2. The canadians can build their own export facilities in Canada entirely bypassing the US. The canadians already take your position as a betrayal of our shared economic arrangement. The deal was that we'd provide certain assets to them and in return we got first bid on resources. You've made liars of us and the canadians are not happy about it.
Previously, then-Representative Markey challenged TransCanada on this question at a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on December 2, 2011. There he asked Alexander Pourbaix, TransCanada's President of Energy and Oil Pipelines, whether he would commit to including a requirement in TransCanada's long-term contracts with Gulf Coast refineries, as a condition of shipping, that all refined fuels produced from oil transported through the Keystone XL pipeline be sold in the United States. In response, Mr. Pourbaix stated "no, I can't do that."
Go ahead, build your own export facilities and ship the stuff to China. I'd much rather Canada not externalize the environmental cost of that infrastructure onto the USA.
As it gets more expensive, there is economic pressure to use less, or to find more efficient ways to use the energy available.
Oil (and consequently, refined petroleum products) has gotten more expensive because of speculation. There was a hearing a few years back and at least one oil company exec came out and said oil shouldn't cost more than $65/barrel. Further, he pointed out that no oil companies were interested in exploiting wells that would cost more than $80/barrel. Because $80 is what the oil industry sees as near the maximum market value for oil in the future. The entire difference between $65 and the spot price is market speculation.
Kick out the investment money that's puffing up oil/fuel and the prices will absolutely come down. It's been done in other commodities markets and it can trivially be done in the USA.
Second, it's unlikely to cause problems that can bioaccumulate in livestock; if it goes bad, the livestock get sick, at which point the milk and meat cannot be used without treating them.
So you're saying there's no government interest in preventing livestock from eating "byproducts" that are full of rat crap, bird droppings, and mold?
It's a drain on the economy any way you dice it, all to solve a problem that doesn't exist..
Food safety is definitely a problem that exists. The reason we don't have *more* health crisis from contaminated food is because of our half-assed food safety regulations. We'd certainly have less mass illnesses and recalls if the regulations weren't constantly being chipped away at.
If we don't give Facebook to the Chinese, they'll be building the first lunar colony, the way things are going nowadays...
Everyone knows that Chinese fake lunar colonies are poor imitations of American fake lunar colonies. They use substandard fake moon rocks. Ours are the good stuff. You know, made in Taiwain.
It's hard to understand why, after all these years, local and state governments STILL haven't figured out why it's pointless to spend one thin dime of tax incentives on projects like this.
That's easy. Nobody ever does a ROI study. Not after 1 year, after 3 years, or after 5 years.
The States/Counties take the puffed up corporate predictions at face value and then nobody checks to see that the promised value (but not in any legal binding way) is actually created.
The state will collect far more than $38 million from the people that work there's income taxes alone.
Microsoft will create 84 jobs when fully built out, with 66 of those jobs required to have a wage of $24.32 an hour.
$24 an hour is ~$40,000 after federal taxes and social security. According to my math, at Iowa's 6.8% tax rate, it'll only take ~208 years to recoup $38 million in personal income taxes.
Those other 18 jobs are undoubtedly for security guards and janitorial staff, at an even lower wage. So don't count on that to noticeably bump up the average.
TLDR: Microsoft is getting a lot of tax breaks and subsidies in return for bupkiss.
This is essentially like claiming that fixing the exploding gas tanks in a Pinto is of no use, because the car will still have other issues.
No, it's like claiming that the Pinto is always going to have an exploding gas tank issue, even if you fix the current cause.
Some cars (software) have so much going on that there will always be problems, unless you use a design process (coding language) that doesn't allow it to happen. Or do you really think that Microsoft products with millions of lines of code are someday going to be bug free?
It's also part of a mentality that's undermining every attempt to have the private sector provide quality infrastructure in the first place, usually at great social and economic cost to the rest of us. The same idiocy, practiced through property taxes, is in part why the entire railroad system in the US collapsed in the 1960s and 1970s.
