Yes, the media over-hyped the storm because they were latching on to the worst case scenario which by sheer luck did not happen. Let me explain.
Winds from a hurricane are caused by the pressure differential from it's core and that outside the storm. The lower the pressure of the storm, the more intense winds. Irene had a central pressure of below 950mb, which is low enough to result in category 3-4 winds. It maintained the pressure in that range all the way up until New Jersey. However the surface windspeeds were much lower. Why?
Here is where we got lucky. After the Bahamas Irene started to go through an eyewall replacement cycle. This is where the wall of intense thunderstorms around the eye of the hurricane break down and a new ring forms to take it's place. This process takes hours, and during the process the hurricane weakens. When Irene started here replacement cycle, she had grown so large that she was sucking dry continental air into her circulation. That plus some southerly shear were enough to keep Irene from ever regenerating her eyewall. Instead, she just got bigger which ended up lowering the overall pressure gradient. So instead of getting an extremely intense cat 3 or 4 hurricane, we got a very large cat 1 or cat 2 (tops) hurricane. She became so large in fact that even when she should have been significantly weakening she wasn't.
All that time there was a chance that her eyewall could reform and the storm could tighten up again. With her central pressure, all she needed to do was regain her eyewall and a couple hours later she would have had roaring winds. Even when she passed by Maryland and Delaware her central pressure was still indicative of a cat 3 hurricane.
THAT is what the mets were afraid of. THAT is why people were evacuated. If they made the wrong call and Irene DID manage to get her eyewall back, that would have given places on the east coast mere hours to brace for it. Luckily that did not happen and we ONLY got a few dozen deaths, major flooding, billions in damages, etc. .
At any rate, don't listen to news coverage of these storms. Go to the NHC website. There's no hype there. And if people want better forecasting they should stop clamoring for cutting funding to NOAA and the NHC, and urge for more spending on newer satellites, buoys, HH craft etc. . Hurricanes are one of the most difficult weather phenomena to predict, especially when it comes ot intensity and the predictions are only as good as they data used to make them.
They can still suspend, expel, detain, and in many other ways punish the troublemakers.
No, they can't. They get lawsuits if they do. It's becoming all too common that grades and records are being brought into the court room, which is both time consuming and costly to the school district. With political idiots aiming to destroy what little is left of the education system with funding cuts left and right, schools have been a lot more reluctant to dole out an serious punishment.
For fuck's sake, all you need to do is accuse a teacher of molestation and destroy his/her career, and cast a pal on the school itself. You really think a teacher is going to physically intervene in bullying/fighting/what have you when all the little bitch/bastard needs to say is the teacher groped them while doing it?
School's and teachers don't discipline because of the consequences of doing so. It doesn't matter if they're in the right. There is a not-insignificant chance that the teacher or the school will be raked over the coals, and that's just too much risk to take.
Yes, an uneducated moron would think the stock market and climate systems are the same. Because only an uneducated moron would compare forecasting an unbounded chaotic system with a bounded quasi-chaotic physical system dictated by a set of physical equations.
To illustrate, we can predict that temperatures in the winter in the northern hemisphere will be cold. You don't even need historical data to show this as a trivial 2D energy balance model can give an decent good approximation. The more details you add to this model, the more accurate it becomes. Then you can take this model and a set of initial conditions and let run forwards to see how well it predicts the climate.
You can even do this with a pure "zero D" energy balance model, though it will only show you the overall temperature of the globe. Once again, even a zero D model will give a fairly accurate prediction of global average temperature.
You compare this to the stock market, which has no set of governing equations. You can't create some model based on some characteristics and predict with any accuracy what will happen the next day, let alone the next year.
Climate models are not constructed based on hind sight. They are constructed based on physical equations. They are then COMPARED against historical data to determine if the model is accurate.
No, actually it is nothing like that. You are comparing apples to 747's. Please educate yourself about climate dynamics (or at least chaotic systems) before making absurd equivalencies.
And has been doing so for the past 12-14,000 years
The planet HAD been cooling since the early Holocene (climatic optimum). It's only over the past 100 years that this cooling has reversed, and pretty dramatically. So no, the arctic not been beating a retreat whole time, and certainly not at the pace we've seen recently.
Or whatever causes climate shifts when human activity wasn't around to be blamed.
That would be CO2, methane, and other green-house gases. Primarily CO2 though as it has a long atmospheric half-life and has a tendency to saturate the biggest sink for it (the oceans) pretty quickly.
We can't have perfect information, but we can have better. It's an obvious strategy to wait till we have better information. There is a real choice here.
You're right. We've parked our truck top of train tracks. We don't know the exact time the train is coming. We don't know exactly how big it will be. But that doesn't change the fact that the truck is still parked on the tracks. We COULD wait until we hear the rumble to move it. We COULD wait until we hear the horn to move it. We COULD wait until we see the train to move. However, the longer we wait until we know the exact size of the train and the exact time it is coming, the less time we have to move the truck.
Waiting for some arbitrarily defined "better" information is a foolish strategy if by the time you get that "better" information it is too late to act on it.
