And I'm under a different impression. Looking at the Wikipedia article, it looks like he could have stayed in the US as well. Having said that, various prominent US scientists and politicians did publicly defend him.
Even if you look at the fringe cases where treatment is exorbitantly expensive, the government will side with the doctor and then use its power of negotiation to get the pharmaceutical companies to lower their prices. They do this because they negotiate on behalf of all Canadians and no company is stupid enough to cut them selves from the entire Canadian market over one type of treatment that is an edge case.
So right here in your first paragraph, we see the Canadian government at some level exercising control over what health care is provided. Here, you claim the Canadian government is exercising monopsony power over the health care market. Since they are negotiating on behalf of the Canadian health care consumer, they are implicitly controlling what health care that consumer receives.
Why do i need to be involved in the negotiation? All i want is to be able to go to the doctor and get taken care of with a minimal personal expense. When the government bears the expense then it is their prerogative to lower costs by playing hardball with the suppliers to lower the costs of the medicine which they are better off doing because they have the weigh of our population behind them in the negotiations.
Because it's your health. I think I merely state the obvious that a lot of people would consume less health care if they were confronted with the choice of paying more for extra health care they might receive.
Your health insurance companies have to make money to pay their investors, our government doesn't even need to worry about running a profit as every Canadian is an equal shareholder thus any profit they run would just lower our taxes.
In other words, health insurance companies and private health care providers have to be efficient while governments flush immense amounts of other peoples' money without a second thought.
Let's establish an important fact here - especially since your comment is woefully lacking in facts. Single-payer health care does not mean the government tells your doctor what to do. It does not mean there is a bureaucrat in the office with you second guessing every decision your physician makes. What it does mean is that everyone has the same base level of care (which is currently a completely alien concept in the US) and the government sets the rates they will pay for certain things. You want other things? You can go buy them yourself.
Sure, it does. Should we start looking at examples of real world single payer systems to see these very behaviors you say don't exist?
As to the "base level of care", that already exists. It's whatever you can get in an emergency room for free or Medicaid, if you qualify for the program.
If you would set down your kool-aid for a moment and think about this problem you would realize that the physicians have little to do with what is charged for their services. These rates are mostly set by the health insurance industry and various costs that come from dealing with them.
It really comes from the complete exclusion of the actual consumer of health care from the negotiation.
No, because the other services can still be offered. You are free to pursue any kind of health care you want - or none at all if you so choose - as a medicare patient. You just know that medicare will cover some things and not others. It is no different from private health insurance, and I have not heard anyone raise a stink about health insurance "controlling" health care.
It's still control. I explained the mechanism by which the control works.
Also no. The group that decides who can offer medical services is primarily the AMA, they decide what makes a person qualified as a physician. The government will decide who they will pay to offer those services but that doesn't mean you can't go elsewhere. There are physicians in this country who don't accept medicare (and some who never have) and they make it through their careers just fine.
And who gave the AMA that power? State licensing boards. You're not thinking.
We have already seen so many exceptions carved out from that such that the regulation you mention is of nearly no consequence.
Saying that doesn't make it true. I already gave counterexamples. Malpractice lawsuits are another example for which so many exceptions have not been made.
First of all, no. They are free to use other hospitals and clinics if they so choose. They may have to pay for those on their own if they have no other health insurance, but they are not prevented from going to them. It is worth noting that in many areas the VA has programs set up that if they cannot get in to see a provider soon enough they will be a covered referral to go elsewhere.
Your objection is irrelevant to the matter at hand. It doesn't refute even a little the observation that the VA is another means by which the US government controls health care of its residents.
We've discussed this before.
Single payer is not government control of health care, period.
Which is 1984-style doublespeak. There's nothing here to rebut. Single payer is a tremendous extension of government power, and of course, control in this area.
There is no way that congress of any foreseeable future would ever pass single payer, regardless of how much the public wants it.
The DNC won't allow Bernie to become president, which will prevent him from being able to propose single payer as president.
The president cannot implement single payer on his own regardless.
