1. In your example, I don't say anything about CO2 not being a green house gas. I don't even say anything about global warming in general in that post. The line you cite is a comment on your specific belief system, not a comment about science. In the sentence "your religious belief in global warming", notice the word "your". 2. See your comment just replied to above for a remark you've made which has been demonstrated and proven to be false. This is way too easy. 3. I never asserted science is a religion. Check your reading comprehension again. I asserted that if _you_ can't even state the particulars of your belief in global warming, you're one of that subset of people who believe in it as a religion, not as science. I never attacked the scientific method, in contrast, I used it in my post to demonstrate you weren't willing/able to follow the scientific method, thus defending it. 4. Once again, your reading comprehension fails you. You failed to notice or understand the word "clearly", even though _clearly state_ was emphasized for you in my sentence.
Try again when you can read and understand what you're replying to.
Please link to and quote anywhere I've ever written CO2 is not a greenhouse gas, even outside this conversation.
The problem is you're making statements which are demonstrably false, then failing to even attempt to back them up. It doesn't help to just make things up out of thin air. Even if you can't read the thread you're responding to, other people can and won't be convinced.
All I did was ask you for a logical argument when you decided to say no one who disagrees with you is being logical about it, and in return you've been spewing emotional non-arguments and not responding to what was asked.
So it's your claims which are without evidence, especially since you can't even be bothered to even _clearly state_ your claims, which is what was originally requested by me in my first post in this thread.
The price of the median home has increased, even adjusted for inflation. That's true. What you're missing is why that's true. Because people have been able to buy them and wanted them, houses are much larger and nicer than they were in 1970. Living space per person has almost doubled, the average house is 1,000 sq. ft. larger and has amenities like walk-in closets and expensive counter-tops you wouldn't find on an average house in the 70s.
So yeah, if you want to buy the "same" house as they bought in 1970, you'll pay way less now adjusted for inflation than they did at that point in time, but nobody wants that size/cheap of house anymore because they've been able to afford nicer ones. Even if you just want the same size house, but with all the new amenities, it's still less expensive per sq. ft. now, $109 vs. $118 in 1970, inflation adjusted.
This complaint is like saying food costs for Billionaires are much higher than those for welfare recipients. It doesn't take into account what's actually being purchased.
"A million dollars only gets you a tiny studio here, because the demand to live here is so incredibly high and land is _artificially_ limited."
There, fixed that for you.:)
There is as much physical land available to build in SF as there is in the Phoenix Metro area (the tribal lands surrounding PHX constrain building in a similar way as the water does around SF), but in PHX if you want to build something higher density, or on existing land, you can, but in SF you legally can't without getting all the neighbors (who already own their property and thus don't want to see property prices go down, ever) to agree.
As a result, one has super-high housing costs and the other one doesn't. The system is literally designed that way.
There's tons of mobility between income ranges. Pretty much anyone who is willing to work hard and not at a disabling level of stupidity can become at least upper-middle-class over time. 73% of Americans spend time in the top 20% of income earners.
Sounds like being shown to the world as having no basis for your religious belief in global warming "hurts your feelings."
Feel free to come back when you're ready to actually discuss the issue, rather than just spew unwarranted personal insults based on your own delusional assumptions.
To paraphrase you, you can always tell the ones who failed to read and understand the comment they were replying to.
If you're going to put forth an argument, you need to be able to at least describe your argument to other people, rather than hand-wave questions away. My comment you replied to didn't make any claims about global warming, nor climate change. It asked the OP to describe their contentions about it by providing the answers to a few key questions about what they believed. If you can't answer those simple questions, then you haven't actually researched, nor thought scientifically about the issue, let alone are ready to have a rational discussion about it.
Saying AGW has lots of evidence for it, but being unable to describe what you think AGW specifically is, let alone what you think it predicts doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in your argument about prediction accuracy, let alone provide evidence for a chain of causality where people need to literally sacrifice lives to implement your preferred policies.
So in other words, you believe in something you can't even define and are unable to make specific explanations of. So yeah, you've proven with your own words above you're a religious believer in global warming and unable to participate in a logical discussion of the issue.
