However, many other countries do not have this problem.
Which is irrelevant since the origin poster explained the scope - "in America".
No, they're not. How is buy groceries comparable to an election ?
The original poster's point was that they weren't.
Still better than government. In America, the majority of political "products on the market" are provided by just two political parties. I have far more power to choose when I go to the grocery store than when I go to the polling booth. And, unlike the political "market", I don't have to eat the groceries I didn't buy.
Keep in mind that this quote was in reply to your post on the alleged futility of shopping around.
Hard to do when a proportional handful of them provide the vast majority of products on the market.
This whole discussion is about hypotheticals. What's your point ?
No, it's about the relative power of corporations and governments. Sure, you can contrive a situation (as you did) where it is somewhat difficult to avoid a particular business's machinations, but that's not true in general and it ignores that governments have considerably more power to interfere in the lives of their citizens than the business does.
First you had incorrectly assumed that blue states receive more money per capita than red states It is a fact that this is not the case.
No, I haven't. So here, we already have one fact which isn't.
Do you pause and say "gee, maybe I should inform myself more about this?" or do you make up any possible explanation that could possibly make your unsupported, incorrect opinion true? Why of course the second, which is the textbook definition of grasping at straws:
Do you pause and say, "gee, maybe khallow has a point and I should inform myself more about this?" No you immediate go into amateur psychology hour.
This is just a standard conflict of interest. One which incidentally exists with government officials as well contrary to your assertion. And the corporation has less power than the government does with which to indulge that conflict.
When hemp threatened the business model of someone, millions of lives were ruined. Laws like the DMCA were not thought up out of the blue by the government
Pay to play doesn't mean that corporations run things. I think that's just how the governments of the world routinely monetize their power.
And as the NSA spying demonstrates, the US government does a lot of stuff without caring about the economic harm caused (much less obtain approval) to its supposed masters.
I give you facts contrary to your beliefs, you then make up some alternate explanation for which you have no evidence and then conclude "you don't know any more than I do".
That's the crux here. You gave me facts not evidence. Evidence can distinguish between alternate hypotheses. And as I note, just because funding was allocated to a state doesn't mean that it stayed there.
You are grasping at straws when confronted with a reality contrary to your beliefs.
No, I'm pointing out something that should be fairly obvious.
And yes most of the money stays in the Red States which is why the supposedly "small government" republicans fight tooth and nail to keep the money flowing.
How much is "most"? Your vague generalities indicate you don't know any more than I do.
Manufacturing jobs are not going over sees, they're disappearing completely.
Let's look at a source that considers more than just US employment (page 8):
Industrial employment hardest hit
â Total global employment in industry declined slightly in 2009, which is a major divergence
from the historical annual growth rate of 3.4 per cent over the period from 2002 to 2007.
Employment in agriculture grew in 2009, which also represented a divergence versus historical
trends.
Does a growth rate of over 3% annually in manufacture employment sound to you like the jobs are "disappearing completely"?
I mean looking back at history, the reason that technology progressed so rapidly in the 50's and 60's was because of the space race. In fact NASA and the DOD were buying 90% of all transistors made from that time period.
DOD was the big buyer here. They weren't heavily into space except as another region in which to compete militarily.
Except that the biggest recipients of government largesse are Red States (look it up).
Does the money stay in red states? Last I checked, if West Virginia gets money for a network, that money ends up with someone like Cisco a California (blue state) business. And similarly, if the funding goes to a financial service (say like debit cards for unemployee insurance payouts), then it's probably more likely to end up in New York (a blue state) rather than in Wyoming (a red state).
He failed to predict that automation would just put people out of work.
Which to state the obvious, was in the right. Automation didn't put people out of work for long. There have always been other jobs to do.
The assumption was that when automation started making physical labor unnecessary that we as a society would work some way of spreading the wealth out. We have, to a limited degree.
Every degree would be limited. Our degree has turned out to be rather ample.
Medicare, Medicaid, and the set of programs that get called "Welfare" wouldn't be possible at their current levels without automation and the profits from greater efficiency, but it's hardly a check in the pocket of every one who would have had a factory job in the past.
