in this case, another driver is that we're trying to lower health care costs.)
Again, your statement is full of erroneous assumptions. In fact...
(1) Fiscally conservative voters tend not to live in cities in the first place.
(2) Fiscally conservative voters tend to be a small minority in cities, so they have limited political influence.
(3) City council members that run on fiscally conservative platforms aren't necessarily fiscally conservative.
(4) Even if city council members are fiscally conservative, they are constrained by powerful administrators, lobbyists and special interests.
(5) Businesses are profit maximizers; they are not "fiscally conservative". So, "running a city like a business" is not a fiscally conservative thing to do.
No, you are simply terrible at using Google to check some simple, basic facts for yourself. I suggest you do (as long as you still can access Google, of course).
Yes, my patriotism for the country I was born in makes me angry, because after WWII, Europeans had a chance to create a free and prosperous society and they have been pissing it away.
What's not so cute is that, as Europe is slowly spiraling down the drain, the US has to foot the bill.
You apparently are just chock full of wrong impressions and naive beliefs. You actually seem to believe that mayors have the power to cut spending over the wishes of administrators and unions, or that what voters want matters to politicians of either party.
Stop seeing politics through your stupid and narrow-minded Republican-vs-Democrat lens. The biggest political affiliation in the US is "independent", and that's because politicians of either party screw voters and the people in similar ways.
So, there is no evidence that it struck a drone; it might have been a bird or a balloon or hail. And whatever it struck caused no damage. And therefore... drones are dangerous???
That's not an "assumption" at all. For example, all the EPA grants on climate change research already presume that it is happening and that it needs to be stopped: https://www.epa.gov/climate-re...
In fact, I have no idea what "disproving global warming" is even supposed to mean. Climate change activists have a never-ending barrage of supposed disaster scenarios that are going to happen that there aren't enough scientists in the world to check scientifically.
Quite the opposite: people who don't agree with the party line on climate change find it almost impossible to publish, get academic positions, or get research grants. This is nothing new either; the same bullshit was happening with governmental dietary guidelines, which have been unraveling the last few years, but not after causing millions of people to become sick unnecessary.
We aren't talking about "the public debate" here, we are talking about the credibility and bias of academics and scientists, and the pressures they are under. Furthermore, the idea that oil companies are somehow able to buy more publicity or influence the debate significantly compared to thousands of government employees, a president that merely needs to fart in order to be on the news, and government budgets that run into the trillions is laughable. In addition, most people speaking out against the AGW FUD have nothing to do with the fossil fuel industry.
Let me be clear about it: human CO2 emissions cause the planet to warm moderately; Exxon knew that, and there is good evidence for that, but that fact is nearly irrelevant to climate change activism, and it's not what we are talking about here.