If you honestly believe this, it makes me suspect everything else you said. Railroads were "growing," but their growth in tonnage was significantly less than the overall growth in product being moved. As roads got better, the balance was was accruing to the trucking industry.
The real game changer for rail was the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Private industry sure as shit wasn't going to build a coast-to-coast highway system, so if you want to talk about "undermining every attempt to have the private sector provide quality infrastructure" you should look at catfights private industry had over who was going to get taxed (and how much) to pay for the public highway system.
Tax cuts are tax relief. When you get a refund it is not a hand out from the government, it is YOUR money being returned because you paid too much. The government runs on your money. It takes from you for the 'common good'... and some of that common good is waste (pork).
You might have a valid point, but without any actual numbers, you're just parroting ideology. It's entirely possible that 60% of spending is pork, but the 40% that goes to the common good is so valuable that it is worth wasting 60 cents on the dollar. To actually have a point, you need to show that the common good generated from your tax dollars is not worth the extra pork that goes along with it.
TLDR: I don't take it as a given that your ideological preconceptions are correct.
The others are usually dictated by citizens or external factors in unexpected ways during a fiscal year. War, 9/11. natural disaster, etc...
I guess "natural disaster" is one way to describe the Bush tax cuts.
The controversy over our budget deficits are an entirely manufactured one, made all the more hypocritical because the biggest critics are also the most responsible for it.
I think it's also worth mentioning that a lot of the outbreaks we have in the USA start with someone who recently returned from Europe.
Europe's problems are twofold. 1. A decade of declining MMR vaccinations thanks to the Wakefield craze. 2. Travelers/immigrants from Africa and Asia carrying infections.
But good luck scaring the kids! It might even last for a few hours until they figure out we've dumped a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere for the past decade with almost no upswing in temperature. Once you realize that, you start caring about real pollution again instead of hating on poor old carbon so much.
In passing, I call attention to the point that those responsible for making a budget can subvert the whole process by just failing to execute their duty. Both the President and Congress have been guilty of that.
This is not a point to be made in passing, it's the entire core of the problem.
Congress hasn't passed an Obama budget since he was sworn into office. Everything since 2009 has been a continuing resolution based on Bush's last budget. Even the sequester wasn't a proper budget, as it was just cutting 10% off the previous continuing resolution. Which puts the lie to your statement that
At the same time, you should understand that you can't "inherit" a deficit. The idea is poppycock. The budget for each year stands fresh on its own.
The real irony of it all is that Republicans want to cut spending by $1 trillion/year. Which happens to be the exact amount of Bush's not-so-temporary 10 year/10 trillion tax cut which is now in its 13th year.
There are recalls all the time on products through honest mistakes people make. Should we call out each of these people individually?
The engineer that designed the part and the replacement lied in front of a Senate Committee when asked if he knew there was a defect. The engineering manager was deposed in a lawsuit and said that GM made a business decision not to fix the defect.
Those aren't honest mistakes. Those are "bad actors" I'm talking about People who intentionally do something wrong, don't fix something that is wrong, or cover up something that is/was wrong.
Your entire post is arguing against a position I did not take.
But she signed up, got a little training in how to estimate probabilities from the people running the program, and then was given access to a website that listed dozens of carefully worded questions on events of interest to the intelligence community, along with a place for her to enter her numerical estimate of their likelihood.
"Usually I just do a Google search," she said.
In fact, she's so good she's been put on a special team with other superforecasters whose predictions are reportedly 30 percent better than intelligence officers with access to actual classified information.
It's not luck they've selected for, it's the ability to make educated guesses.
Maybe you missed the reference. Teela Brown is a character from Larry Niven's Ringworld series. Her defining characteristic is that she's a 6th generation of Birthright Lottery winners and thus, uniquely lucky.
