I get your drift... but two points: Obamacare actually saves money while insuring more people. (Congressional Budget Office analysis). That's because the current system of treating the poor in emergency rooms is outrageously inefficient. And secondly, doctors are not really rich. They may make more than your or me, but in the overall scheme of things it's hospital administrators, pharmaceutical company CEOs, insurance company owners, and bankers who are really really rich.
The biggest political success for Republicans in the last 30 years was convincing the middle and lower middle class to be afraid of the poor. They should instead be very very afraid of the rich.
What Hansen is advocating are plutonium fast breeder reactors. Like the Clinch River plant that was cancelled in the 1980s. He wants to mass-produce them on an assembly line. He wants small distrubuted plants full of plutonium. This is one crazy dude.
He never defends his assertion that nuclear can ramp up faster than solar and wind. He ignores the fact that the government continues to massively subsidize nuclear via the Price-Anderson liability limitation and support for research. He ignores the fact that current plants take 10 years to build. And when he says the new plants would be cheaper than existing plants, I had to laugh. Cheaper than "outrageously overpriced" is still not all that cheap.
So yes, fix the waste problem, fix the terrorist problem, fix the fuel supply problem, fix the cost over-run problem, and fix the economically un-competitive problem And THEN we'll talk.
If the nuclear boys want to play with dangerous toys, they need to find a nice uninhabited planet to do it on. The innovation has been in wind, solar, geothermal, and even natural gas. Those guys are smart, they are having fun, and they do not destroy massive chunks of real estate.
Read the October 1986 issue of Scientific American to see what happens when guys having fun melt down a reactor.
I know a (former) CIA agent who did operations inside China and Russia. They didn't catch him so they didn't do anything.
I've had two responses to my suggestion that Snowden is safer because he claims to have divulged all. One says he was never in danger because the US could not get to him in Russia. The other says he would be killed anyway just to prove a point.
Of course Snowden is a smart guy. The way to really make himself safe is to hold the most embarrassing information in a safe place with instructions to release it if he is killed. That's what a smart guy would do. And the US agencies know he is a smart guy.
There is a lot more that Snowden has not released yet. He is wisely using the drip, drip, drip method of disclosure so the press and public have time to digest each successive piece of information. Before it's done, it will become clear that the House and Senate oversight committees were either derelict in their duties or complicit in illegal activities. They either knew or they didn't. Either way, eventually they will be the ones asking for clemency.
... They question for society is do you actively hurt people who are still living in old houses by interfering in the energy economy to force certain behavior form them? I think that kind of environmentalism is immoral and despicable, people who support it whether they admit it or not are anit-freedom.
That's what conservation subsidies and tax credits are all about. When we insulated my daughter's house this year, about 1/3rd of the cost was covered by tax credits and a subsidy funded by the stimulus money appropriated in 2009. If you don't want to hurt people, you will be concerned about the long term effects of climate change and the effects of nuclear meltdowns. Ask the people in Alaska who are being disposessed by melting sea ice and massive winter storms washing their houses (that have been there for generations) into the sea. Ask the people in Fukushima.
I live in the most energy efficient house in my county, based on good insulation, solar heating, and thermal mass. We just retrofitted my daughter's house (built in 1968) with insulation in attic, walls and crawl space. Nobody is wearing thermal underwear. Nobody is uncomfortable. And we are saving lots of money by NOT using energy. But "cheap" energy undercuts such efforts. The payback time is too long for most folks if energy stays cheap. But energy is only cheap if you ignore the cost of environmental damage. If that damage were included on your power bill each monty, insulation and solar power would look pretty good.
From the article: "Those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough" to deliver the amount of cheap and reliable power the world needs, "
But nuclear power is neither cheap nor reliable. So why do they suggest that as a replacement for renewables. As to the "fast enough" part of that, solar and wind can be ramped up much faster than nuclear. The rationale of the article is not logical.
As opposed to "burn it if you've got it" industrialism? No, I said nothing about shivering. But much energy is wasted because it is too cheap. Conservation is the cheapest source of "new" energy supply.
And I guess if global warming runs it's course, we'll all be to hot to shiver.:)
What assumptions is Hansen making here? Of couse there will "enough" renewables if demand is scaled down by conservation and the price of fossil fuels is raised high enough. Global warming is an externalized envionmental cost of fossil fues. If those costs are internalized in the price of fossil energy, the free market will take care of the problem. Or we can just raise taxes on fossil energy and use the money to build renewables.
