Yeah... I sold my man-seed for $80 a pop in college long ago. Paid for my Porsche that way. Meanwhile the mouthbreathing idiots selling their splooge for beer money down at State College were getting $12 a pop.
Aw, who am I kidding? I paid the "nurse" $20 just to give me the damn specimen cup, and another $40 to smack me around a little bit to get me going.
Probably just a slight slip, but isn't Comcast Business Basic 12/2 for $60?
FYI, next town over from me has Comcast, and their residential lowest tier service (15/3) is $43 a month. You can get it for $20 for 6 months if you bundle with Comcast Cable or Voice.
(Real numbers from scientists estimate the number as 5-15 million uninsured U.S. citizens. +9 million if you include illegal non-citizens/intruders.)
[citation needed]
My five minutes of googling has not come up with sources that agree with your figures. Typically, lowball figures like yours are due to the following errors:
1. They include only people without any insurance for the entire year, though at any given time during the year, a significantly higher number of people are uninsured. 2. They double-dip on the exclusions... for example, they deduct everyone making over $SOME_ARBITRARY_THRESHOLD as being able to afford it but choosing not to, and then they deduct $NUMBER_OF_ILLEGALS, falsely assuming that no individual belongs to both sets. 3. On the subject of exclusions, while we're at it: they state (as you did) that the number of uninsured is X, when they've deducted those who they deem able to afford it but chose not to. Those people are uninsured, and should be counted when you make a claim about the number of uninsured. If you instead make a claim about the number of uninsured not by choice, then you can exclude those people. 4. Exclusions, particularly the rich-enough-to-afford-it exclusion, are arbitrary. I've yet to see a valid analysis of how a family of 4 in central/northern NJ can afford health insurance on a family income of $35k -- yet $35k is the figure used in a lot of these studies.
In short, please provide a link to your source so we can determine if you're blowing smoke or not.
the only reason ISPs have monopolies is because local governments GAVE them the monopoly. If local governments stopped handing-out these exclusive licenses, and allowed the free market to operate, then we'd have a dozen different companies serving our homes.
No. Natural monopoly due to high fixed cost of infrastructure would prevent that.
Get real. Running fiber and purchasing/leasing rights-of-way is expensive, and a dozen companies are not going to run out competing infrastructure without making sure they can dominate the local market.
I personally experienced this in '84-86 when my town was trying to get cable service. We voted a local monopoly for 20 years, which expired in 2006. Guess what? Even though everyone was *pissed* at our current provider, and over 60% of survey respondents said they would change providers if equivalent pricing were available, not a single other provider was interested in coming in. Finally we got Verizon to come in with FiOS -- but they already had the rights-of-way and conduit laid (for telephone service), so there was less of an up-front cost for them.
I'm firmly convinced that if Verizon didn't already have a big chunk of the sunk cost taken care, we'd still be languishing under Cablevision -- and paying 40% more for the same service than our neighbors down the road whose condo board allowed satellite dishes.
The CBO has stated ( as well as liberal economic professors and journalists ) that when taxes are lowered the Govt takes in more revenue but when taxes are raised they bring in less revenue.
You might want to research that issue more fully, since you're mistaken -- it's more complex than that.
I have the feeling that you're not really educated on the topic... maybe I'm mistaken.
No, sorry, I don't waste my time reading propaganda from the likes of Ferguson. He relies on Monckton (firmly in the pocket of corporate interests), and his funding is also questionable -- he spent time before founding SPPI working for groups directly funded by large corporations to write policy papers on their behalf.
1. Yes 2. Yes. 3. Yeah, too bad non-work-related posts may be damaging as well. Your personal, non-work opinions and writings can get you into trouble at work, whether that's fair or not.
I don't think you're ever going to get around the fact that bacon will always be cheaper than fish. Fish is getting more scarce, and generally farmed fish are less efficient at converting feed to meat than pigs are.
your words are wasted because their nothing more then an emotional rant.
If that's the convenient excuse you give to not actually consider them...
your points about oil companys being apposed to alternative power is complete bullshit btw. BP are one of the biggest manufactures of solar panels, chevron are heavily invested in geothermal. energy companys don't care where their profits come from,...
