Really, so you think people having to give up their homes and move to somewhere in which you approve of is a viable solution in the land of the free.
I'm sorry if I seem agitated but people are really pissing me off. Even if everyone moved to the city, the city wouldn't magicly stay the same size making everything magically work efficiently. It would expand and people would still need to drive across town to get to and from work. And no, public transportation doesn't work when it exists except in a few places. And that is when it exists. Think this through a little and don't use cartoon logic.
You people and this peak oil bullshit need to realize something. Peak oil is not a static number or volume. Improvements in processing and extraction happen all the time, the ability to get it from tar sands and shale have moved the peak number at least three times in the last 20 years. Even this 30 year number is an old and outdated guess that doesn't take into consideration the added fields.
And who cares if it starts to naturally increase in costs when we hit peak. It won't happen over night and it will be slow enough that people can adjust to it unlike this artificial BS cap and trade. It still doesn't mean that alternatives can't be explored. Fuck, if we would mandate the use of alternative and renewable fuel sources to covered expanded needs and to replace end of service facilities, it would be a lot more stable and better for the people and the economy then jacking the costs up artificially just to hope someone eventually goes alternative.
NOx, SOx, and COx are already largely regulated already. It still doesn't present a problem unless you are starring down a source of it.
I don't think this is being argued here, by you, but people see the problem with excess CO2 is the environmental damage.
> They aren't seeing a problem, they are being told there is a problem and having people point to normal situations as proof. But just because the sun comes up every day, it doesn't mean my explanation of the gods racing chariots across the sky is accurate. Global warming has been hijacked for political gain, it's little more then a control and revenue scheme with a redistribution of wealth added onto it. The model even seems to be broken currently as it's been not getting warmer with the rise in Co2.
I work where people make decent money and can easily support a family. But since gas was so expensive, they chose to ride the bus or bike to work instead. They could still afford to drive if they wanted to, but they found the price to be not worth it. If they drove a more fuel efficient vehicle, it would have had less of an impact.
Golly gee, it looks like you weren't one of the people I was talking about. I guess that proves everything in the universe wrong and we don't have anyone on government assistance or people who couldn't afford to keep their houses and defaulted on their loans or anything like that.
Get real, I didn't say everyone. And yes, it has been a democrat battle cry that the gap between the poor and wealthy has been getting bigger and bigger so even if you were on the other side, it doesn't make me wrong nor does it invalidate what I said.
You need to come back to reality and touch it or something.
Getting the U.S. off oil isn't just a environment thing. It is a national security thing. We are far to dependent on people who hate us. Speculation causes oil to fluctuate, but no matter what, it is going to run out eventually and prices will continue to rise. The sooner we can get out of that, the better.
There are ways to do this without this massive cap and trade bullshit. Speculation can be limited, and things can be done besides moving the poor into poverty in hopes that someone in the future might have an answer.
I don't disagree that it's a national security thing either. What I disagree with is the lack of thought and respect for the people at the bottom and near bottom of the rung as well as the massive expansion of government.
I don't know what you see as "actually happening...but maybe you just watch Fox News and don't know any better.
Dude, all you have to do is open your fucking eyes and look around. The economy is in the tanks and unemployment is sky high not because everyone has spare money to burn. It's this way because energy costs raped their wallets and they couldn't buy other things or keep their house payments up to date and defaulted on their loans. When energy costs go up, everything goes up, food costs jumped about 15% in the last two years (not surprisingly since the dems took congress), electricity jumped 45% in most markets, in mine it's scheduled to jump another 30% before the end of two more years. All this shit adds up and when gas costs twice as much as it did and the only thing you can cut back more on is showing up to work, you are fucked. Just because it didn't happen to you and that you have a good job doesn't mean it isn't happening anywhere.
And the point was that the pollution in the air that you cannot escape breathing is not harming you significantly, and it has less of an impact as all of the other things you just mentioned.
In other words, worrying about it is worrying for the sake or worrying. It doesnt harm you any more then being in a confined space for extended periods of time in which your own respiration increased the Co2 levels more then what has been raise in the atmosphere over the last 50 years.
It's never a waste when you are attempting to limit the damage. Picking the least of two evils still gives you an advantage you wouldn't have normally had.
Many people here didn't even know about government pre-Bush. Don't shatter their realities. Everything started with Bush and was an idealistic paradise before that.
Now repeat after me, I will not discuss American history on Slashdot again.
You know what, I'm not even a big liberal or anything. IF anything, I'm mostly conservative and think that the government should get out of the business of supporting the poor and allow them to create opportunities to step up and out of the hole they fell in. But damn, this pisses me off when the government is attempting to ignore the very real and hardships it will place on many people.
Even though I'm a let them take care of themselves type of person, I see this as intentionally harming someone through no fault of their own and I cannot for the life of me see how anyone can justify that (not to insinuate you do). This entire issue or track we are on really pissed me off. There are better way to archive the same goals without most of the hardships with the exceptions of they won't put crap loads of money into the government's coffers. Someone needs to bitch slap Obama and congress and it cannot wait until another election cycle. I hope every idiot who votes for this gets booted from office as soon a legally possible.
All the whining over this, and no one seems to care that we have over $60k in direct debt to the federal governemnt now, growing much more than this little amount, and growing for no particularly good reason. And, when you count all the government debts and obligations (obligations which are coded into law, but the laws can easily be changed, not like wiping debt off the books), it's about $750,000 per family. This is a drop in the bucket and is supposed to give real and tangible results. The only difference is "debt" is put off forever util the country collapses, but making someone pay for something now when they do it, and that's irresponsible. I guess I was raised backwards, in that I'd be much more offended at the large amount of money that they are promising I'll pay, and I'm getting no benefit from it.
You better put that no one back in your pocket. I care and have cared for some time. The biggest difference between that and this tax is that the wealthy will be repaying it and the poor and moderately low income people will escape the hardships that repayment would cause.
