President Obama did not "beat a bunch of drums"; he dropped $768 billion in stimulus funding and through the Fed, trillions of bonds into the economy.
And the end result was worse than what Obama's economists claimed would have happened, if nothing had been done.
Your claim that the recession "would end anyway" without any action is specious and incomplete at best, flat wrong at worst. Even IF you accept the notion that the economy would eventually recover without any sort of government intervention, you must make the case that the economy would recover at the same time it would have WITH intervention, which you have not.
That's why I backed my observation elsewhere with two pieces of evidence, the unusually slow recovery compared to previous recoveries and the numerous cases where the Obama administration has prioritized ideological or venal goals over economic recovery (such as his war on fossil fuels or the takeover of General Motors for the benefit of labor unions).
But glancing at my link, I see that economists working for the Obama administration came to the same conclusion as I and then went on to claim a full recovery in unemployment rate by the beginning of 2014!
The most felony convictions under any president ever came out of the Reagan White House.
[...]
Obama has been the best POTUS of my 56 year lifetime. Not great, but better than all before him by far.
Lack of convictions doesn't mean lack of crimes. When will someone from the ATF get convicted for supplying firearms to the Sinaloa cartel or being an accomplice to the murder of a federal law enforcement agent? The Fast and Furious scandal was a pretty open and shut criminal case, but no one was ever indicted, much less convicted, on anything.
That was an observation not a question. Let's look at the full quote again.
You still miss how natural gas has been made cheaper than coal. The cost of operating a power plant is not just the price of the fuel.
Fracking doesn't make the capital costs of building a natural gas plant less. A coal power plant that is already built and paid for can be cheaper to operate and have higher return on expenditure than a natural gas power plant that hasn't been built yet, even if the coal is more expensive for the energy output than the natural gas is.
Which is why I compared his performance with those of other economies.
I explained why that's a bad idea. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, but he still doesn't see as well as someone with two eyes. And once again, I noted some evidence pointing to Obama not being helpful to the US's economy.
Really any way you look at it, his economic record is not the problem.
In a year's time, sure. But he's still president as of now and no matter how you look at it, he's done quite a bit to interfere with the US economy.
p.s. most of the coal plant problems are due to cheap gas. seriously look it up.
You still miss how natural gas has been made cheaper than coal. The cost of operating a power plant is not just the price of the fuel.
Seeing as your economic expectations of Obama are merely that he doesn't interfere so badly with the US economy that it can't recover from the recent recession, I really don't see the point of meeting any expectations you would have.
W I was much more about the disintegration of empires run by one dominant ethnic group into several states run by locally dominant and formerly repressed ethnic groups, whereas WW II was much more about a handful of ethnic groups re-establishing dominance over many others in new multi-national empires.
And WW III would have been about something else too. Not seeing the point here.
The Japanese had already agreed to cease hostilities and surrender.
No, they hadn't.
The Germans also offered to surrender in 1943
That didn't happen either. And I can't help but notice you defended that latter point with the following:
In 1943, Wilhelm Canaris [wikipedia.org], the head of the Abwehr (German Intelligence) offered to assassinate Hitler and end the war. Churchill's reply was that the Allies would accept no terms but unconditional surrender. Later in the war, the Nazis executed Canaris for treason.
So two observations here. First Canaris is not Germany. He was at best a representative of a faction which may have been attempting to negotiate in good faith or not with the British. And since he got executed, that indicates his faction probably couldn't have delivered on their promises even if they wanted to.
In July 1944, a coup was launched and an attempt was made to assassinate Hitler. The plan was to kill Hitler, and then immediately negotiate a surrender. The assassination failed, but the coup did not collapse until it was clear that the Allies had refused to negotiate and were unwilling to accept any terms that included soldiers returning home,
Again, a relatively weak faction is not Germany. And the squashing of the coup leaders indicates they didn't have the power to negotiate a surrender just like Canaris didn't in 1943.
Finally, even if we pretend the situation were as you suggested, why would it be better to accept those terms of surrender? The obvious flaw with this argument is that the Second World War was a rerun of the First World War with the same parties starting both wars. Accepting conditions of surrender that allow Germany to start the Third World War in another generation are not an improvement.