So let's look at the situation. We have some evidence that there's global warming, some connection with greenhouse gas emissions by humans, and models with quality that varies from pretty good (radiative models) to extremely poor (the economic factors in climate estimates a century from now).
Some evidence? Way to play that down sparky. There are thousands of research papers and exabytes of data backing up climate research that show a very strong link between human activity and climate. And not just warming related either. See acid rain and the ozone hole for other examples.
We have significant institutional biases (particularly, funding, peer pressure, and the environmentalism ideology).
[citation needed]
This is a line of pureed bullshit straight from the manufacturers of FUD. From this line alone, it is very clear you have no idea what you are talking about and are attempting to appeal through emotion. To test out how inane your claim is, make up some bullshit paper about global warming and submit it to any one of those "biased" science journals. You won't get published. You'll be lucky to make it through initial editorial review, let alone peer review.
Of course, the most basic counter argument is that if a climate scientist really was in it for the money, they would go to a fossil fuel company and take the opposing side. They pay a whole lot better. Average salary for a climate scientist (publicly funded) is around $75K per year. So they certainly aren't getting rich.
If you want funding, peer pressure, and bias look into private funding sources. For some examples, take a look at the "science" they used to try to pass off smoking is good for you, or that asbestos was a safe material. The same groups who were pushing that psuedo-scientific crap are the same ones behind the denier scene.
We have huge amount of money and political power in play (environmental government agencies, for example, can expand their power considerably).
Scare tactics. Another useless appeal. And no, we don't have a huge amount of money "in play" in this area. AC in Afghanistan runs more than the science budget for the country. And no, the EPA cannot expand it's power "considerably". It would take acts of congress and approval by the president for the EPA to act outside of it's mandate. And even IF some president expanded the charter without congress, congress
The rich should not pay more in the proportional sense. What gives you the right to profit by someone eases labor?
Let me explain how a sustainable civilization works. In a sustainable civilization, people not only work for their own benefit but also work for the benefit of society in general. If someone is exceptionally prosperous, then they should give back to the society that allowed them to become so. That's not communist or socialist, it's common sense. Your civilization won't last long with a bunch of greedy self-serving leeches sitting on top sucking everyone else dry, which is pretty much what we have today.
The top 20% control almost all of the wealth, and keep getting richer while the poor and middle class keep getting poorer. We're the richest country on Earth, and yet we have a large and growing poverty population. Our healthcare is a joke. Our infrastructure is falling apart. And our education system lags behind most of the developed world.
The only thing sustainable in this country IS the rich. The only ones prospering ARE the rich. Everyone else is getting fucked. And now the cracks are starting to show up. This is not sustainable for much longer.
Congress controls the purse strings. It doesn't matter what his administration wants. It all has to go through congress.
Returning spending to Clinton era levels would require CONGRESS to propose such a thing. The president can plead, beg, threaten, whatever but if congress doesn't go along with it than it doesn't matter.
And it is fair to say the Republicans are to blame since the whole crisis was a non-issue until they made it. In fact, the Republicans planned this out exactly to cause the most political damage possible. When they agreed to the budget earlier in the year, everyone knew THEN that the debt ceiling would need to be raised. But instead of keeping to their agreement on the budget, they deliberately used the opportunity to basically be hypocritical assholes. Most of these career republicans have voted to raise the debt ceiling a dozen or more times without so much as a word of protest, so the fact that they are doing so now says more about their political agenda and how far they are willing to go (trash the economy) to get their way.
I'll give credit where credit is due though. I didn't think they would have the balls or the brains for such a move. So kudos on that score. But even now, they are already portraying the credit rating loss as Obama's fault, which is complete bullshit because a) Obama doesn't control the money, congress does b) the S&P report blames the general asshattery of congress (specifically, lack of new revenue) for the downgrade and c) 80% of our current debt was generated under Bush II and a Republican congress.
There's a reason why congress is plumbing new lows in public approval polls.
Is there any media outlet in the US that treated the "death panels" lie with the scorn it deserved? Is there one that doesn't concede every debate to the Republicans before it begins, by using their terms?
Yes, there is. Comedy Central, specifically The Colbert Report and The Daily Show. Sad, but true.
BTW, Fox News channel exists because people want to fucking hear what they say.
And why shouldn't they? The only station that entertains me more and makes me laugh harder is comedy central. You never know what those comedic writers are going to come up with next over at Fox News.
Love it or hate it, you have to share the planet with people that watch it and enjoy it too.
I think the problem is that people think Fox News is a news channel.
You're ignoring the fact that there are physical constraints on efficiency (see thermodynamics). Yes, your appliances may be more efficient now than they were 20 years ago but their really isn't all that much room left to improve them. The "low hanging fruit" has been plucked.
You're also using personal anecdotal experience. You are not the average household. Pretty much every survey on the subject has shown increased power usage on every level.
Long term predictions aren't absurd if you know the basic parameters. We have limited resources, a growing population, and more of that population attempting to reach a higher standard of living. Regardless of future technological improvements, those improvements have limits based on physical law. No matter how you look at it, we're going to have problems.