You seem to have an idea that everyone who has an issue with global warming is having an emotional response and not a logical one. So let's see if you are able to participate in a logical discussion of the issue.
Which specific climate change/global warming model do you believe has successfully predicted in the future a couple of decades of global temperature changes, i.e. what's it's track record for prediction? Also, what's the margin of error of your preferred model and how are measurement errors accounted for in that?
Then, based on that model, what are the estimated overall economic costs of your proposed solutions vs. the costs of not implementing those solutions? Then how do those costs differ compared to implementing them now, vs. doing something about the "problem" when the world is much richer and more technologically advanced, i.e. in the future?
If you'll provide your answers to the above, then you've have at least thought rationally about the issue and we're ready to have a conversation and/or a logical debate about it. If you have no idea of the answers to the above questions, then you have no logical foundation for your listed beliefs and you're just a blind follower in regards to the religion of global warming.
No, the "hackers" involved sent the same phishing emails to the GOP as they did to the Dems. The difference was that GOP tech support blocked the emails, while Dem tech support literally told Podesta it was legitimate, so he went ahead and put in "p@ssword" for them so they could dump the contents of his email account.
The only link to Russians is that there is suspicion based on some of the tools used that a Russian-speaker is involved, and since everyone knows there aren't any non-governmental Russian-speaking hackers (sarcasm), an assumption has been made.
Now you need to go figure out WHY the supply of gas doesn't seem to change that much from day to day.
It's because the prices change instead. When there will be higher demand, prices smooth it out by increasing. When it's lower, prices do the same by lowering.
You're missing the "demand" part of supply and demand. If gas stayed one price, you'd alternately have a glut of gas and shortages of gas, rather than just about the right amount of gas all the time.
In addition, if automobile gas prices are higher for a while, then supply will adjust from either more expensive sources or alternative uses for oil products. If prices are lower for a while, then sources which aren't as competitive cost-wise will shut down.
The retail gas prices change when the wholesale prices change. They're pricing for what they are going to have to pay to replace the gas they already have, not based on what they paid last week for the gas they're selling now. They already made or lost money on that gas.
If you are selling something on Ebay, do you price it based on what you paid for it, or based on what it's worth to others at the point in time you are selling it? That second is what everyone else does, too...
And finally, governments (in the form of taxes) profit way more from a gallon of gas than either the oil producers, refiner or gas stations.
Hardware/bandwidth is a set of AWS instances away, enough for any sort of demo needed. Heck, if someone had an actual break-through idea, Amazon or Bing would probably fund them enough up front to prove it out.
Either way, a POC to get funding doesn't require that much. Plenty of groups spider the web without too much. For a POC, they wouldn't have time constraints for refresh, or even need to deliver performance to the world like Google does, as long as they can demonstrate whatever it is which makes their version better, that's enough to get funding from lots of interested competitors.
Don't confuse something being the best option (currently winning the competition) vs. being the only option (monopoly).
If Google changed tomorrow so that they took 99% of the ad revenue and sites got 1% from their ad network, then within a week 99% of their site space inventory would dry up, because everyone with a site would switch to another ad network that paid more.
Google currently has a more efficient setup that provides what sites and advertisers want better (in general) than their competitors. So they're currently winning. If that changed, they'd be losing. People get confused by the fact that it's so easy on the internet to switch to different options, so the best option over time tends to get more and more market share until it appears they are dominant... but the reality is that as soon as that changes, people can just as easily switch to their suddenly better competition.
No, a startup looking to compete with Google is only doomed if they can't actually compete with Google.
They'd have to produce a product which is better than Google's. Almost as good as isn't enough.
But if someone provided search results which eliminated spam results completely and did a much better job of showing you the pages you actually wanted to see, then it'd take you what, about 10 seconds to switch? The advertisers would follow the users.
The problem you are seeing is that Google is currently better than their competition for most searchers, so they are winning. If they stopped being better, they would begin losing. Myspace was a fake "monopoly" like that, then suddenly they weren't anymore, right? Myspace didn't change, their competitors outdid them and they fell quickly. Same in the search space.
So you're saying in order to prevent the government from using your search history against you, you want to make sure the government is in charge of controlling search history information?
Something about that logic doesn't seem quite right...
