Tell me, do you ALWAYS read what you think is there, and ignore what is said?
That didn't happen here. Let's look at what was actually written down:
Climate denial is the insistence that the climate science as accepted by mainstream is entirely incorrect based solely on the fact that it means that we cannot continue with the current scheme of huge financial interests in fossil fuels and must change.
It's not merely the insistence that climate science is entirely incorrect (which in itself already rules out a lot of people who disagree with the more extreme climate change claims), but entirely incorrect on a very peculiar grounds.
So who actually claims that climate science as accepted is entirely incorrect on the grounds that we must "continue with the current scheme of huge financial interests in fossil fuels"? Nobody.
So we have a claim which is patently false because it is based on an argument which doesn't exist. Hence, my post.
But there's also this gem:
When you deny that the shit weather is evidence of AGW, you're denying climate change, because climate is the average weather, and the average weather is the weather you have, each event.
Climate != shit weather. Climate != average weather either. And shit weather != average weather too. And none of the three == the weather you have, each event. It is rare to see four different concepts conflated so badly.
Shit weather happens whether there is climate change or not. Hence, the presence of shit weather is not in itself evidence of climate change. You have to do statistics on fairly large numbers of such events in order to say anything useful about climate-related effects.
if you sold your stocks, you might get less than your original investment or more, depending on the performance of the company you invested in
My point in that part of my post was that the reasoning riverat1 put forth for having a high income tax justifies deferring taxes on money I put into stocks or other investments.
Climate denial is the insistence that the climate science as accepted by mainstream is entirely incorrect based solely on the fact that it means that we cannot continue with the current scheme of huge financial interests in fossil fuels and must change.
So "climate denial" doesn't actually exist. Good to know.
Sure, it does. The principle from the insurer's point of view is "moral hazard". The more you sell insurance against something happening, the more likely it is to happen because you're giving the insuree more incentive to do the action in question that's being insured against. As a result, a typical policy requires you to disclose any other insurance that may apply.
But it looks to me like the state funds in question didn't even consider this possibility (perhaps through some combination of lobbying and stupidity). It wouldn't have been that hard to require gasoline retailers to disclose insurance payouts.
That's part of the reason, I think, that the settlements are just a small portion of the money the businesses received in the first place. Those oil companies were caught doing a legal, but unseedy activity.
Because nobody ever wants a person who is growing a successful business to ever invest in a different business. For example, I put a significant fraction (more than half) of my last year's income into stock purchases. But I'm not getting a refund for putting money into a business (with the seller taking it out).
Solution for the US? 1950s income tax rates and strengthen the unions: try to bring back the institutions and policies we had during our boom times.
Let's consider the other policy items that weren't around then. There was a lot less regulation, for example, no EPA or OSHA.
Social Security took a much smaller bite (3-5% instead of over 15% currently). Certain huge changes would need to be done to US health care, particularly the constraints on employer-offered health insurance and the recent individual and (as yet not implemented) employer mandates.
While education was less prevalent and subsidized, it was also far less expensive.
So let's critique your proposals. First, stronger labor unions greatly increase the cost of employing people in the US without creating any value to the employer for doing so. Higher income tax rates actually were easy to bypass, resulting in similar real tax rates similar to present.
I don't see what about this scheme will actually help make more middle class people.
And I'm seeing more and more displaced middle-aged workers using their retirement savings to start small businesses to create their own job and many are failing. 4 out of 5 businesses fail.
That's actually a pretty good success rate from what I've heard.
I'd pay these sorts of concerns more credence, if the problem were universal and a large number of societies weren't punishing employers. But it's not. Instead, the problem of "useless people" really is a problem of the first world and some dysfunctional societies in the poorest parts of the world. Everyone else is hiring like crazy. Similarly, all sorts of costs and regulations have been added to the cost of an employee again in the same sort of societies that IMHO have "useless people".
As I see it, if the cost of employing you is larger than the value you can deliver through your labor, then you just became useless to an employer.
Incidentally, there are some copper 1982 pennies out there. They actually did the switch to copper plated zinc in the middle of the year. You can visually tell the two apart because the copper pennies have larger dates than than the copper plated zinc.