None of these are intended to be replacement for labor and wages. So your observation seems quite irrelevant.
However, the pervasive dissatisfaction of those who are employed in menial fluorescent-lit automation related jobs (just about all of us here), as well as the manifest negative effects of depending on a chain of government programs has on people's overall wellbeing, I think "automation will cause malaise" is pretty accurate, even if his underlying economic assumptions were off.
Only if you consider lots of Chinese workers, "automation". This is the main driver for loss of jobs in the developed world. The push towards automation has been due to the developed world's irrational reaction to global labor competition by making their own labor even more expensive.
When meeting people for lunch, this is something I have started to see. Spirituality just isn't there. Usually they care more if you are driving a BMW better than a 3 series than anything cultural, spiritual, or even religious. Materialism is now the biggest religion and spiritual path.
This is a common complaint of spiritualists and theologians through human history. People are inherently materialist and status-seeking. I wager you're either paying more attention to the issue than you used to, or you're moving into a new group of people which happens to be more materialist. But I suppose it could also happen from a break down in society level cooperation.
Of course, mindless materialism can't last. It ends up becoming a petri dish for fascism. The last time we had a global culture similar to this was pre-World War 1, and "The Guns of August" is a good detailing of what can happen... and in the age of the Internet, going from a sleepy materialistic philosophy to armies clashing all around the globe wouldn't be happening in a month, it could happen within days, especially if something happens and a skirmish happens due to disputed islands.
While you're not the first person to make this observation, I think the real similarities are merely that there is a period of peace with considerable infrastructure devoted to preventing large scale wars. In the Pre-First World War period, this was achieved by treaty and large militaries.
In contrast, we don't have the military build up of the First World War. Sure, there's a lot of military build up in the US, but it is both rather frivolous (for example, overpaying service contracts and developing weapon systems that have little use) and not matched by other countries.
As to starting a world war in days, we've had plenty of small conflicts. They didn't magically become big ones.
Paying for contraception is a LOT cheaper than paying for prenatal or pediatric care. Having contraceptive coverage will save you and everyone else in the insurance pool money in the long run.
Not at all. Just because you're paying for someone's contraception, doesn't mean they will use it. I believe the people most likely to have trouble with unexpected pregnancies will be the people least likely to use contraceptives, even if they are free rather than merely cheap.
What you consider to be "cheap" contraceptives are still beyond the means of many people if they had to pay the full price themselves. Good luck affording contraceptives on Walmart wages when you have to pay for rent, transportation and food.
At less than a dollar each, condoms are affordable by anyone on Walmart wages. And there's a lot of female birth control at or under $50 a month. I just don't buy your claim at all.
Get in a car accident (no your auto insurance will not cover you for medical expenses)
As I discovered, yes, car insurance will cover medical expenses for up to two years after the accident.
That my naive young friend is economic insanity. You clearly do not understand the consequences of bankruptcy.
Whatever. The consequences of bankruptcy are well known and people have been making this sort of gamble for a long time. The fact remains that they can still make the gamble and there is method to the madness.
But you're right that things won't turn out like the Civil Rights movement. It'll turn out more like McCarthyism. The Feds are the new Reds, and the people will go to excessive lengths to root out all the scary big government (but in the process become just as if not worse in their witch hunts)
You had me to this point. But this just isn't happening. Instead, for way too many people, government remains the tool of choice when they want to fix society or the perceived flaws in their fellow man.
As to "witch hunts", the problem was that the witch or the red was a vague and ambiguous idea. Someone pulling a paycheck from a government is a lot easier to verify. Also, currently a large portion of the population pulls a check from a government either as wages, pensions, contracts, or entitlements. The "witch hunt" would probably have far more witches than hunters.
Leverages the ARGO/TAO/TRITON/PIRATA/RAMA to estimate ocean heat content and finds that warming has doubled in the most recent decade.
Since these networks don't actually measure deep ocean heat content, then they can't be "leveraged" for the claimed purpose.
Leverages satellite data and finds that the arctic has been warming at 8 times the rate of the rest of the planet.
Again, this isn't direct observation. Here, it is a dubious interpolation of existing data to fill in holes, holes which happen to conveniently contain a lot of alleged missing heat.