The insurance industry owns politicians on both sides of the aisle, they won't allow their servants to pass single payer - and it would be impossible to throw out all the congresspeople who are owned by the insurance industry in any number of election cycles.
I would love for single payer to be impossible. But unlike you, I'm not a fool to believe it is impossible merely because I couldn't see how it would happen in the short term.
Still not hearing a reason to give a shit. A key part of making decisions is understanding what the consequences are either way. If Bangladesh is going to become a massive refugee problem anyway, indistinguishable in outcome, then we need to come up with a better reason for doing things.
It might help if you thought about this a bit. The first thing is not espionage and coincidentally is not considered espionage. The second was (incidentally breaking US law in the process) and was considered espionage. That's the desired outcome, right? We wouldn't want the authorities to confuse their labels, right?
Except there's been a long history of bogus espionage cases against Chinese scientists, going all the way back to Quan Xuesen, one of the founders of the JPL. We suspected that he was sharing his knowledge with China, so we exiled him to China, where he became the father of the Chinese missile and space programs.
Which, needless to say, is a strong indication he really was spying for the Chinese.
Government does not control healthcare for medicare patients. What it does do is set the prices that they will pay for services
Which is control especially given that they pay for some services and not others, and decide who can offer those services. Let us recall that the primary means of control by the federal government is through its funding. For example, tying highway funding to the states in the late 70s to establishment of 55 MPH as a speed limit. Another example is so-called "Title IX" regulations on gender discrimination in colleges which receive federal funding.
I notice several other means by which the federal government controls health care have not yet been mentioned. For an insurer to offer health care insurance, they have to satisfy regulations, including regulations on what services are offered (mandated coverage of birth control being a notorious recent example) and not being able to refuse coverage to people with preexisting conditions. People are now required to have health insurance with the IRS as a result getting some access to health care information of every taxpayer in the US.
The federal government also controls directly the health care of current and former military personnel through its Veteran Affairs hospitals.
And of course, there's future proposals, such as single payer plans, which would extend greatly the US government's power over health care. Just because such plans haven't been successful to date doesn't mean that they will never be.
So what if that were actually true? Let us keep in mind that Bangladesh is going to lose a lot of land anyway just due to natural, non-climate related sinking of the land. And I'm not interested in harming the rest of the world just because Bangladesh is in a bad spot.
A great deal of warming happened after 1970, and we have excellent measurements of the solar forcing in that period. On average, solar forcing went down as temperatures went up.
No, solar forcing is a calculated value based on a rather standard model not a direct observation. And given that there's still a factor of three difference between lowest and highest value of the temperature forcing from CO2, I don't buy that we have precise enough determination of solar forcing to justify your claim.
As demonstrated by their lack of solutions, it's clear that politicians have no interest to deal with the AGW problem. Paying someone to make it go away would be a perfect solution.
Lack of solutions doesn't mean one isn't interested in using the problem. The US has various interminable wars on vague concepts which weren't started because their politicians had solutions or interest in dealing with the problems.
I would LOVE for someone to come along with some real scientific evidence that shows AGW is bullshit.
Which AGW theory? The one where it is thought that humans are responsible for a considerable or even majority of observed global warming? The one where it is thought that 2C warming since 1850 should be the limit we should try for because AGW harm past that point is more important than any other challenges we face? Or the theory that claims we need to stop most industrial activity right now or face catastrophic consequences, including possible extinction of humanity?
There's a scale of belief from complete refusal of any sort of global warming through to the world will end in our lifetimes. The key problem is that certain people want us to act now on AGW which hasn't been shown to be urgent despite all the insistence to the contrary.
Chernobyl killed 100,000 to 1,000,000 depending on how you count and whom you ask.
My, that's a bit higher than the 46 or so people who have actually died from Chernobyl. Makes you wonder how many people died from sunlight which is a much more significant radiation release over that same time period. Eighteen billion maybe?
Nobody is suggesting Venus, nobody is even suggesting end Permian extinction (unless we keep this up for a millennium or so).
Actually a few are on Slashdot. So if they're here, they're probably elsewhere in the world too.
