There is a very simple way out. It's called the end of prohibition.
In no time at all the cartels will be starved of the money they need to operate, without the millions in cash they can't pay the security and they cant bribe the government officials. The result will be a massive loss of the men that make up their force and a government suddenly willing to tackle taking down the key players.
Utility scale solar and wind is almost as cheap as coal on a per kw basis and prices continue to fall. With all the cheap gas for the night time energy use (and how ridiculously cheap NG generators are) it's no wonder utilities are running away from nuclear.
Baloney. McCarthy had the implied threat of government force behind everything he did, he was also operating in a theater that's no different than a court (everything said is on the record and subject to perjury) and as such acting as a defacto arm of the justice system.
If you can't understand that difference I feel sorry for you because McCarthy is exactly what we should really be afraid of, not a bunch of citizens exercising their rights to speech and association. The minute we start equating the two is when we start enacting hate speech laws because you've just equated actual threats of government action with people expressing themselves. It makes you no different than the weenies who want to put a hate speech exception into the first amendment.
The question I have is this: If any two people are able to declare one another as legal heirs to property, hospital visiting rights, joint tax returns, etc., what rights are being deprived if such a status is not called a "marriage"?
The government provides automatic recognition of all those items and many many more though the creation of a marriage contract by paying a small local fee and having a recognized ceremony to cement the contract. But only if it's between a man and woman. If two other people want to do so, for example two women, they must hire a lawyer and execute more than a dozen different legal contracts.
If the man and woman wish to dissolve this contract they file for a divorce and execute a court recognized and legislative defined process that divides the assets and severs all the automatic contracts created when the original contract was initiated. The two women on the other hand must again hire a lawyer and expend the time and resources to sever all the individual contracts, this is complicated by the fact that there is no recognized legislative parameters that define how assets or other items (such as children) are divided.
This also extends to other areas where for example a married man and women can file two tax returns (fed/state) whereas a gay couple could have to file anywhere from four to five separate tax returns, an ongoing cost of several thousand dollars per year.
Marriage is a government contract between two individuals that defines all of these items at almost negligible cost and for the most part is fully automatic. Suggesting that a separate but equal policy that the two women must expend thousands of dollars and weeks of time to accomplish something that will always be significantly less than that afforded a man and women is nothing more than Jim Crow all over again.
As long as marriage is a government contract it deserves equal protection under the law regardless of gender. The solution (as alluded to by the OP) is to remove all government recognition of marriage for everyone and return it to a church based institution with no meaning outside the church. As long as it remains a government institution, anyone that desires to use it's automatic facilities should be able to regardless of gender.
There is a significant difference between senate hearings on someones political beliefs and the implicit threat of government action against their employers and what is happening here.
This is not McCarthyism. This is groups of people choosing to exercise their free speech and association rights against a party they believe is seeking to use the power of government to deny equal protection to a minority. The CEO was perfectly within his rights to do what he did, but on the other hand the people reacting to that speech are perfectly within their rights to react to that speech and refuse to associate with the CEO and to speak out against him. This is nothing more than the consequences of speech. The only thing un-American (as McCarthy would say) about this is the people seeking to stop the free speech of those criticizing the action.
Speech has social consequences, that's a good thing and the way it should be handled. As the saying goes, you reap what you sow.
Impossible? Hardly, HFT make it inherently easy to front run if you have access to the data. Many of the brokers engaging in HFT have access to multiple locations that would give them front running information were they to write the algorithm to take care of it.
And if there was a climate of fear about front running generated by the SEC there would be at least some prosecutions for it for those that tried it. SEC prosecutions are public, go find all those front running prosecutions that show the SEC is aggressively prosecuting it. In addition, the most basic criminology tells you that enforcement doesn't reduce crime because there is always someone that thinks they can get away with it. Even if the SEC did aggressively target front running there would still be prosecutions for it. Try to find them, because I wasn't able to.
Neither of those options is viable as it's neither impossible nor would enforcement decrease the incidence. The lack of any prosecutions for front running indicates that it's far more likely that the SEC simply doesn't monitor for it, likely because the profit to be made is insignificant enough to not justify the costs of enforcement and that proving it was front running would be challenging.
Front running may be illegal but you don't see many prosecutions for it. Either it's incredibly rare or the SEC just isn't monitoring for it. I'd bet on the later.