No, you just have to somehow manage to miss that the economy turned around from the tailspin it fell into under Bush, people got considerably more access to healthcare, a bunch of idiot prejudice towards the LGBT community got considerably set back, predatory consumer credit practices have been reduced, both of that idiot Bush's wars of aggression have been considerably scaled back...
Ever hear of confirmation bias? If a solar eclipse happens and I beat a bunch of drums, do I deserve the credit for scaring the sky dragon away from the Sun? When something will end anyway such as a recession or social pressure applied to prejudice, we don't give credit for "turning around" the recession or making prejudiced people hide for a time, we give credit for making things better than they would be in the absence of action.
Such ridiculous price swings are symptoms of Germany's seriously broken market. And as another poster noted, the cheap side of the price swings are rather unpredictable. Someone might be able to make money at leveling out those price swings, assuming there aren't regulations against doing so, but I don't see that it's a huge opportunity.
Win for all, and great for the environment.
Not for the end user of that electricity who gets to pay an average of almost double the rate of several neighbors of Germany (such as France and Poland).
I might not agree with the rest of what you said, but at least one ca subjectively argue about it. economics on the other hand has numbers behind it and the USA has objectively don great, be it in terms of economic GDP growth, employment expansion, deficit reduction and as compared to most other developed nations.
A really important point about economic policy here is that there would a recovery from the recent recession anyway, even if Obama had done nothing. You have to realize that economies naturally fall into recessions and naturally recover from them in turn. The real matter is whether Obama helped or hindered.
I think it's towards hindered because both of the relatively slow recovery compared to historical recoveries and Obama's notorious prioritization of economic recovery below novel interpretation of regulation (like the aggressive regulation of the fossil fuel industry, which has shut down coal power plants and hindered oil drilling and pipeline construction) and patronage schemes (like the labor union-favored takeover of General Motors).
For example, you claim that SCOTUS did a number of unanimous rulings against O. Other than his appointing a person during what should have been a congressional recession (but GOP was pulling a stupid action), what other unanimous SCOTUS rulings were there?
While we're still in the part of the Court's term before the decisions start flying fast and furiously, I thought I'd present the latest update on where we stand with respect to those unanimous losses, where President Obama doesn't even get the votes of the two justices he appointed. Here are the stats:
In the first 6.5 years of Obama's presidency (January 2009 to June 2015), the government lost unanimously at the Supreme Court 23 times, an average of 3.62 cases per year.
In all 8 years of George W. Bush's presidency, the government lost unanimously 15 times (1.875 cases per year).
In all 8 years of Bill Clinton's presidency, the government lost 23 times (2.875 cases per year).
In other words, Obama has lost unanimously twice as often as Bush and 1.5 times as often as Clinton. Obama also passed Bush's 8-year total in less than 5 years.
The Justice Department's unanimous loss rate from 2012 to 2014 was especially bad - 13 cases in 30 months - almost three times Bush's overall rate and almost twice Clinton's (and that doesn't count amicus litigating positions with unanimous losses).
Another indication of the aggressiveness of the Obama administration is the high portion of losses at the Supreme Court. Obama's administration loses ten percent more of their cases than the next least successful modern (since Truman) president, Kennedy.
Some of these cases were so callous and disregarded existing law so badly that one wonders why, upon reading of the case in the morning newspaper, Obama didn't start firing people. For example, Sackett v. EPA is breathtaking in its attempted increase of government power. The EPA actually claimed in this case that the Sackett family, who had started to build a home on land that the EPA deemed to be wetlands, did not have standing to sue the EPA until they paid a large fine and reversed construction on the site.
I might not agree with the rest of what you said, but at least one ca subjectively argue about it. economics on the other hand has numbers behind it and the USA has objectively don great, be it in terms of economic GDP growth, employment expansion, deficit reduction and as compared to most other developed nations.
Most other developed world countries are committing economic suicide. Not everyone is as far along as the PIGS or Japan, but there's a lot of bad moves elsewhere over the span of Obama's tenure.
I think it's better to compare the US's current performance to past performance as a better indication. If you do so, then the "done great" stats you mention just aren't that great.
Why would history judge his presidency to be horrible?