What is being suggested is that given what we know now, most of the possible outcomes are ones where trying to do something about the problem now works out to cost less than living with the consequences.
Suggested being the key word. There are common key problems to these suggestions such as exaggeration of costs of AGW, downplaying costs of mitigation, and ignoring the serious problems that have come with current attempts at AGW mitigation.
The estimates seem to say that in the next 100 years around 10% of the population will be displaced by this.
There are three problems with this. First, they aren't predicting enough sea level rise to do that. Even the worst estimates are around 1 meter rise from 2000 and currently we're on track for about a third of that.
Even when someone is displaced, it would be only by a short distance. It's not much of a refugee problem, if the people just move a few miles.
Third, that 10% of the population would probably move a few times anyway in the next century. It's my belief that it would be difficult at the societal level to notice the effects of sea level rise over the next century. Some slivers of coastal land might lose value or become uninhabited, but people would just move on to more viable locations without much problem.
This is not a serious work. There's too many authors from the Cook et al 2013 study which came up with the bogus 97% consensus claim in the first place.
To outline what was wrong with the 2013 paper, the primary author, John Cook, who incidentally is also the primary author of this current work, already had started working out the propaganda uses of the research before he started the 2013 study, the raters (of which eight of the nine coauthors of that 2013 work are coauthors on this paper) discussed papers and authors in what was supposed to be a double-blind study, there was plenty of bias exhibited by the raters in internal discussions, and a bunch of misclassified and/or ignored papers. A couple of key discussions of these problems can be found here and here.
Bottom line is that the Cook 2013 study was so bad, biased, and predisposed to use as pro-climate change propaganda, that it should have never been published. I consider it outright fraud. Now, he and his fellow coauthors get to contaminate another such survey? That's very foolish.
Ultimately, the problem here is that this is an argument from authority fallacy, written by a primary author, John Cook who has already demonstrated that he is too biased to do credible scientific work.
So what is it about the science of climate change that you cannot verify yourself ?
The climate past about 150 years ago. For example, a key problem about which there is a great deal of confidence, but not a great deal of evidence is the assertion that solar forcing is not responsible for a majority of the global warming since 1850.
Exactly. Surveys among scientists are a way to derive policy from science. How else would you do it ? Have the President and Senate go out with thermometers and test it themselves ? Of course, scientists themselves are not basing their opinion on consensus. They are free to disagree and show evidence for their position.
Just because a problem is hard, doesn't justify that sort of short cut. And you ignore huge confirmation bias here. Let us keep in mind that there is all sorts of money for confirming global warming and exaggerating its effects. Sure, you would be free to disagree with the consensus and show evidence, but you aren't going to get significant funding to do so.
How about next time you discuss the topic at hand, instead of making up shit.
Now, we're into denial of Japanese atrocities which is suspiciously like the corresponding denial of Nazi Germany's atrocities. Remember the first rule of holes: when you're stuck in a hole, stop digging.
See, that's the problem: I don't think "equal opportunity" means anything in conservative rhetoric. It's simply a way to handwave away the problems inherent in the conservative value system by claiming you support equality in some abstract sense which has no effect on the actual, extremely inequal outcomes. That would be fine if this was just some philosophical debate, but people have to live with those outcomes.
Look, your argument is stupid. Words have meaning and in this case opportunity != outcome. I find it interesting how you have this considerable willful misunderstanding of someone's argument while this AC summed you up quite well.
The current push amongst the "social justice" left is equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.
It reminds me of Vox Day's three laws of the Social Justice Warrior: always lie, always double down, and always project. You willfully misinterpret someone's words in order to make an embarrassing terrible rhetorical argument and then double down through your above rationalization.
Note in particular, your claim that what you think of it is what matters. It is irrelevant that you think that "equal opportunity" doesn't mean anything in conservative rhetoric. What matters in that regard is what the users of the rhetoric think their words mean. And as I noted in my earlier reply, that meaning is rather clear. You have implied here that your thinking on the rhetoric corresponds with the conservatives' thinking on the rhetoric. That is projection.
Thus, I find it interesting that you demonstrate all three degenerate behaviors described by Vox Day's three laws.