That said, naming names of an engineer is a really bad precedent. What is the goal GM is trying to achieve here. Do they want people to go break the guy's windows? Burn down his house? Call him in the middle of the night or deliver pizza? Apart from potentially removing the guy's livelihood for the remainder of his life because no-one wants to hire 'that guy' ever again, and a lot of abuse being targeted his way, what will this achieve?
Why exactly is it a bad precedent? The names of everyone involved are going to come out anyways, with all the possible consequences you described. Our judicial system is usually exceedingly unwilling to pierce the corporate veil and directly hold bad actors responsible for their choices. So I'm perfectly happy with a society that aggressively shuns those people, regardless of judicial outcomes.
I'm *guessing* GM's goal is to scapegoat a few responsible parties as early as possible, so that when the management failures are unmasked, there won't be as much heat and vitriol.
I think the traditional/. response involves something along the lines of: "But what if you're a doctor in a movie theater and someone dies because you didn't get an e-mail in the seconds after it was sent?"
i just think it's unprofessional and lazy...her performance in Orange is the New Black is equally as bad, IMHO...very perfunctory
If you hated her in Star Trek and Orange is the New Black, you'll love her in NTSF:SD:SUV It's a show designed to make bad, unprofessional, and lazy acting really shine
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2. The canadians can build their own export facilities in Canada entirely bypassing the US. The canadians already take your position as a betrayal of our shared economic arrangement. The deal was that we'd provide certain assets to them and in return we got first bid on resources. You've made liars of us and the canadians are not happy about it.
http://www.markey.senate.gov/news/press-releases/markey-presses-transcanada-to-bar-exports-of-keystone-xl-oil-refined-products
Previously, then-Representative Markey challenged TransCanada on this question at a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on December 2, 2011. There he asked Alexander Pourbaix, TransCanada's President of Energy and Oil Pipelines, whether he would commit to including a requirement in TransCanada's long-term contracts with Gulf Coast refineries, as a condition of shipping, that all refined fuels produced from oil transported through the Keystone XL pipeline be sold in the United States. In response, Mr. Pourbaix stated "no, I can't do that."
Go ahead, build your own export facilities and ship the stuff to China.
I'd much rather Canada not externalize the environmental cost of that infrastructure onto the USA.
As it gets more expensive, there is economic pressure to use less, or to find more efficient ways to use the energy available.
Oil (and consequently, refined petroleum products) has gotten more expensive because of speculation.
There was a hearing a few years back and at least one oil company exec came out and said oil shouldn't cost more than $65/barrel.
Further, he pointed out that no oil companies were interested in exploiting wells that would cost more than $80/barrel.
Because $80 is what the oil industry sees as near the maximum market value for oil in the future.
The entire difference between $65 and the spot price is market speculation.
Kick out the investment money that's puffing up oil/fuel and the prices will absolutely come down.
It's been done in other commodities markets and it can trivially be done in the USA.
Second, it's unlikely to cause problems that can bioaccumulate in livestock; if it goes bad, the livestock get sick, at which point the milk and meat cannot be used without treating them.
So you're saying there's no government interest in preventing livestock from eating "byproducts" that are full of rat crap, bird droppings, and mold?
It's a drain on the economy any way you dice it, all to solve a problem that doesn't exist..
Food safety is definitely a problem that exists.
The reason we don't have *more* health crisis from contaminated food is because of our half-assed food safety regulations.
We'd certainly have less mass illnesses and recalls if the regulations weren't constantly being chipped away at.
If we don't give Facebook to the Chinese, they'll be building the first lunar colony, the way things are going nowadays...
Everyone knows that Chinese fake lunar colonies are poor imitations of American fake lunar colonies.
They use substandard fake moon rocks. Ours are the good stuff. You know, made in Taiwain.
It's hard to understand why, after all these years, local and state governments STILL haven't figured out why it's pointless to spend one thin dime of tax incentives on projects like this.
That's easy.
Nobody ever does a ROI study.
Not after 1 year, after 3 years, or after 5 years.
The States/Counties take the puffed up corporate predictions at face value and then nobody checks to see that the promised value (but not in any legal binding way) is actually created.