Why wouldn't it? The primary arguments for Obama are checking off the appropriate ethnicity boxes, kludging pre-existing medical conditions, and being the lesser of two evils in two presidential races.
The arguments against include pathological and often criminal behavior in his administration on par with the worst in US history, remarkably bad legislative and regulatory efforts, terrible economic policy, terrible foreign policy, and a larger than normal number of unanimous Supreme Court defeats for blatantly unconstitutional practices.
The obvious rebuttal is that those old movies don't really have much to do with the current world and there's way too much "save the space whale" tales to dilute the message.
Further, I think anyone who will go whole hog on that technocratic approach will deliberately forget history, Futurism-style. Those old movies will be ignored because they are decreed to be irrelevant.
One obvious rebuttal is that the title of the paper is "Interactions between sea-level rise and wave exposure on reef island dynamics in the Solomon Islands". But they don't actually measure the effects of sea level rise and thus, can't say anything about the interactions of sea level rise and wave exposure. This can be seen in the conclusion to the study:
This study represents the ïrst assessment of shoreline change from the Solomon Islands, a global sea-level rise hotspot. We have documented ïve vegetated reef islands(1â"5hainsize)thathaverecentlyvanishedand a further six islands experiencing severe shoreline recession. Shoreline recession at two sites has destroyed villages that have existed since at least 1935, leading to community relocations. The large range of erosion severity on the islands in this study highlights the critical need to understand the complex interplay between the projected accelerating sea-level rise, other changes in global climate such as winds and waves, and local tectonics, to guide future adaptation planning and minimise social impacts.
In other words, we have nothing to add to the particular issue of sea level rise interactions with wave exposure on reef island dynamics, contrary to our title, but we think they're probably important.
And if these researchers think that the media is misrepresenting their research, then they are free to correct the media presentation of it.
You're deliberately confusing being taxed by a legitimate government and being robbed by somebody, who may or may not pretend to something less honest than outright greed.
Because we all should only be robbed by legitimate governments.
Once again, political enemies are claiming that a Clinton has broken many laws and is headed to jail.
Once again, the released evidence doesn't support this, but there have been many many leaks which "prove" that THIS TIME they are guilty.
Once again, despite the fact that every other time the accusations have been baseless or quite overblown, many people believe fall for this.
Well, the thing is, Clinton has broken laws here. After all, we have clearly classified information (eg, satellite photos) being passed on her email server to unauthorized parties without Clinton attempting to report or correct the exposure of this information. We have her instructing a subordinate to strip headers off of classified information. Those are felonies not baseless accusations. In response, you assert stuff without an indication that you understand the problem here.
I wasn't saying her server didn't have holes - I was pointing out that your language seemed to imply that she 'created' those holes for some purpose - presumably to welcome in enemies of the US. Now maybe you didn't intend to say that, but you sure seemed to be implying it.
I write for reasonable people. It would not have seemed that way to them.
I neither said or implied that Clinton was trying to destroy the US
No, you just said she 'created security holes'.
Ok, seems to me just fine. I don't see here any implication of my words that Clinton was trying to destroy the US or even create security holes. Once again, outcome doesn't imply intent.
Except there's no evidence that she broke the law at all. The current rule that would render her server illegal was enacted after she left office.
There are many more laws in the US than just that one. She maintained an unauthorized server on which classified information was passed on, and didn't notify anyone about those breaches of security. That's felonies right there. She instructed employees to strip classified headers from an email. That is a felony as well. If she evaded FOIA requests for any reason, including because Republicans, that's a felony.
it's much more likely that Clinton's purposes are benign
But it's wasted if you use that money to make airbags that don't shoot little bits of metal into your face, or you use that money to make cars that don't burn when rear-ended? It seems that the argument is trying to be something like the broken glass fallacy, except the moral of your and Friedman's story seems to be "whoopsie, I broke the glass, but I'll be damned if that glazier's getting a cent. You're going to have to leave the glass broken or people are going to starve for no discernible reason!!1!"
Already something like 10,000 to 1 airbags are of the type that don't shoot metal or whatever into your face. They shoot airbag.
If they are both designed to fire little bits of metal into your face
Airbags aren't designed to do that. And some shot gun shells will take your head off, which isn't a problem with airbags no matter what the press is.