The short term decline can actually be tied to the start up time and costs of organized crime. It took years for the mobsters to build connections with Irish and Canadian brewers and distillers (B&D). Before they could even start building connections they had to buy through normal retail channels and build the distribution and smuggling networks to acquire the cash flow necessary to recruit the B&D into direct sales.
So for the first part of prohibition while the networks were being built there was a drop of in availability in rural or middle America (equidistant from the Mexican and Canadian border). This drop resulted in reduced consumption up until the black market and organized crime backing it became strong enough to put the supply in consumers hands whereby consumption bounced back to pre-prohibition levels.
Black markets don't spring into existence overnight. The Mexican cartels through much of the 80's were just smugglers for Colombian cartels and third rate pot growers. Within about a decade they had built themselves up to rival their Colombian suppliers and begin to control the US market directly and moved to more lucrative products like Meth that they could produce themselves along with heavily expanded cannabis cultivation. Now is in the 10's they are a direct threat to the Mexican government because of the power they've accumulated building their network.
What you are describing isn't insider trading, it has a name called front running. And it's been happening since the market existed. It used to be domain of "market makers" who followed a stock and bought and purchased that stock to provide the market (ie to ensure there is always a buyer and seller). These market makers made a margin on each transaction of anywhere from 10%-0% depending on the number of market makers on that particular stock. The more heavily traded the thinner the margins but even stocks you might consider reasonable traded (a million shares a day) had market makers taking 3% off every single transaction by being the buyer or seller on every transaction. Without a limit order in those days your trade would execute at 3% less than the going rate. Most people never knew why.
HFT has eliminated the market makers and has driven down the margin made on each transaction to a millionth of a percent as each HFT system tries to undercut the other and reap the margin. HFT has made it possible to trade even thinly traded pink sheet stocks and make reasonable returns without the market maker eating the whole pie. HFT has made it significantly easier to get returns as a small investor. It's now possible to make market orders and get the price on the ticker.
I don't disagree that front running could be a problem, BUT HFT has made the system far better than it used to be and front running could be easily regulated by the SEC.
Securities fraud to be exact. When they opened a US branch they opened themselves to US law. The IRS just ruled that bitcoins are property not currency. As a result they fall under US securities laws. And amazingly the US fed's have been investigating them for a while.
The SEC is going to eat the CEO for lunch, just wait. It's going to take a little while to build the case depending on when they started the investigation but I'd wager within 2-3 years he's going to be charged with violations of US securities laws. I have no doubt whatsoever that he'll be convicted and go to jail for around a decade. That and the government will seize all his assets.
I would have the exact same reaction. See I'm not brainwashed by the republicrats or democans into believing there is any difference whatsoever between the parties that I start to believe in silly BS like this where someone starts claiming discrimination because someone isn't "tolerant" of someone else's views. The employees are well within their rights to exercise their rights to freedom of speech and association to threaten to quit because he once wore a blue suit and they don't like blue suits. And I would fully support the other employees that think the ones that don't like blue suits are idiots threatening to quit if the request is honored.
The best response to people exercising their free speech and association rights in ways someone doesn't like is to exercise their own free speech and association rights as well. All I see in this thread is a bunch of whiny little bitches complaining about people exercising their rights apparently because they don't like the idea that anti-gay speech can and will lead to serious counter speech and people exercising their freedom of association rights to have nothing to do with the bigot. Get used to the idea, because in a free country if you start saying shit other people don't like they are probably going to react to that speech. Your choice is either to keep your mouth shut or to realize you may only be able to associate with people that share similar views because no one else will want to.
It's not that rare at certain kinds of companies for people to be shown the door if they're "outed" as a conservative (possibly the most famous being the editor of Playgirl).
There are no more conservatives being fired for their opinions than there are anyone else being fired for their views. Your presecution complex is showing, and I hate to break it to you but such a persecution complex is nothing but a sign of mental illness.
Proposition 8 isn't the only state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in the country that's been thrown out. In fact the Supreme court threw out the Federal defense of marriage law and cited that it directly violated the 14th amendment. Since that ruling several district courts have ruled that even state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage are a violation of the 14th amendment and cite the supreme court ruling on DOMA and the supreme court ruling that threw out laws and state constitutional amendments that banned inter-racial marriage.