Despite the obvious problems with our political system currently, anyone with a clue knows that public schools need to be improved rather than phased ou
Looks like charter schools are the way to do it in the US.
Or a rounding error in the US and Chinese annual defense budget, it's not that we can't do ambitious things, it's that we choose not to.
The thing is, that defense budget does serve an important role. And you do have to consider the relative importance of things else my next meal should get just as much funding as your national defense budget.
Dumping a "rounding error" of a budget for an important task into living quarters for a rather unimportant, status signaling project doesn't strike me as an improvement.
Don't you freedom-loving libertarians love this kind of shit?
No, fraud is typically near the top of the list of the things libertarians don't like. I would wager in fact that a lot of spittle has been hurled on the subject of fraud and how to prevent it in a libertarian society.
What I think is particularly interesting about this example is not that it is outright fraud, but that the people perpetrating it think they can do so because they are Republicans and the victims are Democrats. If they had instead been "parodying" a big non-profit like Red Cross or World Wildlife Fund, I don't think there would be any doubt that it was intentional fraud.
heck, almost every weapon banned by treaty is there because it's not very effective
Unless your goal is random killing of unprotected civilians. When I read of Iraq's dabbling with various chemical weapons during the Iraq-Iran war, it just didn't work that well, even on an initially unprepared opponent. It's most effective use appeared to be as a temporary obstruction to a enemy attack. For example, mustard gas is apparently persistent to a degree and lingers on a battlefield for a couple of days. So it could be used to interfere with a foe's logistics.
And in the wars afterward, the enemy was technologically advanced with plenty of gear for dealing with chemical weapons and far superior WMD (tactical nuclear weapons). Use of chemical weapons just wouldn't have gone well for Iraq.
Heck, why not just put one in solar orbit where size would be less of a problem and you could avoid all the vacuum chambers, pumps and the cost of digging the tunnel.
Because that would mean with our current almost non-existent infrastructure that all of it would have to be put up from Earth at several thousand dollars per kg. For example, the LHC has a staff of somewhere between hundreds to over a thousand (I can't find numbers for it, but CERN itself, has just under four thousand employees, full time and part time).
Just looking at the mass of space stations per crew member, I get that the ISS has 75 metric tons per crew member of mass and Mir had about 44 metric tons per crew member. Even if we could get that down to 10 metric tons per crew member, just the living quarters by themselves would be around 10,000 metric tons or tens of billions of dollars just in launch costs.
All you did was quote the other AC, and then restate your position.
And that's all I had to do.
It's not saying the rich has more free time, but that there's less overhead taking up the rich's time.
They have plenty of overhead too, such as maintaining that wealth.
Oh, and fuck beta
I don't hate beta that much, but how hard would it really be to keep the current competent interface for the people who want it? This change does seem to be for the ad views.
since your point is irrelevant to what was being discussed
Let's review. Some AC wrote:
they have time to do the research [...] Life's overhead takes up a great deal of time if one is not among the 1% - or even the 10%.
So I questioned that very dubious assumption. Wealth doesn't magically result in lots of free time with which to "do the research" even if you have the option to pay people to do stuff for you. Being rich just means that one has more wealth than another.
Among other things, if one wants to maintain that wealth or the means by which that wealth was obtained, then one needs to spend some time personally on that rather than on "doing the research". For example, people who successfully run businesses tend to be pretty hardcore workaholics. Which is why I wrote what I wrote.
They pay people to research important things for them, lawyers on how to exploit the lay, accountants on how to cheat the state, PR folks on determine how the public will react to something.
And all of these activities require supervision from the rich person. Assuming too generously of course, that this actually is done.
That 1% is an Industry for determining and ofuscating the truth.
"Determining and obfuscating the truth"? Well that's 50% better than what you accomplished with your post.
I grant there's probably someone out there doing ad campaigns or whatever. Just as some rich people buy really expensive boats for status signaling, so some would play such games for the same purpose. We should ask whether such things are actually effective.