Yeah, the major publishers are still trying to push readers away from ebooks towards paper and they price accordingly. As a result, small/Indie publishers and writers (not captured in this article's stats) are eating their lunch in ebooks, taking more and more of the growing (+4% last Q at Amazon) market.
Yeah, the original article is way off reality. They're reporting on mainstream publishing house ebook sales only..
The real story is that ebook sales are growing and Indie publishers and writers (not included in the cited stats) are taking over more and more of the market. So it's shrinking for traditional publishers, but growing overall.
C) How the market for commodity retail goods works. Normal margins are about 3%, similar to Walmart. Do you really think they're going to destroy Walmart any time soon?
Anyway, for retails goods which are available for any company to sell, the profit margins are always slightly over the actual sales cost. This is because there is plenty of competition which will undercut on price very quickly if you raise your prices. Amazon has distribution, sales costs and volume advantages over most other companies, so they're able to price lower for most stuff. That doesn't mean they can ever raise their prices to anything higher than their next closest competitor's costs without being undercut in turn. They know that, so they keep their prices lower than the competition in order to keep their customer base.
The fact that someone owns wealth and has not consumed it requires that at some point, someone decided not to consume it, i.e. deferred their consumption.
This is a tautology, it's true by definition.
Also, that you believe the normal state is for people to start out life with different amounts of wealth (as if it's endowed by some random action), rather than as the result of choices and work people have done says a lot about your prior beliefs.
So believing what Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison put in writing during the ratification debates about what the phrase meant is arguing the writers on the Constitution were unable to properly express themselves??? You obviously didn't bother to read the quotes from them in the link.
I'm not twisting anything. The real puzzle is why some people have created this myth that it somehow includes everything. Standard legal construction (for hundreds of years) is to read phrases as adding meaning to the text, not being superfluous. If it can cover any kind of spending, then there would have been no point in adding it to the Constitution. Only if it expresses a limitation on what kind of spending is allowed does it convey a meaning.
For a consumption tax, you don't have to track people's purchases. Instead, you track people's sales and the tax is collected by the seller.
In terms of privacy, this is much better, as you pretty much already know that Widget Corp. is a seller of Widgets and the government doesn't need to collect exactly _who_ they sold widgets to, just how much they sold them all for.
In terms of tracking, 90% of the States currently already track sales. It's how they collect State-level sales taxes. Piggybacking on an existing system is much cheaper/easier than running a completely different system, which is why most States currently piggy-back on the federal system for their income taxes.
In terms of black markets, even income made on the black market (currently untaxed due to the income tax system) gets taxed when used to consume things.
As for cheating, it's relatively simple to catch businesses cheating and they already have the structure and the . For the most part, individuals can't cheat because they're the buyers, not the sellers. You may get some used-market under the table cheating, but you can either call that a recycling incentive, or else create monetary incentives to catch it, i.e. a reward (no penalties) to any buyer who turns in a seller who sold them something without charging the tax.
It's funny how you respond to a post almost entirely about interest representing the compensation for the choice to defer consumption with no mention whatsoever of that point.
Just repeating your mistaken economic views over and over again while deriding the views of actual economists isn't very convincing. Try addressing the actual argument next time.
There is a huge misconception many people have about promoting the general Welfare. It's a phrase that basically means no crony capitalism (which in practice tends to appear even more with socialist politicians). The general welfare is the welfare of everyone in the country, as opposed to the specific welfare of individuals or a geographic or other subset. So defense spending defends everyone, but solar panel company loan guarantees benefit only the people who buy and sell solar panels, making it out of scope for Congress' power to raise and spend money.
In terms of Energy Star specifically, it's a completely useless rating which just encourages manufacturers to have their default "energy saving" rating take say, two hours to do a load of dishes (because then the energy consumption per minute is really low!) and when consumers complain, they add a speed wash mode you can select which uses way more energy but actually does the dishes in a reasonable time.
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1. In your example, I don't say anything about CO2 not being a green house gas. I don't even say anything about global warming in general in that post. The line you cite is a comment on your specific belief system, not a comment about science. In the sentence "your religious belief in global warming", notice the word "your".