Regardless of what the justification was for throwing out prop 8 it would have eventually been thrown out. Banning gay marriage is no different than banning inter-racial marriage. It is a direct and IMO criminal violation of rights codified in the constitution and it's amendments. In 50 years it will be looked upon with the same disdain that most people today feel about to the same inter-racial marriage bans.
The employees of Mozilla are within their rights to ask him to step down for those atrocious views. Of course he can refuse and the majority of the workforce could quit as a result, which would highly damage Mozilla. He needs to decide if his running Mozilla is more important than the potential loss of those employees which have requested he step down. I can imagine the recruiters are salivating at the thought of him refusing.
It's been said several times in this thread but I'll repeat it. The Republicans have always been the party of crony capitalism and protecting entrenched businesses. The national dealers association has had their hands so far into state politics that you ignore them at the peril of losing your office. The dealers association has, and will, throw millions into a state political campaign where $100k is the typical election budget when governors or legislators don't tow their line.
To put this in perspective, there are quite a number of members of the dealers association that own major professional sports teams. They are often the wealthiest people in the urban area they operate in and have the ear of the local politicians. The association they operate has had more than 50 years to perfect their ability to wield money to ensure the regulations, both state and federal, that protect them remain in place. They work very aggressively to stomp out any regulation changes that impact their bottom line.
I agree that Win8 is a product where Microsoft didn't give a rats ass about what their customers thought of it, but it also has the feel of a product where the developers own input was disregarded. The entire metro interface feels like a design that was created by committee (that never has used it) and forced on the developers by order of management.
I honestly don't believe developers would have done half of the BS that's in Windows8 if left to their own devices and even if certain features were dictated there would have been settings to reset the behavior to previous standards. That those settings don't exist screams of management dictating behavior.
A combination of court rulings and legislation caused the problem. The USPTO was basically forced to issue these patents. Now that the chicken has come home to roost there is going to need to be legislation and supreme court rulings that reverse the previous decisions for this to be fixed.
Some of the legislative changes have already been put in place and others are proposed. We've also already had one supreme court ruling that basically tossed business method patents and some secondary rulings that have hinted at "on a computer" patents being invalid on their face.
It takes a long time for this stuff to work through the system, consider that the changes and court rulings that created this problem happened in the 80's/90's and it's taken till now to snowball into something that's actively damaging the economy. It will likely take almost as long to wind back out of the system baring some serious legislation and authoritative ruling by the supreme court. That authoritative ruling by the supreme is highly unlikely. The high court is beyond cautious in reversing themselves. It usually takes strings of cases where they slowly erode away the foundation of the previous ruling before they reverse it. The legislature on the other hand can almost immediately reverse the situation, but patent heavy companies like IBM aggressively campaign against patent reform.
The lake in the central valley did dry up because water was diverted, but this was intentional. The lake was very shallow, IIRC less than 30' at the deepest location with an average less than 10'.
The government made the decision to dry out the lake and turn the area into active farmland. A massive irrigation and diversion project was undertaken and within a small period of time they dried out the lake and began farming what remained. That land is some of the most fertile in the US.
Nate made a name for himself doing statistical analysis on events where there are generally two possible outcomes and a fairly limited numbers of possible ways to get there. Sports, voting, etc are ALL yes or no answers with very very limited possible ways to get there.
Real science on the other hand frequently involves situations where the answer isn't really known and the possible ways to get there are infinite. So rather than evaluating whether the local voters will vote for candidate A or candidate B is an entirely different situation than evaluating whether climate change is increasing the cost of disasters. There are two variables in the first and good data (such as polling) indicating how people in general will vote. With solid statistical analysis this type of situations should be fairly easy to predict IF your data collection is good. He made his name by doing better data picking than the others.
Climate change disaster levels on the other hand is an entirely different game. Because this is all rather cutting edge science, whether the frequency or size of disasters has gone up (at this time) is a question of open debate in the scientific community. This paper makes blatant assumptions about which side of this debate is right then proceeds to use that assumption as the basis to draw firm conclusions. This isn't good science and it's not good data analysis. Consensus is needed in science if you are going to rely on the conclusions to make predictions on other data sets. And that's exactly the problem, there isn't a yes or no answer to the question there was an assumed answer. There is evidence indicating things and certain scientists may agree or disagree about what that evidence indicates and in time after much research the scientific community will reach a consensus and we'll likely have the real answer with hard evidence at that point.