Once the design flaw is known to exist, continuing to use that design is intentional.
It's not much of a design flaw let us note. And we still are left with the observation that it is most likely killing more people than it saves through the squandering of resources on frivolous, vast scale theater, not even counting the ignored problems that likely exist with installation of replacement airbags.
Ugh, just because Apple experiences incentives to waste cash (which are provided by the same people behind the 70 airbag recall) doesn't mean that $10 billion (or perhaps much more, I see the figure of $24 billion bandied about) is going to be wasted. It depends on the incentives of your society.
And I find it deeply ironic that you babble about non sequiturs while simultaneously using the completely irrelevant example of Apple. Psychological projection at its finest.
How about when I get into a car that may or may not have an airbag made by this company that may or may not be defective?
How about you don't lose your shit over minor risks of living?
Meanwhile, tell me: What's the difference between maybe shooting a man in the face with a shotgun and making a machine that maybe shoots a man in the face with a shotgun? Pucker up, ugly pug, and drive real careful.
Here's another non sequitur. An airbag is not a shotgun.
How the hell you get from presumed incompetence to run a secure email server to "there's a really good chance she created security holes which were exploited". If you think HRC had any inkling of an intention to purposely 'create' holes to leak stuff she was obviously trying to keep private, you're insanely paranoid. If you think she had the technical sophistication to do it - even if she had wanted to - you're just dumb.
Come on, this is basic stuff. Clinton is a high value target for several world-class intelligence agencies. I'm sure your close buddy, Putin would never dream of throwing a few hackers at this server, but maybe your close buddy, Xi Jinping would.
And one doesn't need intent to screw up security on an email server any more than one needs intent to drive into a ditch. That's so stupid even you should have figured it out before you wrote it. Things which are unintended happen, but they happen more often to the incompetent.
And your post misses an obvious point. An email server on the State Department's network can still get hacked, but they have a lot more brainpower, manpower, and firepower to throw at any detected intrusions than the people Clinton employed. By making her own server, even if the people setting it up were awesome, that server is not protected like official servers would be.
The simplest explanation is always the best. Hillary knew that if her email were subject to subpoena, members of the opposition party would spend her full tenure ginning up reasons to do it. Why? On the off chance that they'd find something they could use against her. And y'know what? She was right about that. So your FOIA avoidance explanation is kind of right - give the man a prize! - but you're kind of wrong on the reasoning behind it. Now, when she made up that excuse about not wanting to carry two devices - yep, she was lying. I for one, understand the lie and why she told it. Only someone paranoid enough to think she was intentionally trying to compromise US security could ignore this obvious explanation and go down that route.
Well, there's an obvious solution here. Throw Clinton in jail for a few years and future Secretaries of State won't use that as an excuse to blatantly break the law. It doesn't get any simpler than that.
Of course, you tried to use that as an excuse for Clinton's actions, because Republicans. And of course, your close buddy, Clinton would never lie to you about the reasons she needed to evade FOIA requests.
Clinton has one overarching goal. To make history as the first woman president, and presumably, to do a good enough job at it to be treated well in those history books. And that's not the worst thing in the world, either. If she merely wanted to get rich, a Yale-educated lawyer could find much easier ways to do that. But if you're willing to entertain the fantasy that she (or anyone for that matter) would spend an entire lifetime accruing credentials (whatever you may think of her particular ones) to run for president - just to destroy the country...
Another profoundly stupid paragraph from the peanut gallery. I neither said or implied that Clinton was trying to destroy the US. I find it remarkable how the tools trying to defend Clinton come up with the dumbest arguments. You are truly a hammer in the proverbial bag of hammers.
Look, maybe you ought to just let the grown ups talk, kay?
It's actually kind of jaw-dropping listening to Friedman ramble on with his non sequiturs about safe cars causing people to starve to death.
That's why Friedman is an economist and you are an idiot. That there are tremendous costs to making things too safe is not in doubt. This story is a prime example. They can only point to a handful of deaths and about an order of magnitude more injuries. Successful deployments to excessive injury deployments are about 10,000 to 1.