I don't think people here have a problem with HFT technology or understanding it. It's how it is being used (and abused) that make people angry.
The anger directed at HFT is really misplaced. It should be on the banks and firms who use it, shady practices, and dark markets to bend the world over so they can make more money. I think people are also angry with the fact that these companies continue to rake in the cash and profits, while simultaneously bitching about taxes. A recent report cited companies making considerable profit, and yet unemployment rates are not improving all that much. Isn't it their mouthpieces in congress who claim that lower taxes will spawn job creation?
The anger comes from getting economically ass-raped seven different ways till Sunday, and then having to pay the sociopathic assholes for the honor of being ass-raped. That's why HFT, CDOs, big banks, and financial institutions have been the target of all this venom and hatred. It's not the technology or the ideas or the products. It is what was done with them that pissed people off.
That being said, you don't work for some benevolent altruistic company. You don't work for a company who is concerned about the greater good, or furthering the progress of humanity. You aren't performing some great majestic service for mankind. You work for an HFT company, who's only concern is to make assloads of money. You're upper management could give a fuck less about "balancing the markets" and even less about wiping out grandma's savings and throwing her out in the street. As long as it pulls in profits, they'd be happy kicking babies off the top floor of their 30 story trade tower.
So don't come on here and pretend that HFT is some mechanism intended for the benefit of all. HFT is what it is, and that's a money making tool. The fact that it has some fringe benefits for the rest of us serfs is purely a unintended side effect.
And with that, you get a giant red "Fuck The World" button placed directly in your hands. One little mistake and you can set off a massive cascade reaction that wipes out billions to trillions of dollars in the span of 15 minutes.
I'm so happy sociopathic assholes are willing to take the risk of wiping out OUR savings and impacting OUR economy in return for making a buck for themselves. But you're just following orders, right?
There is no belief involved. Research paper after research paper, data point after data point continues to show that our planet is warming up. Just because you are not able to read and understand the science doesn't mean the decades of research is based on nothing more than faith.
And really, that's all your statement really shows; a complete lack in comprehension. Unless you have peer-reviewed sources showing that the decades of science, research, and data is all flawed, you really don't have anything to back up your "shaky ground" claim other than your personal belief and ignorance. Plenty of research papers on the subject make falsifiable claims, and they back them up.
Oh yes, quite valid. Except it's built on shoddy science. So their conclusions are also shoddy. Real Climate does a pretty good job tearing it apart, along with a couple links to other articles that dive further into just how off the paper is (including an in-depth description of the model they used and how incomplete it is).
But what do you expect of a paper that spent 10 days being peer reviewed.
Basically, they are talking about lack of model sensitivity for non-radiative feedback, which is something that was already known. The models on a MONTHLY basis don't go high enough on the maximums and don't go low enough on the minimums (and there is a lag). Or in other words, the models get the general predictions right (warmer temperatures) but don't capture shorter term variability as well (heat waves, cold snaps).
Of course, it's already well known that climate models don't capture short term variability very well. However, this paper helps quantify that and provides some insights on how to better improve that aspect of modeling.
Or if you don't want to read the whole paper just skip to the conclusions sections, which mention nothing about invalidating global warming or the science thereof.
How that gets translated into "New Study Trashes Global Warming" is beyond me.
Informative? How is this ignorant tripe informative?
You give no proof of your accusations. None. While on the other hand, you ignore that mountains of data and research, some of which even the most uneducated people can verify with some data and a few graphics tools.
You imply conspiracy, with no evidence. You imply cronyism, with no evidence. Wild ass accusations like this is why there can be no reasonable discussion of the science.
Deniers and conspiracy theorists are nutters. Skeptics are not. Unfortunately, the real skeptics are drowned out by the near cacophonous roar of the idiotic and insane. If you read an real science journals you would see that there are more than a handful of real skeptics with real credentials and real research. McIntyre and others of his ilk are not real skeptics and do nothing besides FUD the issue up.
If you're going to make such claims, it is up to you to provide the solid research and proof of them. If you can't hen you're just another nut on the internet.
Peer review is skeptic review. The science community is very competitive. If you think peer review is simply rubber stamping any research that comes through because it agrees with your perspective, you are horribly mistaken. Peer review is is a difficult, and often vicious process. It can take months to years for any paper to finally get through. You may have to rewrite sections or the entire paper depending on the criticisms. Or you may have your research thrown out entirely due to errors you never thought of.
Anyone thinking peer-review is a rubber-stamp process has never written a paper before.
You pay for your credit scores. You pay your insurance premiums. There are numerous industries that generate information that is not available to the public because it is the product they sell.
Not all climate and weather data is generated by government agencies. The government may buy it, but the government is subject to contracts just like everyone else. They may be able to distribute products based on the data, but they may not be free to distribute the data. Happens all the time.
1) All a balanced budget will do is ensure we don't take on a massive amount of long term debt, and help pay down the massive debt we already have. Most people consider that a good thing. A balanced budget amendment on the other hand could cause some complications.
2) Yes there are, however politicians are mainly concerned with the effects on their constituencies despite their lip service otherwise. And there are also consequences to not raising taxes above and beyond not pissing people off. You can choose which consequences you like better.