2. See your comment just replied to above for a remark you've made which has been demonstrated and proven to be false. This is way too easy.
3. I never asserted science is a religion. Check your reading comprehension again. I asserted that if _you_ can't even state the particulars of your belief in global warming, you're one of that subset of people who believe in it as a religion, not as science. I never attacked the scientific method, in contrast, I used it in my post to demonstrate you weren't willing/able to follow the scientific method, thus defending it.
4. Once again, your reading comprehension fails you. You failed to notice or understand the word "clearly", even though _clearly state_ was emphasized for you in my sentence.
Try again when you can read and understand what you're replying to.
Just a guess, but you must live in the Bay Area or NY or someplace people have elected folks to prevent growth.
Try looking at the rest of the country.
Please link to and quote anywhere I've ever written CO2 is not a greenhouse gas, even outside this conversation.
The problem is you're making statements which are demonstrably false, then failing to even attempt to back them up. It doesn't help to just make things up out of thin air. Even if you can't read the thread you're responding to, other people can and won't be convinced.
All I did was ask you for a logical argument when you decided to say no one who disagrees with you is being logical about it, and in return you've been spewing emotional non-arguments and not responding to what was asked.
So it's your claims which are without evidence, especially since you can't even be bothered to even _clearly state_ your claims, which is what was originally requested by me in my first post in this thread.
The price of the median home has increased, even adjusted for inflation. That's true. What you're missing is why that's true. Because people have been able to buy them and wanted them, houses are much larger and nicer than they were in 1970. Living space per person has almost doubled, the average house is 1,000 sq. ft. larger and has amenities like walk-in closets and expensive counter-tops you wouldn't find on an average house in the 70s.
So yeah, if you want to buy the "same" house as they bought in 1970, you'll pay way less now adjusted for inflation than they did at that point in time, but nobody wants that size/cheap of house anymore because they've been able to afford nicer ones. Even if you just want the same size house, but with all the new amenities, it's still less expensive per sq. ft. now, $109 vs. $118 in 1970, inflation adjusted.
This complaint is like saying food costs for Billionaires are much higher than those for welfare recipients. It doesn't take into account what's actually being purchased.
"A million dollars only gets you a tiny studio here, because the demand to live here is so incredibly high and land is _artificially_ limited."
There, fixed that for you. :)
There is as much physical land available to build in SF as there is in the Phoenix Metro area (the tribal lands surrounding PHX constrain building in a similar way as the water does around SF), but in PHX if you want to build something higher density, or on existing land, you can, but in SF you legally can't without getting all the neighbors (who already own their property and thus don't want to see property prices go down, ever) to agree.
As a result, one has super-high housing costs and the other one doesn't. The system is literally designed that way.
Most Americans are in both the top _and_ the bottom quintile of income over the course of their life.
There's tons of mobility between income ranges. Pretty much anyone who is willing to work hard and not at a disabling level of stupidity can become at least upper-middle-class over time. 73% of Americans spend time in the top 20% of income earners.
Sounds like being shown to the world as having no basis for your religious belief in global warming "hurts your feelings."
Feel free to come back when you're ready to actually discuss the issue, rather than just spew unwarranted personal insults based on your own delusional assumptions.
To paraphrase you, you can always tell the ones who failed to read and understand the comment they were replying to.
If you're going to put forth an argument, you need to be able to at least describe your argument to other people, rather than hand-wave questions away. My comment you replied to didn't make any claims about global warming, nor climate change. It asked the OP to describe their contentions about it by providing the answers to a few key questions about what they believed. If you can't answer those simple questions, then you haven't actually researched, nor thought scientifically about the issue, let alone are ready to have a rational discussion about it.
Saying AGW has lots of evidence for it, but being unable to describe what you think AGW specifically is, let alone what you think it predicts doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in your argument about prediction accuracy, let alone provide evidence for a chain of causality where people need to literally sacrifice lives to implement your preferred policies.
So in other words, you believe in something you can't even define and are unable to make specific explanations of. So yeah, you've proven with your own words above you're a religious believer in global warming and unable to participate in a logical discussion of the issue.
You seem to have an idea that everyone who has an issue with global warming is having an emotional response and not a logical one. So let's see if you are able to participate in a logical discussion of the issue.