The state will collect far more than $38 million from the people that work there's income taxes alone.
Microsoft will create 84 jobs when fully built out, with 66 of those jobs required to have a wage of $24.32 an hour.
$24 an hour is ~$40,000 after federal taxes and social security.
According to my math, at Iowa's 6.8% tax rate, it'll only take ~208 years to recoup $38 million in personal income taxes.
Those other 18 jobs are undoubtedly for security guards and janitorial staff, at an even lower wage.
So don't count on that to noticeably bump up the average.
TLDR: Microsoft is getting a lot of tax breaks and subsidies in return for bupkiss.
outliers notwithstanding
Drunk people are not "outliers" and no amount of training is going to fix that particular class of problems.
This is essentially like claiming that fixing the exploding gas tanks in a Pinto is of no use, because the car will still have other issues.
No, it's like claiming that the Pinto is always going to have an exploding gas tank issue, even if you fix the current cause.
Some cars (software) have so much going on that there will always be problems,
unless you use a design process (coding language) that doesn't allow it to happen.
Or do you really think that Microsoft products with millions of lines of code are someday going to be bug free?
It's also part of a mentality that's undermining every attempt to have the private sector provide quality infrastructure in the first place, usually at great social and economic cost to the rest of us. The same idiocy, practiced through property taxes, is in part why the entire railroad system in the US collapsed in the 1960s and 1970s.
If you honestly believe this, it makes me suspect everything else you said.
Railroads were "growing," but their growth in tonnage was significantly less than the overall growth in product being moved.
As roads got better, the balance was was accruing to the trucking industry.
The real game changer for rail was the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.
Private industry sure as shit wasn't going to build a coast-to-coast highway system,
so if you want to talk about "undermining every attempt to have the private sector provide quality infrastructure"
you should look at catfights private industry had over who was going to get taxed (and how much) to pay for the public highway system.
Tax cuts are tax relief. When you get a refund it is not a hand out from the government, it is YOUR money being returned because you paid too much. The government runs on your money. It takes from you for the 'common good'... and some of that common good is waste (pork).
You might have a valid point, but without any actual numbers, you're just parroting ideology.
It's entirely possible that 60% of spending is pork, but the 40% that goes to the common good is so valuable that it is worth wasting 60 cents on the dollar.
To actually have a point, you need to show that the common good generated from your tax dollars is not worth the extra pork that goes along with it.
TLDR: I don't take it as a given that your ideological preconceptions are correct.
The others are usually dictated by citizens or external factors in unexpected ways during a fiscal year. War, 9/11. natural disaster, etc...
I guess "natural disaster" is one way to describe the Bush tax cuts.
The controversy over our budget deficits are an entirely manufactured one,
made all the more hypocritical because the biggest critics are also the most responsible for it.
For whatever reason, WSJ seems to give Google a pass when it comes to the paywall
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303663604579504691512965308
The CA has to be validated by third party auditors, before it can even be trusted.
All those big box stores that got their credit card numbers hacked....
Validated by third party auditors.
IIRC, one of the stores was actively being exploited throughout the audit process and still passed.
"A European schedule"?
I think it's also worth mentioning that a lot of the outbreaks we have in the USA start with someone who recently returned from Europe.
Europe's problems are twofold.
1. A decade of declining MMR vaccinations thanks to the Wakefield craze.
2. Travelers/immigrants from Africa and Asia carrying infections.
Internet should count as critical infrastructure that should be paid for and maintained out of tax money, just the same as roads.
You might be surprised how many public roads/bridges/tunnels have been privatized and had a toll booth slapped on them.
Think about it. Could you predict the sentiments of every human on the planet (over 4 billion) by asking the last 500 people born?
There are charts that you can use to look up the proper sample size for whatever population and confidence interval you want.
http://www.research-advisors.com/tools/SampleSize.htm
Generally, you over sample in order to account for geographic areas, sub-groups, age/gender/etc.