Meanwhile poverty kills many orders of magnitude more than that. A society, which is willing to burn $10 billion or more dollars just to save about a dozen lives every four years, will in the process kill a lot more people due to starvation and the other problems of poverty. That diversion of resources could have fed and employed a lot of people.
There's a similar dysfunction in medical regulation where the lives of a few test subjects are more important than the lives of the billions of people who could benefit from medical improvements that human testing is required for. The result is a net harm to society.
The bill for the broken eggs will come due, and the people who insisted they be allowed to break them shall be hunted down and made to pay it.
A lot of humans will need to suffer for humans, if we're going to get the sort of health technologies that will prevent most human illnesses and dysfunctions currently in existence. Animal models only take you so far.
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President Obama did not "beat a bunch of drums"; he dropped $768 billion in stimulus funding and through the Fed, trillions of bonds into the economy.
And the end result was worse than what Obama's economists claimed would have happened, if nothing had been done.
Your claim that the recession "would end anyway" without any action is specious and incomplete at best, flat wrong at worst. Even IF you accept the notion that the economy would eventually recover without any sort of government intervention, you must make the case that the economy would recover at the same time it would have WITH intervention, which you have not.
That's why I backed my observation elsewhere with two pieces of evidence, the unusually slow recovery compared to previous recoveries and the numerous cases where the Obama administration has prioritized ideological or venal goals over economic recovery (such as his war on fossil fuels or the takeover of General Motors for the benefit of labor unions).
But glancing at my link, I see that economists working for the Obama administration came to the same conclusion as I and then went on to claim a full recovery in unemployment rate by the beginning of 2014!
The most felony convictions under any president ever came out of the Reagan White House.
[...] Obama has been the best POTUS of my 56 year lifetime. Not great, but better than all before him by far.
Lack of convictions doesn't mean lack of crimes. When will someone from the ATF get convicted for supplying firearms to the Sinaloa cartel or being an accomplice to the murder of a federal law enforcement agent? The Fast and Furious scandal was a pretty open and shut criminal case, but no one was ever indicted, much less convicted, on anything.
You still miss how natural gas has been made cheaper than coal. The cost of operating a power plant is not just the price of the fuel.
Fracking doesn't make the capital costs of building a natural gas plant less. A coal power plant that is already built and paid for can be cheaper to operate and have higher return on expenditure than a natural gas power plant that hasn't been built yet, even if the coal is more expensive for the energy output than the natural gas is.
Which is why I compared his performance with those of other economies.
I explained why that's a bad idea. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, but he still doesn't see as well as someone with two eyes. And once again, I noted some evidence pointing to Obama not being helpful to the US's economy.
Really any way you look at it, his economic record is not the problem.
In a year's time, sure. But he's still president as of now and no matter how you look at it, he's done quite a bit to interfere with the US economy.
p.s. most of the coal plant problems are due to cheap gas. seriously look it up.
You still miss how natural gas has been made cheaper than coal. The cost of operating a power plant is not just the price of the fuel.
I don't expect you to acknowledge this.
Seeing as your economic expectations of Obama are merely that he doesn't interfere so badly with the US economy that it can't recover from the recent recession, I really don't see the point of meeting any expectations you would have.
W I was much more about the disintegration of empires run by one dominant ethnic group into several states run by locally dominant and formerly repressed ethnic groups, whereas WW II was much more about a handful of ethnic groups re-establishing dominance over many others in new multi-national empires.
And WW III would have been about something else too. Not seeing the point here.
The Japanese had already agreed to cease hostilities and surrender.
No, they hadn't.
The Germans also offered to surrender in 1943
That didn't happen either. And I can't help but notice you defended that latter point with the following:
In 1943, Wilhelm Canaris [wikipedia.org], the head of the Abwehr (German Intelligence) offered to assassinate Hitler and end the war. Churchill's reply was that the Allies would accept no terms but unconditional surrender. Later in the war, the Nazis executed Canaris for treason.
So two observations here. First Canaris is not Germany. He was at best a representative of a faction which may have been attempting to negotiate in good faith or not with the British. And since he got executed, that indicates his faction probably couldn't have delivered on their promises even if they wanted to.