And pay almost all of the taxes. Half of the people in the country pay no income taxes, and many are given a tax "rebate" (on taxes they never even paid!) as a form of redistribution.
SS is not paid from income tax, and neither is MC. They are separately taxed. And while the 20% pay most of the income taxes, they use many loopholes and tricks (some more gray than others) to reduce their liabilities to below what it would be. The amount of revenue generated from taxes is far from what one would think just by looking at the tax brackets, both on a corporate and individual level.
No, there isn't. What you mean is that you think there's plenty of economic activity that could be taxed in order to raise that revenue, and you think you know that further taxing the economy will grow the economy. A notion that has been proven wrong every time.
Taxes don't just come from economic activity, and yes there is plenty, even in our craptastic economy. Also, if raising taxes is always detrimental to the economy, then explain how Clinton raised taxes and had huge economic growth? Or how Bush cut taxes and we still ended up in an economic pit? More than taxes determine the success or failure of growth during an economic time frame.
They may not want to, but they already do. The people who really don't want to pay taxes are the people who don't want to start paying taxes, because they think only other people should do so. That would be half the people in the country.
Nonsense. Everyone pays taxes. Income tax is only one part of the tax burden. But why does 47% of the country pay no income tax?
Lets say someone is earning $20K. You're total income tax is $2575 leaving you with about $17,500 for the year to get by on. Now let's say someone is making $2,000,000 a year. You're total income tax is $677,314 leaving you with just under $1.4 million for the year. Which one of these two is going to have the hardest time keeping the lights on and a roof over their head?
It's not so much about not wanting to pay taxes as not being able to. For that 47%, $2500 is a Big Fucking Deal. That's the difference between paying rent and being in the street. That's heating oil for the winter. You make it sound like that 47% are living in the lap of luxury and laughing all the way to the bank because they don't pay income tax. Most of that 47% are living paycheck to paycheck and are one unexpected expense or job loss away from being yet another welfare recipient.
Greed on the left...
Oh have they got you trained. Greed is not left or right. Greed isn't republican or democrat. Greed is the beating heart of capitalism and when left unchecked, you get what we have now. Right now you get to chose which greed you think is better, which is more than likely based upon your own greed. But don't kid yourself, it is still greed.
I doubt anything has changed. The president does not control the debt ceiling. The president does not control the budget. The president does not control the money. It's congress. The president can veto or accept what congress provides, but that's it. He can get them to come together for talks. He can plead. He can bargain. He can demand. But it all comes down to congress.
It's very likely that he still feels the same way. But do you think he could get the tax revenues and spending cuts he would like to see in order to balance the budget through THIS congress? Or ANY congress? We aren't even talking about the budget yet. This is just a debt ceiling increase. Something that was done many many times before under many different presidents, most of the time with little if any fanfare. This is barely a preview of what a mud-slings cat fight the budget will be.
The president is asking for the debt ceiling increase because he has to, not necessarily because he wants to. The budget AS PASSED BY CONGRESS requires a debt limit increase to fund it. Everyone has known that it was going to require a debt limit increase, including the Republicans who signed off on the budget. They all knew this was coming. The only difference is that this time Republicans(many of which didn't have a problem increasing the debt ceiling under Bush) have decided to use it as a political tool, which seems to have taken the democrats off guard.
The financial authority of our government rests with legislative branch, not the executive branch.
The programs don't depend on exponential growth. They depend on revenue. If that revenue is not adequately or accurately adjusted to match reality, then you will get a shortfall.
But neither SS nor our tax code accurately reflect the wealth distribution or population demographics. A mere 20% of the population controls the vast majority of wealth in this country. Our population base has been in decline because it is too much of a financial strain to have more than one or two kids. Wages have been stagnant for most Americans for at least a decade. And thanks to the "job creators", jobs have been moving overseas leaving lower paying jobs (or no jobs) in their place, further diminishing revenues of any sort. This doesn't even take into account the various tax loopholes, dodges, and other tricks those with the bucks (people and corporations) can afford to employ to avoid their tax burden.
We can fund SS. We can even fund our gross bloated unnecessary budget. There is plenty of revenue available to pay for it and more. The problem is nobody wants to raise taxes to levels necessary to cover the expenses, nor do those with the wealth want to pay for it.
Greed is what will kill the US, not any particular set of defense, social, or discretionary spending. It's why any balanced budget amendment will never ever pass congress. It's why congress never comes up with long term solutions. It's why people who don't need social program assistance think it's all a big waste of money and why "those lazy welfare bastards can't work like the rest of us".
The US has a GDP of around $15 trillion. Our tax revenue is $2.1 trillion. Our latest budget is $3.5 trillion. We have plenty of room to cover our bills. We CHOOSE not to.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the media over-hyped the storm because they were latching on to the worst case scenario which by sheer luck did not happen. Let me explain.