Evidence. There's no supporting evidence for your concern that a feedback loop exists.
We KNOW a fast rise in temperatures is extremely dangerous to life diversity on Earth, which is essential to our own survival.
Life diversity is not essential to our own survival. We depend instead on a rather small number of species, both for direct benefit and to sustain an ecosystem.
We KNOW the atmosphere has a feedback component and a lot of inertia
No, we don't. Instead we KNOW that heat radiates as the fourth power of temperature which is a strong negative feedback mechanism.
Your sister doesn't work in a field with tens of thousands of researchers.
Really? How many, according to you? Tens of thousands sound about right to me.
Sounds right to someone without a clue. For example, most of the research about which climate change research and advocacy is based comes from a few dozen researchers.
Also the simple radiative model doesn't take into account clouds or convection.
It does. Clouds account to the albedo of the planet.
Nope, clouds have a much higher albedo than Earth does. Thus, you have to consider other factors such as how often clouds form and the degree of cloud cover.
The only (local) bias in the model was due to underestimating the amount of heat absorbed by the oceans, which slow down warming in the immediate term but induces a positive feedback in the long term (since warmer water implies less CO2 dissolved in the oceans). All in all, the amount of energy in our atmosphere is steadily rising at the pace predicted by the models.
Where's the evidence for this claim? This is a "God of the gaps" argument where the missing heat is attributed to ignorance of our environment - it must be in the places we don't know much about, rather than to flaws in our models.
Similar claims are made for the differences between GISS satellite data and weather station data. Satellite data supposedly shows heating that doesn't exist in the instrument record, so it must be in the locations where we don't have instruments. Or it could be flawed satellite data. But that doesn't seem to be considered.
It's not like we haven't seen how the Civil Rights movement ran its course, the Privacy Rights movement will probably play out quite similarly.
From what you wrote, I take it you haven't actually paid attention to how the Civil Rights movement played out. Reverse discrimination, the core legislative tool of that time, still ended up being racism, but sanctioned racism against an approved ethnic group. Current problems have nothing to do with people getting raised wrong by racist parents and a lot to do with the failure of modern tools intended to prevent racism.
Now, how can the Privacy Rights movement fail in that way? There's no easily identifiable group against which we can practice reverse spying. Quota systems? Runs into the Fourth Amendment.
Now our enemy is not hate, but fear. Fast cars and Fast food kill 400 times more people every year than 9/11, but our government used the event as to manufacture consent for a "War on Terror" instead of a war on the far more dangerous Automobiles, Happy Meals, The Flu, Bathroom Falls, Lightning, etc.
This is disingenuous. Automobiles don't kill more people, if we don't work hard to keep them from doing so. They can't escalate. As a result, insentient causes of death are a different quality than deliberate, sentient ones.
For example, the Washington, DC area had 10 murders in a 20 day period in 2002 from two people acting as a sniper team. If they had been allowed to continue their activities at that death rate for the last eleven years, we'd be around 2000 deaths by now. That's assuming that the team didn't escalate their activities to more destructive and lethal means (they had already escalated from seven murders in the previous eight months).
Sure, it was a vast overreaction to the 911 attacks, but any causing of death which involves people and for which the killers expected to gain, always requires more attention and resources than a cause of death that just happens because of the potential for escalation. As I've said before, it would have been a terrible idea to wait till Al Qaeda figured out how to profit from these sorts of attacks or build up the logistics so that they could frequently and routinely cause 9/11 scale harm.
We ALL pay into a pool and share the risk so that we individually won't be crushed by the financial burden of an illness. Insurance (even catastrophic coverage) cannot work unless everyone pays for stuff they probably wont need.
So what does contraception have to do with this? I doubt it would help people who can't be bothered to buy and use cheap contraceptives, for example.
You cannot buy a plan after the fact because they do not kick in immediately. Most plans even through the health exchanges take at least 2 weeks (usually more) to take effect and cannot be purchased at any time. In all likelihood you will incur a huge amount of medical bills in the event of an accident or serious illness prior to receiving coverage.