But good luck scaring the kids! It might even last for a few hours until they figure out we've dumped a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere for the past decade with almost no upswing in temperature. Once you realize that, you start caring about real pollution again instead of hating on poor old carbon so much.
The people denying man made climate change are also the same dickholes that refuse to enact or properly enforce job-killing regulations on "real pollution".
Look at the recent shit show in North Carolina with Duke Energy and the Republican Governor as a prime example.
Or those idiots in Texas who can't be bothered to inspect massive stockpiles of fertilizer that blow up towns.
In passing, I call attention to the point that those responsible for making a budget can subvert the whole process by just failing to execute their duty. Both the President and Congress have been guilty of that.
This is not a point to be made in passing, it's the entire core of the problem.
Congress hasn't passed an Obama budget since he was sworn into office.
Everything since 2009 has been a continuing resolution based on Bush's last budget.
Even the sequester wasn't a proper budget, as it was just cutting 10% off the previous continuing resolution.
Which puts the lie to your statement that
At the same time, you should understand that you can't "inherit" a deficit. The idea is poppycock. The budget for each year stands fresh on its own.
The real irony of it all is that Republicans want to cut spending by $1 trillion/year.
Which happens to be the exact amount of Bush's not-so-temporary 10 year/10 trillion tax cut which is now in its 13th year.
There are recalls all the time on products through honest mistakes people make. Should we call out each of these people individually?
The engineer that designed the part and the replacement lied in front of a Senate Committee when asked if he knew there was a defect.
The engineering manager was deposed in a lawsuit and said that GM made a business decision not to fix the defect.
Those aren't honest mistakes. Those are "bad actors" I'm talking about
People who intentionally do something wrong, don't fix something that is wrong, or cover up something that is/was wrong.
Your entire post is arguing against a position I did not take.
I wonder if they properly controlled for luck.
You obviously didn't RTFA.
But she signed up, got a little training in how to estimate probabilities from the people running the program, and then was given access to a website that listed dozens of carefully worded questions on events of interest to the intelligence community, along with a place for her to enter her numerical estimate of their likelihood.
"Usually I just do a Google search," she said.
In fact, she's so good she's been put on a special team with other superforecasters whose predictions are reportedly 30 percent better than intelligence officers with access to actual classified information.
It's not luck they've selected for, it's the ability to make educated guesses.
Maybe you missed the reference.
Teela Brown is a character from Larry Niven's Ringworld series.
Her defining characteristic is that she's a 6th generation of Birthright Lottery winners and thus, uniquely lucky.
That said, naming names of an engineer is a really bad precedent. What is the goal GM is trying to achieve here. Do they want people to go break the guy's windows? Burn down his house? Call him in the middle of the night or deliver pizza? Apart from potentially removing the guy's livelihood for the remainder of his life because no-one wants to hire 'that guy' ever again, and a lot of abuse being targeted his way, what will this achieve?
Why exactly is it a bad precedent?
The names of everyone involved are going to come out anyways, with all the possible consequences you described.
Our judicial system is usually exceedingly unwilling to pierce the corporate veil and directly hold bad actors responsible for their choices.
So I'm perfectly happy with a society that aggressively shuns those people, regardless of judicial outcomes.
I'm *guessing* GM's goal is to scapegoat a few responsible parties as early as possible,
so that when the management failures are unmasked, there won't be as much heat and vitriol.
I think the traditional /. response involves something along the lines of:
"But what if you're a doctor in a movie theater and someone dies because you didn't get an e-mail in the seconds after it was sent?"
i just think it's unprofessional and lazy...her performance in Orange is the New Black is equally as bad, IMHO...very perfunctory
If you hated her in Star Trek and Orange is the New Black, you'll love her in NTSF:SD:SUV
It's a show designed to make bad, unprofessional, and lazy acting really shine
Give it a try. If you find yourself unsatisfied... well, that may have been the point.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbCWYm7B_B4&t=7s