Nate should stick to what he's good at, fixed data sets with yes or no answers. He apparently doesn't have the scientific background to realize that not all scientific conclusions drawn in papers are either right nor are they the consensus of the community. After all, any jackass can write a paper and draw conclusions and be completely wrong or even fake data, in fact it happens all to often.
The flood plain in your area likely didn't grow. What is going on with the flood plains is related to legitimate science and the history of how they were originally developed. Many many of the original flood plain maps were developed with insufficient data and information to draw the kind of conclusions the flood plain maps do. When you run into those situations you don't throw up your hands and just not produce a flood map, you just do the best you can with the limited data you have.
Now years later work is underway to take all the previous data, plus all the new data collected since the last map was generated and generate new maps. These maps frequently differ because as I noted the original data wasn't that great.
On the other hand, I'm NOT arguing that changing climate hasn't caused changes to flood maps. What I'm saying is that the picture is far more complicated and broad generalizations about why the flood plain got bigger are going to be wrong because they are broad generalizations. If you want to know why a particular flood plain map got bigger you should request a copy of the hydraulic study that evaluated the previous flood plain and developed the new map. The summary at the front of the report will likely list the reasons the flood plain map has changed to the best of the engineers ability to discern. These summaries are often readable and comprehensible by non-engineers because they are targeted at planning and local government officials who will be required to enact the recommendations in the report.
Scientists go after any scientist or report claiming to be scientific that violates scientific principles or that is blatantly false. It happens all the time.
Maybe if you weren't predisposed to an answer you would realize that attack on the science might just indicate that the science is bad.
Hundreds of Black soldiers at Tuskegee during WWII were deliberately infected with Syphilis and then not told and deliberately not treated as an experiment to understand the long term impacts of Syphilis. There is also evidence that the CIA facilitated the smuggling and sale of crack cocaine in black neighborhoods to finance covert projects during the 80's.
Given that it's not hard to understand why there are conspiracy theories involving this.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if you are a fool.
There is a very simple way out. It's called the end of prohibition.
In no time at all the cartels will be starved of the money they need to operate, without the millions in cash they can't pay the security and they cant bribe the government officials. The result will be a massive loss of the men that make up their force and a government suddenly willing to tackle taking down the key players.
Utility scale solar and wind is almost as cheap as coal on a per kw basis and prices continue to fall. With all the cheap gas for the night time energy use (and how ridiculously cheap NG generators are) it's no wonder utilities are running away from nuclear.
Baloney. McCarthy had the implied threat of government force behind everything he did, he was also operating in a theater that's no different than a court (everything said is on the record and subject to perjury) and as such acting as a defacto arm of the justice system.
If you can't understand that difference I feel sorry for you because McCarthy is exactly what we should really be afraid of, not a bunch of citizens exercising their rights to speech and association. The minute we start equating the two is when we start enacting hate speech laws because you've just equated actual threats of government action with people expressing themselves. It makes you no different than the weenies who want to put a hate speech exception into the first amendment.
The government provides automatic recognition of all those items and many many more though the creation of a marriage contract by paying a small local fee and having a recognized ceremony to cement the contract. But only if it's between a man and woman. If two other people want to do so, for example two women, they must hire a lawyer and execute more than a dozen different legal contracts.
If the man and woman wish to dissolve this contract they file for a divorce and execute a court recognized and legislative defined process that divides the assets and severs all the automatic contracts created when the original contract was initiated. The two women on the other hand must again hire a lawyer and expend the time and resources to sever all the individual contracts, this is complicated by the fact that there is no recognized legislative parameters that define how assets or other items (such as children) are divided.
This also extends to other areas where for example a married man and women can file two tax returns (fed/state) whereas a gay couple could have to file anywhere from four to five separate tax returns, an ongoing cost of several thousand dollars per year.
Marriage is a government contract between two individuals that defines all of these items at almost negligible cost and for the most part is fully automatic. Suggesting that a separate but equal policy that the two women must expend thousands of dollars and weeks of time to accomplish something that will always be significantly less than that afforded a man and women is nothing more than Jim Crow all over again.