You don't think the energy companies are working to ensure that they can extract maximum profit from the trillions of dollars in fossil fuel reserves (a sunk cost, in some cases) they've accumulated?
You don't think that the largest energy companies are not actively trying to ensure that *they* are the only ones able to compete in the energy market?
they aren't emotionally invested in one outcome like you.
They don't need to be emotionally invested... they have a financial incentive to downplay alternative energy sources while they still have huge amounts of production capacity for fossil fuels. I'm sorry to see that you buy into the greenwashing that goes on.
You've contributed nothing here. Next time, post with your real name, so you can be properly modded "troll".
Who's the dummy? FYI, I'm not the person you responded to.
But you should know first that users can't be modded troll, posts receive moderation. Sure, enough downmods and a user can automagically have a (-1) added to all their posts... in which case they'll either register a new ID or they'll post AC or they'll go away.
Second, you should know that asking someone to "post with your real name" is meaningless. We're almost all anonymous here, even if we have a user ID and have registered. Asking for people to act non-anonymously is rather stupid, IMO.
Third, it's a trollish comment by an AC. If that's going to get your panties all in a bunch, maybe you're not mature enough for slashdot.
Finally, knock it off with the ALL-CAPS. Do you shout when you're having a discussion in public? No? Then why do it here? If you do shout in the normal course of conversation, perhaps you should consider why you have limited friends. FYI, slashdot accepts limited HTML so you can use bold, strong, italic, etc.
I see. We're back to, "Well, I know what I'm doing is bad, but it's *possible* that something else is worse, so I can continue doing what I'm doing while ignoring the consequences"?
out of some nebulous feeling of guilt that mankind must be punished for using its minds and muscles to increase our quality of life and life span.
This is despite knowing that the long-term impact of our actions will likely lead to *lower* quality of life?
Dude there hasn't been significant global warming for the last 15 years, and depending on how you measure the temperature it been getting cooler.
Are you denying that there is increased energy within the atmosphere and surface as result of increased CO2 in the atmosphere over the last fifteen years?
Even if you do want to decrease atmospheric CO2 what better way than to put it into the seawater where the algae will turn it into fishfood?
I see. You have no understanding of what acidification actually does. Are you claiming that increased CO2 dissolution in our oceans leads to greater biomass and has a net positive effect?
Irrelevant. Those goods may be produced in Asia but they are sold by people with jobs here - advertisers, retail staff and so forth. I'm not up for getting into a massive discussion about it but take a look at http://cafehayek.com/myths-and-fallacies and some of the articles there. You should have more respect for his opinion than mine. To answer the second question, I'm not an economist but he is.
I've read a lot of Hayek. I disagree with him on a few topics (but if I were on the same level as him, I'd have my own following:)). As for it being irrelevant, that's not quite so. It just means that while we're not losing 100% of the cash being spent on foreign goods, we are still losing some of the positive impact that cash could have in our economy.
Did you read that article? DeLong states that in a "normal" economy, return on government spending is about 1.4 (40% over and above the amount invested). But during a depression, return is 2.5 (150% over and above what is spent). Important to note that DeLong is a Keynesian... if you're looking for a non-Keynesian point of view, he's a bad source:)
I think the safer course of action with those odds is to leave the money with the people who know how to spend it best in their situation, the people who earned it.
History tells us that's a poor option. Devastating cycles of recessions and depressions in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries would tend to agree...
Is it any of your damned business? Or do you not value personal freedom to do what you wish with your own hard earned money?
False dichotomy. And, useless for debate. We do not live in a black-and-white world, no matter how much you'd like it to be that way.
Worst case scenario: America spends all its money overseas and we in turn become poor. Good news: Now we are a cheaper market for manufacturing and the cycle of global economic equilibrium reasserts itself.
Ah, I see you have limited understanding of feedback mechanisms and interdependency in macroeconomics. Either that, or you're willing to have needless suffering on international scales because of the desire to maintain some kind of ideological purity. Good to know. I can avoid getting into a lengthy discussion with someone who: either knows some words but not the in-depth knowledge and understanding necessary to have informed debate; or has a moral/ethical stance that makes any kind of rational discussion on the subject useless.