Winds from a hurricane are caused by the pressure differential from it's core and that outside the storm. The lower the pressure of the storm, the more intense winds. Irene had a central pressure of below 950mb, which is low enough to result in category 3-4 winds. It maintained the pressure in that range all the way up until New Jersey. However the surface windspeeds were much lower. Why?
Here is where we got lucky. After the Bahamas Irene started to go through an eyewall replacement cycle. This is where the wall of intense thunderstorms around the eye of the hurricane break down and a new ring forms to take it's place. This process takes hours, and during the process the hurricane weakens. When Irene started here replacement cycle, she had grown so large that she was sucking dry continental air into her circulation. That plus some southerly shear were enough to keep Irene from ever regenerating her eyewall. Instead, she just got bigger which ended up lowering the overall pressure gradient. So instead of getting an extremely intense cat 3 or 4 hurricane, we got a very large cat 1 or cat 2 (tops) hurricane. She became so large in fact that even when she should have been significantly weakening she wasn't.
All that time there was a chance that her eyewall could reform and the storm could tighten up again. With her central pressure, all she needed to do was regain her eyewall and a couple hours later she would have had roaring winds. Even when she passed by Maryland and Delaware her central pressure was still indicative of a cat 3 hurricane.
THAT is what the mets were afraid of. THAT is why people were evacuated. If they made the wrong call and Irene DID manage to get her eyewall back, that would have given places on the east coast mere hours to brace for it. Luckily that did not happen and we ONLY got a few dozen deaths, major flooding, billions in damages, etc. .
At any rate, don't listen to news coverage of these storms. Go to the NHC website. There's no hype there. And if people want better forecasting they should stop clamoring for cutting funding to NOAA and the NHC, and urge for more spending on newer satellites, buoys, HH craft etc. . Hurricanes are one of the most difficult weather phenomena to predict, especially when it comes ot intensity and the predictions are only as good as they data used to make them.
They can still suspend, expel, detain, and in many other ways punish the troublemakers.
No, they can't. They get lawsuits if they do. It's becoming all too common that grades and records are being brought into the court room, which is both time consuming and costly to the school district. With political idiots aiming to destroy what little is left of the education system with funding cuts left and right, schools have been a lot more reluctant to dole out an serious punishment.
For fuck's sake, all you need to do is accuse a teacher of molestation and destroy his/her career, and cast a pal on the school itself. You really think a teacher is going to physically intervene in bullying/fighting/what have you when all the little bitch/bastard needs to say is the teacher groped them while doing it?
School's and teachers don't discipline because of the consequences of doing so. It doesn't matter if they're in the right. There is a not-insignificant chance that the teacher or the school will be raked over the coals, and that's just too much risk to take.
Yes, an uneducated moron would think the stock market and climate systems are the same. Because only an uneducated moron would compare forecasting an unbounded chaotic system with a bounded quasi-chaotic physical system dictated by a set of physical equations.
To illustrate, we can predict that temperatures in the winter in the northern hemisphere will be cold. You don't even need historical data to show this as a trivial 2D energy balance model can give an decent good approximation. The more details you add to this model, the more accurate it becomes. Then you can take this model and a set of initial conditions and let run forwards to see how well it predicts the climate.
You can even do this with a pure "zero D" energy balance model, though it will only show you the overall temperature of the globe. Once again, even a zero D model will give a fairly accurate prediction of global average temperature.
You compare this to the stock market, which has no set of governing equations. You can't create some model based on some characteristics and predict with any accuracy what will happen the next day, let alone the next year.
Climate models are not constructed based on hind sight. They are constructed based on physical equations. They are then COMPARED against historical data to determine if the model is accurate.
No, actually it is nothing like that. You are comparing apples to 747's. Please educate yourself about climate dynamics (or at least chaotic systems) before making absurd equivalencies.
Insightful?
And has been doing so for the past 12-14,000 years
The planet HAD been cooling since the early Holocene (climatic optimum). It's only over the past 100 years that this cooling has reversed, and pretty dramatically. So no, the arctic not been beating a retreat whole time, and certainly not at the pace we've seen recently.
Or whatever causes climate shifts when human activity wasn't around to be blamed.
That would be CO2, methane, and other green-house gases. Primarily CO2 though as it has a long atmospheric half-life and has a tendency to saturate the biggest sink for it (the oceans) pretty quickly.
We can't have perfect information, but we can have better. It's an obvious strategy to wait till we have better information. There is a real choice here.
You're right. We've parked our truck top of train tracks. We don't know the exact time the train is coming. We don't know exactly how big it will be. But that doesn't change the fact that the truck is still parked on the tracks. We COULD wait until we hear the rumble to move it. We COULD wait until we hear the horn to move it. We COULD wait until we see the train to move. However, the longer we wait until we know the exact size of the train and the exact time it is coming, the less time we have to move the truck.
Waiting for some arbitrarily defined "better" information is a foolish strategy if by the time you get that "better" information it is too late to act on it.
So let's look at the situation. We have some evidence that there's global warming, some connection with greenhouse gas emissions by humans, and models with quality that varies from pretty good (radiative models) to extremely poor (the economic factors in climate estimates a century from now).