Are you influenced by rich people buying ads or whatever? I suppose so since you speak of the "1%" which is a propaganda fad these days. But influenced to the point that you'd advocate doing something that you wouldn't otherwise support? I don't see it.
I see no evidence that the "1%" has a lot of free time either.
That's because you don't think hard enough.
The rich may not have much more total hours in a day than the rest of us, but they make more efficient use of their time. The rich can get more done within the same time.
And I see that you don't actually contradict my point despite your vacuous accusation at the beginning. Just because someone makes more efficient use of their time doesn't mean that they have more free time. My experience has been that such things actually tend to consume free time because it's a bigger opportunity cost to have free time when you can use it so much more efficiently.
To do something, you have to identify a problem - ergo assigning blame.
No. You can have a problem without having anyone to blame. And you can have someone to blame without actually having a problem.
As to the rest of your post, I find it very disingenuous. Living in a populous democratic society, my ability to control that society is by definition very limited (unless I should happen to muster enough power to make that society other than democratic). There will never be a politician in such a society who would represent my interests precisely, even if I were that politician.
And certain dynamics like the two party system or entitlements in the US are extremely well entrenched. There's a huge force multiplier to those who benefit from the dynamic of bribing with entitlements. I do not believe that there are enough people with my sensibilities to overturn these things at this time.
The US military isn't developing large scale solar projects, but rather high efficiency projects. Here's the original quote:
Here's a clue for the clueless. Despite urban myth nonsense about US oil companies suppressing more efficient car engines and the like, if there was ANY possible real benefit to a giant solar plant, the USA would be there first. When the usual suspects have no interest in this form of engineering, you can take it for granted that it is junk science.
I mean, I understand how it could be unprofitable for those who paid to build the turbines, but cheap electricity has got to be good for the economy as a whole.
Unless the subsidies encourage people to do otherwise wildly unprofitable stuff. That money has to come from somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell me, do you ALWAYS read what you think is there, and ignore what is said?
That didn't happen here. Let's look at what was actually written down:
Climate denial is the insistence that the climate science as accepted by mainstream is entirely incorrect based solely on the fact that it means that we cannot continue with the current scheme of huge financial interests in fossil fuels and must change.
It's not merely the insistence that climate science is entirely incorrect (which in itself already rules out a lot of people who disagree with the more extreme climate change claims), but entirely incorrect on a very peculiar grounds.
So who actually claims that climate science as accepted is entirely incorrect on the grounds that we must "continue with the current scheme of huge financial interests in fossil fuels"? Nobody.
So we have a claim which is patently false because it is based on an argument which doesn't exist. Hence, my post.
But there's also this gem:
When you deny that the shit weather is evidence of AGW, you're denying climate change, because climate is the average weather, and the average weather is the weather you have, each event.
Climate != shit weather. Climate != average weather either. And shit weather != average weather too. And none of the three == the weather you have, each event. It is rare to see four different concepts conflated so badly.
Shit weather happens whether there is climate change or not. Hence, the presence of shit weather is not in itself evidence of climate change. You have to do statistics on fairly large numbers of such events in order to say anything useful about climate-related effects.
if you sold your stocks, you might get less than your original investment or more, depending on the performance of the company you invested in
My point in that part of my post was that the reasoning riverat1 put forth for having a high income tax justifies deferring taxes on money I put into stocks or other investments.
Please don't pretend that Reagan's spending was not out of control.
Most human actions including "out of control" spending do not have universally negative results.
Climate denial is the insistence that the climate science as accepted by mainstream is entirely incorrect based solely on the fact that it means that we cannot continue with the current scheme of huge financial interests in fossil fuels and must change.
So "climate denial" doesn't actually exist. Good to know.
Sure, it does. The principle from the insurer's point of view is "moral hazard". The more you sell insurance against something happening, the more likely it is to happen because you're giving the insuree more incentive to do the action in question that's being insured against. As a result, a typical policy requires you to disclose any other insurance that may apply.
But it looks to me like the state funds in question didn't even consider this possibility (perhaps through some combination of lobbying and stupidity). It wouldn't have been that hard to require gasoline retailers to disclose insurance payouts.