"Japan was evil because they were imperialist and wanted territory" argument always seems to ignore the fact that the majority of the resource rich territories they were interested in had already been carved up and claimed as the empires of far flung western powers. French Indochina, US Philippines , Dutch East Indies, etc.
Dumb argument to make since it still wasn't theirs to take.
I also note that the fact that the USA had been helping the Chinese in the 2nd Sino-Japanese war via their loan assistance program didn't help matters. The USA was effectively already at war with Japan by proxy.
Another dumb argument to make since there was no cause for Japan to invade China.
Japan was at war with China, in the middle of this the Allies decided to cut off 80% of the oil supply to the country. To then act surprised that Japan acted to secure resources, or that Japan was asking for a nuclear bomb, is simplistic in the extreme.
I doubt the US was surprised that Japan responded. Instead, they were surprised by the effectiveness of the response. Further, I can't imagine what the point of "less aggressive economic warfare" would be. The Japanese had already invaded several neighbors and was a clear threat to the rest of the world. Any lesser action than cutting off as completely as possible Japan's ability to make war would not make a sensible response to this threat.
And the subsequent war and killing of millions of Japanese citizens was a sensible response to Japan's wholesale escalation of the conflict to a matter of survival.
The Social Security trust fund is by law invested in US bonds.
Since the US bonds don't actually create an obligation of the federal government (they're not actually owed to anyone physical, including you) to pay them off nor an obligation to grant a certain level of benefit to Social Security pensioners, it is completely irrelevant. They are merely the legal machinery by which excess Social Security funds have been dumped into the general fund for the past 80 years and from there, squandered.
It's just a pay-as-you-go program gussied up as a traditional pension fund.
As far as ending the sorry mess goes, that would have a REALLY big impact on people my age and older. It would have to be phased out over a long time. I'm going to guess that you're probably under 40, which means that if SS ended you could use the freed-up funds to put together a substantial 401(k) or IRA. I'm not.
I don't have a problem with that since I didn't create the mess or fail to fix it over the course of my life. Sooner or later this pyramid scheme will collapse. I'd rather it happened while the people largely responsible for it were still alive to help take their share of the burden.
I've been paying into that program all my working life, and I'd like to get something from it.
Last I heard, cutting back benefits by 25% would allow the hamster wheel to keep spinning indefinitely (though that may be understating the scope of the problem). I don't see the belt tightening happening yet for some odd reason.
and I'd like either my SS benefits or my money back, adjusted for inflation and with a reasonable interest rate
Wouldn't we all? Problem is that we can't all do that and still have a functioning federal government in the US. I believe the key problem is simply that the entire Social Security surplus has been dropped down a rat hole for its entire lifespan. There is no investment from which to recover the money you or I put in.
It's politically possible to make changes to keep the program on a sound financial footing, or gradual changes (like the gradual increase in full retirement age for people born in 1948-1960), but arbitrarily abolishing the program isn't going to happen.
I'm quite aware of the lock-in that the program has. But my belief is that the usual creative accounting that the federal government engages in will eventually whittle away the benefits of the program via inflation or other means. I'd rather just end the sorry mess now than deal with the consequences of the games that would otherwise be played in the future to make ends meet.
And there are other programs that are in much worse shape, such as the federal employees and railroad employees retirement pensions or Medicare.
It may well be beneficial to the economy to dump the elderly into the streets with no way to support themselves, or simply shoot them, but I don't consider that morally acceptable.
Well, we'll either fix our problems or get to the point where that sort of thing does become morally acceptable. It alarms me quite a bit that the problems have been left to fester for many decades. That's not a good sign for the future.
if some demented evil country pulverized American cities with nuclear bombs, that would be entirely fine and excusable because the US would be prosperous a few decades later?
Why would the US be prosperous a few decades later? It's worth noting here that leaving the military government in charge of Japan in the 40s would probably not be better for Japan or those citizens of Hiroshima.
Slashdot Mirror
And I'm under a different impression. Looking at the Wikipedia article, it looks like he could have stayed in the US as well. Having said that, various prominent US scientists and politicians did publicly defend him.