I agree with a lot of your points (not all the specifics for spending, like highways -- that cash would be better spent on mass transit, IMO).
But I think it's mistaken to say that none of the relief funds are being spent on worthwhile projects. Federal aid to states, and state aid to municipalities is the most effective form of federal spending for economic stimulus. This is what we got under the stimulus bill last year, what is being spent now, and what has shown to be most effective.
Unfortunately, the current "jobs" bills in the works don't take the same tack. And I'm with you 100% on the fact that a lot of the funds are being misspent, and it's only going to get worse with the different bills being considered now.
I'm familiar with the broken window fallacy. But I think it's a mistake to think it applies everywhere -- surely some of the public spending going on seems to apply, but definitely not all of it. It seems to be a fallback argument for a lot of people -- not saying you're one of them -- and it gets used in places where it doesn't apply, especially by people who have a limited understanding of economics.
The only economic argument that you might be able to make in favor of helping these people is that some of them might possibly be converted back into productive citizens with enough investment.
Not so. Most of these people spend every penny they get. If they purchase from productive people, that aids the productive people because it increases the market for whatever they put into the economy.
However, even that is a BIG IF considering the history of many people who use our public mental health services.
Perhaps you should actually look at some of the research that's out there before spewing ignorant crap.
It's not my fault that some people grew up in a broken home, or drank themselves stupid or did drugs. I had no say in any of that so why should I be forced to help them?
Because it's costing you even more money to NOT help help them. You'll save more money on law enforcement and prisons than you will spend on mental health care.
Hoarding money in the US economy is such a rare phenomenon, that it might as well not exist.
Hoarding money and hoarding wealth are two different things. There is plenty of wealth being hoarded in the US... real estate, precious metals, fine art. Some of them are "hoarding" because they want to see values come back to a high level, but the effect is the same. This has an impact on the economy.
People are spending money they don't even have, and in many cases, spending money they never will have. It's called credit. The credit crisis in the United States CAUSED the meltdown.
Please check current figures for your citations, and understand that not everyone does exactly the average. While there are still people taking advantage of credit, that situation has changed drastically over the past year. Meanwhile, plenty of people are hoarding wealth.
Furthermore, easily available credit was a cause of the meltdown. It's debatable if it was even the primary cause.
You didn't answer my question (sorry for the HTML screwup, maybe it made my question unreadable).
CBO estimates for every 3 the govt takes in only one comes out
[citation needed]
If there are no reserves (which we know to be true), what black hole are the other two dollars disappearing into? Are they getting extracted via profit for public contractors (some of it is). Are they being spent on wages and salary for government employees (if, so that has stimulatory impact)?
What you call "hoarding", I call "saving" and the general lack of savings in America is a Bad Thing (tm).
No, hoarding and saving are not the same thing. Hoarding is keeping it in a jar or under your mattress, where it literally is out of the economy. Hoarding is a subset of saving. Saving, on the other hand, can include things like depositing your cash in a interest-bearing depository account, where it actually circulates in the economy due to the magic of banking. And given fractional reserve lending, that money may actually create multiples of itself in circulation.
Govt takes in 3 dollars and 1 comes out.,/blockquote>What black hole does the money go into that it never comes out? Seriously. How is it possible for govts to be running deficits and have no reserves if they keep $2 of every $3 they take in?
If people are honest, we don't even have a handle on what the current temperature trends mean or how they will play out or whats REALLY causing them. they have a hypothesis that it's CO2.
If you're still spouting this nonsense, I'm sure the following words are wasted. There is ZERO chance that increased CO2 in the atmosphere does not directly result in increased solar energy retention. It is a FACT that we release huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
And I have a hypothesis that you'd staunchly oppose any action long past the time when any action could have been useful.
