So you're saying Trump isn't an AGW denier and doesn't count other AGW deniers as his close advisers? Oh wait, you pulled out because you don't actually want to have to answer that question.
AGW pseudo-skeptics really are a pack of cowards, which most certainly indicates that a fair portion of them actually know that AGW is real, but either are sociopaths who don't really care if it fucks of everyone else, or believe that a few more years can be squeezed out of fossil fuels, and then it's some future government's problem.
No, it's a good analogy, because basically the intent of saying "We shouldn't do anything because China and India aren't" (which isn't even true, they are signatories to the Paris climate accord) is to say "Because some of my neighbors are killers, I'm going to join them in the murderous orgy because, heck, what could me not being a killer do to the overall murder statistics on my block?"
Apart from the fact that the US does in fact generate a rather significant fraction of over-all green house gasses, so that if it did, all on its own, reign in emissions, it would have a measurable effect on the amount of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere.
And another lie. We have much longer than 20 years worth of data.
Is it your intent to just simply lie at every turn, to repeat bullshit that people whose only interest is to profit by making sure a harmful way of producing energy is used as long as possible? What other motive could there be than cowardice and/or stupidity?
Water vapor, including cloud cover, while not perfectly modeled, is considered to be relatively consistent over time. If you have some evidence to counter this, please provide it.
But you don't, because you're a fucking retard who just mouths Heartland Institute talking points. You're an infantile child who is too cowardly to admit the truth. You're pathetic and vile and stupid.
But the short term stimulation will come at medium and long term costs that will outweigh any short term benefit. It's like a guy who makes money selling blood who thinks if he just ups the amount he sells by a couple of pints a day, he'll have more money in his wallet. Well yes, for a very brief that's true, but then he's going to end up seriously anemic, extremely ill, and whatever he made in selling blood, and more than that, will have to spent to get him healthy again.
It will take the angry losers a few years after the infrastructure money that Trump has dumped on their heads has dried up and the entire country has to pay for the largess.
A lot of people thought they elected some sort of conservative Santa Claus. What they've really done is elected a Hugo Chavez with bad hair.
Let's imagine if several other major trading partners started slapping tariffs on American exports as a means of making the US pay for its lack of action on climate change.
Are you going to bomb the EU into buying American goods?
Or we could just move to alternative energy sources? Why in the fuck should we spend untold trillions on engineering the climate just so we can keep burning oil, when we could, you know, stop burning fucking oil.
So let me get this straight. If you lived on a street where several of your neighbors were murderers, your solution wouldn't be to try to get them put away, your solution would be to grab an ax and join them in the frenzy?
But there is something we can do about climate within the scale of a century or two, and we do that by stopping the vomiting of large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. What you're doing is the last redoubt of the AGW deniner, to accept, but insist that short term goals should override long term goals.
If that's the case, why don't you light your house on fire and say "Well, at least I'll be warm tonight."
Beyond that, the costs to the US and global economies over the next few decades is go to mount and mount, and unless you're in your 70s or 80s, it's likely you'll be paying just like the rest of us for it, so in other words, being selfish and short sighted is fucking yourself over. And for what? It's not like the universe doesn't have plenty of other ways to produce energy. Are you really so fucking moronic that you want to sacrifice even your own well being so some rich fucking assholes can make a decade or two more profits?
By "highest standard of ethics", you mean it is regulated so that you never read anything you don't like in a newspaper or on a big media news site.
Would you also like Breitbarts and Fox regulated? What about asshole bloggers on Wordpress that pass around stories of buses full of black people sent to commit fraud?
I've seen news outlets do that my entire life. You'll always see the front page story "Local soccer coach accused of child molestation!", but the story six months later that all charges were dropped is buried somewhere on page four below a story about how a Suffolk County family's cat had nine conjoined kittens.
New employment needs new skills. Folks in the Rust Belt idled by factory shutdowns are going to have to do their part, and that's the problem. In my part of the world I've seen more than one new industry come into an area, but with the necessary skills hard to find in the area, they actually end up having to bring in workers from outside the area.