Which specific climate change/global warming model do you believe has successfully predicted in the future a couple of decades of global temperature changes, i.e. what's it's track record for prediction? Also, what's the margin of error of your preferred model and how are measurement errors accounted for in that?
Then, based on that model, what are the estimated overall economic costs of your proposed solutions vs. the costs of not implementing those solutions? Then how do those costs differ compared to implementing them now, vs. doing something about the "problem" when the world is much richer and more technologically advanced, i.e. in the future?
If you'll provide your answers to the above, then you've have at least thought rationally about the issue and we're ready to have a conversation and/or a logical debate about it. If you have no idea of the answers to the above questions, then you have no logical foundation for your listed beliefs and you're just a blind follower in regards to the religion of global warming.
No, the "hackers" involved sent the same phishing emails to the GOP as they did to the Dems. The difference was that GOP tech support blocked the emails, while Dem tech support literally told Podesta it was legitimate, so he went ahead and put in "p@ssword" for them so they could dump the contents of his email account.
The only link to Russians is that there is suspicion based on some of the tools used that a Russian-speaker is involved, and since everyone knows there aren't any non-governmental Russian-speaking hackers (sarcasm), an assumption has been made.
Now you need to go figure out WHY the supply of gas doesn't seem to change that much from day to day.
It's because the prices change instead. When there will be higher demand, prices smooth it out by increasing. When it's lower, prices do the same by lowering.
You're missing the "demand" part of supply and demand. If gas stayed one price, you'd alternately have a glut of gas and shortages of gas, rather than just about the right amount of gas all the time.
In addition, if automobile gas prices are higher for a while, then supply will adjust from either more expensive sources or alternative uses for oil products. If prices are lower for a while, then sources which aren't as competitive cost-wise will shut down.
The retail gas prices change when the wholesale prices change. They're pricing for what they are going to have to pay to replace the gas they already have, not based on what they paid last week for the gas they're selling now. They already made or lost money on that gas.
If you are selling something on Ebay, do you price it based on what you paid for it, or based on what it's worth to others at the point in time you are selling it? That second is what everyone else does, too...
And finally, governments (in the form of taxes) profit way more from a gallon of gas than either the oil producers, refiner or gas stations.
In practice, this mostly means ARCO takes debit cards instead of credit cards.
Hardware/bandwidth is a set of AWS instances away, enough for any sort of demo needed. Heck, if someone had an actual break-through idea, Amazon or Bing would probably fund them enough up front to prove it out.
Either way, a POC to get funding doesn't require that much. Plenty of groups spider the web without too much. For a POC, they wouldn't have time constraints for refresh, or even need to deliver performance to the world like Google does, as long as they can demonstrate whatever it is which makes their version better, that's enough to get funding from lots of interested competitors.
Don't confuse something being the best option (currently winning the competition) vs. being the only option (monopoly).
If Google changed tomorrow so that they took 99% of the ad revenue and sites got 1% from their ad network, then within a week 99% of their site space inventory would dry up, because everyone with a site would switch to another ad network that paid more.
Google currently has a more efficient setup that provides what sites and advertisers want better (in general) than their competitors. So they're currently winning. If that changed, they'd be losing. People get confused by the fact that it's so easy on the internet to switch to different options, so the best option over time tends to get more and more market share until it appears they are dominant... but the reality is that as soon as that changes, people can just as easily switch to their suddenly better competition.
See for example, Myspace, or Yahoo, etc...
No, a startup looking to compete with Google is only doomed if they can't actually compete with Google.
They'd have to produce a product which is better than Google's. Almost as good as isn't enough.
But if someone provided search results which eliminated spam results completely and did a much better job of showing you the pages you actually wanted to see, then it'd take you what, about 10 seconds to switch? The advertisers would follow the users.
The problem you are seeing is that Google is currently better than their competition for most searchers, so they are winning. If they stopped being better, they would begin losing. Myspace was a fake "monopoly" like that, then suddenly they weren't anymore, right? Myspace didn't change, their competitors outdid them and they fell quickly. Same in the search space.