If it was raining hard for several days, and your yard was under a few inches of water due to flooding of a nearby river, with forecasts of continued heavy rain for the next week, would you wait and see if the rain is actually causing the flood before moving your belongings out of the basement and fleeing to higher ground? I mean, maybe there's a dam upriver that busted, and the flood'll subside before your house is underwater. Maybe an underground river carved a new path and now feeds into the local river, and this is just the new level when you factor in the water from the underground source. Or do you do the prudent thing, and evaluate options for preventing or mitigating the flood damage?
actually it's not shell, Exon or Mobile that are the CO2 emmiters, it's people like you driving their car to work and using electricity. so feel free to revolt against modern convienence anytime.
Good point, except that we are not the ones directly deciding by what means electricity is produced. You're falsely equating modern convenience with current levels of CO2 emission. That doesn't mean that Shell or ExxonMobile (you know they are one company now, right?)or any other energy producer is to blame... except they are, for continually lobbying to ensure that their interests in fossil fuel sources are protected, that their interests in selling fossil fuels are protected. Also true for the coal companies. They have made sure that economically, their sources of energy are the best choice for the consumers driving their cars, etc... because they have been able to externalize the costs of all their pollution.
We do not need to get our electricity from fossil fuels. We could use nuclear. We could use a combination of sources like nuclear, solar, wind, tidal, hydro. But decades of lobbying have ensured that we are waaaay behind on implementing alternative energy sources.
Depends on what you're composting, and on what scale. I've composted sheep manure, chicken manure, and pig manure. When it rains, they stink.
2. Recycling is cheaper than not recycling - you just have to put a cost on pollution created by not recycling something and it suddenly becomes the cheap alternative.
Depends on what the cost of the pollution is. More inert materials have a low cost of pollution, as long as land for landfills is cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah... I sold my man-seed for $80 a pop in college long ago. Paid for my Porsche that way. Meanwhile the mouthbreathing idiots selling their splooge for beer money down at State College were getting $12 a pop.
Aw, who am I kidding? I paid the "nurse" $20 just to give me the damn specimen cup, and another $40 to smack me around a little bit to get me going.
Probably just a slight slip, but isn't Comcast Business Basic 12/2 for $60?
FYI, next town over from me has Comcast, and their residential lowest tier service (15/3) is $43 a month. You can get it for $20 for 6 months if you bundle with Comcast Cable or Voice.
Never mind the fact that Hatch cleverly ignores the fact that he's double-dipping on the exclusions.
[citation needed]
My five minutes of googling has not come up with sources that agree with your figures. Typically, lowball figures like yours are due to the following errors:
1. They include only people without any insurance for the entire year, though at any given time during the year, a significantly higher number of people are uninsured.
2. They double-dip on the exclusions... for example, they deduct everyone making over $SOME_ARBITRARY_THRESHOLD as being able to afford it but choosing not to, and then they deduct $NUMBER_OF_ILLEGALS, falsely assuming that no individual belongs to both sets.
3. On the subject of exclusions, while we're at it: they state (as you did) that the number of uninsured is X, when they've deducted those who they deem able to afford it but chose not to. Those people are uninsured, and should be counted when you make a claim about the number of uninsured. If you instead make a claim about the number of uninsured not by choice, then you can exclude those people.
4. Exclusions, particularly the rich-enough-to-afford-it exclusion, are arbitrary. I've yet to see a valid analysis of how a family of 4 in central/northern NJ can afford health insurance on a family income of $35k -- yet $35k is the figure used in a lot of these studies.
In short, please provide a link to your source so we can determine if you're blowing smoke or not.
No. Natural monopoly due to high fixed cost of infrastructure would prevent that.
Get real. Running fiber and purchasing/leasing rights-of-way is expensive, and a dozen companies are not going to run out competing infrastructure without making sure they can dominate the local market.
I personally experienced this in '84-86 when my town was trying to get cable service. We voted a local monopoly for 20 years, which expired in 2006. Guess what? Even though everyone was *pissed* at our current provider, and over 60% of survey respondents said they would change providers if equivalent pricing were available, not a single other provider was interested in coming in. Finally we got Verizon to come in with FiOS -- but they already had the rights-of-way and conduit laid (for telephone service), so there was less of an up-front cost for them.