Are you serious? There's a lot of expensive health problems that can be put off for two weeks. A physical injury generally doesn't cost that much. And in the rare situation where it does, then go with bankruptcy and move on. A chronic medical condition does. People who do this were always part of the "uninsured". They aren't going to stop making these calculations just because you really want them to.
How is my being forced to pay for Lockheed to build an F22 any different from my having to pick an insurance company and buy insurance from them?
First, the F22 is a tool which furthers an explicit role of the US federal government, providing for the defense of the US. Second, if it turns out too expensive, the US government and actually has reduced the number it buys. There's no similar limit on the cost of health insurance. It's a mandate. You have to spend the money.
So, the ACA required that insurers cover pre-existing conditions, and the necessary tradeoff is that everybody has to buy insurance. Otherwise anybody with half a brain would just sign up on their way to the hospital and cancel the day after they get all their prescriptions filled after being discharged. In fact, that could still be a problem because for as much as people complain about the penalty for not having insurance it really isn't that large which makes incurring it the rational self-interested choice in most cases.
This is the typical stupid argument that comes as a result of creating a public good. We now have to control the behavior of hundreds of millions of people in order to keep the public good from getting overconsumed. This is the primary reason I oppose the program in the first place. Because it provides yet another control lever for a powerful government, the same government whose abuses have been discussed here in recent days.
I can already tell you how it'll turn out unless someone fixes the system. The cost of health insurance and health care will continue to climb at a rate much faster than inflation. To control the increase in health insurance subsidies (recall that spending on health insurance is capped to a small percentage of wages for those covered by the subsidies), more people will be shoved onto Medicaid/Medicare and Medicaid/Medicare benefits will continue to decline.
And of course, the federal government will tighten its grip on the public in order to control personal decisions which cost money to the federal government.
I'm sure at some point that the system will have failed sufficiently hard that the federal government comes up with yet another fix. But the people proposing these sorts of solutions never seem to learn from what didn't work before. The fact that your Medicaid coverage is crap will be more important than coming up with a viable plan.
Clearly there has to be some sort of limitation on this sort of thinking.
And why does there "need" to be such a limitation? You can after all get your own insurance or your own contraception. And please keep in mind that the Christian Scientists could use the same sort of reasoning to prevent health insurance from providing any money for contraceptives. The people you elect aren't magically going to stay in office forever. This reasoning is a dog that bites the hand that feeds it.
But what really puzzles me about this debate is who the contraceptive thing is meant for. Either the person uses cheap contraceptives or they don't. I don't see health insurance helping even a little bit here. A charity giving out free condoms will have more impact IMHO.
And this is an example of the anti-scientific attitude. You are obsessed over evidence for the existence of global warming (with a particular emphasis on certain oversimplified radiative models) as if it were the only way your belief system could go wrong.
But global warming is not a binary state. I grant that there is compelling evidence for the existence of global warming. What I don't grant is that there is evidence that we need to do anything about global warming now.
There are plenty of people with various reasons and incentives for portraying global warming as being an urgent matter. And paleoclimate data is one of the weak spots being attacked IMHO. That's why I advocate looking at actual global temperature data over the next few decades. That can't be faked unlike interpreting tree rings or ice cores from a time before instruments.
As my sister (A post-doc climate researcher) pointed out to me once , her profession is filled with tens of thousands of researchers desparately looking for that one piece of evidence that would show that the whole fields got it wrong and theres nothing to look for. Unfortunately in the century since scientists started worring about CO2 and infra-red, that evidence has failed to materialize.
Your sister doesn't work in a field with tens of thousands of researchers. Also the simple radiative model doesn't take into account clouds or convection. So there probably is a temperature forcing from higher CO2 levels, but it is smaller than expected from the basic radiative model because there is small scale weather which partially increases the rate of heat transfer to the upper atmosphere and to space.
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However, many other countries do not have this problem.
Which is irrelevant since the origin poster explained the scope - "in America".
No, they're not. How is buy groceries comparable to an election ?
The original poster's point was that they weren't.
Still better than government. In America, the majority of political "products on the market" are provided by just two political parties. I have far more power to choose when I go to the grocery store than when I go to the polling booth. And, unlike the political "market", I don't have to eat the groceries I didn't buy.