But it's different with this, poor people will be poorer now, well off people will be poor and the only ones who will seem unfazed will be the wealthy who can afford to pay to play. I know people living off of less then 16K a year who will not be able to keep their utilities on or have to make decisions on whether to buy food or put gas in the car to get to work.
but hey, I got some other news along this front, I started comparing the list of major cities and states who attempted to implement Kyoto style reforms and after comparing it to the unemployment rates for those cities and states, it appears that not only is all the claims made over this going to be true, but it's already showing itself by the higher then everywhere else unemployment rates in those cities.
Oh, and if the debt were paid off today, then the total tax on people with a plan like this would still be less than we'd save by not having to pay interest anymore. Yes, this massive, huge, horrible plan that's going to bankrupt the country is still less than just the interest payment on our debt, and yet the outcry is about this and not the debt. People like to whine occassionally about it, but no one will ever work on paying it off (well, except Clinton, and he was bashed by both sides for it, which is why it won't be an issue again for a long time in national politics).
So are you suggesting we just say fuck it and give up to this nonsense that will drastically place unnecessary hardships onto the least fortunate people? I mean it sounds like your wanting to just give up because something else is already bad. Well, the first thing to do when you find you have dug yourself into a hole is to stop digging. The deeper you make it, the harder it will be to get out.
Now, if this was really about getting results, then why piss around with this massive expansion of power, this massive tax increase, this massive control over people's lives, this massive damage to people's lives, that is designed to hope something changes instead of making the change, and why don't we just mandate a switch renewable energy, grandfather existing power plants in and phase them out at the end of their expected life while just mandating renewable sources be used for replacement and expansion needs? It would cost less, wouldn't shock the poor or move the middle class to the poor class, and it would gracefully transition with improvements being made as things start needing to be replaced.
In other words, this is like going from LA to San Diego via Tokyo and NY. You will eventually get there, but it takes a lot more time and costs a lot more money.
Here is a hint, right now the pollution from the manufacture and use of all of these products is embedded in the air you are breathing, and you currently have no way to avoid it.
And yet people are living longer and longer as time goes by. Tell me again, what was the major problem with this crap in the atmosphere? The average live span has almost doubled since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
his is merely charging people for their actual use of public property - air - which has been overused. You will be charged no extra if you only use the air you breathe.
Lol.. Here we go with the fictional owners of stuff already present. You owe me 2 million dollar for breathing air I own. Of course I'm not breathing any air you own, it all belongs to me and the guy next door.
Man- you guys are idiots. Why is it that only the wealth nations are being charged for fictional ownership and usage of what is already there and has been used as a tool since the beginning of time? How come this charge isn't applied to everyone equally?
Not sure what 'new crap' you are talking about that won't be improved but:
The crap is the wind, solar, and other renewable energy. And won't be improved means exactly that, it can't compete so instead of improving it, they are moving to the lowest common denominator.
absolutely. That's the point.
The point is fucking stupid and contradicts what you claimed- that is would force people into the alternative energy. If that was the point, then instead of taxing the hell out of people and products they need, the alternative would be to simply outlaw coal and fossil fuel power generation, give a grandfather clause over the useful life of existing facilities and mandate that future expansion and replacement power needs to be of a certain renewable resource. I mean all this shit does is takes you from LA to Albuquerque NM, via New York and Japan. It's a lot more expensive, a lot longer to get there, and your not going to like it once you are there. Sure, it sounds real good in the brochure but once you are there all you will find is the transplanted locals complaining that the locals aren't local enough and the locals who are now foreigners because they can't afford to live in the city anymore.
If you are comparing them solely on the cost of energy production then yes, they don't compete. But then you are disregarding the effect the pollution of the non-renewable source has. If you factor that in for society (by making companies pay more as heavier polluters) then they absolutely compete. Do you think that any of the other ways to deal with pollution/global warming wouldn't cost society in some way (it always ends up paid by the consumers).
The effects of pollution are not disregarded. It's reflected in the price and the so called pollution is just now being called a problem in order to push the alternative sources and conflate this bullshit tax. There is nothing different from you concept and say an antivirus company creating and releasing a virus in order to sell it's own software. It's the same reason why MS has a hell of a time selling security products for it's own flaws hidden inside it's own operating systems.
As for global warming, it's over stated, from almost inception it has been politically hijacked for political purposes, and we don't understand enough of the elements being claimed as the problem to actually understand of they truly are or if they could be. Take this methane bullshit (literally), they want to tax cattle and livestock because of the methane they produce, however, cows or any animal does not create extra GHG's, all they do is transfer captured GHG's from plant life and place it back into the atmosphere in order for the plants to do it all over with again. If cattle wasn't involved, it would still happen naturally in about the same amount of time because live things die, they shed like leaves, and bacteria, fungi, insects and other animals decompose it pretty efficiently.
But, as I said earlier, if anyone was seriously concerned over global warming, then the answer isn't to inflate the costs of everything in hopes that something better comes about, the answer is to mandate the change over a certain period of time, make it happen and be done with it. This cap and trade has nothing to do with pollution or global warming, it's all about control, taxes, and redistributing wealth. It's the same damn thing that Kyoto was and it's proven to be ineffective toward it's claimed goals while being very effective at promoting growth in third world countries and countries who aren't subject to limits. There is a reason the majority of countries that signed onto Kyoto has no Co2 limits and to why Kyoto has had the opposite effect and GHG emissions increased by 26% since 1998 when Kyoto was conceived. And surprisingly, the US GHG emissions increases since 1998 is only off of Europe's increases by.16 percent or.0016 with Europe having the higher increase.
Sorry dude, this thing just really pisses me off and when I saw you supporting the idea that punishing people at the bottom end of the income scale and placing more people there was a viable solution, I just freaked..
But I think in a few years, if prices stayed that way, you'd see a shift in purchasing to more fuel efficient vehicles.
What will end up happening is that we will see a round of inflation where first, prices of everything goes up, then people will demand more pay which will eventually cause the same but it will equal out eventually. People will buy more efficient cars because it will be the only thing being made. That's not a bad thing but it can be accomplished without screwing the majority of the population for 10 to 20 years until pay scales adjust and the carbon tax ends up with a limited effectiveness.
This was the same thing warned about with Kyoto, seen happening in Europe (check out Spain's blunder in going overboard), and has largely been offset only by utilizing imports from foreign third world countries. Since Europe stated the cap and trade BS, they have tripled their imports from China, India, and some south American countries and it's still impacting the average family by more then $1300 a year in extra costs.