In July 1944, a coup was launched and an attempt was made to assassinate Hitler. The plan was to kill Hitler, and then immediately negotiate a surrender. The assassination failed, but the coup did not collapse until it was clear that the Allies had refused to negotiate and were unwilling to accept any terms that included soldiers returning home,
Again, a relatively weak faction is not Germany. And the squashing of the coup leaders indicates they didn't have the power to negotiate a surrender just like Canaris didn't in 1943.
Finally, even if we pretend the situation were as you suggested, why would it be better to accept those terms of surrender? The obvious flaw with this argument is that the Second World War was a rerun of the First World War with the same parties starting both wars. Accepting conditions of surrender that allow Germany to start the Third World War in another generation are not an improvement.
No, you just have to somehow manage to miss that the economy turned around from the tailspin it fell into under Bush, people got considerably more access to healthcare, a bunch of idiot prejudice towards the LGBT community got considerably set back, predatory consumer credit practices have been reduced, both of that idiot Bush's wars of aggression have been considerably scaled back...
Ever hear of confirmation bias? If a solar eclipse happens and I beat a bunch of drums, do I deserve the credit for scaring the sky dragon away from the Sun? When something will end anyway such as a recession or social pressure applied to prejudice, we don't give credit for "turning around" the recession or making prejudiced people hide for a time, we give credit for making things better than they would be in the absence of action.
Win for all, and great for the environment.
Not for the end user of that electricity who gets to pay an average of almost double the rate of several neighbors of Germany (such as France and Poland).
I might not agree with the rest of what you said, but at least one ca subjectively argue about it. economics on the other hand has numbers behind it and the USA has objectively don great, be it in terms of economic GDP growth, employment expansion, deficit reduction and as compared to most other developed nations.
A really important point about economic policy here is that there would a recovery from the recent recession anyway, even if Obama had done nothing. You have to realize that economies naturally fall into recessions and naturally recover from them in turn. The real matter is whether Obama helped or hindered.
I think it's towards hindered because both of the relatively slow recovery compared to historical recoveries and Obama's notorious prioritization of economic recovery below novel interpretation of regulation (like the aggressive regulation of the fossil fuel industry, which has shut down coal power plants and hindered oil drilling and pipeline construction) and patronage schemes (like the labor union-favored takeover of General Motors).
For example, you claim that SCOTUS did a number of unanimous rulings against O. Other than his appointing a person during what should have been a congressional recession (but GOP was pulling a stupid action), what other unanimous SCOTUS rulings were there?
Well, here's an answer to that.
While we're still in the part of the Court's term before the decisions start flying fast and furiously, I thought I'd present the latest update on where we stand with respect to those unanimous losses, where President Obama doesn't even get the votes of the two justices he appointed. Here are the stats:
Another indication of the aggressiveness of the Obama administration is the high portion of losses at the Supreme Court. Obama's administration loses ten percent more of their cases than the next least successful modern (since Truman) president, Kennedy.
Some of these cases were so callous and disregarded existing law so badly that one wonders why, upon reading of the case in the morning newspaper, Obama didn't start firing people. For example, Sackett v. EPA is breathtaking in its attempted increase of government power. The EPA actually claimed in this case that the Sackett family, who had started to build a home on land that the EPA deemed to be wetlands, did not have standing to sue the EPA until they paid a large fine and reversed construction on the site.
I might not agree with the rest of what you said, but at least one ca subjectively argue about it. economics on the other hand has numbers behind it and the USA has objectively don great, be it in terms of economic GDP growth, employment expansion, deficit reduction and as compared to most other developed nations.
Most other developed world countries are committing economic suicide. Not everyone is as far along as the PIGS or Japan, but there's a lot of bad moves elsewhere over the span of Obama's tenure.
I think it's better to compare the US's current performance to past performance as a better indication. If you do so, then the "done great" stats you mention just aren't that great.
That is, if you care about the facts.
Back at you.
Why would history judge his presidency to be horrible?
Why wouldn't it? The primary arguments for Obama are checking off the appropriate ethnicity boxes, kludging pre-existing medical conditions, and being the lesser of two evils in two presidential races.
The arguments against include pathological and often criminal behavior in his administration on par with the worst in US history, remarkably bad legislative and regulatory efforts, terrible economic policy, terrible foreign policy, and a larger than normal number of unanimous Supreme Court defeats for blatantly unconstitutional practices.