What Hansen is really saying is that there will not be enough renewables if we continue with business as usual, including subsidies to the fossil fuel and nuclear industires. That is true but it relies on the wrong assumtions.
Anti-poaching is only one means by which corporations weaken workers. Illegal retaliatory firing for union organizing is another. The suit is about maintaining a free market in labor. Union membership is one way that individuals participate in that free market. The decline in union membership is a major cause of the decline in the income of American workers.
As documented in Robert Reich's book Super-Capitalism, the most productive and prosperous time in US history was the age (1950s-1960s) of collaboration between big government, big business, and big labor. With labor out of the picture and government oversight waning, is it any wonder that corporations are feasting on the bones of their powerless workforce?
"I agree that it should probably be a felony to gather or misuse personal data. I do not think felony should be applied to copyrighted works. Very big difference, there."--- Jane Q. Public
I agree with eveything you say... but how do you make the legal distinction? If "corporations are people my friends", then corporate data IS personal data. The evil starts by pretending that corporations have rights. Corporations have priviledges and responsibilities but they don't have rights because they are NOT people.
When Microsoft suggests anything to "protect" the user, I immediately look for the trap. In this case it's easy to find. When DRM violations are made a felony, it won't be a felony only when the violated party is the user. This is a back door way to make DRM violations against big corporations a felony. This has nothing to do with protecting users and everything to do with helping corporations.
The British shot people too. The reason we have a protection against self incrimination is the history of American colonists being forced by the British to confess to crimes they didn't commit. Many law enforcement personnel attempt to do this constantly. To them it is a game and they win if you confess. Truth plays no role.
From the article: "would he really hand over his license and registration and then sit silently in the driver's seat refusing to respond the cop's questions (which pretty much eliminates your chance at being let off with a warning)? "
Right there you admit that the police will act differently toward silent citizens even if those citizens have every right to remain silent. THAT is the problem. That is coercion and it happens as a routine part of current policing.
Oh yes, there certainly would be brave presecutors and brave judges who would face down the NSA, just as Edward Snowden has, regardless of the personal cost. But they must have a law to work with.
The greatest threat in the face of evil is complacency. The greatest power of despotism is the ability to induce self-censorship.
Do you recognize evil when it is reading your email?
The Russians offered military competition because (as we discovered after the fall of Communism) they were sacrificing everything else in their country to pay for the military. Russia never offered economic competition or competition in innovation outside of the military arena. The real long term battle is economic and not military.
SuricouRaven, you are correct that China has turned to free enterprise at the micro level to set prices and allocate resources. No argument there. But China still has a command economy at the macro level, setting overall goals and choosing winners and losers in the marketplace. A recent example is that the Chinese government has forced all the rare earth mining companies in the country to join a government consortium which controls access at the source. This is part of a plan to make China pre-eminent in high-tech manufacturing using rare earths. I'm saying that China has a plan. The US has no industrial or innovation plan. So we will see which system works better. If US companies focus on short term profit instead of long term innovation, I think this will be the last time they do that. The US government will step in to secure our future.
Since WW2, the US has had a huge lead in science and tech, in part due to the lack of competition from countries that were severely damaged by the war. China is the second largest economy in the world and is the first "command economy" to actually offer competition in innovation to the US. US companies have long argued that the free market was the best way to produce cutting edge innovation. Aside from the defense arena, that is how most tech has been developed.... without an overarching central plan. Now US tech faces a concerted, planned, and nationally funded challenge from China. If the MLP innitiatives are successful in moving China ahead of the US in the targeted areas of research, it will be the end of the hands-off approach of the US government.
These projects were most likely tax exempt 501(c)3 entities. They are set up to receive donations and not to provide for-profit services. In asking them to invoice you for serivces that were not rendered, you were asking them to commit tax fraud. Your management knows this but they wanted to write off the donation as a business expense. Just make the donation and stop trying to game the system. This is how tax exempt organizations lose their tax exempt status. This is also how people go to jail.
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I get your drift... but two points: Obamacare actually saves money while insuring more people. (Congressional Budget Office analysis). That's because the current system of treating the poor in emergency rooms is outrageously inefficient. And secondly, doctors are not really rich. They may make more than your or me, but in the overall scheme of things it's hospital administrators, pharmaceutical company CEOs, insurance company owners, and bankers who are really really rich.