Some evidence? Way to play that down sparky. There are thousands of research papers and exabytes of data backing up climate research that show a very strong link between human activity and climate. And not just warming related either. See acid rain and the ozone hole for other examples.
We have significant institutional biases (particularly, funding, peer pressure, and the environmentalism ideology).
[citation needed]
This is a line of pureed bullshit straight from the manufacturers of FUD. From this line alone, it is very clear you have no idea what you are talking about and are attempting to appeal through emotion. To test out how inane your claim is, make up some bullshit paper about global warming and submit it to any one of those "biased" science journals. You won't get published. You'll be lucky to make it through initial editorial review, let alone peer review.
Of course, the most basic counter argument is that if a climate scientist really was in it for the money, they would go to a fossil fuel company and take the opposing side. They pay a whole lot better. Average salary for a climate scientist (publicly funded) is around $75K per year. So they certainly aren't getting rich.
If you want funding, peer pressure, and bias look into private funding sources. For some examples, take a look at the "science" they used to try to pass off smoking is good for you, or that asbestos was a safe material. The same groups who were pushing that psuedo-scientific crap are the same ones behind the denier scene.
We have huge amount of money and political power in play (environmental government agencies, for example, can expand their power considerably).
Scare tactics. Another useless appeal. And no, we don't have a huge amount of money "in play" in this area. AC in Afghanistan runs more than the science budget for the country. And no, the EPA cannot expand it's power "considerably". It would take acts of congress and approval by the president for the EPA to act outside of it's mandate. And even IF some president expanded the charter without congress, congress
Are these girl scout cookies made from real girl scouts?
The rich should not pay more in the proportional sense. What gives you the right to profit by someone eases labor?
Let me explain how a sustainable civilization works. In a sustainable civilization, people not only work for their own benefit but also work for the benefit of society in general. If someone is exceptionally prosperous, then they should give back to the society that allowed them to become so. That's not communist or socialist, it's common sense. Your civilization won't last long with a bunch of greedy self-serving leeches sitting on top sucking everyone else dry, which is pretty much what we have today.
The top 20% control almost all of the wealth, and keep getting richer while the poor and middle class keep getting poorer. We're the richest country on Earth, and yet we have a large and growing poverty population. Our healthcare is a joke. Our infrastructure is falling apart. And our education system lags behind most of the developed world.
The only thing sustainable in this country IS the rich. The only ones prospering ARE the rich. Everyone else is getting fucked. And now the cracks are starting to show up. This is not sustainable for much longer.
Congress controls the purse strings. It doesn't matter what his administration wants. It all has to go through congress.
Returning spending to Clinton era levels would require CONGRESS to propose such a thing. The president can plead, beg, threaten, whatever but if congress doesn't go along with it than it doesn't matter.
And it is fair to say the Republicans are to blame since the whole crisis was a non-issue until they made it. In fact, the Republicans planned this out exactly to cause the most political damage possible. When they agreed to the budget earlier in the year, everyone knew THEN that the debt ceiling would need to be raised. But instead of keeping to their agreement on the budget, they deliberately used the opportunity to basically be hypocritical assholes. Most of these career republicans have voted to raise the debt ceiling a dozen or more times without so much as a word of protest, so the fact that they are doing so now says more about their political agenda and how far they are willing to go (trash the economy) to get their way.
I'll give credit where credit is due though. I didn't think they would have the balls or the brains for such a move. So kudos on that score. But even now, they are already portraying the credit rating loss as Obama's fault, which is complete bullshit because a) Obama doesn't control the money, congress does b) the S&P report blames the general asshattery of congress (specifically, lack of new revenue) for the downgrade and c) 80% of our current debt was generated under Bush II and a Republican congress.
There's a reason why congress is plumbing new lows in public approval polls.
Is there any media outlet in the US that treated the "death panels" lie with the scorn it deserved? Is there one that doesn't concede every debate to the Republicans before it begins, by using their terms?
Yes, there is. Comedy Central, specifically The Colbert Report and The Daily Show. Sad, but true.
BTW, Fox News channel exists because people want to fucking hear what they say.
And why shouldn't they? The only station that entertains me more and makes me laugh harder is comedy central. You never know what those comedic writers are going to come up with next over at Fox News.
Love it or hate it, you have to share the planet with people that watch it and enjoy it too.
I think the problem is that people think Fox News is a news channel.
You're ignoring the fact that there are physical constraints on efficiency (see thermodynamics). Yes, your appliances may be more efficient now than they were 20 years ago but their really isn't all that much room left to improve them. The "low hanging fruit" has been plucked.
You're also using personal anecdotal experience. You are not the average household. Pretty much every survey on the subject has shown increased power usage on every level.
Long term predictions aren't absurd if you know the basic parameters. We have limited resources, a growing population, and more of that population attempting to reach a higher standard of living. Regardless of future technological improvements, those improvements have limits based on physical law. No matter how you look at it, we're going to have problems.
You give politicians way too much credit. Given some of their floor speeches, I'm surprised they can breath on their own without being reminded to.
Why do hate America so much? Raising taxes is what Hitler would do. /snark
I don't think people here have a problem with HFT technology or understanding it. It's how it is being used (and abused) that make people angry.
