Bad analogy. You don't "hire" a congressman to do a specific job (well, some people DO, but let's assume for a moment that they are truly representative), it's more of an overhead cost for having a government at all. And compared to having NO government, it's a pretty good bargain (the overhead of running congress itself, that is).
But I do think you're wrong about the OP's point, which is really more along the lines of Thoreau: "That government is best which governs least...", as in, when they aren't passing laws to tax us, or drone us, or take away our rights, that's better than when they are. For a good look at how someone can arrive at this conclusion, take a look at the legislation or issues that have enjoyed overwhelming with "bipartisan support":
I can't see how this furthers the exploration of space, which seems to be the very last priority on the budget sheet these days, and the one that gets entirely cut first.
Tell you what - you keep defending this kind of waste of resources, and I'll refocus my efforts from fully funding the agency to eliminating it entirely. Maybe then enough money will be freed up to help the private enterprises that are doing things like... actually furthering our reach into space.
Scientific discovery using spaceborne instruments, such as GRACE, is part of NASA's core mission.
But this isn't scientific discovery, since gravity was already discovered 150 years ago. "NASA's mission is to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research."
Some tortured logic could be conjured up to claim there is some blue-sky "discovery" that has some chance of being made on this mission, but meanwhile the rest of the explicit mission seems to be getting swept under the rug.
it also means that you are paying for services that you are not receiving
No, Congress is not a "service". It's a representative body. The vast amount of money required to run Congress is the only real problem, but that money is such a small percentage of the budget as to be basically irrelevant.
Why are aeronautical engineers, astrophysicists, rocket scientists, etc. involved in perpetuating a political agenda based on bad "science" for an administration that refuses to fund the organization's actual purpose?
I'll ask the opposite question: why shouldn't aeronautical engineers, astrophysicists, and rocket scientists be involved in trying to make unambiguous measurements of a critical issue, to try to resolve key questions in a way that's independent of computer models or temperature measurements? Making an independent measurement of key scientific claims using a different technique is pretty much the gold standard of science.
Because the budget has been cut so much that doing those things means there's no money left for the core mission of... aeronautics and space?
But that's an implementation detail not reflective of an inherent flaw in socialism - rearrange it so that (for example) everyone is entitled to the same benefits and tax rates are adjusted to *gradually* cancel it out as income approaches the median and the demotivational aspects vanish.
That seems to defy human nature. How do you encourage someone coming from a culture of dependence to devote a significant amount of their time to an endeavor that would barely reap even marginal benefits in the short term? How do you keep them from gaming such a system to reap maximum benefits, while using their time to reap rewards that a black market economy can provide? Especially in a socialist environment where there are many more opportunities for a black market to exist (there being a greater amount of controlled commerce and contraband)?
Okay, you are an income redistribution advocate. I'm curious, have you done any back-of-the-envelope calculations on the worker / beneficiary ratios that you could expect in a rational socialist state? That is, what percentage of the population would basically end up never being required to work? What is the range?
Which brings up another point - a socialized medical system is in a far better position to promote *preventative* medicine than a for-profit system - and preventative medicine tends to cost far, far less per-person (which is *exactly* why it sees little support in for-profit systems)
This assertion doesn't really make sense in a system (as exists in the US) supported 80% by third-party payment systems. Are you saying the payers are so ignorant of this dynamic that they blindly refuse to pay for preventative services out of that ignorance? There are really only 2 effective ways to control costs of health care:
1. A bureaucratic system where supply is limited to certain amounts by fiat (such as NHS), or
2. The consumers of health services have market options that allow them to shop prices, and incentives to do so
Option #2 actually exists to a limited extent in the US today. There are services such as lasic eye correction, cosmetic dental procedures, and that 20% of consumers that do not rely on 3rd party systems for payment. Price controls in these markets work extremely well. There is significant competition in all but the later category, and even there the ranges of prices that are offered (when they are available) are extremely wide.