Keep in mind that this quote was in reply to your post on the alleged futility of shopping around.
Hard to do when a proportional handful of them provide the vast majority of products on the market.
This whole discussion is about hypotheticals. What's your point ?
No, it's about the relative power of corporations and governments. Sure, you can contrive a situation (as you did) where it is somewhat difficult to avoid a particular business's machinations, but that's not true in general and it ignores that governments have considerably more power to interfere in the lives of their citizens than the business does.
First you had incorrectly assumed that blue states receive more money per capita than red states It is a fact that this is not the case.
No, I haven't. So here, we already have one fact which isn't.
Do you pause and say "gee, maybe I should inform myself more about this?" or do you make up any possible explanation that could possibly make your unsupported, incorrect opinion true? Why of course the second, which is the textbook definition of grasping at straws:
Do you pause and say, "gee, maybe khallow has a point and I should inform myself more about this?" No you immediate go into amateur psychology hour.
Corporations want to take your money.
This is just a standard conflict of interest. One which incidentally exists with government officials as well contrary to your assertion. And the corporation has less power than the government does with which to indulge that conflict.
Despite the belief of many, America does not have a monopoly on Government.
Yea, "in America" (which I assume means in the US as a whole) it's a duopoly with a few niche third party competitors.
Apples to oranges.
Which are quite comparable, especially in the context of the grocery store analogy.
What do you do when one company owns all the grocery stores within easy reach of you ?
You can still travel to other stores. Just buy a lot more at a time. And it's worth noting that in most of the US, this situation just doesn't exist.
When hemp threatened the business model of someone, millions of lives were ruined. Laws like the DMCA were not thought up out of the blue by the government
Pay to play doesn't mean that corporations run things. I think that's just how the governments of the world routinely monetize their power.
And as the NSA spying demonstrates, the US government does a lot of stuff without caring about the economic harm caused (much less obtain approval) to its supposed masters.
I give you facts contrary to your beliefs, you then make up some alternate explanation for which you have no evidence and then conclude "you don't know any more than I do".
That's the crux here. You gave me facts not evidence. Evidence can distinguish between alternate hypotheses. And as I note, just because funding was allocated to a state doesn't mean that it stayed there.
You are grasping at straws when confronted with a reality contrary to your beliefs.
No, I'm pointing out something that should be fairly obvious.
And yes most of the money stays in the Red States which is why the supposedly "small government" republicans fight tooth and nail to keep the money flowing.
How much is "most"? Your vague generalities indicate you don't know any more than I do.
Manufacturing jobs are not going over sees, they're disappearing completely.
Let's look at a source that considers more than just US employment (page 8):
Industrial employment hardest hit
â Total global employment in industry declined slightly in 2009, which is a major divergence from the historical annual growth rate of 3.4 per cent over the period from 2002 to 2007. Employment in agriculture grew in 2009, which also represented a divergence versus historical trends.
Does a growth rate of over 3% annually in manufacture employment sound to you like the jobs are "disappearing completely"?
I mean looking back at history, the reason that technology progressed so rapidly in the 50's and 60's was because of the space race. In fact NASA and the DOD were buying 90% of all transistors made from that time period.
DOD was the big buyer here. They weren't heavily into space except as another region in which to compete militarily.
Except that the biggest recipients of government largesse are Red States (look it up).
Does the money stay in red states? Last I checked, if West Virginia gets money for a network, that money ends up with someone like Cisco a California (blue state) business. And similarly, if the funding goes to a financial service (say like debit cards for unemployee insurance payouts), then it's probably more likely to end up in New York (a blue state) rather than in Wyoming (a red state).
He failed to predict that automation would just put people out of work.
Which to state the obvious, was in the right. Automation didn't put people out of work for long. There have always been other jobs to do.
The assumption was that when automation started making physical labor unnecessary that we as a society would work some way of spreading the wealth out. We have, to a limited degree.
Every degree would be limited. Our degree has turned out to be rather ample.
Medicare, Medicaid, and the set of programs that get called "Welfare" wouldn't be possible at their current levels without automation and the profits from greater efficiency, but it's hardly a check in the pocket of every one who would have had a factory job in the past.