Trump was actually promising out of work coal miners that he'd open the mines again. He's basically committing to turning back the clock, and he will, of course, have to back down on that
The problem is that it isn't the banks that are making those groups poor. It's simply a function of a changing domestic and global economy. Trump will no more be able to restore the Rust Belt to its former glory than any president in the last quarter century. Punish the Elite if you think that will help, but the most these voters can expect is a short-lived Venezuelan-style cash dump that ultimately does nothing to solve the problem. The problem is that they possess skills that are increasingly not wanted.
And believe me, in twenty or thirty years the Mexicans, Indians and Chinese that took their jobs will be in exactly the same place.
There were still fields that needed to be plowed and planted, since livestock that needed to be tended, still village and town economies to service, still armies to be raised and trained. Not everyone died, just a lot of them. There seems to be this fixation on the idea that an economy is purely a construct of consumerism, but an economy is a vast machine, and even the much simpler economies of Medieval Europe still required able-bodied people to make it work. Yes, less people would mean less demand in some areas, but you would still have all that infrastructure, economic and physical, that needed to be serviced.
The general rule of demographics, so far as I understand it, is that the wealthier a demographic group, the less children they have. I'd have to hunt down the source now, but I remember reading that even in Early Modern Era England, the Puritans and other Non-conformists, who were in fact the nascent middle class of England, had lower fertility rates than the poorer classes (like indentured agrarian workers). This was centuries before modern birth control, but even four or five hundred years ago, there were some means to prevent pregnancy, and the Puritans, unlike their modern Evangelical descendants, were quite so squeamish about using the means available to them to terminate pregnancies.
Now jump forward to the world of the last half century, where the birth control pill has basically severed the relationship between sexual intercourse and fertility completely. If in the pre-birth control world you still find the middle classes reducing fertility, you can see how the effect of far more effective birth control methods could lead to a crash. Now I agree that Japan may have aspects of its society that explain why its demographic crash is worse than some other countries, the fact is that even though it may be an outlier in its extremely low birth rates, almost every advanced economy in the world is seeing a similar demographic collapse. In North America in particular the Baby Boomers are exacerbating this because as they reach old age, they are putting increased pressure on health and pension systems, and also because a great deal of infrastructure was built to deal with that large post-war population boom (everything from schools to hospitals to roads to commercial enterprises), but even without that Baby Boom, many advanced economies would be beginning to experience the severe pressures of an aging demographic.
I don't know about every election, but certainly elections where the popular vote is very close, or when the popular vote points in one direction but the Electoral College points in the other (like 2000).
Because the Executive wields significant powers, and the Founding Fathers, who fundamentally viewed the United States as a *Union of States*, believed that those States had some great interest in who occupied that most powerful of positions.
But that happens anyways. Generally, "safe states" don't get nearly the attention from candidates as the battleground states.
Mind you, I think one of the things that is going to come out in the wash from this election is that the idea of "firewall states" is a phantom, a miasma built out of pseudo-scientific demographic bafflegab. Clinton didn't lose because Trump stormed the gates so much as she lost because the firewall that Obama had built didn't really exist, or at the very least, it only existed so long as the candidate in question was Barack Obama. I read a report this morning that Bill Clinton had been worried in the lead up to the vote that she hadn't done nearly enough campaigning, that she had put all her effort into battleground states.
In fact, people like myself were actually criticizing Trump for spending so much time in states where his vote was safe, but I think, whatever you think of Trump, his pollsters and campaign team recognized that relying on the notion of safe states is pure hubris. Trump may have built the new engine of presidential elections, and he did it with less money and less resources than Clinton. By every rule in the presidential campaign book, Clinton checked all the boxes, and yet a portion of the supposed safe demographic walked away from her and voted for Trump.