Even if you look at the fringe cases where treatment is exorbitantly expensive, the government will side with the doctor and then use its power of negotiation to get the pharmaceutical companies to lower their prices. They do this because they negotiate on behalf of all Canadians and no company is stupid enough to cut them selves from the entire Canadian market over one type of treatment that is an edge case.
So right here in your first paragraph, we see the Canadian government at some level exercising control over what health care is provided. Here, you claim the Canadian government is exercising monopsony power over the health care market. Since they are negotiating on behalf of the Canadian health care consumer, they are implicitly controlling what health care that consumer receives.
Why do i need to be involved in the negotiation? All i want is to be able to go to the doctor and get taken care of with a minimal personal expense. When the government bears the expense then it is their prerogative to lower costs by playing hardball with the suppliers to lower the costs of the medicine which they are better off doing because they have the weigh of our population behind them in the negotiations.
Because it's your health. I think I merely state the obvious that a lot of people would consume less health care if they were confronted with the choice of paying more for extra health care they might receive.
Your health insurance companies have to make money to pay their investors, our government doesn't even need to worry about running a profit as every Canadian is an equal shareholder thus any profit they run would just lower our taxes.
In other words, health insurance companies and private health care providers have to be efficient while governments flush immense amounts of other peoples' money without a second thought.
Let's establish an important fact here - especially since your comment is woefully lacking in facts. Single-payer health care does not mean the government tells your doctor what to do. It does not mean there is a bureaucrat in the office with you second guessing every decision your physician makes. What it does mean is that everyone has the same base level of care (which is currently a completely alien concept in the US) and the government sets the rates they will pay for certain things. You want other things? You can go buy them yourself.
Sure, it does. Should we start looking at examples of real world single payer systems to see these very behaviors you say don't exist?
As to the "base level of care", that already exists. It's whatever you can get in an emergency room for free or Medicaid, if you qualify for the program.
If you would set down your kool-aid for a moment and think about this problem you would realize that the physicians have little to do with what is charged for their services. These rates are mostly set by the health insurance industry and various costs that come from dealing with them.
It really comes from the complete exclusion of the actual consumer of health care from the negotiation.
No, because the other services can still be offered. You are free to pursue any kind of health care you want - or none at all if you so choose - as a medicare patient. You just know that medicare will cover some things and not others. It is no different from private health insurance, and I have not heard anyone raise a stink about health insurance "controlling" health care.
It's still control. I explained the mechanism by which the control works.
Also no. The group that decides who can offer medical services is primarily the AMA, they decide what makes a person qualified as a physician. The government will decide who they will pay to offer those services but that doesn't mean you can't go elsewhere. There are physicians in this country who don't accept medicare (and some who never have) and they make it through their careers just fine.
And who gave the AMA that power? State licensing boards. You're not thinking.
We have already seen so many exceptions carved out from that such that the regulation you mention is of nearly no consequence.
Saying that doesn't make it true. I already gave counterexamples. Malpractice lawsuits are another example for which so many exceptions have not been made.
First of all, no. They are free to use other hospitals and clinics if they so choose. They may have to pay for those on their own if they have no other health insurance, but they are not prevented from going to them. It is worth noting that in many areas the VA has programs set up that if they cannot get in to see a provider soon enough they will be a covered referral to go elsewhere.
Your objection is irrelevant to the matter at hand. It doesn't refute even a little the observation that the VA is another means by which the US government controls health care of its residents.
We've discussed this before.
Single payer is not government control of health care, period.
Which is 1984-style doublespeak. There's nothing here to rebut. Single payer is a tremendous extension of government power, and of course, control in this area.
There is no way that congress of any foreseeable future would ever pass single payer, regardless of how much the public wants it.
The DNC won't allow Bernie to become president, which will prevent him from being able to propose single payer as president.
The president cannot implement single payer on his own regardless.
The insurance industry owns politicians on both sides of the aisle, they won't allow their servants to pass single payer - and it would be impossible to throw out all the congresspeople who are owned by the insurance industry in any number of election cycles.