In 2008, some Americans voted "Yes (we can!)" to all of the above.
There, fixed that for you.
In fact it it was only 9.5 million more Americans out of what 303 million that tipped the scales for all of the above. And I would say that a majority of them were actually voting against warrant-less wiretaps which didn't go away, the war in Iraq which is outside a few name changes will be following the Bush plan too.
That's not where the flaw in the logic exists. The flaw is in actually believing it was about technology, the environment and not a control program manipulated to tax the people.
This is nothing more then a scheme to tax people and control them.
Lol.. That's right, when wind, solar and other renewable energy sources can't compete, we will just place a massive tax on the traditional energy and make the noncompetitive compete.
Here is a hint, much of these costs will be embedded into items you purchase and you will have no way to avoid it. Here is another hint, this bill is just a tax, Carbon and global warming are just excuses to through it down. There are plenty of other ways to deal with global warming that will not cause the same hardships on people. And with this being just another tax that they have convinced you that inflating the real costs of something is a good idea instead of improving the new crap to make it better, pretty much tells us that even when we get away from traditional sources of energy and into renewable ones, the taxes will go over to the new. IT will never diaper.
I think your missing the forest for all the trees.
When gas prices raised and you think you saw habits change, most of those habits were actually reflections of people losing their jobs from the economy going stagnant because all disposable income was going into the gas tanks.
There is a point in which people cannot trim their gas usage any lower. Going to and from work is mandatory if you want to keep a job, regardless of what anyone thinks of public transportation, it's non-existent in many if not the majority of places.
Surcharges work only when you don't care about the impact it has on the people. Losing their jobs, their homes, choosing between food and gasoline, none of that is an acceptable option to me but it's exactly what happened when gas went to $4.00 a gallon so that you could see the change in habits.
You need to get over yourself and look at what is actually happening.
pollution per capita has a lot more to do with population density then efficiency unless your going to use abstract rules in your efficiency.
Anyways, the cap and trade laws are not identical to those in Europe. It turns out that in Europe, they increased the costs to the "average" family by $1,300 a year. In the US with the US limits in this bill being voted on, we are looking at an estimated costs starting out at adding $1,870 in costs for the average family which will increase to over $6,800 by the time everything is implemented.
Yes, it's most likely you are over estimating a lot of things. The biggest is your intellect and ability to fathom the real implications of this program. And no, people are not saying no caps at all, they are saying it has to be done in ways that do not damage the economy or place people through hardships that aren't necessary. Why is taking the time to do it right such a big fucking inconvenience for this democrat congress. It's like the bailouts in which they claimed to be outraged a bonuses being paid when the democrats wrote the law to allow the bonuses to be paid then forgot it was there (or didn't think anyone was actually smart enough to look) and acted outrages at their own actions.
I have to call into question your report or facts.
There are so many situation in which people are classified as sexual offenders in which the particulars are so unique to the case it just wouldn't happen again. Take the sexual offender registry lists. A few years ago, we were looking at our county's listings and out of 141 registered offenders, something like 60 or 70 of them were situations involving high school sweethearts over the past 20 years in which one person was older then the other and reached past the legal age of consent before the other had. In my state, the law is 18 years of age unless your within 2 years of each other in which consent is at 15 or both under the age of consent but above 15 years of age. This creates a very real situation where a freshmen can date a junior during high school but they could be in violation of the law if their birthdays are set apart enough and the junior was held back a grade.
There was also 10 or 15 sexual battery charges in which sexual contact wasn't involved at all. Evidently beating or smacking around your other half because they were withholding sex or cheating on you is still a sexual offense. Then there are cases where people stole the underwear of people they had a crush on and after finding it to be illegal beyond a petty theft, would never do it again. Then you have the voyeurism in which someone gets caught with their pants down while pissing behind the bushes or two consenting adults get too frisky while parted somewhere and the cops catch them in the act (* something about a car in the middle of nowhere with the windows all fogged up and rocking from side to side that always makes a cop want to investigate).
In my county's case, we determined that out of the 141 registered sexual offenders, and yes, you can have sexual offenses that you don't have to register for which do carry jail time, there was only 40-60 people of real concern. So by applying sane interpretations of what would be a qualifying sexual offense, over 58% of the sexual offenders who have to register can be eliminated and I have no idea how many sexual offenders who aren't required to register could be excluded too. So lets ignore the those who don't register and the fact that quite a few of the registered offenders are still in jail/prison and see what this 3% to 13% would look like just with the specifics of not likely to ever happen again applied.
The 3% of the 141 comes out to 4.23 people, the 13% comes out to 18.33 people. without those people who's situation is so specific that it isn't likely to ever happen again, those same 4.23 people now become 7% and the 18.33 becomes 30.5% if we look at my high end estimate of 60 offenders I needed to be concerned over. If I got really liberal and picked the low end of 40 offended to be concerned about, the 3% becomes 10.5% and the 13% becomes 45.8% If we exclude those who don't need to register or the 15 year old's boning the their 14 year old girlfriends (statutory rape), Equalize all the offenses to match guidelines between the different states (like age of consent on one state being different then another) I'm sure this number would jump considerably.
That's sort of the problem with organizations like the NCIA. They will present the evidence to their favor, I weeded most of it out and turned to my favor. We can ignore the very real fact that a good portion of sexual related offenses wouldn't ever happen again because of circumstances surrounding the offense (like age of consent issues when you dated the same person since the 7th grade, or sleeping with a drunk girl making advances on you then later regretting is and you getting popped with a felony). But if we don't ignore it, then the numbers mentioned look a lot different and the no tolerance applications could be specifically targeted to repeat offenders or perhaps even those most likely to repeat offend. But the NCIA has an invested interest in pushing things other then jail and will pretend the problem is less severe then it actually is in order to advance it's goals.
A couple of things here. (BTW, not trying to be an ass, really, but FYI it's "precedent", not "precedence". You are by no means the only one here to make that mistake.)
Well, no. Don't assume I was talking about the legal authority established by a certain case when I was talking about the order of cases presenting the legal authority. I admit the sentence was poorly worded, it should have read something like different precedents (that the supreme court ruled on) in a precedence (simple ordering, based on either importance or sequence). One precedent was before another.