None of these are intended to be replacement for labor and wages. So your observation seems quite irrelevant.
However, the pervasive dissatisfaction of those who are employed in menial fluorescent-lit automation related jobs (just about all of us here), as well as the manifest negative effects of depending on a chain of government programs has on people's overall wellbeing, I think "automation will cause malaise" is pretty accurate, even if his underlying economic assumptions were off.
Those "menial" jobs are also well-paying jobs.
Wasn't it?
Only if you consider lots of Chinese workers, "automation". This is the main driver for loss of jobs in the developed world. The push towards automation has been due to the developed world's irrational reaction to global labor competition by making their own labor even more expensive.
In the US we still have Christian extremists trying to smother evolution.
They've been trying since the mid-19th century and they haven't gotten any more effective.
When meeting people for lunch, this is something I have started to see. Spirituality just isn't there. Usually they care more if you are driving a BMW better than a 3 series than anything cultural, spiritual, or even religious. Materialism is now the biggest religion and spiritual path.
This is a common complaint of spiritualists and theologians through human history. People are inherently materialist and status-seeking. I wager you're either paying more attention to the issue than you used to, or you're moving into a new group of people which happens to be more materialist. But I suppose it could also happen from a break down in society level cooperation.
Of course, mindless materialism can't last. It ends up becoming a petri dish for fascism. The last time we had a global culture similar to this was pre-World War 1, and "The Guns of August" is a good detailing of what can happen... and in the age of the Internet, going from a sleepy materialistic philosophy to armies clashing all around the globe wouldn't be happening in a month, it could happen within days, especially if something happens and a skirmish happens due to disputed islands.
While you're not the first person to make this observation, I think the real similarities are merely that there is a period of peace with considerable infrastructure devoted to preventing large scale wars. In the Pre-First World War period, this was achieved by treaty and large militaries.
In contrast, we don't have the military build up of the First World War. Sure, there's a lot of military build up in the US, but it is both rather frivolous (for example, overpaying service contracts and developing weapon systems that have little use) and not matched by other countries.
As to starting a world war in days, we've had plenty of small conflicts. They didn't magically become big ones.
Racism happens everywhere. And I find it perversely interesting how the person intensely bigoted against "SOUTHERN bigots" is playing the race card.
Paying for contraception is a LOT cheaper than paying for prenatal or pediatric care. Having contraceptive coverage will save you and everyone else in the insurance pool money in the long run.
Not at all. Just because you're paying for someone's contraception, doesn't mean they will use it. I believe the people most likely to have trouble with unexpected pregnancies will be the people least likely to use contraceptives, even if they are free rather than merely cheap.
What you consider to be "cheap" contraceptives are still beyond the means of many people if they had to pay the full price themselves. Good luck affording contraceptives on Walmart wages when you have to pay for rent, transportation and food.
At less than a dollar each, condoms are affordable by anyone on Walmart wages. And there's a lot of female birth control at or under $50 a month. I just don't buy your claim at all.
Get in a car accident (no your auto insurance will not cover you for medical expenses)
As I discovered, yes, car insurance will cover medical expenses for up to two years after the accident.
That my naive young friend is economic insanity. You clearly do not understand the consequences of bankruptcy.
Whatever. The consequences of bankruptcy are well known and people have been making this sort of gamble for a long time. The fact remains that they can still make the gamble and there is method to the madness.
But you're right that things won't turn out like the Civil Rights movement. It'll turn out more like McCarthyism. The Feds are the new Reds, and the people will go to excessive lengths to root out all the scary big government (but in the process become just as if not worse in their witch hunts)
You had me to this point. But this just isn't happening. Instead, for way too many people, government remains the tool of choice when they want to fix society or the perceived flaws in their fellow man.
As to "witch hunts", the problem was that the witch or the red was a vague and ambiguous idea. Someone pulling a paycheck from a government is a lot easier to verify. Also, currently a large portion of the population pulls a check from a government either as wages, pensions, contracts, or entitlements. The "witch hunt" would probably have far more witches than hunters.
Leverages the ARGO/TAO/TRITON/PIRATA/RAMA to estimate ocean heat content and finds that warming has doubled in the most recent decade.