So you're saying in order to prevent the government from using your search history against you, you want to make sure the government is in charge of controlling search history information?
Something about that logic doesn't seem quite right...
Yeah, the major publishers are still trying to push readers away from ebooks towards paper and they price accordingly. As a result, small/Indie publishers and writers (not captured in this article's stats) are eating their lunch in ebooks, taking more and more of the growing (+4% last Q at Amazon) market.
Yeah, the original article is way off reality. They're reporting on mainstream publishing house ebook sales only..
The real story is that ebook sales are growing and Indie publishers and writers (not included in the cited stats) are taking over more and more of the market. So it's shrinking for traditional publishers, but growing overall.
C) How the market for commodity retail goods works. Normal margins are about 3%, similar to Walmart. Do you really think they're going to destroy Walmart any time soon?
Amazon's e-commerce business is a very profitable sideline for them, but they make their money from AWS. They sell much more "stuff" overall, but 90% of Amazon's profits are from AWS.
Anyway, for retails goods which are available for any company to sell, the profit margins are always slightly over the actual sales cost. This is because there is plenty of competition which will undercut on price very quickly if you raise your prices. Amazon has distribution, sales costs and volume advantages over most other companies, so they're able to price lower for most stuff. That doesn't mean they can ever raise their prices to anything higher than their next closest competitor's costs without being undercut in turn. They know that, so they keep their prices lower than the competition in order to keep their customer base.
The fact that someone owns wealth and has not consumed it requires that at some point, someone decided not to consume it, i.e. deferred their consumption.
This is a tautology, it's true by definition.
Also, that you believe the normal state is for people to start out life with different amounts of wealth (as if it's endowed by some random action), rather than as the result of choices and work people have done says a lot about your prior beliefs.
So believing what Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison put in writing during the ratification debates about what the phrase meant is arguing the writers on the Constitution were unable to properly express themselves??? You obviously didn't bother to read the quotes from them in the link.
I'm not twisting anything. The real puzzle is why some people have created this myth that it somehow includes everything. Standard legal construction (for hundreds of years) is to read phrases as adding meaning to the text, not being superfluous. If it can cover any kind of spending, then there would have been no point in adding it to the Constitution. Only if it expresses a limitation on what kind of spending is allowed does it convey a meaning.
For a consumption tax, you don't have to track people's purchases. Instead, you track people's sales and the tax is collected by the seller.
In terms of privacy, this is much better, as you pretty much already know that Widget Corp. is a seller of Widgets and the government doesn't need to collect exactly _who_ they sold widgets to, just how much they sold them all for.
In terms of tracking, 90% of the States currently already track sales. It's how they collect State-level sales taxes. Piggybacking on an existing system is much cheaper/easier than running a completely different system, which is why most States currently piggy-back on the federal system for their income taxes.
In terms of black markets, even income made on the black market (currently untaxed due to the income tax system) gets taxed when used to consume things.
As for cheating, it's relatively simple to catch businesses cheating and they already have the structure and the . For the most part, individuals can't cheat because they're the buyers, not the sellers. You may get some used-market under the table cheating, but you can either call that a recycling incentive, or else create monetary incentives to catch it, i.e. a reward (no penalties) to any buyer who turns in a seller who sold them something without charging the tax.
It's funny how you respond to a post almost entirely about interest representing the compensation for the choice to defer consumption with no mention whatsoever of that point.
Just repeating your mistaken economic views over and over again while deriding the views of actual economists isn't very convincing. Try addressing the actual argument next time.
There is a huge misconception many people have about promoting the general Welfare. It's a phrase that basically means no crony capitalism (which in practice tends to appear even more with socialist politicians). The general welfare is the welfare of everyone in the country, as opposed to the specific welfare of individuals or a geographic or other subset. So defense spending defends everyone, but solar panel company loan guarantees benefit only the people who buy and sell solar panels, making it out of scope for Congress' power to raise and spend money.
In terms of Energy Star specifically, it's a completely useless rating which just encourages manufacturers to have their default "energy saving" rating take say, two hours to do a load of dishes (because then the energy consumption per minute is really low!) and when consumers complain, they add a speed wash mode you can select which uses way more energy but actually does the dishes in a reasonable time.