The biggest political success for Republicans in the last 30 years was convincing the middle and lower middle class to be afraid of the poor. They should instead be very very afraid of the rich.
What Hansen is advocating are plutonium fast breeder reactors. Like the Clinch River plant that was cancelled in the 1980s. He wants to mass-produce them on an assembly line. He wants small distrubuted plants full of plutonium. This is one crazy dude.
He never defends his assertion that nuclear can ramp up faster than solar and wind. He ignores the fact that the government continues to massively subsidize nuclear via the Price-Anderson liability limitation and support for research. He ignores the fact that current plants take 10 years to build. And when he says the new plants would be cheaper than existing plants, I had to laugh. Cheaper than "outrageously overpriced" is still not all that cheap.
So yes, fix the waste problem, fix the terrorist problem, fix the fuel supply problem, fix the cost over-run problem, and fix the economically un-competitive problem And THEN we'll talk.
If the nuclear boys want to play with dangerous toys, they need to find a nice uninhabited planet to do it on. The innovation has been in wind, solar, geothermal, and even natural gas. Those guys are smart, they are having fun, and they do not destroy massive chunks of real estate.
Read the October 1986 issue of Scientific American to see what happens when guys having fun melt down a reactor.
I carry a phone with no contract or data plan. I can text and surf only from wifi.
I know a (former) CIA agent who did operations inside China and Russia. They didn't catch him so they didn't do anything.
I've had two responses to my suggestion that Snowden is safer because he claims to have divulged all. One says he was never in danger because the US could not get to him in Russia. The other says he would be killed anyway just to prove a point.
Of course Snowden is a smart guy. The way to really make himself safe is to hold the most embarrassing information in a safe place with instructions to release it if he is killed. That's what a smart guy would do. And the US agencies know he is a smart guy.
That's what I would say too.... if I had a target on my back. If he has disclosed everything, there is no reason to take him out.
There is a lot more that Snowden has not released yet. He is wisely using the drip, drip, drip method of disclosure so the press and public have time to digest each successive piece of information. Before it's done, it will become clear that the House and Senate oversight committees were either derelict in their duties or complicit in illegal activities. They either knew or they didn't. Either way, eventually they will be the ones asking for clemency.
... They question for society is do you actively hurt people who are still living in old houses by interfering in the energy economy to force certain behavior form them? I think that kind of environmentalism is immoral and despicable, people who support it whether they admit it or not are anit-freedom.
That's what conservation subsidies and tax credits are all about. When we insulated my daughter's house this year, about 1/3rd of the cost was covered by tax credits and a subsidy funded by the stimulus money appropriated in 2009. If you don't want to hurt people, you will be concerned about the long term effects of climate change and the effects of nuclear meltdowns. Ask the people in Alaska who are being disposessed by melting sea ice and massive winter storms washing their houses (that have been there for generations) into the sea. Ask the people in Fukushima.
I live in the most energy efficient house in my county, based on good insulation, solar heating, and thermal mass. We just retrofitted my daughter's house (built in 1968) with insulation in attic, walls and crawl space. Nobody is wearing thermal underwear. Nobody is uncomfortable. And we are saving lots of money by NOT using energy. But "cheap" energy undercuts such efforts. The payback time is too long for most folks if energy stays cheap. But energy is only cheap if you ignore the cost of environmental damage. If that damage were included on your power bill each monty, insulation and solar power would look pretty good.
From the article: "Those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough" to deliver the amount of cheap and reliable power the world needs, "
But nuclear power is neither cheap nor reliable. So why do they suggest that as a replacement for renewables. As to the "fast enough" part of that, solar and wind can be ramped up much faster than nuclear. The rationale of the article is not logical.
As opposed to "burn it if you've got it" industrialism? No, I said nothing about shivering. But much energy is wasted because it is too cheap. Conservation is the cheapest source of "new" energy supply.
And I guess if global warming runs it's course, we'll all be to hot to shiver. :)
What assumptions is Hansen making here? Of couse there will "enough" renewables if demand is scaled down by conservation and the price of fossil fuels is raised high enough. Global warming is an externalized envionmental cost of fossil fues. If those costs are internalized in the price of fossil energy, the free market will take care of the problem. Or we can just raise taxes on fossil energy and use the money to build renewables.
What Hansen is really saying is that there will not be enough renewables if we continue with business as usual, including subsidies to the fossil fuel and nuclear industires. That is true but it relies on the wrong assumtions.