I would love for single payer to be impossible. But unlike you, I'm not a fool to believe it is impossible merely because I couldn't see how it would happen in the short term.
Still not hearing a reason to give a shit. A key part of making decisions is understanding what the consequences are either way. If Bangladesh is going to become a massive refugee problem anyway, indistinguishable in outcome, then we need to come up with a better reason for doing things.
It might help if you thought about this a bit. The first thing is not espionage and coincidentally is not considered espionage. The second was (incidentally breaking US law in the process) and was considered espionage. That's the desired outcome, right? We wouldn't want the authorities to confuse their labels, right?
Except there's been a long history of bogus espionage cases against Chinese scientists, going all the way back to Quan Xuesen, one of the founders of the JPL. We suspected that he was sharing his knowledge with China, so we exiled him to China, where he became the father of the Chinese missile and space programs.
Which, needless to say, is a strong indication he really was spying for the Chinese.
Government does not control healthcare for medicare patients. What it does do is set the prices that they will pay for services
Which is control especially given that they pay for some services and not others, and decide who can offer those services. Let us recall that the primary means of control by the federal government is through its funding. For example, tying highway funding to the states in the late 70s to establishment of 55 MPH as a speed limit. Another example is so-called "Title IX" regulations on gender discrimination in colleges which receive federal funding.
I notice several other means by which the federal government controls health care have not yet been mentioned. For an insurer to offer health care insurance, they have to satisfy regulations, including regulations on what services are offered (mandated coverage of birth control being a notorious recent example) and not being able to refuse coverage to people with preexisting conditions. People are now required to have health insurance with the IRS as a result getting some access to health care information of every taxpayer in the US.
The federal government also controls directly the health care of current and former military personnel through its Veteran Affairs hospitals.
And of course, there's future proposals, such as single payer plans, which would extend greatly the US government's power over health care. Just because such plans haven't been successful to date doesn't mean that they will never be.
Just remember, don't bring a gun to the "better stick" contest. That would be cheating.
So what if that were actually true? Let us keep in mind that Bangladesh is going to lose a lot of land anyway just due to natural, non-climate related sinking of the land. And I'm not interested in harming the rest of the world just because Bangladesh is in a bad spot.
A great deal of warming happened after 1970, and we have excellent measurements of the solar forcing in that period. On average, solar forcing went down as temperatures went up.
No, solar forcing is a calculated value based on a rather standard model not a direct observation. And given that there's still a factor of three difference between lowest and highest value of the temperature forcing from CO2, I don't buy that we have precise enough determination of solar forcing to justify your claim.
As demonstrated by their lack of solutions, it's clear that politicians have no interest to deal with the AGW problem. Paying someone to make it go away would be a perfect solution.
Lack of solutions doesn't mean one isn't interested in using the problem. The US has various interminable wars on vague concepts which weren't started because their politicians had solutions or interest in dealing with the problems.
Alternative? Keep observing. If there are any real problems with climate change, it will turn up eventually.
I would LOVE for someone to come along with some real scientific evidence that shows AGW is bullshit.
Which AGW theory? The one where it is thought that humans are responsible for a considerable or even majority of observed global warming? The one where it is thought that 2C warming since 1850 should be the limit we should try for because AGW harm past that point is more important than any other challenges we face? Or the theory that claims we need to stop most industrial activity right now or face catastrophic consequences, including possible extinction of humanity?
There's a scale of belief from complete refusal of any sort of global warming through to the world will end in our lifetimes. The key problem is that certain people want us to act now on AGW which hasn't been shown to be urgent despite all the insistence to the contrary.
Chernobyl killed 100,000 to 1,000,000 depending on how you count and whom you ask.
My, that's a bit higher than the 46 or so people who have actually died from Chernobyl. Makes you wonder how many people died from sunlight which is a much more significant radiation release over that same time period. Eighteen billion maybe?
Nobody is suggesting Venus, nobody is even suggesting end Permian extinction (unless we keep this up for a millennium or so).
Actually a few are on Slashdot. So if they're here, they're probably elsewhere in the world too.