The anger directed at HFT is really misplaced. It should be on the banks and firms who use it, shady practices, and dark markets to bend the world over so they can make more money. I think people are also angry with the fact that these companies continue to rake in the cash and profits, while simultaneously bitching about taxes. A recent report cited companies making considerable profit, and yet unemployment rates are not improving all that much. Isn't it their mouthpieces in congress who claim that lower taxes will spawn job creation?
The anger comes from getting economically ass-raped seven different ways till Sunday, and then having to pay the sociopathic assholes for the honor of being ass-raped. That's why HFT, CDOs, big banks, and financial institutions have been the target of all this venom and hatred. It's not the technology or the ideas or the products. It is what was done with them that pissed people off.
That being said, you don't work for some benevolent altruistic company. You don't work for a company who is concerned about the greater good, or furthering the progress of humanity. You aren't performing some great majestic service for mankind. You work for an HFT company, who's only concern is to make assloads of money. You're upper management could give a fuck less about "balancing the markets" and even less about wiping out grandma's savings and throwing her out in the street. As long as it pulls in profits, they'd be happy kicking babies off the top floor of their 30 story trade tower.
So don't come on here and pretend that HFT is some mechanism intended for the benefit of all. HFT is what it is, and that's a money making tool. The fact that it has some fringe benefits for the rest of us serfs is purely a unintended side effect.
And with that, you get a giant red "Fuck The World" button placed directly in your hands. One little mistake and you can set off a massive cascade reaction that wipes out billions to trillions of dollars in the span of 15 minutes.
I'm so happy sociopathic assholes are willing to take the risk of wiping out OUR savings and impacting OUR economy in return for making a buck for themselves. But you're just following orders, right?
AL GORE IS NOT A CLIMATE SCIENTIST.
There is no belief involved. Research paper after research paper, data point after data point continues to show that our planet is warming up. Just because you are not able to read and understand the science doesn't mean the decades of research is based on nothing more than faith.
And really, that's all your statement really shows; a complete lack in comprehension. Unless you have peer-reviewed sources showing that the decades of science, research, and data is all flawed, you really don't have anything to back up your "shaky ground" claim other than your personal belief and ignorance. Plenty of research papers on the subject make falsifiable claims, and they back them up.
On a side note, Henrik's theory has been refuted.
Oh yes, quite valid. Except it's built on shoddy science. So their conclusions are also shoddy. Real Climate does a pretty good job tearing it apart, along with a couple links to other articles that dive further into just how off the paper is (including an in-depth description of the model they used and how incomplete it is).
But what do you expect of a paper that spent 10 days being peer reviewed.
The paper doesn't do anything close to what the summary suggests, nor what either story suggests. The submitter is basically trolling it up.
The paper is available for all to read here: http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/8/1603/pdf
Basically, they are talking about lack of model sensitivity for non-radiative feedback, which is something that was already known. The models on a MONTHLY basis don't go high enough on the maximums and don't go low enough on the minimums (and there is a lag). Or in other words, the models get the general predictions right (warmer temperatures) but don't capture shorter term variability as well (heat waves, cold snaps).
Of course, it's already well known that climate models don't capture short term variability very well. However, this paper helps quantify that and provides some insights on how to better improve that aspect of modeling.
Or if you don't want to read the whole paper just skip to the conclusions sections, which mention nothing about invalidating global warming or the science thereof.
How that gets translated into "New Study Trashes Global Warming" is beyond me.
Informative? How is this ignorant tripe informative?
You give no proof of your accusations. None. While on the other hand, you ignore that mountains of data and research, some of which even the most uneducated people can verify with some data and a few graphics tools.
You imply conspiracy, with no evidence. You imply cronyism, with no evidence. Wild ass accusations like this is why there can be no reasonable discussion of the science.
Deniers and conspiracy theorists are nutters. Skeptics are not. Unfortunately, the real skeptics are drowned out by the near cacophonous roar of the idiotic and insane. If you read an real science journals you would see that there are more than a handful of real skeptics with real credentials and real research. McIntyre and others of his ilk are not real skeptics and do nothing besides FUD the issue up.
If you're going to make such claims, it is up to you to provide the solid research and proof of them. If you can't hen you're just another nut on the internet.
Peer review is skeptic review. The science community is very competitive. If you think peer review is simply rubber stamping any research that comes through because it agrees with your perspective, you are horribly mistaken. Peer review is is a difficult, and often vicious process. It can take months to years for any paper to finally get through. You may have to rewrite sections or the entire paper depending on the criticisms. Or you may have your research thrown out entirely due to errors you never thought of.
Anyone thinking peer-review is a rubber-stamp process has never written a paper before.
You pay for your credit scores. You pay your insurance premiums. There are numerous industries that generate information that is not available to the public because it is the product they sell.
Not all climate and weather data is generated by government agencies. The government may buy it, but the government is subject to contracts just like everyone else. They may be able to distribute products based on the data, but they may not be free to distribute the data. Happens all the time.