I'm firmly convinced that if Verizon didn't already have a big chunk of the sunk cost taken care, we'd still be languishing under Cablevision -- and paying 40% more for the same service than our neighbors down the road whose condo board allowed satellite dishes.
You might want to research that issue more fully, since you're mistaken -- it's more complex than that.
I have the feeling that you're not really educated on the topic... maybe I'm mistaken.
No, sorry, I don't waste my time reading propaganda from the likes of Ferguson. He relies on Monckton (firmly in the pocket of corporate interests), and his funding is also questionable -- he spent time before founding SPPI working for groups directly funded by large corporations to write policy papers on their behalf.
Wow. Off your meds again, internet tough guy?
1. Yes
2. Yes.
3. Yeah, too bad non-work-related posts may be damaging as well. Your personal, non-work opinions and writings can get you into trouble at work, whether that's fair or not.
Five o'clock shadow and calloused man-hands tend to intrude on your imagination some, I've heard.
I don't think you're ever going to get around the fact that bacon will always be cheaper than fish. Fish is getting more scarce, and generally farmed fish are less efficient at converting feed to meat than pigs are.
If that's the convenient excuse you give to not actually consider them...
You don't think the energy companies are working to ensure that they can extract maximum profit from the trillions of dollars in fossil fuel reserves (a sunk cost, in some cases) they've accumulated?
You don't think that the largest energy companies are not actively trying to ensure that *they* are the only ones able to compete in the energy market?
They don't need to be emotionally invested... they have a financial incentive to downplay alternative energy sources while they still have huge amounts of production capacity for fossil fuels. I'm sorry to see that you buy into the greenwashing that goes on.
Who's the dummy? FYI, I'm not the person you responded to.
But you should know first that users can't be modded troll, posts receive moderation. Sure, enough downmods and a user can automagically have a (-1) added to all their posts... in which case they'll either register a new ID or they'll post AC or they'll go away.
Second, you should know that asking someone to "post with your real name" is meaningless. We're almost all anonymous here, even if we have a user ID and have registered. Asking for people to act non-anonymously is rather stupid, IMO.
Third, it's a trollish comment by an AC. If that's going to get your panties all in a bunch, maybe you're not mature enough for slashdot.
Finally, knock it off with the ALL-CAPS. Do you shout when you're having a discussion in public? No? Then why do it here? If you do shout in the normal course of conversation, perhaps you should consider why you have limited friends. FYI, slashdot accepts limited HTML so you can use bold, strong, italic, etc.
This is despite knowing that the long-term impact of our actions will likely lead to *lower* quality of life?
What cloud are you on?
Are you denying that there is increased energy within the atmosphere and surface as result of increased CO2 in the atmosphere over the last fifteen years?
I see. You have no understanding of what acidification actually does. Are you claiming that increased CO2 dissolution in our oceans leads to greater biomass and has a net positive effect?
I've read a lot of Hayek. I disagree with him on a few topics (but if I were on the same level as him, I'd have my own following :)). As for it being irrelevant, that's not quite so. It just means that while we're not losing 100% of the cash being spent on foreign goods, we are still losing some of the positive impact that cash could have in our economy.
Emphasis mine:
Did you read that article? DeLong states that in a "normal" economy, return on government spending is about 1.4 (40% over and above the amount invested). But during a depression, return is 2.5 (150% over and above what is spent). Important to note that DeLong is a Keynesian... if you're looking for a non-Keynesian point of view, he's a bad source :)
History tells us that's a poor option. Devastating cycles of recessions and depressions in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries would tend to agree...
False dichotomy. And, useless for debate. We do not live in a black-and-white world, no matter how much you'd like it to be that way.
Ah, I see you have limited understanding of feedback mechanisms and interdependency in macroeconomics. Either that, or you're willing to have needless suffering on international scales because of the desire to maintain some kind of ideological purity. Good to know. I can avoid getting into a lengthy discussion with someone who: either knows some words but not the in-depth knowledge and understanding necessary to have informed debate; or has a moral/ethical stance that makes any kind of rational discussion on the subject useless.