What I think is the most important is the order of the cases where is one was before the other, it could block the previous in this instance. If it was after, it would augment the case/decision you are referring to creating an exception. The Supreme court rules in 2009 that obscene is not protected speech. If the case can be made that the photos were obscene, the protections from the 2002 case can disappear in part if not entirely.
In any case, I made the point myself that the faces of actual children were used, and I agree that it will be interesting.
Yes, I saw that. If I conveyed the idea that you were oblivious to it, it was not my intention. I think it will play little in the case as it unfolds though, the guy in question never used the children for anything, he used their likeness obtained from legitimate sources acting in appropriate ways. The only real connection would be in finding your likeness attached to a potentially embarrassing photo with people not knowing it was a fake.
I'm not aware of this guy distributing the photo. Though it appears that they were found because the state/county police were already investigation a real case of sexual imposition of a minor in which they found 31 sexually explicit and altered photograph's of three (3) juvenile females. Of those, it appears all were real photos except the three in question. It took quite a bit of searching before I discovered that. I wish the original story was more accurate with how and why the police were involved in the first place.
But I would like to bring up a fine but important point: the issue here is "obscenity", not "indecency".
Indecent material can cross the line into obscene material. That's the reason I used the wording in the way I did. Here is a summery of the Supreme Courts test to indicate obscene material that I lifted from the FCC's website.
"What makes material "obscene?" Obscene speech is not protected by the First Amendment and broadcasters are prohibited, by statute and regulation, from airing obscene programming at any time. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, to be obscene, material must meet a three-prong test: (1) an average person, applying contemporary community standards, must find that the material, as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest (i.e., material having a tendency to excite lustful thoughts); (2) the material must depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable law; and (3) the material, taken as a whole, must lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. The Supreme Court has indicated that this test is designed to cover hard-core pornography."
Please note that if the material is lacking any of the three requirements, it's just indecent and objectionable material. I will explain where the 28 year old young looking girlfriend fits in when we look at the FCC's statement on the differences between obscene and indecent. As far as I know, these representations are accurate across different applications and aren't limited to the FCC's application.
I think the gist of this is in which the SCOTUS also said that indecent and obscene is a community standard and speech isn't always protected under that. That's the reference to the change in TN law in which they think will work despite the ruling you mentioned. You also have the fact that children are present in the photo even though it's faked.
What TN did was attempt to change the wording of the law in order to be in compliance with another precedence that the supreme court ruled on. Instead of being just child porn, it's now indecent pictures depicting child porn for sexual gratification (which makes it obscene and not protected speech).
It should be interesting in how this will play out. the TN law doesn't require the state to prove the age of the child or that harm was done. The age thing seems to be disturbing unless they are going after the community standard for obscene or something. If you were being tried for having sex with a minor, the state proving your partner was actually a minor seems pretty important otherwise they could pop you for banging your 28 year old girlfriend. If she looks 15 when dressed in a schoolgirl outfit and with the right lights, and you have nude pictures of her, you could be poped under this current state law.
I don't know how many times someone gets something in their head because of only knowing half the truth or randomly trusting one story over another. The cops, at least have training to determine the legitimacy of the story, made a decision to arrest or not, and would have had an entire legal department at HQ advising him on what or how he should proceed.
Someone making a claim who was also busted is a serious offense, the girl turned out to have no drugs and it's likely that the other person picked her in order to allow others involved to evade capture/discovery.
I agree - I'm glad that the search itself is not constitutional, but why isn't strip searching an actual 13 year old not considered sexual exploitation?
It has to do with the intentions of the person plus the obviousness to those intentions (what others can determine the intentions to be given the facts).
Just think - if one of those school officials had just drawn a picture of the search, rather than putting her through the invasive ordeal, he'd probably be up on child porn charges.
He should damn well be up on kiddie porn charges. Drawing a picture of the strip search does nothing to further what was perceived as a justifiable act. If he drew a picture of the search instead of actually doing it, it would imply he was more concerned with seeing the student naked or semi-nude then any actual justification for the holding and searching.
Sure it is. However, when I said middleman, I was thinking of someone who doesn't do much but facilitate a sale between you and a buyer and takes a cut of either the profits or the product or both.
The bottom line I was attempting to convey is that the same Co2 - CH4 released by a cow would be released without the cow even being there by similar and other means.
While that is great and I thank you for the information they are not really significant changes though. In essence they are resolving a really fundamental basis design issue. What I'm talking about are four trains accident mitigation like in the EPR, underground facilities, etc etc etc. Design changes which give the reactor an opportunity to mitigate accidents *when* they occur.
Please remember 2 things here, First, when I said they were upgraded, I was talking specifically of the RBMK units that was the type used in the Chernobyl plant. They have other reactor designs in use to and some of them meet what your talking about. Second, please remember that I was speaking of a Chernobyl style accident happening in modern time. It is virtually impossible for a Chernobyl accident to happen today because of the fixes in place. While that may not me significant in your book, it is significant to the control of the reaction and limiting it's ability to get out of control.
No, it's exactly what I mean. you are talking about core cooling I am talking about core containment. The ratio is expressed as the containment buildings capacity to 'contain' the thermal pressures created in an accident scenario.
Well, actually, you are then. The different designs and reaction cores place different requirements on the containment vessels and so on. Because a 50 year old design needed more concrete and steel doesn't mean that a more efficient and easier cooled/maintained design would need the same. This goes along with the concept of taking advantage of improvements and why you wouldn't want to design a reactor to last the life of the isotopes.
So it's not actually 'greenfeild'. Thats the bottom line, there are still radioactive isotopes contained on the site.
There are confined and safely stored Radioactive isotopes on site. They are awaiting the completion of the DOE's storage facility in which they will then be moved to. There won't be any residual radiation once they are moved and there is no detectable radiation on site outside of the storage containers themselves.