As long as marriage is a government contract it deserves equal protection under the law regardless of gender. The solution (as alluded to by the OP) is to remove all government recognition of marriage for everyone and return it to a church based institution with no meaning outside the church. As long as it remains a government institution, anyone that desires to use it's automatic facilities should be able to regardless of gender.
There is a significant difference between senate hearings on someones political beliefs and the implicit threat of government action against their employers and what is happening here.
This is not McCarthyism. This is groups of people choosing to exercise their free speech and association rights against a party they believe is seeking to use the power of government to deny equal protection to a minority. The CEO was perfectly within his rights to do what he did, but on the other hand the people reacting to that speech are perfectly within their rights to react to that speech and refuse to associate with the CEO and to speak out against him. This is nothing more than the consequences of speech. The only thing un-American (as McCarthy would say) about this is the people seeking to stop the free speech of those criticizing the action.
Speech has social consequences, that's a good thing and the way it should be handled. As the saying goes, you reap what you sow.
Impossible? Hardly, HFT make it inherently easy to front run if you have access to the data. Many of the brokers engaging in HFT have access to multiple locations that would give them front running information were they to write the algorithm to take care of it.
And if there was a climate of fear about front running generated by the SEC there would be at least some prosecutions for it for those that tried it. SEC prosecutions are public, go find all those front running prosecutions that show the SEC is aggressively prosecuting it. In addition, the most basic criminology tells you that enforcement doesn't reduce crime because there is always someone that thinks they can get away with it. Even if the SEC did aggressively target front running there would still be prosecutions for it. Try to find them, because I wasn't able to.
Neither of those options is viable as it's neither impossible nor would enforcement decrease the incidence. The lack of any prosecutions for front running indicates that it's far more likely that the SEC simply doesn't monitor for it, likely because the profit to be made is insignificant enough to not justify the costs of enforcement and that proving it was front running would be challenging.
Front running may be illegal but you don't see many prosecutions for it. Either it's incredibly rare or the SEC just isn't monitoring for it. I'd bet on the later.
The short term decline can actually be tied to the start up time and costs of organized crime. It took years for the mobsters to build connections with Irish and Canadian brewers and distillers (B&D). Before they could even start building connections they had to buy through normal retail channels and build the distribution and smuggling networks to acquire the cash flow necessary to recruit the B&D into direct sales.
So for the first part of prohibition while the networks were being built there was a drop of in availability in rural or middle America (equidistant from the Mexican and Canadian border). This drop resulted in reduced consumption up until the black market and organized crime backing it became strong enough to put the supply in consumers hands whereby consumption bounced back to pre-prohibition levels.
Black markets don't spring into existence overnight. The Mexican cartels through much of the 80's were just smugglers for Colombian cartels and third rate pot growers. Within about a decade they had built themselves up to rival their Colombian suppliers and begin to control the US market directly and moved to more lucrative products like Meth that they could produce themselves along with heavily expanded cannabis cultivation. Now is in the 10's they are a direct threat to the Mexican government because of the power they've accumulated building their network.
Prohibition doesn't work.
What you are describing isn't insider trading, it has a name called front running. And it's been happening since the market existed. It used to be domain of "market makers" who followed a stock and bought and purchased that stock to provide the market (ie to ensure there is always a buyer and seller). These market makers made a margin on each transaction of anywhere from 10%-0% depending on the number of market makers on that particular stock. The more heavily traded the thinner the margins but even stocks you might consider reasonable traded (a million shares a day) had market makers taking 3% off every single transaction by being the buyer or seller on every transaction. Without a limit order in those days your trade would execute at 3% less than the going rate. Most people never knew why.
HFT has eliminated the market makers and has driven down the margin made on each transaction to a millionth of a percent as each HFT system tries to undercut the other and reap the margin. HFT has made it possible to trade even thinly traded pink sheet stocks and make reasonable returns without the market maker eating the whole pie. HFT has made it significantly easier to get returns as a small investor. It's now possible to make market orders and get the price on the ticker.
I don't disagree that front running could be a problem, BUT HFT has made the system far better than it used to be and front running could be easily regulated by the SEC.
Securities fraud to be exact. When they opened a US branch they opened themselves to US law. The IRS just ruled that bitcoins are property not currency. As a result they fall under US securities laws. And amazingly the US fed's have been investigating them for a while.