And having already been ruled on by an Administrative hearing, the hurdle is much much higher for VZ than normal court case
Not quite. Actually, this decision is the first opportunity for Verizon to challenge the ruling in a court, according to the APA (Administrative Procedure Act). You can't challenge rules written by an executive agency until you reach the "final action" by the agency. This is it.
Protip: They are effectively a first-level court, at least in their area of power.
Not trying to be a dick, just trying to introduce you to the very baffling world of administrative law.
Well, you're right, except it's not that baffling if you just think of bureaucrats as lords of the manor, and everyone else as dirty serfs. Sure, the bureaucrats bicker all the time over who gets which piece of the dirt, but as a serf, it's clear that your portion is exactly nothing.
There is a huge difference between progressive tax system (note that the US has the most progressive tax system in the world), which you claim to advocate, and the socialist-welfare state that creates nothing but dependence and destroys dignity among the poor and destroys incentives for work and taking risks to grow among the well-to-do.
You're right about government supporting corporatism though - that's what's giving capitalism a bad name in the world right now, and it's not even capitalism at all, it's closer to fascism.
I have to LOL at this complaint. $44,000 doesn't really "fund" very much, less than Al Gore gets for a single speaking engagement. He's probably lucky to have gotten even that.
... the claim is that an increase in CO2 concentrations from about 380 PPM to 600 PPM will cause a "tipping effect" and exponential feedback loop causing catastrophically accelerated global warming.
Is that the scientific consensus? Or your straw man?
Are you really that ignorant of the basic claims of the IPCC and the climate models? You could argue that my numbers are off, but they are in the less than 400 PPM range, which far from "massive quantities" represents atmospheric increases of less than 0.05%. Of course there's not much talk about the tipping point these days, since NASA data indicated that more energy was being released from the atmosphere than the models were using.
No, he's a well known denier... He's not a climatologist; he's a local meteorologist... Fox affiliate... unpublished,... ripped to shreds... the Heartland Institute... conservative... industry money... denial... global warming denial... Koch Industries... denial... tobacco and cancer... Philip-Morris),
Countdown was too slow.
It's only a "3 - Informative" so far. Need to throw in some "extremist right-winger" and "Mobil oil", maybe some "earth-destroying" adjectives to reach the +5.
Journals like controversial findings, for the same reason that newspapers up-play their headlines: it attracts attention. Furthermore, a shoddy paper with a controversial conclusion will often spur a slew of debate and comments, each citing the original paper, and thus raising the journals impact factor.
That's true generally, but journals focused on climate science are the rather obvious exception, and has been for some time.
There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that surface temperatures are rising. Scientist knows it, Military knows it, farmers and fishermen know it. I'm surprised people are still trying to disprove things that are in plain sight for everyone to see.
Try at LEAST reading the summary of the paper, even if you can't be bothered to try to understand it. The paper does not attempt to refute temperature increases, it only points out errors in the US surface temperature as reported by NOAA.
Yeah because Watts doesn't have an agenda *eye roll*
Oh, he has an "agenda"? You seem to know something - what is Watt's agenda? Who is paying him? What does he stand to gain? What is his ultimate goal, and how does this further his ambitions?
I don't quite get how massive quantities of greenhouse gas released in the atmosphere would mysteriously lose their greenhouse effect potential at some point. How exactly is chrb's post extraordinary in its claims? Please explain.
Define "massive quantities", and then fix your understanding of the actual claims. The claim is NOT that an increase in CO2 (the least effective of all known greenhouse gasses) will cause an increase in warming, the claim is that an increase in CO2 concentrations from about 380 PPM to 600 PPM will cause a "tipping effect" and exponential feedback loop causing catastrophically accelerated global warming.
That's just stupid. Most qualified scientists agree So we can't trust them to review each other's work . If we applied that sort of thinking everywhere there would be no accepted concensus on basic arithmetic.
It depends on which side of the debate they are on. If they are AGW proponents, then it's a consensus of experts. If they are deniers, then it is confirmation bias.