Sounds like the first step in Hari Seldon's Psychohistory. http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/07/tampering-with-historical-destiny-isaac-asimovs-foundation-trilogy
Anti-poaching is only one means by which corporations weaken workers. Illegal retaliatory firing for union organizing is another. The suit is about maintaining a free market in labor. Union membership is one way that individuals participate in that free market. The decline in union membership is a major cause of the decline in the income of American workers.
As documented in Robert Reich's book Super-Capitalism, the most productive and prosperous time in US history was the age (1950s-1960s) of collaboration between big government, big business, and big labor. With labor out of the picture and government oversight waning, is it any wonder that corporations are feasting on the bones of their powerless workforce?
Assuming you could get to a black hole before dying of old age.....
Gamma Radiation would kill you long before a quantum firewall or tidal forces.
"I agree that it should probably be a felony to gather or misuse personal data. I do not think felony should be applied to copyrighted works. Very big difference, there."--- Jane Q. Public
I agree with eveything you say... but how do you make the legal distinction? If "corporations are people my friends", then corporate data IS personal data. The evil starts by pretending that corporations have rights. Corporations have priviledges and responsibilities but they don't have rights because they are NOT people.
When Microsoft suggests anything to "protect" the user, I immediately look for the trap. In this case it's easy to find. When DRM violations are made a felony, it won't be a felony only when the violated party is the user. This is a back door way to make DRM violations against big corporations a felony. This has nothing to do with protecting users and everything to do with helping corporations.
That's like the mob saying we won't break you legs because you exhibited co-operative behavior. If you know the alternative, it's already coercion.
The British shot people too. The reason we have a protection against self incrimination is the history of American colonists being forced by the British to confess to crimes they didn't commit. Many law enforcement personnel attempt to do this constantly. To them it is a game and they win if you confess. Truth plays no role.
From the article: "would he really hand over his license and registration and then sit silently in the driver's seat refusing to respond the cop's questions (which pretty much eliminates your chance at being let off with a warning)? "
Right there you admit that the police will act differently toward silent citizens even if those citizens have every right to remain silent. THAT is the problem. That is coercion and it happens as a routine part of current policing.
Oh yes, there certainly would be brave presecutors and brave judges who would face down the NSA, just as Edward Snowden has, regardless of the personal cost. But they must have a law to work with.
The greatest threat in the face of evil is complacency. The greatest power of despotism is the ability to induce self-censorship.
Do you recognize evil when it is reading your email?
The Russians offered military competition because (as we discovered after the fall of Communism) they were sacrificing everything else in their country to pay for the military. Russia never offered economic competition or competition in innovation outside of the military arena. The real long term battle is economic and not military.
SuricouRaven, you are correct that China has turned to free enterprise at the micro level to set prices and allocate resources. No argument there. But China still has a command economy at the macro level, setting overall goals and choosing winners and losers in the marketplace. A recent example is that the Chinese government has forced all the rare earth mining companies in the country to join a government consortium which controls access at the source. This is part of a plan to make China pre-eminent in high-tech manufacturing using rare earths. I'm saying that China has a plan. The US has no industrial or innovation plan. So we will see which system works better. If US companies focus on short term profit instead of long term innovation, I think this will be the last time they do that. The US government will step in to secure our future.
Since WW2, the US has had a huge lead in science and tech, in part due to the lack of competition from countries that were severely damaged by the war. China is the second largest economy in the world and is the first "command economy" to actually offer competition in innovation to the US. US companies have long argued that the free market was the best way to produce cutting edge innovation. Aside from the defense arena, that is how most tech has been developed.... without an overarching central plan. Now US tech faces a concerted, planned, and nationally funded challenge from China. If the MLP innitiatives are successful in moving China ahead of the US in the targeted areas of research, it will be the end of the hands-off approach of the US government.
like their ancestors did 3 years ago.
These projects were most likely tax exempt 501(c)3 entities. They are set up to receive donations and not to provide for-profit services. In asking them to invoice you for serivces that were not rendered, you were asking them to commit tax fraud. Your management knows this but they wanted to write off the donation as a business expense. Just make the donation and stop trying to game the system. This is how tax exempt organizations lose their tax exempt status. This is also how people go to jail.
All that time and engineering effort. All that programming expertise. And yet.... it still drives on the wrong side of the road.