Since these networks don't actually measure deep ocean heat content, then they can't be "leveraged" for the claimed purpose.
Leverages satellite data and finds that the arctic has been warming at 8 times the rate of the rest of the planet.
Again, this isn't direct observation. Here, it is a dubious interpolation of existing data to fill in holes, holes which happen to conveniently contain a lot of alleged missing heat.
Do you know what feedback loop is?
Evidence. There's no supporting evidence for your concern that a feedback loop exists.
We KNOW a fast rise in temperatures is extremely dangerous to life diversity on Earth, which is essential to our own survival.
Life diversity is not essential to our own survival. We depend instead on a rather small number of species, both for direct benefit and to sustain an ecosystem.
We KNOW the atmosphere has a feedback component and a lot of inertia
No, we don't. Instead we KNOW that heat radiates as the fourth power of temperature which is a strong negative feedback mechanism.
Your sister doesn't work in a field with tens of thousands of researchers.
Really? How many, according to you? Tens of thousands sound about right to me.
Sounds right to someone without a clue. For example, most of the research about which climate change research and advocacy is based comes from a few dozen researchers.
Also the simple radiative model doesn't take into account clouds or convection.
It does. Clouds account to the albedo of the planet.
Nope, clouds have a much higher albedo than Earth does. Thus, you have to consider other factors such as how often clouds form and the degree of cloud cover.
The only (local) bias in the model was due to underestimating the amount of heat absorbed by the oceans, which slow down warming in the immediate term but induces a positive feedback in the long term (since warmer water implies less CO2 dissolved in the oceans). All in all, the amount of energy in our atmosphere is steadily rising at the pace predicted by the models.
Where's the evidence for this claim? This is a "God of the gaps" argument where the missing heat is attributed to ignorance of our environment - it must be in the places we don't know much about, rather than to flaws in our models.
Similar claims are made for the differences between GISS satellite data and weather station data. Satellite data supposedly shows heating that doesn't exist in the instrument record, so it must be in the locations where we don't have instruments. Or it could be flawed satellite data. But that doesn't seem to be considered.
It's not like we haven't seen how the Civil Rights movement ran its course, the Privacy Rights movement will probably play out quite similarly.
From what you wrote, I take it you haven't actually paid attention to how the Civil Rights movement played out. Reverse discrimination, the core legislative tool of that time, still ended up being racism, but sanctioned racism against an approved ethnic group. Current problems have nothing to do with people getting raised wrong by racist parents and a lot to do with the failure of modern tools intended to prevent racism.
Now, how can the Privacy Rights movement fail in that way? There's no easily identifiable group against which we can practice reverse spying. Quota systems? Runs into the Fourth Amendment.
Now our enemy is not hate, but fear. Fast cars and Fast food kill 400 times more people every year than 9/11, but our government used the event as to manufacture consent for a "War on Terror" instead of a war on the far more dangerous Automobiles, Happy Meals, The Flu, Bathroom Falls, Lightning, etc.
This is disingenuous. Automobiles don't kill more people, if we don't work hard to keep them from doing so. They can't escalate. As a result, insentient causes of death are a different quality than deliberate, sentient ones.
For example, the Washington, DC area had 10 murders in a 20 day period in 2002 from two people acting as a sniper team. If they had been allowed to continue their activities at that death rate for the last eleven years, we'd be around 2000 deaths by now. That's assuming that the team didn't escalate their activities to more destructive and lethal means (they had already escalated from seven murders in the previous eight months).
Sure, it was a vast overreaction to the 911 attacks, but any causing of death which involves people and for which the killers expected to gain, always requires more attention and resources than a cause of death that just happens because of the potential for escalation. As I've said before, it would have been a terrible idea to wait till Al Qaeda figured out how to profit from these sorts of attacks or build up the logistics so that they could frequently and routinely cause 9/11 scale harm.
But when one party completely blocks useful and meaningful compromise, the system breaks down.
That's working as intended. Keep in mind that this obstruction helped hinder some of the worst law of the past few decades.