What is being suggested is that given what we know now, most of the possible outcomes are ones where trying to do something about the problem now works out to cost less than living with the consequences.
Suggested being the key word. There are common key problems to these suggestions such as exaggeration of costs of AGW, downplaying costs of mitigation, and ignoring the serious problems that have come with current attempts at AGW mitigation.
The estimates seem to say that in the next 100 years around 10% of the population will be displaced by this.
There are three problems with this. First, they aren't predicting enough sea level rise to do that. Even the worst estimates are around 1 meter rise from 2000 and currently we're on track for about a third of that.
Even when someone is displaced, it would be only by a short distance. It's not much of a refugee problem, if the people just move a few miles.
Third, that 10% of the population would probably move a few times anyway in the next century. It's my belief that it would be difficult at the societal level to notice the effects of sea level rise over the next century. Some slivers of coastal land might lose value or become uninhabited, but people would just move on to more viable locations without much problem.
This is not a serious work. There's too many authors from the Cook et al 2013 study which came up with the bogus 97% consensus claim in the first place.
To outline what was wrong with the 2013 paper, the primary author, John Cook, who incidentally is also the primary author of this current work, already had started working out the propaganda uses of the research before he started the 2013 study, the raters (of which eight of the nine coauthors of that 2013 work are coauthors on this paper) discussed papers and authors in what was supposed to be a double-blind study, there was plenty of bias exhibited by the raters in internal discussions, and a bunch of misclassified and/or ignored papers. A couple of key discussions of these problems can be found here and here.
Bottom line is that the Cook 2013 study was so bad, biased, and predisposed to use as pro-climate change propaganda, that it should have never been published. I consider it outright fraud. Now, he and his fellow coauthors get to contaminate another such survey? That's very foolish.
Ultimately, the problem here is that this is an argument from authority fallacy, written by a primary author, John Cook who has already demonstrated that he is too biased to do credible scientific work.
So what is it about the science of climate change that you cannot verify yourself ?
The climate past about 150 years ago. For example, a key problem about which there is a great deal of confidence, but not a great deal of evidence is the assertion that solar forcing is not responsible for a majority of the global warming since 1850.
Exactly. Surveys among scientists are a way to derive policy from science. How else would you do it ? Have the President and Senate go out with thermometers and test it themselves ? Of course, scientists themselves are not basing their opinion on consensus. They are free to disagree and show evidence for their position.
Just because a problem is hard, doesn't justify that sort of short cut. And you ignore huge confirmation bias here. Let us keep in mind that there is all sorts of money for confirming global warming and exaggerating its effects. Sure, you would be free to disagree with the consensus and show evidence, but you aren't going to get significant funding to do so.
How about next time you discuss the topic at hand, instead of making up shit.
Now, we're into denial of Japanese atrocities which is suspiciously like the corresponding denial of Nazi Germany's atrocities. Remember the first rule of holes: when you're stuck in a hole, stop digging.
See, that's the problem: I don't think "equal opportunity" means anything in conservative rhetoric. It's simply a way to handwave away the problems inherent in the conservative value system by claiming you support equality in some abstract sense which has no effect on the actual, extremely inequal outcomes. That would be fine if this was just some philosophical debate, but people have to live with those outcomes.
Look, your argument is stupid. Words have meaning and in this case opportunity != outcome. I find it interesting how you have this considerable willful misunderstanding of someone's argument while this AC summed you up quite well.
The current push amongst the "social justice" left is equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.
It reminds me of Vox Day's three laws of the Social Justice Warrior: always lie, always double down, and always project. You willfully misinterpret someone's words in order to make an embarrassing terrible rhetorical argument and then double down through your above rationalization.
Note in particular, your claim that what you think of it is what matters. It is irrelevant that you think that "equal opportunity" doesn't mean anything in conservative rhetoric. What matters in that regard is what the users of the rhetoric think their words mean. And as I noted in my earlier reply, that meaning is rather clear. You have implied here that your thinking on the rhetoric corresponds with the conservatives' thinking on the rhetoric. That is projection.