I agree with a lot of your points (not all the specifics for spending, like highways -- that cash would be better spent on mass transit, IMO).
But I think it's mistaken to say that none of the relief funds are being spent on worthwhile projects. Federal aid to states, and state aid to municipalities is the most effective form of federal spending for economic stimulus. This is what we got under the stimulus bill last year, what is being spent now, and what has shown to be most effective.
Unfortunately, the current "jobs" bills in the works don't take the same tack. And I'm with you 100% on the fact that a lot of the funds are being misspent, and it's only going to get worse with the different bills being considered now.
I'm familiar with the broken window fallacy. But I think it's a mistake to think it applies everywhere -- surely some of the public spending going on seems to apply, but definitely not all of it. It seems to be a fallback argument for a lot of people -- not saying you're one of them -- and it gets used in places where it doesn't apply, especially by people who have a limited understanding of economics.
Not so. Most of these people spend every penny they get. If they purchase from productive people, that aids the productive people because it increases the market for whatever they put into the economy.
Perhaps you should actually look at some of the research that's out there before spewing ignorant crap.
Because it's costing you even more money to NOT help help them. You'll save more money on law enforcement and prisons than you will spend on mental health care.
Hoarding money and hoarding wealth are two different things. There is plenty of wealth being hoarded in the US... real estate, precious metals, fine art. Some of them are "hoarding" because they want to see values come back to a high level, but the effect is the same. This has an impact on the economy.
Please check current figures for your citations, and understand that not everyone does exactly the average. While there are still people taking advantage of credit, that situation has changed drastically over the past year. Meanwhile, plenty of people are hoarding wealth.
Furthermore, easily available credit was a cause of the meltdown. It's debatable if it was even the primary cause.
[citation needed]
If there are no reserves (which we know to be true), what black hole are the other two dollars disappearing into? Are they getting extracted via profit for public contractors (some of it is). Are they being spent on wages and salary for government employees (if, so that has stimulatory impact)?
No, hoarding and saving are not the same thing. Hoarding is keeping it in a jar or under your mattress, where it literally is out of the economy. Hoarding is a subset of saving. Saving, on the other hand, can include things like depositing your cash in a interest-bearing depository account, where it actually circulates in the economy due to the magic of banking. And given fractional reserve lending, that money may actually create multiples of itself in circulation.
If you're still spouting this nonsense, I'm sure the following words are wasted. There is ZERO chance that increased CO2 in the atmosphere does not directly result in increased solar energy retention. It is a FACT that we release huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
And I have a hypothesis that you'd staunchly oppose any action long past the time when any action could have been useful.
If it was raining hard for several days, and your yard was under a few inches of water due to flooding of a nearby river, with forecasts of continued heavy rain for the next week, would you wait and see if the rain is actually causing the flood before moving your belongings out of the basement and fleeing to higher ground? I mean, maybe there's a dam upriver that busted, and the flood'll subside before your house is underwater. Maybe an underground river carved a new path and now feeds into the local river, and this is just the new level when you factor in the water from the underground source. Or do you do the prudent thing, and evaluate options for preventing or mitigating the flood damage?
Good point, except that we are not the ones directly deciding by what means electricity is produced. You're falsely equating modern convenience with current levels of CO2 emission. That doesn't mean that Shell or ExxonMobile (you know they are one company now, right?)or any other energy producer is to blame... except they are, for continually lobbying to ensure that their interests in fossil fuel sources are protected, that their interests in selling fossil fuels are protected. Also true for the coal companies. They have made sure that economically, their sources of energy are the best choice for the consumers driving their cars, etc... because they have been able to externalize the costs of all their pollution.
We do not need to get our electricity from fossil fuels. We could use nuclear. We could use a combination of sources like nuclear, solar, wind, tidal, hydro. But decades of lobbying have ensured that we are waaaay behind on implementing alternative energy sources.
Depends on what you're composting, and on what scale. I've composted sheep manure, chicken manure, and pig manure. When it rains, they stink.
Depends on what the cost of the pollution is. More inert materials have a low cost of pollution, as long as land for landfills is cheap.