The obvious rebuttal is that those old movies don't really have much to do with the current world and there's way too much "save the space whale" tales to dilute the message.
Further, I think anyone who will go whole hog on that technocratic approach will deliberately forget history, Futurism-style. Those old movies will be ignored because they are decreed to be irrelevant.
Evidence distinguishes between hypotheses.
This study represents the ïrst assessment of shoreline change from the Solomon Islands, a global sea-level rise hotspot. We have documented ïve vegetated reef islands(1â"5hainsize)thathaverecentlyvanishedand a further six islands experiencing severe shoreline recession. Shoreline recession at two sites has destroyed villages that have existed since at least 1935, leading to community relocations. The large range of erosion severity on the islands in this study highlights the critical need to understand the complex interplay between the projected accelerating sea-level rise, other changes in global climate such as winds and waves, and local tectonics, to guide future adaptation planning and minimise social impacts.
In other words, we have nothing to add to the particular issue of sea level rise interactions with wave exposure on reef island dynamics, contrary to our title, but we think they're probably important.
And if these researchers think that the media is misrepresenting their research, then they are free to correct the media presentation of it.
You're deliberately confusing being taxed by a legitimate government and being robbed by somebody, who may or may not pretend to something less honest than outright greed.
Because we all should only be robbed by legitimate governments.
Once again, political enemies are claiming that a Clinton has broken many laws and is headed to jail. Once again, the released evidence doesn't support this, but there have been many many leaks which "prove" that THIS TIME they are guilty. Once again, despite the fact that every other time the accusations have been baseless or quite overblown, many people believe fall for this.
Well, the thing is, Clinton has broken laws here. After all, we have clearly classified information (eg, satellite photos) being passed on her email server to unauthorized parties without Clinton attempting to report or correct the exposure of this information. We have her instructing a subordinate to strip headers off of classified information. Those are felonies not baseless accusations. In response, you assert stuff without an indication that you understand the problem here.
Kennedy also didn't want to get involved in Vietnam.
But he got involved anyway. Sometimes the worst problems come from the people who didn't want to get involved allegedly, but decided to meddle anyway.
I wasn't saying her server didn't have holes - I was pointing out that your language seemed to imply that she 'created' those holes for some purpose - presumably to welcome in enemies of the US. Now maybe you didn't intend to say that, but you sure seemed to be implying it.
I write for reasonable people. It would not have seemed that way to them.
I neither said or implied that Clinton was trying to destroy the US
No, you just said she 'created security holes'.
Ok, seems to me just fine. I don't see here any implication of my words that Clinton was trying to destroy the US or even create security holes. Once again, outcome doesn't imply intent.
Except there's no evidence that she broke the law at all. The current rule that would render her server illegal was enacted after she left office.
There are many more laws in the US than just that one. She maintained an unauthorized server on which classified information was passed on, and didn't notify anyone about those breaches of security. That's felonies right there. She instructed employees to strip classified headers from an email. That is a felony as well. If she evaded FOIA requests for any reason, including because Republicans, that's a felony.
it's much more likely that Clinton's purposes are benign
Whistling past the graveyard.
But it's wasted if you use that money to make airbags that don't shoot little bits of metal into your face, or you use that money to make cars that don't burn when rear-ended? It seems that the argument is trying to be something like the broken glass fallacy, except the moral of your and Friedman's story seems to be "whoopsie, I broke the glass, but I'll be damned if that glazier's getting a cent. You're going to have to leave the glass broken or people are going to starve for no discernible reason!!1!"
Already something like 10,000 to 1 airbags are of the type that don't shoot metal or whatever into your face. They shoot airbag.
If they are both designed to fire little bits of metal into your face
Airbags aren't designed to do that. And some shot gun shells will take your head off, which isn't a problem with airbags no matter what the press is.
Once the design flaw is known to exist, continuing to use that design is intentional.
It's not much of a design flaw let us note. And we still are left with the observation that it is most likely killing more people than it saves through the squandering of resources on frivolous, vast scale theater, not even counting the ignored problems that likely exist with installation of replacement airbags.
And I find it deeply ironic that you babble about non sequiturs while simultaneously using the completely irrelevant example of Apple. Psychological projection at its finest.