Two answers:
1) All a balanced budget will do is ensure we don't take on a massive amount of long term debt, and help pay down the massive debt we already have. Most people consider that a good thing. A balanced budget amendment on the other hand could cause some complications.
2) Yes there are, however politicians are mainly concerned with the effects on their constituencies despite their lip service otherwise. And there are also consequences to not raising taxes above and beyond not pissing people off. You can choose which consequences you like better.
And pay almost all of the taxes. Half of the people in the country pay no income taxes, and many are given a tax "rebate" (on taxes they never even paid!) as a form of redistribution.
SS is not paid from income tax, and neither is MC. They are separately taxed. And while the 20% pay most of the income taxes, they use many loopholes and tricks (some more gray than others) to reduce their liabilities to below what it would be. The amount of revenue generated from taxes is far from what one would think just by looking at the tax brackets, both on a corporate and individual level.
No, there isn't. What you mean is that you think there's plenty of economic activity that could be taxed in order to raise that revenue, and you think you know that further taxing the economy will grow the economy. A notion that has been proven wrong every time.
Taxes don't just come from economic activity, and yes there is plenty, even in our craptastic economy. Also, if raising taxes is always detrimental to the economy, then explain how Clinton raised taxes and had huge economic growth? Or how Bush cut taxes and we still ended up in an economic pit? More than taxes determine the success or failure of growth during an economic time frame.
They may not want to, but they already do. The people who really don't want to pay taxes are the people who don't want to start paying taxes, because they think only other people should do so. That would be half the people in the country.
Nonsense. Everyone pays taxes. Income tax is only one part of the tax burden. But why does 47% of the country pay no income tax?
Lets say someone is earning $20K. You're total income tax is $2575 leaving you with about $17,500 for the year to get by on. Now let's say someone is making $2,000,000 a year. You're total income tax is $677,314 leaving you with just under $1.4 million for the year. Which one of these two is going to have the hardest time keeping the lights on and a roof over their head?
It's not so much about not wanting to pay taxes as not being able to. For that 47%, $2500 is a Big Fucking Deal. That's the difference between paying rent and being in the street. That's heating oil for the winter. You make it sound like that 47% are living in the lap of luxury and laughing all the way to the bank because they don't pay income tax. Most of that 47% are living paycheck to paycheck and are one unexpected expense or job loss away from being yet another welfare recipient.
Greed on the left...
Oh have they got you trained. Greed is not left or right. Greed isn't republican or democrat. Greed is the beating heart of capitalism and when left unchecked, you get what we have now. Right now you get to chose which greed you think is better, which is more than likely based upon your own greed. But don't kid yourself, it is still greed.
I doubt anything has changed. The president does not control the debt ceiling. The president does not control the budget. The president does not control the money. It's congress. The president can veto or accept what congress provides, but that's it. He can get them to come together for talks. He can plead. He can bargain. He can demand. But it all comes down to congress.
It's very likely that he still feels the same way. But do you think he could get the tax revenues and spending cuts he would like to see in order to balance the budget through THIS congress? Or ANY congress? We aren't even talking about the budget yet. This is just a debt ceiling increase. Something that was done many many times before under many different presidents, most of the time with little if any fanfare. This is barely a preview of what a mud-slings cat fight the budget will be.
The president is asking for the debt ceiling increase because he has to, not necessarily because he wants to. The budget AS PASSED BY CONGRESS requires a debt limit increase to fund it. Everyone has known that it was going to require a debt limit increase, including the Republicans who signed off on the budget. They all knew this was coming. The only difference is that this time Republicans(many of which didn't have a problem increasing the debt ceiling under Bush) have decided to use it as a political tool, which seems to have taken the democrats off guard.
The financial authority of our government rests with legislative branch, not the executive branch.
The programs don't depend on exponential growth. They depend on revenue. If that revenue is not adequately or accurately adjusted to match reality, then you will get a shortfall.
But neither SS nor our tax code accurately reflect the wealth distribution or population demographics. A mere 20% of the population controls the vast majority of wealth in this country. Our population base has been in decline because it is too much of a financial strain to have more than one or two kids. Wages have been stagnant for most Americans for at least a decade. And thanks to the "job creators", jobs have been moving overseas leaving lower paying jobs (or no jobs) in their place, further diminishing revenues of any sort. This doesn't even take into account the various tax loopholes, dodges, and other tricks those with the bucks (people and corporations) can afford to employ to avoid their tax burden.
We can fund SS. We can even fund our gross bloated unnecessary budget. There is plenty of revenue available to pay for it and more. The problem is nobody wants to raise taxes to levels necessary to cover the expenses, nor do those with the wealth want to pay for it.
Greed is what will kill the US, not any particular set of defense, social, or discretionary spending. It's why any balanced budget amendment will never ever pass congress. It's why congress never comes up with long term solutions. It's why people who don't need social program assistance think it's all a big waste of money and why "those lazy welfare bastards can't work like the rest of us".
The US has a GDP of around $15 trillion. Our tax revenue is $2.1 trillion. Our latest budget is $3.5 trillion. We have plenty of room to cover our bills. We CHOOSE not to.