Your getting kind of anally picky here too. A nuclear power plant can use take up several square miles of land and the storage of spent fuel takes the space about the size of an Olympic basketball court. The storage space isn't dangerous or radioactive and outside of security concerns, there is no reason why people couldn't walk through that space with no protective gear. Claiming no green fielding is happening is hanging onto a technicality because you think it proves your point. The reality is that moving the fuel is so expensive that it's planned on only being done once when the DOE storage facility is up and running.
because like the coal industry got away with foisting it's externalities on the community, the Nuclear industry does exactly the same thing.
Ok, I didn't want to get into this but externalities are a load of crap. Everyone uses electricity and they pay for the externalities in savings in the cost of it. It's really that simple. Don't act like a business that is created to sell electricity to the consumer would somehow magically absorb all the costs of creating that electricity. They have to at least break even to stay the same, profit to grow and meet tomorrows demands, and profit to make the investment capitol worth the expenditure. If Coal or Nuclear, or Hydro had to cover all externalizations, you would simply be paying more for your electricity. So all of the externalities is already recovered by your decreased costs. Now that the government wants to tax this money under the guise that it impacts the air or global warming or whatever is nothing more then a money and control issue. It has nothing to do with the environmental impact. If it did, they would just mandate a reduction, grandfather some small offenders in, and give X amo
Plants capture carbon, they then die, hibernate and shed leaves or whatever and rot. All the carbon they absorbed gets released again. When a cow eats hay or corn, it's just being a middleman in that cycle. The cow would offset a number of insects, bacteria, fungus, and other animals that would be processing the carbon and releasing it into the air too.
Now, as for the heat trapping aspect of gasses, It's true that given the same volume of gas, methane is about 20 or so times more potent at trapping heat. However, because the methane is coming from something that would have released all it's carbon to begin with, you end up with 1/20th the amount of Co2 or water vapor or whatever greenhouse gas would be created by the decaying plants. So the fact that methane is released instead of Co2 is negated when you consider the chemical makeup and that they are limited to the elements availible.
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Really, so you think people having to give up their homes and move to somewhere in which you approve of is a viable solution in the land of the free.
I'm sorry if I seem agitated but people are really pissing me off. Even if everyone moved to the city, the city wouldn't magicly stay the same size making everything magically work efficiently. It would expand and people would still need to drive across town to get to and from work. And no, public transportation doesn't work when it exists except in a few places. And that is when it exists. Think this through a little and don't use cartoon logic.
You people and this peak oil bullshit need to realize something. Peak oil is not a static number or volume. Improvements in processing and extraction happen all the time, the ability to get it from tar sands and shale have moved the peak number at least three times in the last 20 years. Even this 30 year number is an old and outdated guess that doesn't take into consideration the added fields.
And who cares if it starts to naturally increase in costs when we hit peak. It won't happen over night and it will be slow enough that people can adjust to it unlike this artificial BS cap and trade. It still doesn't mean that alternatives can't be explored. Fuck, if we would mandate the use of alternative and renewable fuel sources to covered expanded needs and to replace end of service facilities, it would be a lot more stable and better for the people and the economy then jacking the costs up artificially just to hope someone eventually goes alternative.
NOx, SOx, and COx are already largely regulated already. It still doesn't present a problem unless you are starring down a source of it.
> They aren't seeing a problem, they are being told there is a problem and having people point to normal situations as proof. But just because the sun comes up every day, it doesn't mean my explanation of the gods racing chariots across the sky is accurate. Global warming has been hijacked for political gain, it's little more then a control and revenue scheme with a redistribution of wealth added onto it. The model even seems to be broken currently as it's been not getting warmer with the rise in Co2.
Golly gee, it looks like you weren't one of the people I was talking about. I guess that proves everything in the universe wrong and we don't have anyone on government assistance or people who couldn't afford to keep their houses and defaulted on their loans or anything like that.
Get real, I didn't say everyone. And yes, it has been a democrat battle cry that the gap between the poor and wealthy has been getting bigger and bigger so even if you were on the other side, it doesn't make me wrong nor does it invalidate what I said.
You need to come back to reality and touch it or something.
There are ways to do this without this massive cap and trade bullshit. Speculation can be limited, and things can be done besides moving the poor into poverty in hopes that someone in the future might have an answer.
I don't disagree that it's a national security thing either. What I disagree with is the lack of thought and respect for the people at the bottom and near bottom of the rung as well as the massive expansion of government.
Dude, all you have to do is open your fucking eyes and look around. The economy is in the tanks and unemployment is sky high not because everyone has spare money to burn. It's this way because energy costs raped their wallets and they couldn't buy other things or keep their house payments up to date and defaulted on their loans. When energy costs go up, everything goes up, food costs jumped about 15% in the last two years (not surprisingly since the dems took congress), electricity jumped 45% in most markets, in mine it's scheduled to jump another 30% before the end of two more years. All this shit adds up and when gas costs twice as much as it did and the only thing you can cut back more on is showing up to work, you are fucked. Just because it didn't happen to you and that you have a good job doesn't mean it isn't happening anywhere.
And the point was that the pollution in the air that you cannot escape breathing is not harming you significantly, and it has less of an impact as all of the other things you just mentioned.
In other words, worrying about it is worrying for the sake or worrying. It doesnt harm you any more then being in a confined space for extended periods of time in which your own respiration increased the Co2 levels more then what has been raise in the atmosphere over the last 50 years.
It's never a waste when you are attempting to limit the damage. Picking the least of two evils still gives you an advantage you wouldn't have normally had.
SSHHHH...
Many people here didn't even know about government pre-Bush. Don't shatter their realities. Everything started with Bush and was an idealistic paradise before that.
Now repeat after me, I will not discuss American history on Slashdot again.
You know what, I'm not even a big liberal or anything. IF anything, I'm mostly conservative and think that the government should get out of the business of supporting the poor and allow them to create opportunities to step up and out of the hole they fell in. But damn, this pisses me off when the government is attempting to ignore the very real and hardships it will place on many people.
Even though I'm a let them take care of themselves type of person, I see this as intentionally harming someone through no fault of their own and I cannot for the life of me see how anyone can justify that (not to insinuate you do). This entire issue or track we are on really pissed me off. There are better way to archive the same goals without most of the hardships with the exceptions of they won't put crap loads of money into the government's coffers. Someone needs to bitch slap Obama and congress and it cannot wait until another election cycle. I hope every idiot who votes for this gets booted from office as soon a legally possible.