I've never dried "drop therapy" or "impact maintenance". I'm sure it could help under specific circumstances like a stuck spindle or loose connection but I've never witness it.
That seems like something that would never work on a hard drive. However, I had a Deskstar drive that actually came out of a broken computer and sat on the shelf for a couple of months before I tried to re-use it. I plugged it in, along with an identical model drive that worked fine, and it would not spin up. I tried multiple troubleshooting techniques, and I had pretty much resigned myself to checking the warranty and sending it back, but at that moment of frustration I slammed the thing on the floor, and low and behold it started right up!
It worked fine for I know years after that, and is probably still working now.
I'm afraid your link is firewalled off here: "politics/opinion". An OPINION piece is worthless.
I don't know WTF you're talking about or responding to. Do you know how to use the Internet? What a totally worthless attempt to dismiss a fact - one that everyone already knew about, (that is, Monsanto's "former" executives taking over agencies in charge of regulating them).
The FACT is that 50 years ago the air in front of the Sauget, IL Monsanto plant burned your lungs. The FACT is that it no longer does; nowdays the worst is an occasional hint of a whiff of bleach. Vegetation there has gone from brown in the '60s to healthy green today.
Actually, those are assertions by you, and screaming "IT IS FACT OMG FACT FACT" does not make it so. This is much more like "opinion".
The FACT is that rivers and streams no longer catch fire. The FACT is that things started improving shortly after the enactment of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act (signed into law by Republican President Nixon).
Ah, of course, nothing could be done until the all-powerful Federal government could come around and bash some heads. The pollution around Sauget caused by Monsanto was bad (even if your assertions were wrong), but the clean up started before the clean air and water acts. Because the PEOPLE that were LOCAL had a problem and started to do something about it. People downstream were complaining. Claiming that the correlation with the EPA powers caused the cleanup to start is bullshit.
Can you offer any other explanation besides regulation that changed things?
Call it what you want, people do not want pollution and will work to stop it, as has happened all over the country locally and nationally.
The question is not the straw man you are creating that produces a choice between "no regulation" and "ample regulation", it's the difference between oppressive regulation that leads to tyranny, and reasonable regulation that provides the protection that people want.
You know how the EPA has become oppressive? They have a law that says, basically, that it is unlawful to "discharge pollution into the navigable waters of the US." That's reasonable, right? We want that kind of regulation, right? BUT, today, they claim that "dirt" is a pollutant, and that a puddle is "navigable waters". WTF? Yep, total oppression, it's so bad you CANNOT EVEN KNOW WHEN they are going to claim you're a polluter, or have any idea what you can do with your land! Check out what they did to the Sacketts. Sure, they eventually won some relief, but only after a 5-year court battle, and the EPA is still going to keep going after them, they just won the right for a judge to hear the case. That's right, 5 years in court, all the way to the Supreme court, just to be allowed to have a hearing about what the EPA was doing to them.
What you describe as "deregulation" to explain California's problems really wasn't deregulation at all. Sure, they CALLED it that, but it was a scam, and it was successfully pulled off because the NIMBY Californians refused to allow ANY new power generation plants to be built for 20 years, even as they demanded more electricity. So electricity kept getting more expensive and these guys came in with a "plan" to "deregulate" which would "lower costs". All bullshit. The scam has been tried all over the country but most people are onto it now.
Frankly, you should have been tipped off to the "deregulation" scam right away - Electricity is a natural monopoly (certainly the transmission infrastructure is), and the type of industry that needs close oversight. What was sold by the oligarchs as "deregulation", was a scam not much different than the "carbon trading" scam they are trying to pull right now. It's a phony trading scheme where the traders make all the money and the producers and consumers are the ones that get screwed.
Slashdot Mirror
Bad analogy. You don't "hire" a congressman to do a specific job (well, some people DO, but let's assume for a moment that they are truly representative), it's more of an overhead cost for having a government at all. And compared to having NO government, it's a pretty good bargain (the overhead of running congress itself, that is).