The SEC is going to eat the CEO for lunch, just wait. It's going to take a little while to build the case depending on when they started the investigation but I'd wager within 2-3 years he's going to be charged with violations of US securities laws. I have no doubt whatsoever that he'll be convicted and go to jail for around a decade. That and the government will seize all his assets.
I would have the exact same reaction. See I'm not brainwashed by the republicrats or democans into believing there is any difference whatsoever between the parties that I start to believe in silly BS like this where someone starts claiming discrimination because someone isn't "tolerant" of someone else's views. The employees are well within their rights to exercise their rights to freedom of speech and association to threaten to quit because he once wore a blue suit and they don't like blue suits. And I would fully support the other employees that think the ones that don't like blue suits are idiots threatening to quit if the request is honored.
The best response to people exercising their free speech and association rights in ways someone doesn't like is to exercise their own free speech and association rights as well. All I see in this thread is a bunch of whiny little bitches complaining about people exercising their rights apparently because they don't like the idea that anti-gay speech can and will lead to serious counter speech and people exercising their freedom of association rights to have nothing to do with the bigot. Get used to the idea, because in a free country if you start saying shit other people don't like they are probably going to react to that speech. Your choice is either to keep your mouth shut or to realize you may only be able to associate with people that share similar views because no one else will want to.
There are no more conservatives being fired for their opinions than there are anyone else being fired for their views. Your presecution complex is showing, and I hate to break it to you but such a persecution complex is nothing but a sign of mental illness.
So your mental gymnastics involve the belief that threatening to quit a company is somehow blackmail?
You're a fucking idiot.
Proposition 8 isn't the only state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in the country that's been thrown out. In fact the Supreme court threw out the Federal defense of marriage law and cited that it directly violated the 14th amendment. Since that ruling several district courts have ruled that even state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage are a violation of the 14th amendment and cite the supreme court ruling on DOMA and the supreme court ruling that threw out laws and state constitutional amendments that banned inter-racial marriage.
Regardless of what the justification was for throwing out prop 8 it would have eventually been thrown out. Banning gay marriage is no different than banning inter-racial marriage. It is a direct and IMO criminal violation of rights codified in the constitution and it's amendments. In 50 years it will be looked upon with the same disdain that most people today feel about to the same inter-racial marriage bans.
The employees of Mozilla are within their rights to ask him to step down for those atrocious views. Of course he can refuse and the majority of the workforce could quit as a result, which would highly damage Mozilla. He needs to decide if his running Mozilla is more important than the potential loss of those employees which have requested he step down. I can imagine the recruiters are salivating at the thought of him refusing.
You have OBVIOUSLY never listed to NPR.
It's been said several times in this thread but I'll repeat it. The Republicans have always been the party of crony capitalism and protecting entrenched businesses. The national dealers association has had their hands so far into state politics that you ignore them at the peril of losing your office. The dealers association has, and will, throw millions into a state political campaign where $100k is the typical election budget when governors or legislators don't tow their line.
To put this in perspective, there are quite a number of members of the dealers association that own major professional sports teams. They are often the wealthiest people in the urban area they operate in and have the ear of the local politicians. The association they operate has had more than 50 years to perfect their ability to wield money to ensure the regulations, both state and federal, that protect them remain in place. They work very aggressively to stomp out any regulation changes that impact their bottom line.
I agree that Win8 is a product where Microsoft didn't give a rats ass about what their customers thought of it, but it also has the feel of a product where the developers own input was disregarded. The entire metro interface feels like a design that was created by committee (that never has used it) and forced on the developers by order of management.
I honestly don't believe developers would have done half of the BS that's in Windows8 if left to their own devices and even if certain features were dictated there would have been settings to reset the behavior to previous standards. That those settings don't exist screams of management dictating behavior.
Imagine if you will all the Horror of Games for Windows Live, combined with Facebook.
Now instead of having to log into GFWL you have to log into facebook to play that game.
Personally, I'm horrified by this vision.
A combination of court rulings and legislation caused the problem. The USPTO was basically forced to issue these patents. Now that the chicken has come home to roost there is going to need to be legislation and supreme court rulings that reverse the previous decisions for this to be fixed.
Some of the legislative changes have already been put in place and others are proposed. We've also already had one supreme court ruling that basically tossed business method patents and some secondary rulings that have hinted at "on a computer" patents being invalid on their face.