How about when I get into a car that may or may not have an airbag made by this company that may or may not be defective?
How about you don't lose your shit over minor risks of living?
Meanwhile, tell me: What's the difference between maybe shooting a man in the face with a shotgun and making a machine that maybe shoots a man in the face with a shotgun? Pucker up, ugly pug, and drive real careful.
Here's another non sequitur. An airbag is not a shotgun.
How the hell you get from presumed incompetence to run a secure email server to "there's a really good chance she created security holes which were exploited". If you think HRC had any inkling of an intention to purposely 'create' holes to leak stuff she was obviously trying to keep private, you're insanely paranoid. If you think she had the technical sophistication to do it - even if she had wanted to - you're just dumb.
Come on, this is basic stuff. Clinton is a high value target for several world-class intelligence agencies. I'm sure your close buddy, Putin would never dream of throwing a few hackers at this server, but maybe your close buddy, Xi Jinping would.
And one doesn't need intent to screw up security on an email server any more than one needs intent to drive into a ditch. That's so stupid even you should have figured it out before you wrote it. Things which are unintended happen, but they happen more often to the incompetent.
And your post misses an obvious point. An email server on the State Department's network can still get hacked, but they have a lot more brainpower, manpower, and firepower to throw at any detected intrusions than the people Clinton employed. By making her own server, even if the people setting it up were awesome, that server is not protected like official servers would be.
The simplest explanation is always the best. Hillary knew that if her email were subject to subpoena, members of the opposition party would spend her full tenure ginning up reasons to do it. Why? On the off chance that they'd find something they could use against her. And y'know what? She was right about that. So your FOIA avoidance explanation is kind of right - give the man a prize! - but you're kind of wrong on the reasoning behind it. Now, when she made up that excuse about not wanting to carry two devices - yep, she was lying. I for one, understand the lie and why she told it. Only someone paranoid enough to think she was intentionally trying to compromise US security could ignore this obvious explanation and go down that route.
Well, there's an obvious solution here. Throw Clinton in jail for a few years and future Secretaries of State won't use that as an excuse to blatantly break the law. It doesn't get any simpler than that.
Of course, you tried to use that as an excuse for Clinton's actions, because Republicans. And of course, your close buddy, Clinton would never lie to you about the reasons she needed to evade FOIA requests.
Clinton has one overarching goal. To make history as the first woman president, and presumably, to do a good enough job at it to be treated well in those history books. And that's not the worst thing in the world, either. If she merely wanted to get rich, a Yale-educated lawyer could find much easier ways to do that. But if you're willing to entertain the fantasy that she (or anyone for that matter) would spend an entire lifetime accruing credentials (whatever you may think of her particular ones) to run for president - just to destroy the country...
Another profoundly stupid paragraph from the peanut gallery. I neither said or implied that Clinton was trying to destroy the US. I find it remarkable how the tools trying to defend Clinton come up with the dumbest arguments. You are truly a hammer in the proverbial bag of hammers.
Look, maybe you ought to just let the grown ups talk, kay?
It's actually kind of jaw-dropping listening to Friedman ramble on with his non sequiturs about safe cars causing people to starve to death.
That's why Friedman is an economist and you are an idiot. That there are tremendous costs to making things too safe is not in doubt. This story is a prime example. They can only point to a handful of deaths and about an order of magnitude more injuries. Successful deployments to excessive injury deployments are about 10,000 to 1.
Meanwhile poverty kills many orders of magnitude more than that. A society, which is willing to burn $10 billion or more dollars just to save about a dozen lives every four years, will in the process kill a lot more people due to starvation and the other problems of poverty. That diversion of resources could have fed and employed a lot of people.
There's a similar dysfunction in medical regulation where the lives of a few test subjects are more important than the lives of the billions of people who could benefit from medical improvements that human testing is required for. The result is a net harm to society.
The bill for the broken eggs will come due, and the people who insisted they be allowed to break them shall be hunted down and made to pay it.
When's your turn at being prey, pretty boy?
A lot of humans will need to suffer for humans, if we're going to get the sort of health technologies that will prevent most human illnesses and dysfunctions currently in existence. Animal models only take you so far.