But I do think you're wrong about the OP's point, which is really more along the lines of Thoreau: "That government is best which governs least...", as in, when they aren't passing laws to tax us, or drone us, or take away our rights, that's better than when they are. For a good look at how someone can arrive at this conclusion, take a look at the legislation or issues that have enjoyed overwhelming with "bipartisan support":
I can't see how this furthers the exploration of space, which seems to be the very last priority on the budget sheet these days, and the one that gets entirely cut first.
Tell you what - you keep defending this kind of waste of resources, and I'll refocus my efforts from fully funding the agency to eliminating it entirely. Maybe then enough money will be freed up to help the private enterprises that are doing things like ... actually furthering our reach into space.
Scientific discovery using spaceborne instruments, such as GRACE, is part of NASA's core mission.
But this isn't scientific discovery, since gravity was already discovered 150 years ago. "NASA's mission is to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research."
Some tortured logic could be conjured up to claim there is some blue-sky "discovery" that has some chance of being made on this mission, but meanwhile the rest of the explicit mission seems to be getting swept under the rug.
it also means that you are paying for services that you are not receiving
No, Congress is not a "service". It's a representative body. The vast amount of money required to run Congress is the only real problem, but that money is such a small percentage of the budget as to be basically irrelevant.
Why are aeronautical engineers, astrophysicists, rocket scientists, etc. involved in perpetuating a political agenda based on bad "science" for an administration that refuses to fund the organization's actual purpose?
I'll ask the opposite question: why shouldn't aeronautical engineers, astrophysicists, and rocket scientists be involved in trying to make unambiguous measurements of a critical issue, to try to resolve key questions in a way that's independent of computer models or temperature measurements? Making an independent measurement of key scientific claims using a different technique is pretty much the gold standard of science.
Because the budget has been cut so much that doing those things means there's no money left for the core mission of ... aeronautics and space?
That's funny - I used the same criteria, and it looks like AGW fails 3 of the 6 tests. How do you get 5-15%?
But that's an implementation detail not reflective of an inherent flaw in socialism - rearrange it so that (for example) everyone is entitled to the same benefits and tax rates are adjusted to *gradually* cancel it out as income approaches the median and the demotivational aspects vanish.
That seems to defy human nature. How do you encourage someone coming from a culture of dependence to devote a significant amount of their time to an endeavor that would barely reap even marginal benefits in the short term? How do you keep them from gaming such a system to reap maximum benefits, while using their time to reap rewards that a black market economy can provide? Especially in a socialist environment where there are many more opportunities for a black market to exist (there being a greater amount of controlled commerce and contraband)?
Okay, you are an income redistribution advocate. I'm curious, have you done any back-of-the-envelope calculations on the worker / beneficiary ratios that you could expect in a rational socialist state? That is, what percentage of the population would basically end up never being required to work? What is the range?
Which brings up another point - a socialized medical system is in a far better position to promote *preventative* medicine than a for-profit system - and preventative medicine tends to cost far, far less per-person (which is *exactly* why it sees little support in for-profit systems)
This assertion doesn't really make sense in a system (as exists in the US) supported 80% by third-party payment systems. Are you saying the payers are so ignorant of this dynamic that they blindly refuse to pay for preventative services out of that ignorance? There are really only 2 effective ways to control costs of health care:
Option #2 actually exists to a limited extent in the US today. There are services such as lasic eye correction, cosmetic dental procedures, and that 20% of consumers that do not rely on 3rd party systems for payment. Price controls in these markets work extremely well. There is significant competition in all but the later category, and even there the ranges of prices that are offered (when they are available) are extremely wide.
And having already been ruled on by an Administrative hearing, the hurdle is much much higher for VZ than normal court case
Not quite. Actually, this decision is the first opportunity for Verizon to challenge the ruling in a court, according to the APA (Administrative Procedure Act). You can't challenge rules written by an executive agency until you reach the "final action" by the agency. This is it.
Protip: They are effectively a first-level court, at least in their area of power.
Not trying to be a dick, just trying to introduce you to the very baffling world of administrative law.