You better put that no one back in your pocket. I care and have cared for some time. The biggest difference between that and this tax is that the wealthy will be repaying it and the poor and moderately low income people will escape the hardships that repayment would cause.
But it's different with this, poor people will be poorer now, well off people will be poor and the only ones who will seem unfazed will be the wealthy who can afford to pay to play. I know people living off of less then 16K a year who will not be able to keep their utilities on or have to make decisions on whether to buy food or put gas in the car to get to work.
but hey, I got some other news along this front, I started comparing the list of major cities and states who attempted to implement Kyoto style reforms and after comparing it to the unemployment rates for those cities and states, it appears that not only is all the claims made over this going to be true, but it's already showing itself by the higher then everywhere else unemployment rates in those cities.
So are you suggesting we just say fuck it and give up to this nonsense that will drastically place unnecessary hardships onto the least fortunate people? I mean it sounds like your wanting to just give up because something else is already bad. Well, the first thing to do when you find you have dug yourself into a hole is to stop digging. The deeper you make it, the harder it will be to get out.
Now, if this was really about getting results, then why piss around with this massive expansion of power, this massive tax increase, this massive control over people's lives, this massive damage to people's lives, that is designed to hope something changes instead of making the change, and why don't we just mandate a switch renewable energy, grandfather existing power plants in and phase them out at the end of their expected life while just mandating renewable sources be used for replacement and expansion needs? It would cost less, wouldn't shock the poor or move the middle class to the poor class, and it would gracefully transition with improvements being made as things start needing to be replaced.
In other words, this is like going from LA to San Diego via Tokyo and NY. You will eventually get there, but it takes a lot more time and costs a lot more money.
And yet people are living longer and longer as time goes by. Tell me again, what was the major problem with this crap in the atmosphere? The average live span has almost doubled since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Lol.. Here we go with the fictional owners of stuff already present. You owe me 2 million dollar for breathing air I own. Of course I'm not breathing any air you own, it all belongs to me and the guy next door.
Man- you guys are idiots. Why is it that only the wealth nations are being charged for fictional ownership and usage of what is already there and has been used as a tool since the beginning of time? How come this charge isn't applied to everyone equally?
The crap is the wind, solar, and other renewable energy. And won't be improved means exactly that, it can't compete so instead of improving it, they are moving to the lowest common denominator.
The point is fucking stupid and contradicts what you claimed- that is would force people into the alternative energy. If that was the point, then instead of taxing the hell out of people and products they need, the alternative would be to simply outlaw coal and fossil fuel power generation, give a grandfather clause over the useful life of existing facilities and mandate that future expansion and replacement power needs to be of a certain renewable resource. I mean all this shit does is takes you from LA to Albuquerque NM, via New York and Japan. It's a lot more expensive, a lot longer to get there, and your not going to like it once you are there. Sure, it sounds real good in the brochure but once you are there all you will find is the transplanted locals complaining that the locals aren't local enough and the locals who are now foreigners because they can't afford to live in the city anymore.
The effects of pollution are not disregarded. It's reflected in the price and the so called pollution is just now being called a problem in order to push the alternative sources and conflate this bullshit tax. There is nothing different from you concept and say an antivirus company creating and releasing a virus in order to sell it's own software. It's the same reason why MS has a hell of a time selling security products for it's own flaws hidden inside it's own operating systems.
As for global warming, it's over stated, from almost inception it has been politically hijacked for political purposes, and we don't understand enough of the elements being claimed as the problem to actually understand of they truly are or if they could be. Take this methane bullshit (literally), they want to tax cattle and livestock because of the methane they produce, however, cows or any animal does not create extra GHG's, all they do is transfer captured GHG's from plant life and place it back into the atmosphere in order for the plants to do it all over with again. If cattle wasn't involved, it would still happen naturally in about the same amount of time because live things die, they shed like leaves, and bacteria, fungi, insects and other animals decompose it pretty efficiently.
But, as I said earlier, if anyone was seriously concerned over global warming, then the answer isn't to inflate the costs of everything in hopes that something better comes about, the answer is to mandate the change over a certain period of time, make it happen and be done with it. This cap and trade has nothing to do with pollution or global warming, it's all about control, taxes, and redistributing wealth. It's the same damn thing that Kyoto was and it's proven to be ineffective toward it's claimed goals while being very effective at promoting growth in third world countries and countries who aren't subject to limits. There is a reason the majority of countries that signed onto Kyoto has no Co2 limits and to why Kyoto has had the opposite effect and GHG emissions increased by 26% since 1998 when Kyoto was conceived. And surprisingly, the US GHG emissions increases since 1998 is only off of Europe's increases by .16 percent or .0016 with Europe having the higher increase.
Sorry dude, this thing just really pisses me off and when I saw you supporting the idea that punishing people at the bottom end of the income scale and placing more people there was a viable solution, I just freaked..
What will end up happening is that we will see a round of inflation where first, prices of everything goes up, then people will demand more pay which will eventually cause the same but it will equal out eventually. People will buy more efficient cars because it will be the only thing being made. That's not a bad thing but it can be accomplished without screwing the majority of the population for 10 to 20 years until pay scales adjust and the carbon tax ends up with a limited effectiveness.
This was the same thing warned about with Kyoto, seen happening in Europe (check out Spain's blunder in going overboard), and has largely been offset only by utilizing imports from foreign third world countries. Since Europe stated the cap and trade BS, they have tripled their imports from China, India, and some south American countries and it's still impacting the average family by more then $1300 a year in extra costs.
In 2008, some Americans voted "Yes (we can!)" to all of the above.
There, fixed that for you.
In fact it it was only 9.5 million more Americans out of what 303 million that tipped the scales for all of the above. And I would say that a majority of them were actually voting against warrant-less wiretaps which didn't go away, the war in Iraq which is outside a few name changes will be following the Bush plan too.
That's not where the flaw in the logic exists. The flaw is in actually believing it was about technology, the environment and not a control program manipulated to tax the people.
This is nothing more then a scheme to tax people and control them.