That's part of the reason, I think, that the settlements are just a small portion of the money the businesses received in the first place. Those oil companies were caught doing a legal, but unseedy activity.
Because nobody ever wants a person who is growing a successful business to ever invest in a different business. For example, I put a significant fraction (more than half) of my last year's income into stock purchases. But I'm not getting a refund for putting money into a business (with the seller taking it out).
Solution for the US? 1950s income tax rates and strengthen the unions: try to bring back the institutions and policies we had during our boom times.
Let's consider the other policy items that weren't around then. There was a lot less regulation, for example, no EPA or OSHA.
Social Security took a much smaller bite (3-5% instead of over 15% currently). Certain huge changes would need to be done to US health care, particularly the constraints on employer-offered health insurance and the recent individual and (as yet not implemented) employer mandates.
While education was less prevalent and subsidized, it was also far less expensive.
So let's critique your proposals. First, stronger labor unions greatly increase the cost of employing people in the US without creating any value to the employer for doing so. Higher income tax rates actually were easy to bypass, resulting in similar real tax rates similar to present.
I don't see what about this scheme will actually help make more middle class people.
And I'm seeing more and more displaced middle-aged workers using their retirement savings to start small businesses to create their own job and many are failing. 4 out of 5 businesses fail.
That's actually a pretty good success rate from what I've heard.
I'd pay these sorts of concerns more credence, if the problem were universal and a large number of societies weren't punishing employers. But it's not. Instead, the problem of "useless people" really is a problem of the first world and some dysfunctional societies in the poorest parts of the world. Everyone else is hiring like crazy. Similarly, all sorts of costs and regulations have been added to the cost of an employee again in the same sort of societies that IMHO have "useless people".
As I see it, if the cost of employing you is larger than the value you can deliver through your labor, then you just became useless to an employer.
Incidentally, there are some copper 1982 pennies out there. They actually did the switch to copper plated zinc in the middle of the year. You can visually tell the two apart because the copper pennies have larger dates than than the copper plated zinc.
It's just like the 1990s when deep-pocketed for-profit HMOs offered healthcare at below-market rates.
That's based on the unwarranted assumption that there actually is a market rate for health services.
Despite the obvious problems with our political system currently, anyone with a clue knows that public schools need to be improved rather than phased ou
Looks like charter schools are the way to do it in the US.
Or a rounding error in the US and Chinese annual defense budget, it's not that we can't do ambitious things, it's that we choose not to.
The thing is, that defense budget does serve an important role. And you do have to consider the relative importance of things else my next meal should get just as much funding as your national defense budget.
Dumping a "rounding error" of a budget for an important task into living quarters for a rather unimportant, status signaling project doesn't strike me as an improvement.
Ad hominem is a classic first step in the scientific method.
Don't you freedom-loving libertarians love this kind of shit?
No, fraud is typically near the top of the list of the things libertarians don't like. I would wager in fact that a lot of spittle has been hurled on the subject of fraud and how to prevent it in a libertarian society.
What I think is particularly interesting about this example is not that it is outright fraud, but that the people perpetrating it think they can do so because they are Republicans and the victims are Democrats. If they had instead been "parodying" a big non-profit like Red Cross or World Wildlife Fund, I don't think there would be any doubt that it was intentional fraud.
heck, almost every weapon banned by treaty is there because it's not very effective
Unless your goal is random killing of unprotected civilians. When I read of Iraq's dabbling with various chemical weapons during the Iraq-Iran war, it just didn't work that well, even on an initially unprepared opponent. It's most effective use appeared to be as a temporary obstruction to a enemy attack. For example, mustard gas is apparently persistent to a degree and lingers on a battlefield for a couple of days. So it could be used to interfere with a foe's logistics.
And in the wars afterward, the enemy was technologically advanced with plenty of gear for dealing with chemical weapons and far superior WMD (tactical nuclear weapons). Use of chemical weapons just wouldn't have gone well for Iraq.
Heck, why not just put one in solar orbit where size would be less of a problem and you could avoid all the vacuum chambers, pumps and the cost of digging the tunnel.