Well, you're right, except it's not that baffling if you just think of bureaucrats as lords of the manor, and everyone else as dirty serfs. Sure, the bureaucrats bicker all the time over who gets which piece of the dirt, but as a serf, it's clear that your portion is exactly nothing.
Point taken. Although I was under the impression that the Portuguese generally regard what is spoken in Brazil as "Cajun".
There is a huge difference between progressive tax system (note that the US has the most progressive tax system in the world), which you claim to advocate, and the socialist-welfare state that creates nothing but dependence and destroys dignity among the poor and destroys incentives for work and taking risks to grow among the well-to-do.
You're right about government supporting corporatism though - that's what's giving capitalism a bad name in the world right now, and it's not even capitalism at all, it's closer to fascism.
You're missing his point: People who have lots of money are smarter than the rest of us and always know better how to spend it.
Yes, people actually believe this.
No, YOU are missing the point. But Socialists will never understand economics anyway.
Of course it is. I hear they even speak it in the UK now.
No, most of them still don't. The US and the UK are the only 2 countries separated by a common language.
I have to LOL at this complaint. $44,000 doesn't really "fund" very much, less than Al Gore gets for a single speaking engagement. He's probably lucky to have gotten even that.
... the claim is that an increase in CO2 concentrations from about 380 PPM to 600 PPM will cause a "tipping effect" and exponential feedback loop causing catastrophically accelerated global warming.
Is that the scientific consensus? Or your straw man?
Are you really that ignorant of the basic claims of the IPCC and the climate models? You could argue that my numbers are off, but they are in the less than 400 PPM range, which far from "massive quantities" represents atmospheric increases of less than 0.05%. Of course there's not much talk about the tipping point these days, since NASA data indicated that more energy was being released from the atmosphere than the models were using.
And the insults start in 3.....2......1......
No, he's a well known denier ... He's not a climatologist; he's a local meteorologist ... Fox affiliate ... unpublished, ... ripped to shreds ... the Heartland Institute ... conservative ... industry money ... denial ... global warming denial ... Koch Industries ... denial ... tobacco and cancer ... Philip-Morris),
Countdown was too slow.
It's only a "3 - Informative" so far. Need to throw in some "extremist right-winger" and "Mobil oil", maybe some "earth-destroying" adjectives to reach the +5.
Journals like controversial findings, for the same reason that newspapers up-play their headlines: it attracts attention. Furthermore, a shoddy paper with a controversial conclusion will often spur a slew of debate and comments, each citing the original paper, and thus raising the journals impact factor.
That's true generally, but journals focused on climate science are the rather obvious exception, and has been for some time.
And of course, nobody blindly accepts anything in science.
I think this statement is rather easily debunked.
There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that surface temperatures are rising. Scientist knows it, Military knows it, farmers and fishermen know it. I'm surprised people are still trying to disprove things that are in plain sight for everyone to see.
Try at LEAST reading the summary of the paper, even if you can't be bothered to try to understand it. The paper does not attempt to refute temperature increases, it only points out errors in the US surface temperature as reported by NOAA.
Yeah because Watts doesn't have an agenda *eye roll*
Oh, he has an "agenda"? You seem to know something - what is Watt's agenda? Who is paying him? What does he stand to gain? What is his ultimate goal, and how does this further his ambitions?
That's for linking to some idiotic talking-point BS from 3 years ago, without reading the paper or addressing anything in it.
I think they generally refer to people that behave that way as "shill".
I don't quite get how massive quantities of greenhouse gas released in the atmosphere would mysteriously lose their greenhouse effect potential at some point. How exactly is chrb's post extraordinary in its claims? Please explain.
Define "massive quantities", and then fix your understanding of the actual claims. The claim is NOT that an increase in CO2 (the least effective of all known greenhouse gasses) will cause an increase in warming, the claim is that an increase in CO2 concentrations from about 380 PPM to 600 PPM will cause a "tipping effect" and exponential feedback loop causing catastrophically accelerated global warming.