The question that the Dems and Republicans will spend the next three or so years trying to answer is "Is Trump's victory a bizarre one-off, a sort of American Brexit, and will never happen again, or is there a new paradigm taking form?" I'd say as interesting as the 2016 election was, I'm wagering the 2020 is going to be the real product of this disruption. I'd also say guys like Nate Silver and Sam Wang may want to find something else to do, because this, even though I didn't believe, did end up being a Brexit-style vote, where traditional demographic models failed utterly and the pollsters and aggregators by and large got it wrong.
The intent of the EC was twofold: 1. It was a compromise between the states to assure that smaller states still had at least some proportional influence over who became president. 2. It was born out of the Founding Fathers' belief that even democracy needs some sort of check.
Walter Bagehot, the famed British constitutionalist (writer of the English Constitution, a must-read for those who want to understand the Westminster Parliamentary system) viewed the EC as a failure, in that he felt the Founding Fathers' original intent was to create sort of parliament to select the president. I think there's probably some justice to Bagehot's view, but I also think he didn't fully realize the extent to which the Founding Fathers believed that even the electorate needed to be held in check. That's why the original formulation produced only one directly and generally elected Federal body; the House of Representatives. The President was selected by an electoral college, the Senate was picked by the states, and the Supreme Court was selected by the Senate based on the President's nominees
The thread here is obvious, that no aspect of the Republic should ever be held in one individual or even one group's hands; whether that be Congressmen, Justices, the President, and yes, even the voter. To some extent, it is unfortunate that the Senate was made a directly elected body, rather than having the selection process reformed but keeping it with the states. But in general, I believe that the US should stick with the original intent here. If the EC needs reform, then that's the direction to go. Frankly, I think the winner take all method used by almost all the states should be dispensed with, which would at least partially serve to address the complaint that the EC can stand in defiance of the popular will, but I still think the EC should be retained, precisely because it creates a check on the popular will.
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So you're saying Trump isn't an AGW denier and doesn't count other AGW deniers as his close advisers? Oh wait, you pulled out because you don't actually want to have to answer that question.
AGW pseudo-skeptics really are a pack of cowards, which most certainly indicates that a fair portion of them actually know that AGW is real, but either are sociopaths who don't really care if it fucks of everyone else, or believe that a few more years can be squeezed out of fossil fuels, and then it's some future government's problem.
No, it's a good analogy, because basically the intent of saying "We shouldn't do anything because China and India aren't" (which isn't even true, they are signatories to the Paris climate accord) is to say "Because some of my neighbors are killers, I'm going to join them in the murderous orgy because, heck, what could me not being a killer do to the overall murder statistics on my block?"
Apart from the fact that the US does in fact generate a rather significant fraction of over-all green house gasses, so that if it did, all on its own, reign in emissions, it would have a measurable effect on the amount of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere.
And another lie. We have much longer than 20 years worth of data.
Is it your intent to just simply lie at every turn, to repeat bullshit that people whose only interest is to profit by making sure a harmful way of producing energy is used as long as possible? What other motive could there be than cowardice and/or stupidity?
Water vapor, including cloud cover, while not perfectly modeled, is considered to be relatively consistent over time. If you have some evidence to counter this, please provide it.
But you don't, because you're a fucking retard who just mouths Heartland Institute talking points. You're an infantile child who is too cowardly to admit the truth. You're pathetic and vile and stupid.
But the short term stimulation will come at medium and long term costs that will outweigh any short term benefit. It's like a guy who makes money selling blood who thinks if he just ups the amount he sells by a couple of pints a day, he'll have more money in his wallet. Well yes, for a very brief that's true, but then he's going to end up seriously anemic, extremely ill, and whatever he made in selling blood, and more than that, will have to spent to get him healthy again.
It will take the angry losers a few years after the infrastructure money that Trump has dumped on their heads has dried up and the entire country has to pay for the largess.
A lot of people thought they elected some sort of conservative Santa Claus. What they've really done is elected a Hugo Chavez with bad hair.
Let's imagine if several other major trading partners started slapping tariffs on American exports as a means of making the US pay for its lack of action on climate change.
Are you going to bomb the EU into buying American goods?