Because that would mean with our current almost non-existent infrastructure that all of it would have to be put up from Earth at several thousand dollars per kg. For example, the LHC has a staff of somewhere between hundreds to over a thousand (I can't find numbers for it, but CERN itself, has just under four thousand employees, full time and part time).
Just looking at the mass of space stations per crew member, I get that the ISS has 75 metric tons per crew member of mass and Mir had about 44 metric tons per crew member. Even if we could get that down to 10 metric tons per crew member, just the living quarters by themselves would be around 10,000 metric tons or tens of billions of dollars just in launch costs.
All you did was quote the other AC, and then restate your position.
And that's all I had to do.
It's not saying the rich has more free time, but that there's less overhead taking up the rich's time.
They have plenty of overhead too, such as maintaining that wealth.
Oh, and fuck beta
I don't hate beta that much, but how hard would it really be to keep the current competent interface for the people who want it? This change does seem to be for the ad views.
since your point is irrelevant to what was being discussed
Let's review. Some AC wrote:
they have time to do the research [...] Life's overhead takes up a great deal of time if one is not among the 1% - or even the 10%.
So I questioned that very dubious assumption. Wealth doesn't magically result in lots of free time with which to "do the research" even if you have the option to pay people to do stuff for you. Being rich just means that one has more wealth than another.
Among other things, if one wants to maintain that wealth or the means by which that wealth was obtained, then one needs to spend some time personally on that rather than on "doing the research". For example, people who successfully run businesses tend to be pretty hardcore workaholics. Which is why I wrote what I wrote.
They pay people to research important things for them, lawyers on how to exploit the lay, accountants on how to cheat the state, PR folks on determine how the public will react to something.
And all of these activities require supervision from the rich person. Assuming too generously of course, that this actually is done.
That 1% is an Industry for determining and ofuscating the truth.
"Determining and obfuscating the truth"? Well that's 50% better than what you accomplished with your post.
I grant there's probably someone out there doing ad campaigns or whatever. Just as some rich people buy really expensive boats for status signaling, so some would play such games for the same purpose. We should ask whether such things are actually effective.
Are you influenced by rich people buying ads or whatever? I suppose so since you speak of the "1%" which is a propaganda fad these days. But influenced to the point that you'd advocate doing something that you wouldn't otherwise support? I don't see it.
I see no evidence that the "1%" has a lot of free time either.
That's because you don't think hard enough.
The rich may not have much more total hours in a day than the rest of us, but they make more efficient use of their time. The rich can get more done within the same time.
And I see that you don't actually contradict my point despite your vacuous accusation at the beginning. Just because someone makes more efficient use of their time doesn't mean that they have more free time. My experience has been that such things actually tend to consume free time because it's a bigger opportunity cost to have free time when you can use it so much more efficiently.
Don't you have something better to do?
To do something, you have to identify a problem - ergo assigning blame.
No. You can have a problem without having anyone to blame. And you can have someone to blame without actually having a problem.
As to the rest of your post, I find it very disingenuous. Living in a populous democratic society, my ability to control that society is by definition very limited (unless I should happen to muster enough power to make that society other than democratic). There will never be a politician in such a society who would represent my interests precisely, even if I were that politician.
And certain dynamics like the two party system or entitlements in the US are extremely well entrenched. There's a huge force multiplier to those who benefit from the dynamic of bribing with entitlements. I do not believe that there are enough people with my sensibilities to overturn these things at this time.
Here's a clue for the clueless. Despite urban myth nonsense about US oil companies suppressing more efficient car engines and the like, if there was ANY possible real benefit to a giant solar plant, the USA would be there first. When the usual suspects have no interest in this form of engineering, you can take it for granted that it is junk science.
So no, you aren't giving a counterexample.
What makes you think a giant solar power project is "investing in solar research"?
I mean, I understand how it could be unprofitable for those who paid to build the turbines, but cheap electricity has got to be good for the economy as a whole.
Unless the subsidies encourage people to do otherwise wildly unprofitable stuff. That money has to come from somewhere.