Lol.. That's right, when wind, solar and other renewable energy sources can't compete, we will just place a massive tax on the traditional energy and make the noncompetitive compete.
Here is a hint, much of these costs will be embedded into items you purchase and you will have no way to avoid it. Here is another hint, this bill is just a tax, Carbon and global warming are just excuses to through it down. There are plenty of other ways to deal with global warming that will not cause the same hardships on people. And with this being just another tax that they have convinced you that inflating the real costs of something is a good idea instead of improving the new crap to make it better, pretty much tells us that even when we get away from traditional sources of energy and into renewable ones, the taxes will go over to the new. IT will never diaper.
I think your missing the forest for all the trees.
When gas prices raised and you think you saw habits change, most of those habits were actually reflections of people losing their jobs from the economy going stagnant because all disposable income was going into the gas tanks.
There is a point in which people cannot trim their gas usage any lower. Going to and from work is mandatory if you want to keep a job, regardless of what anyone thinks of public transportation, it's non-existent in many if not the majority of places.
Surcharges work only when you don't care about the impact it has on the people. Losing their jobs, their homes, choosing between food and gasoline, none of that is an acceptable option to me but it's exactly what happened when gas went to $4.00 a gallon so that you could see the change in habits.
You need to get over yourself and look at what is actually happening.
pollution per capita has a lot more to do with population density then efficiency unless your going to use abstract rules in your efficiency.
Anyways, the cap and trade laws are not identical to those in Europe. It turns out that in Europe, they increased the costs to the "average" family by $1,300 a year. In the US with the US limits in this bill being voted on, we are looking at an estimated costs starting out at adding $1,870 in costs for the average family which will increase to over $6,800 by the time everything is implemented.
Yes, it's most likely you are over estimating a lot of things. The biggest is your intellect and ability to fathom the real implications of this program. And no, people are not saying no caps at all, they are saying it has to be done in ways that do not damage the economy or place people through hardships that aren't necessary. Why is taking the time to do it right such a big fucking inconvenience for this democrat congress. It's like the bailouts in which they claimed to be outraged a bonuses being paid when the democrats wrote the law to allow the bonuses to be paid then forgot it was there (or didn't think anyone was actually smart enough to look) and acted outrages at their own actions.
I have to call into question your report or facts.
There are so many situation in which people are classified as sexual offenders in which the particulars are so unique to the case it just wouldn't happen again. Take the sexual offender registry lists. A few years ago, we were looking at our county's listings and out of 141 registered offenders, something like 60 or 70 of them were situations involving high school sweethearts over the past 20 years in which one person was older then the other and reached past the legal age of consent before the other had. In my state, the law is 18 years of age unless your within 2 years of each other in which consent is at 15 or both under the age of consent but above 15 years of age. This creates a very real situation where a freshmen can date a junior during high school but they could be in violation of the law if their birthdays are set apart enough and the junior was held back a grade.
There was also 10 or 15 sexual battery charges in which sexual contact wasn't involved at all. Evidently beating or smacking around your other half because they were withholding sex or cheating on you is still a sexual offense. Then there are cases where people stole the underwear of people they had a crush on and after finding it to be illegal beyond a petty theft, would never do it again. Then you have the voyeurism in which someone gets caught with their pants down while pissing behind the bushes or two consenting adults get too frisky while parted somewhere and the cops catch them in the act (* something about a car in the middle of nowhere with the windows all fogged up and rocking from side to side that always makes a cop want to investigate).
In my county's case, we determined that out of the 141 registered sexual offenders, and yes, you can have sexual offenses that you don't have to register for which do carry jail time, there was only 40-60 people of real concern. So by applying sane interpretations of what would be a qualifying sexual offense, over 58% of the sexual offenders who have to register can be eliminated and I have no idea how many sexual offenders who aren't required to register could be excluded too. So lets ignore the those who don't register and the fact that quite a few of the registered offenders are still in jail/prison and see what this 3% to 13% would look like just with the specifics of not likely to ever happen again applied.
The 3% of the 141 comes out to 4.23 people, the 13% comes out to 18.33 people. without those people who's situation is so specific that it isn't likely to ever happen again, those same 4.23 people now become 7% and the 18.33 becomes 30.5% if we look at my high end estimate of 60 offenders I needed to be concerned over. If I got really liberal and picked the low end of 40 offended to be concerned about, the 3% becomes 10.5% and the 13% becomes 45.8% If we exclude those who don't need to register or the 15 year old's boning the their 14 year old girlfriends (statutory rape), Equalize all the offenses to match guidelines between the different states (like age of consent on one state being different then another) I'm sure this number would jump considerably.
That's sort of the problem with organizations like the NCIA. They will present the evidence to their favor, I weeded most of it out and turned to my favor. We can ignore the very real fact that a good portion of sexual related offenses wouldn't ever happen again because of circumstances surrounding the offense (like age of consent issues when you dated the same person since the 7th grade, or sleeping with a drunk girl making advances on you then later regretting is and you getting popped with a felony). But if we don't ignore it, then the numbers mentioned look a lot different and the no tolerance applications could be specifically targeted to repeat offenders or perhaps even those most likely to repeat offend. But the NCIA has an invested interest in pushing things other then jail and will pretend the problem is less severe then it actually is in order to advance it's goals.
Well, no. Don't assume I was talking about the legal authority established by a certain case when I was talking about the order of cases presenting the legal authority. I admit the sentence was poorly worded, it should have read something like different precedents (that the supreme court ruled on) in a precedence (simple ordering, based on either importance or sequence). One precedent was before another.
What I think is the most important is the order of the cases where is one was before the other, it could block the previous in this instance. If it was after, it would augment the case/decision you are referring to creating an exception. The Supreme court rules in 2009 that obscene is not protected speech. If the case can be made that the photos were obscene, the protections from the 2002 case can disappear in part if not entirely.
Yes, I saw that. If I conveyed the idea that you were oblivious to it, it was not my intention. I think it will play little in the case as it unfolds though, the guy in question never used the children for anything, he used their likeness obtained from legitimate sources acting in appropriate ways. The only real connection would be in finding your likeness attached to a potentially embarrassing photo with people not knowing it was a fake.