Or we could just move to alternative energy sources? Why in the fuck should we spend untold trillions on engineering the climate just so we can keep burning oil, when we could, you know, stop burning fucking oil.
So let me get this straight. If you lived on a street where several of your neighbors were murderers, your solution wouldn't be to try to get them put away, your solution would be to grab an ax and join them in the frenzy?
Temperatures are going up, you moron.
There is no logic to the reasoning. It is the reasoning of sociopaths and morons.
But there is something we can do about climate within the scale of a century or two, and we do that by stopping the vomiting of large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. What you're doing is the last redoubt of the AGW deniner, to accept, but insist that short term goals should override long term goals.
If that's the case, why don't you light your house on fire and say "Well, at least I'll be warm tonight."
Beyond that, the costs to the US and global economies over the next few decades is go to mount and mount, and unless you're in your 70s or 80s, it's likely you'll be paying just like the rest of us for it, so in other words, being selfish and short sighted is fucking yourself over. And for what? It's not like the universe doesn't have plenty of other ways to produce energy. Are you really so fucking moronic that you want to sacrifice even your own well being so some rich fucking assholes can make a decade or two more profits?
By "highest standard of ethics", you mean it is regulated so that you never read anything you don't like in a newspaper or on a big media news site.
Would you also like Breitbarts and Fox regulated? What about asshole bloggers on Wordpress that pass around stories of buses full of black people sent to commit fraud?
Translation: Free speech is fine, except when it says things I don't like, in which case I want government intervention!
I've seen news outlets do that my entire life. You'll always see the front page story "Local soccer coach accused of child molestation!", but the story six months later that all charges were dropped is buried somewhere on page four below a story about how a Suffolk County family's cat had nine conjoined kittens.
New employment needs new skills. Folks in the Rust Belt idled by factory shutdowns are going to have to do their part, and that's the problem. In my part of the world I've seen more than one new industry come into an area, but with the necessary skills hard to find in the area, they actually end up having to bring in workers from outside the area.
Trump was actually promising out of work coal miners that he'd open the mines again. He's basically committing to turning back the clock, and he will, of course, have to back down on that
California is the 8th largest economy in the world. Jesus Christ the political right is populated by some real halfwits.
Trump isn't going to make those Rust Belt jobs come any more than Teddy Roosevelt could have restored the buggy whip industry.
The problem is that it isn't the banks that are making those groups poor. It's simply a function of a changing domestic and global economy. Trump will no more be able to restore the Rust Belt to its former glory than any president in the last quarter century. Punish the Elite if you think that will help, but the most these voters can expect is a short-lived Venezuelan-style cash dump that ultimately does nothing to solve the problem. The problem is that they possess skills that are increasingly not wanted.
And believe me, in twenty or thirty years the Mexicans, Indians and Chinese that took their jobs will be in exactly the same place.
There were still fields that needed to be plowed and planted, since livestock that needed to be tended, still village and town economies to service, still armies to be raised and trained. Not everyone died, just a lot of them. There seems to be this fixation on the idea that an economy is purely a construct of consumerism, but an economy is a vast machine, and even the much simpler economies of Medieval Europe still required able-bodied people to make it work. Yes, less people would mean less demand in some areas, but you would still have all that infrastructure, economic and physical, that needed to be serviced.
The general rule of demographics, so far as I understand it, is that the wealthier a demographic group, the less children they have. I'd have to hunt down the source now, but I remember reading that even in Early Modern Era England, the Puritans and other Non-conformists, who were in fact the nascent middle class of England, had lower fertility rates than the poorer classes (like indentured agrarian workers). This was centuries before modern birth control, but even four or five hundred years ago, there were some means to prevent pregnancy, and the Puritans, unlike their modern Evangelical descendants, were quite so squeamish about using the means available to them to terminate pregnancies.