That's just stupid. Most qualified scientists agree So we can't trust them to review each other's work . If we applied that sort of thinking everywhere there would be no accepted concensus on basic arithmetic.
It depends on which side of the debate they are on. If they are AGW proponents, then it's a consensus of experts. If they are deniers, then it is confirmation bias.
I've never dried "drop therapy" or "impact maintenance". I'm sure it could help under specific circumstances like a stuck spindle or loose connection but I've never witness it.
That seems like something that would never work on a hard drive. However, I had a Deskstar drive that actually came out of a broken computer and sat on the shelf for a couple of months before I tried to re-use it. I plugged it in, along with an identical model drive that worked fine, and it would not spin up. I tried multiple troubleshooting techniques, and I had pretty much resigned myself to checking the warranty and sending it back, but at that moment of frustration I slammed the thing on the floor, and low and behold it started right up!
It worked fine for I know years after that, and is probably still working now.
I'm afraid your link is firewalled off here: "politics/opinion". An OPINION piece is worthless.
I don't know WTF you're talking about or responding to. Do you know how to use the Internet? What a totally worthless attempt to dismiss a fact - one that everyone already knew about, (that is, Monsanto's "former" executives taking over agencies in charge of regulating them).
The FACT is that 50 years ago the air in front of the Sauget, IL Monsanto plant burned your lungs. The FACT is that it no longer does; nowdays the worst is an occasional hint of a whiff of bleach. Vegetation there has gone from brown in the '60s to healthy green today.
Actually, those are assertions by you, and screaming "IT IS FACT OMG FACT FACT" does not make it so. This is much more like "opinion".
The FACT is that rivers and streams no longer catch fire. The FACT is that things started improving shortly after the enactment of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act (signed into law by Republican President Nixon).
Ah, of course, nothing could be done until the all-powerful Federal government could come around and bash some heads. The pollution around Sauget caused by Monsanto was bad (even if your assertions were wrong), but the clean up started before the clean air and water acts. Because the PEOPLE that were LOCAL had a problem and started to do something about it. People downstream were complaining. Claiming that the correlation with the EPA powers caused the cleanup to start is bullshit.
Can you offer any other explanation besides regulation that changed things?
Call it what you want, people do not want pollution and will work to stop it, as has happened all over the country locally and nationally.
The question is not the straw man you are creating that produces a choice between "no regulation" and "ample regulation", it's the difference between oppressive regulation that leads to tyranny, and reasonable regulation that provides the protection that people want.
You know how the EPA has become oppressive? They have a law that says, basically, that it is unlawful to "discharge pollution into the navigable waters of the US." That's reasonable, right? We want that kind of regulation, right? BUT, today, they claim that "dirt" is a pollutant, and that a puddle is "navigable waters". WTF? Yep, total oppression, it's so bad you CANNOT EVEN KNOW WHEN they are going to claim you're a polluter, or have any idea what you can do with your land! Check out what they did to the Sacketts. Sure, they eventually won some relief, but only after a 5-year court battle, and the EPA is still going to keep going after them, they just won the right for a judge to hear the case. That's right, 5 years in court, all the way to the Supreme court, just to be allowed to have a hearing about what the EPA was doing to them.
What you describe as "deregulation" to explain California's problems really wasn't deregulation at all. Sure, they CALLED it that, but it was a scam, and it was successfully pulled off because the NIMBY Californians refused to allow ANY new power generation plants to be built for 20 years, even as they demanded more electricity. So electricity kept getting more expensive and these guys came in with a "plan" to "deregulate" which would "lower costs". All bullshit. The scam has been tried all over the country but most people are onto it now.
Frankly, you should have been tipped off to the "deregulation" scam right away - Electricity is a natural monopoly (certainly the transmission infrastructure is), and the type of industry that needs close oversight. What was sold by the oligarchs as "deregulation", was a scam not much different than the "carbon trading" scam they are trying to pull right now. It's a phony trading scheme where the traders make all the money and the producers and consumers are the ones that get screwed.