We ALL pay into a pool and share the risk so that we individually won't be crushed by the financial burden of an illness. Insurance (even catastrophic coverage) cannot work unless everyone pays for stuff they probably wont need.
So what does contraception have to do with this? I doubt it would help people who can't be bothered to buy and use cheap contraceptives, for example.
You cannot buy a plan after the fact because they do not kick in immediately. Most plans even through the health exchanges take at least 2 weeks (usually more) to take effect and cannot be purchased at any time. In all likelihood you will incur a huge amount of medical bills in the event of an accident or serious illness prior to receiving coverage.
Are you serious? There's a lot of expensive health problems that can be put off for two weeks. A physical injury generally doesn't cost that much. And in the rare situation where it does, then go with bankruptcy and move on. A chronic medical condition does. People who do this were always part of the "uninsured". They aren't going to stop making these calculations just because you really want them to.
How is my being forced to pay for Lockheed to build an F22 any different from my having to pick an insurance company and buy insurance from them?
First, the F22 is a tool which furthers an explicit role of the US federal government, providing for the defense of the US. Second, if it turns out too expensive, the US government and actually has reduced the number it buys. There's no similar limit on the cost of health insurance. It's a mandate. You have to spend the money.
So, the ACA required that insurers cover pre-existing conditions, and the necessary tradeoff is that everybody has to buy insurance. Otherwise anybody with half a brain would just sign up on their way to the hospital and cancel the day after they get all their prescriptions filled after being discharged. In fact, that could still be a problem because for as much as people complain about the penalty for not having insurance it really isn't that large which makes incurring it the rational self-interested choice in most cases.
This is the typical stupid argument that comes as a result of creating a public good. We now have to control the behavior of hundreds of millions of people in order to keep the public good from getting overconsumed. This is the primary reason I oppose the program in the first place. Because it provides yet another control lever for a powerful government, the same government whose abuses have been discussed here in recent days.
I can already tell you how it'll turn out unless someone fixes the system. The cost of health insurance and health care will continue to climb at a rate much faster than inflation. To control the increase in health insurance subsidies (recall that spending on health insurance is capped to a small percentage of wages for those covered by the subsidies), more people will be shoved onto Medicaid/Medicare and Medicaid/Medicare benefits will continue to decline.
And of course, the federal government will tighten its grip on the public in order to control personal decisions which cost money to the federal government.
I'm sure at some point that the system will have failed sufficiently hard that the federal government comes up with yet another fix. But the people proposing these sorts of solutions never seem to learn from what didn't work before. The fact that your Medicaid coverage is crap will be more important than coming up with a viable plan.
Clearly there has to be some sort of limitation on this sort of thinking.
And why does there "need" to be such a limitation? You can after all get your own insurance or your own contraception. And please keep in mind that the Christian Scientists could use the same sort of reasoning to prevent health insurance from providing any money for contraceptives. The people you elect aren't magically going to stay in office forever. This reasoning is a dog that bites the hand that feeds it.
But what really puzzles me about this debate is who the contraceptive thing is meant for. Either the person uses cheap contraceptives or they don't. I don't see health insurance helping even a little bit here. A charity giving out free condoms will have more impact IMHO.
But global warming is not a binary state. I grant that there is compelling evidence for the existence of global warming. What I don't grant is that there is evidence that we need to do anything about global warming now.
There are plenty of people with various reasons and incentives for portraying global warming as being an urgent matter. And paleoclimate data is one of the weak spots being attacked IMHO. That's why I advocate looking at actual global temperature data over the next few decades. That can't be faked unlike interpreting tree rings or ice cores from a time before instruments.
As my sister (A post-doc climate researcher) pointed out to me once , her profession is filled with tens of thousands of researchers desparately looking for that one piece of evidence that would show that the whole fields got it wrong and theres nothing to look for. Unfortunately in the century since scientists started worring about CO2 and infra-red, that evidence has failed to materialize.
Your sister doesn't work in a field with tens of thousands of researchers. Also the simple radiative model doesn't take into account clouds or convection. So there probably is a temperature forcing from higher CO2 levels, but it is smaller than expected from the basic radiative model because there is small scale weather which partially increases the rate of heat transfer to the upper atmosphere and to space.