Now jump forward to the world of the last half century, where the birth control pill has basically severed the relationship between sexual intercourse and fertility completely. If in the pre-birth control world you still find the middle classes reducing fertility, you can see how the effect of far more effective birth control methods could lead to a crash. Now I agree that Japan may have aspects of its society that explain why its demographic crash is worse than some other countries, the fact is that even though it may be an outlier in its extremely low birth rates, almost every advanced economy in the world is seeing a similar demographic collapse. In North America in particular the Baby Boomers are exacerbating this because as they reach old age, they are putting increased pressure on health and pension systems, and also because a great deal of infrastructure was built to deal with that large post-war population boom (everything from schools to hospitals to roads to commercial enterprises), but even without that Baby Boom, many advanced economies would be beginning to experience the severe pressures of an aging demographic.
I don't know about every election, but certainly elections where the popular vote is very close, or when the popular vote points in one direction but the Electoral College points in the other (like 2000).
Because the Executive wields significant powers, and the Founding Fathers, who fundamentally viewed the United States as a *Union of States*, believed that those States had some great interest in who occupied that most powerful of positions.
But that happens anyways. Generally, "safe states" don't get nearly the attention from candidates as the battleground states.
Mind you, I think one of the things that is going to come out in the wash from this election is that the idea of "firewall states" is a phantom, a miasma built out of pseudo-scientific demographic bafflegab. Clinton didn't lose because Trump stormed the gates so much as she lost because the firewall that Obama had built didn't really exist, or at the very least, it only existed so long as the candidate in question was Barack Obama. I read a report this morning that Bill Clinton had been worried in the lead up to the vote that she hadn't done nearly enough campaigning, that she had put all her effort into battleground states.
In fact, people like myself were actually criticizing Trump for spending so much time in states where his vote was safe, but I think, whatever you think of Trump, his pollsters and campaign team recognized that relying on the notion of safe states is pure hubris. Trump may have built the new engine of presidential elections, and he did it with less money and less resources than Clinton. By every rule in the presidential campaign book, Clinton checked all the boxes, and yet a portion of the supposed safe demographic walked away from her and voted for Trump.
The question that the Dems and Republicans will spend the next three or so years trying to answer is "Is Trump's victory a bizarre one-off, a sort of American Brexit, and will never happen again, or is there a new paradigm taking form?" I'd say as interesting as the 2016 election was, I'm wagering the 2020 is going to be the real product of this disruption. I'd also say guys like Nate Silver and Sam Wang may want to find something else to do, because this, even though I didn't believe, did end up being a Brexit-style vote, where traditional demographic models failed utterly and the pollsters and aggregators by and large got it wrong.
The intent of the EC was twofold:
1. It was a compromise between the states to assure that smaller states still had at least some proportional influence over who became president.
2. It was born out of the Founding Fathers' belief that even democracy needs some sort of check.
Walter Bagehot, the famed British constitutionalist (writer of the English Constitution, a must-read for those who want to understand the Westminster Parliamentary system) viewed the EC as a failure, in that he felt the Founding Fathers' original intent was to create sort of parliament to select the president. I think there's probably some justice to Bagehot's view, but I also think he didn't fully realize the extent to which the Founding Fathers believed that even the electorate needed to be held in check. That's why the original formulation produced only one directly and generally elected Federal body; the House of Representatives. The President was selected by an electoral college, the Senate was picked by the states, and the Supreme Court was selected by the Senate based on the President's nominees
The thread here is obvious, that no aspect of the Republic should ever be held in one individual or even one group's hands; whether that be Congressmen, Justices, the President, and yes, even the voter. To some extent, it is unfortunate that the Senate was made a directly elected body, rather than having the selection process reformed but keeping it with the states. But in general, I believe that the US should stick with the original intent here. If the EC needs reform, then that's the direction to go. Frankly, I think the winner take all method used by almost all the states should be dispensed with, which would at least partially serve to address the complaint that the EC can stand in defiance of the popular will, but I still think the EC should be retained, precisely because it creates a check on the popular will.
So, in other words, in the long run it would make no difference to the domestic labor pool whether cheap immigrant labor picked the tomato or a robot.