Thus, I find it interesting that you demonstrate all three degenerate behaviors described by Vox Day's three laws.
"Japan was evil because they were imperialist and wanted territory" argument always seems to ignore the fact that the majority of the resource rich territories they were interested in had already been carved up and claimed as the empires of far flung western powers. French Indochina, US Philippines , Dutch East Indies, etc.
Dumb argument to make since it still wasn't theirs to take.
I also note that the fact that the USA had been helping the Chinese in the 2nd Sino-Japanese war via their loan assistance program didn't help matters. The USA was effectively already at war with Japan by proxy.
Another dumb argument to make since there was no cause for Japan to invade China.
Japan was at war with China, in the middle of this the Allies decided to cut off 80% of the oil supply to the country. To then act surprised that Japan acted to secure resources, or that Japan was asking for a nuclear bomb, is simplistic in the extreme.
I doubt the US was surprised that Japan responded. Instead, they were surprised by the effectiveness of the response. Further, I can't imagine what the point of "less aggressive economic warfare" would be. The Japanese had already invaded several neighbors and was a clear threat to the rest of the world. Any lesser action than cutting off as completely as possible Japan's ability to make war would not make a sensible response to this threat.
And the subsequent war and killing of millions of Japanese citizens was a sensible response to Japan's wholesale escalation of the conflict to a matter of survival.
The Social Security trust fund is by law invested in US bonds.
Since the US bonds don't actually create an obligation of the federal government (they're not actually owed to anyone physical, including you) to pay them off nor an obligation to grant a certain level of benefit to Social Security pensioners, it is completely irrelevant. They are merely the legal machinery by which excess Social Security funds have been dumped into the general fund for the past 80 years and from there, squandered.
It's just a pay-as-you-go program gussied up as a traditional pension fund.
As far as ending the sorry mess goes, that would have a REALLY big impact on people my age and older. It would have to be phased out over a long time. I'm going to guess that you're probably under 40, which means that if SS ended you could use the freed-up funds to put together a substantial 401(k) or IRA. I'm not.
I don't have a problem with that since I didn't create the mess or fail to fix it over the course of my life. Sooner or later this pyramid scheme will collapse. I'd rather it happened while the people largely responsible for it were still alive to help take their share of the burden.
Can't have parasites without food. And here. the government funding is the food source.
I've been paying into that program all my working life, and I'd like to get something from it.
Last I heard, cutting back benefits by 25% would allow the hamster wheel to keep spinning indefinitely (though that may be understating the scope of the problem). I don't see the belt tightening happening yet for some odd reason.
and I'd like either my SS benefits or my money back, adjusted for inflation and with a reasonable interest rate
Wouldn't we all? Problem is that we can't all do that and still have a functioning federal government in the US. I believe the key problem is simply that the entire Social Security surplus has been dropped down a rat hole for its entire lifespan. There is no investment from which to recover the money you or I put in.
It's politically possible to make changes to keep the program on a sound financial footing, or gradual changes (like the gradual increase in full retirement age for people born in 1948-1960), but arbitrarily abolishing the program isn't going to happen.
I'm quite aware of the lock-in that the program has. But my belief is that the usual creative accounting that the federal government engages in will eventually whittle away the benefits of the program via inflation or other means. I'd rather just end the sorry mess now than deal with the consequences of the games that would otherwise be played in the future to make ends meet.
And there are other programs that are in much worse shape, such as the federal employees and railroad employees retirement pensions or Medicare.
It may well be beneficial to the economy to dump the elderly into the streets with no way to support themselves, or simply shoot them, but I don't consider that morally acceptable.
Well, we'll either fix our problems or get to the point where that sort of thing does become morally acceptable. It alarms me quite a bit that the problems have been left to fester for many decades. That's not a good sign for the future.
if some demented evil country pulverized American cities with nuclear bombs, that would be entirely fine and excusable because the US would be prosperous a few decades later?
Why would the US be prosperous a few decades later? It's worth noting here that leaving the military government in charge of Japan in the 40s would probably not be better for Japan or those citizens of Hiroshima.