I'm not aware of this guy distributing the photo. Though it appears that they were found because the state/county police were already investigation a real case of sexual imposition of a minor in which they found 31 sexually explicit and altered photograph's of three (3) juvenile females. Of those, it appears all were real photos except the three in question. It took quite a bit of searching before I discovered that. I wish the original story was more accurate with how and why the police were involved in the first place.
Indecent material can cross the line into obscene material. That's the reason I used the wording in the way I did. Here is a summery of the Supreme Courts test to indicate obscene material that I lifted from the FCC's website.
"What makes material "obscene?" Obscene speech is not protected by the First Amendment and broadcasters are prohibited, by statute and regulation, from airing obscene programming at any time. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, to be obscene, material must meet a three-prong test: (1) an average person, applying contemporary community standards, must find that the material, as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest (i.e., material having a tendency to excite lustful thoughts); (2) the material must depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable law; and (3) the material, taken as a whole, must lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. The Supreme Court has indicated that this test is designed to cover hard-core pornography."
Please note that if the material is lacking any of the three requirements, it's just indecent and objectionable material. I will explain where the 28 year old young looking girlfriend fits in when we look at the FCC's statement on the differences between obscene and indecent. As far as I know, these representations are accurate across different applications and aren't limited to the FCC's application.
I think the gist of this is in which the SCOTUS also said that indecent and obscene is a community standard and speech isn't always protected under that. That's the reference to the change in TN law in which they think will work despite the ruling you mentioned. You also have the fact that children are present in the photo even though it's faked.
What TN did was attempt to change the wording of the law in order to be in compliance with another precedence that the supreme court ruled on. Instead of being just child porn, it's now indecent pictures depicting child porn for sexual gratification (which makes it obscene and not protected speech).
It should be interesting in how this will play out. the TN law doesn't require the state to prove the age of the child or that harm was done. The age thing seems to be disturbing unless they are going after the community standard for obscene or something. If you were being tried for having sex with a minor, the state proving your partner was actually a minor seems pretty important otherwise they could pop you for banging your 28 year old girlfriend. If she looks 15 when dressed in a schoolgirl outfit and with the right lights, and you have nude pictures of her, you could be poped under this current state law.
Right on!
I don't know how many times someone gets something in their head because of only knowing half the truth or randomly trusting one story over another. The cops, at least have training to determine the legitimacy of the story, made a decision to arrest or not, and would have had an entire legal department at HQ advising him on what or how he should proceed.
Someone making a claim who was also busted is a serious offense, the girl turned out to have no drugs and it's likely that the other person picked her in order to allow others involved to evade capture/discovery.
It has to do with the intentions of the person plus the obviousness to those intentions (what others can determine the intentions to be given the facts).
He should damn well be up on kiddie porn charges. Drawing a picture of the strip search does nothing to further what was perceived as a justifiable act. If he drew a picture of the search instead of actually doing it, it would imply he was more concerned with seeing the student naked or semi-nude then any actual justification for the holding and searching.
Sure it is. However, when I said middleman, I was thinking of someone who doesn't do much but facilitate a sale between you and a buyer and takes a cut of either the profits or the product or both.
The bottom line I was attempting to convey is that the same Co2 - CH4 released by a cow would be released without the cow even being there by similar and other means.
Please remember 2 things here, First, when I said they were upgraded, I was talking specifically of the RBMK units that was the type used in the Chernobyl plant. They have other reactor designs in use to and some of them meet what your talking about. Second, please remember that I was speaking of a Chernobyl style accident happening in modern time. It is virtually impossible for a Chernobyl accident to happen today because of the fixes in place. While that may not me significant in your book, it is significant to the control of the reaction and limiting it's ability to get out of control.
Well, actually, you are then. The different designs and reaction cores place different requirements on the containment vessels and so on. Because a 50 year old design needed more concrete and steel doesn't mean that a more efficient and easier cooled/maintained design would need the same. This goes along with the concept of taking advantage of improvements and why you wouldn't want to design a reactor to last the life of the isotopes.
There are confined and safely stored Radioactive isotopes on site. They are awaiting the completion of the DOE's storage facility in which they will then be moved to. There won't be any residual radiation once they are moved and there is no detectable radiation on site outside of the storage containers themselves.
Your getting kind of anally picky here too. A nuclear power plant can use take up several square miles of land and the storage of spent fuel takes the space about the size of an Olympic basketball court. The storage space isn't dangerous or radioactive and outside of security concerns, there is no reason why people couldn't walk through that space with no protective gear. Claiming no green fielding is happening is hanging onto a technicality because you think it proves your point. The reality is that moving the fuel is so expensive that it's planned on only being done once when the DOE storage facility is up and running.
Ok, I didn't want to get into this but externalities are a load of crap. Everyone uses electricity and they pay for the externalities in savings in the cost of it. It's really that simple. Don't act like a business that is created to sell electricity to the consumer would somehow magically absorb all the costs of creating that electricity. They have to at least break even to stay the same, profit to grow and meet tomorrows demands, and profit to make the investment capitol worth the expenditure. If Coal or Nuclear, or Hydro had to cover all externalizations, you would simply be paying more for your electricity. So all of the externalities is already recovered by your decreased costs. Now that the government wants to tax this money under the guise that it impacts the air or global warming or whatever is nothing more then a money and control issue. It has nothing to do with the environmental impact. If it did, they would just mandate a reduction, grandfather some small offenders in, and give X amo
I'll take a stab at it, carbon neutrality
Plants capture carbon, they then die, hibernate and shed leaves or whatever and rot. All the carbon they absorbed gets released again. When a cow eats hay or corn, it's just being a middleman in that cycle. The cow would offset a number of insects, bacteria, fungus, and other animals that would be processing the carbon and releasing it into the air too.
Now, as for the heat trapping aspect of gasses, It's true that given the same volume of gas, methane is about 20 or so times more potent at trapping heat. However, because the methane is coming from something that would have released all it's carbon to begin with, you end up with 1/20th the amount of Co2 or water vapor or whatever greenhouse gas would be created by the decaying plants. So the fact that methane is released instead of Co2 is negated when you consider the chemical makeup and that they are limited to the elements availible.