It takes a long time for this stuff to work through the system, consider that the changes and court rulings that created this problem happened in the 80's/90's and it's taken till now to snowball into something that's actively damaging the economy. It will likely take almost as long to wind back out of the system baring some serious legislation and authoritative ruling by the supreme court. That authoritative ruling by the supreme is highly unlikely. The high court is beyond cautious in reversing themselves. It usually takes strings of cases where they slowly erode away the foundation of the previous ruling before they reverse it. The legislature on the other hand can almost immediately reverse the situation, but patent heavy companies like IBM aggressively campaign against patent reform.
The lake in the central valley did dry up because water was diverted, but this was intentional. The lake was very shallow, IIRC less than 30' at the deepest location with an average less than 10'.
The government made the decision to dry out the lake and turn the area into active farmland. A massive irrigation and diversion project was undertaken and within a small period of time they dried out the lake and began farming what remained. That land is some of the most fertile in the US.
Nate made a name for himself doing statistical analysis on events where there are generally two possible outcomes and a fairly limited numbers of possible ways to get there. Sports, voting, etc are ALL yes or no answers with very very limited possible ways to get there.
Real science on the other hand frequently involves situations where the answer isn't really known and the possible ways to get there are infinite. So rather than evaluating whether the local voters will vote for candidate A or candidate B is an entirely different situation than evaluating whether climate change is increasing the cost of disasters. There are two variables in the first and good data (such as polling) indicating how people in general will vote. With solid statistical analysis this type of situations should be fairly easy to predict IF your data collection is good. He made his name by doing better data picking than the others.
Climate change disaster levels on the other hand is an entirely different game. Because this is all rather cutting edge science, whether the frequency or size of disasters has gone up (at this time) is a question of open debate in the scientific community. This paper makes blatant assumptions about which side of this debate is right then proceeds to use that assumption as the basis to draw firm conclusions. This isn't good science and it's not good data analysis. Consensus is needed in science if you are going to rely on the conclusions to make predictions on other data sets. And that's exactly the problem, there isn't a yes or no answer to the question there was an assumed answer. There is evidence indicating things and certain scientists may agree or disagree about what that evidence indicates and in time after much research the scientific community will reach a consensus and we'll likely have the real answer with hard evidence at that point.
Nate should stick to what he's good at, fixed data sets with yes or no answers. He apparently doesn't have the scientific background to realize that not all scientific conclusions drawn in papers are either right nor are they the consensus of the community. After all, any jackass can write a paper and draw conclusions and be completely wrong or even fake data, in fact it happens all to often.
The flood plain in your area likely didn't grow. What is going on with the flood plains is related to legitimate science and the history of how they were originally developed. Many many of the original flood plain maps were developed with insufficient data and information to draw the kind of conclusions the flood plain maps do. When you run into those situations you don't throw up your hands and just not produce a flood map, you just do the best you can with the limited data you have.
Now years later work is underway to take all the previous data, plus all the new data collected since the last map was generated and generate new maps. These maps frequently differ because as I noted the original data wasn't that great.
On the other hand, I'm NOT arguing that changing climate hasn't caused changes to flood maps. What I'm saying is that the picture is far more complicated and broad generalizations about why the flood plain got bigger are going to be wrong because they are broad generalizations. If you want to know why a particular flood plain map got bigger you should request a copy of the hydraulic study that evaluated the previous flood plain and developed the new map. The summary at the front of the report will likely list the reasons the flood plain map has changed to the best of the engineers ability to discern. These summaries are often readable and comprehensible by non-engineers because they are targeted at planning and local government officials who will be required to enact the recommendations in the report.
Scientists go after any scientist or report claiming to be scientific that violates scientific principles or that is blatantly false. It happens all the time.
Maybe if you weren't predisposed to an answer you would realize that attack on the science might just indicate that the science is bad.
Hundreds of Black soldiers at Tuskegee during WWII were deliberately infected with Syphilis and then not told and deliberately not treated as an experiment to understand the long term impacts of Syphilis. There is also evidence that the CIA facilitated the smuggling and sale of crack cocaine in black neighborhoods to finance covert projects during the 80's.
Given that it's not hard to understand why there are conspiracy theories involving this.