Sure, but the Republican's position was different: They were ok with applying to BP right now, which would have been illegal anyway, but strongly opposed to removing the cap for future companies.
That, and ex-post-facto law isn't the most terrible thing in the world. All laws that are passed end up messing with previously established plans to some extent: An unregulated polluting factory might be built under the assumption that it will continue to be able to operate unregulated, but that isn't an argument against shutting those plants down.
And yes, I do think an ex-post-facto lifting of the liability cap would have been a good thing. The damage was done, and somebody had to pay the cost. What would have been better, seizing the money from BP, or paying for it from general tax revenue? Taxes are subject to considerable deadweight loss, while the main consequence from seizure would be that businesses would be more hesitant to take on projects that have a chance of causing considerable public harm and outcry.
"Perhaps because the quality of life metrics are written by those that favor the European model?"
.
Ok, give me one measure where European countries don't dominate the top 20.
"As for immigration, last time I checked, the entire western world was (mostly) populated by people fleeing Europe for a better life. That Europe is better than someplace like Rwanda where the government is non-existent isn't a surprise... neither is the fact that Europe is desperate for immigrants since their socio-economic models cannot sustain themselves with the declining European native population rates. Stop pretending Europe is the be all and end all..."
That's nice. Still, Europe has net immigration with nearly every country in the world.
Not quite. Highly educated people, with post-graduate degrees, tend to lean left. But most rich people do not have them. As a whole, rich people are the most right-leaning group out there. See http://redbluerichpoor.com/blog/2008/10/amazon-usa/ .
" Completely disparate ideas are lumped together into party platforms. It's absolutely illogical to me that pro-death-penalty and anti-abortion tends to be tied together."
.
You would think so, but that combination tends to happen in every country. Psychological studies have shown that people with strong feelings in "justice" and revenge tend to be both Republican and religious.
"Big businesses often trend Democrat because Democrats believe in protectionism, whereas Republicans believe in competition and small businesses."
,
Empirically, that's really suspect. Agricultural subsidies exist because of Republicans, while free trade is quite popular in highly democratic Washington. Clinton is the one who signed NAFTA and granted China most-favored-nation status. Meanwhile, Republicans tend to be against proper anti-trust enforcement and Democrats tend to be pretty enthusiastic about small-business subsidies.
The simpler reason is that big businesses tend to trend Republican, which is why corporate contributions have gone to Republicans over Democrats 6:1 this cycle. They do this because they are run by rich people with high tax bills, and Republicans have not agreed to a tax increase since 1991. And yes, Rich people are Republican. See http://redbluerichpoor.com/blog/2008/10/amazon-usa/ . If only rich people could vote, then Republicans would win everywhere but New York and Cali, where it'd be really close.
"A reduction on income tax doesn't make the slightest difference to the ultra-rich, who get most of their money from capital gains."
Bullshit. Most of the money from Bush's tax-cuts went directly to the rich. As far as Capital gains go, most Democrats support an increase in the capital gains tax, while not a single Republican does.
"you don't hear anything about how John Kerry reduced capital gains taxes"
How exactly did John Kerry do that? The Republicans controlled the Senate when the cuts were passed.
"how Democrats recently killed the carried interest exemption (one of their 2008 campaign promises) after they had a lot of money thrown at them by lobbyists."
If by "Democrats killed" you mean "5 or 6 Democrats out of 59 joined all 40 republicans in order to filibuster", then sure...
Eh, I think political donations are almost always a terrible deal for shareholders, because they usually benefit the executives of the company instead of the company itself. It's just the transaction costs for shareholder governance are terribly high. Worse, after Citizens United, most donations have been autonomous and beyond the knowledge of shareholders anyway.
.
To give an example, consider all the short term stimulus measures over the summer: Most non-partisan private sector forecasters predicted that it would benefit the vast majority of companies due to the aggregate demand increase. Pull any economist, left or right, and they'd tell you it was a good idea. But the chamber of commerce fought it tooth and nail, because it would have eventually had to have been paid for by taxes from the executives of the companies. You see a similar dynamic with regard to encouraging overly right monetary policy.
". I've known plenty of people from extremely liberal area's who spend their time railing on about the virtues of communism and yet claim that they're moderate, simply because everyone from where they grew up is as far left as they are."
.
Really? I've lived in all the big liberal cities (NYC, Boston, Miami, SF, DC), worked in the Obama campaign, and spend a lot of time hanging out in the progressive blogosphere. I have *never* met a communist, even when I lived in Moscow! And I'm not exaggerating. Not a single one, ever. I think people have been messing with you.
"And what makes the Eurocentric frame of reference the correct one? "
Objectively? European countries have the highest rates of economic growth, the highest living standards, and score at the top of pretty much every quality of life metric ever designed. There's a reason so many people from Africa and the Middle east are trying to go there.
For all practical purposes, yes they are. In both the House and Senate, the most liberal Republican is to the right of the most conservative Democrat. Any attempt to say otherwise is cute bullshit.
Sure, but you can only go so far. One of the official blogs at CAP came out and essentially said that Tony Podesta was a detestable human being. Several high-profile republicans on the other hand, fillibusted the Democrat's attempt to lift the absurd 50 million dollar liability cap so that BP would be forced to pay for on-shore damages. They also denounced Obama's 20 billion dollar trust fund deal as "Chicago thuggery".
That's childish. One party created a universal health-care bill that will lower insurance premiums for most of the population, cover millions of people, and reduce the deficit, at the cost of giving unnecessary money to insurance companies so that the bill could pass. The other party invaded a large country and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people for no reason whatsoever. Both parties suck, but one is a lot better then the other.
That's a bullshit argument. You neglect the fact that the whites and blacks live in completely different areas. Even on a city level, take a look at racial habitation within Birmingham: http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/5010401643/ . To look on a state level, you can look at Obama returns on a county level at http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/county/#ALP00map (Literaly 98% of Alabama blacks voted for Obama and 88% of Whites voted for McCain, so it's a pretty good proxy).
Diverse would be a place like Miami, where 60% of the population wasn't born in the United States, and the largest ethnic group(Cubans) makes up only 30% of the population.
Sure there is. Knocking a country of the internet in the case of war could be a quite potent weapon. In the short term, it'd do a lot to disrupt internal communication.
From a humanitarian point of view, it's not ideal. But we let these people drop cluster bombs on cities, so that's really besides the point.
Walk-forward testing(a special type of something more general called cross-validation), is a bit over-rated. It's very intuitive, which is why it's used so much in the technical analysis crowd. But statistically, it's really roughly equivalent to multiplying the standard error by a constant factor unless you have severe model mis-specification(In which case you're doing something very wrong!)
In general, it's good to parametrize a range of plausible models, test the assumptions of the model, and conservatively build up if it makes theoretical sense, and don't be afraid to move beyond OLS. That does a lot more to protect against over-fitting then a couple of choice statistics.This can't always be done, Machine-Learning is a necessary evil in some fields, but for something low-dimensional like financial time series or Chess? Should be doable...
I thought so too, but looking at the site, it seems relatively trivial to set up a Bayesian structural equation model that models evolution of individual player's ability. That will produce a ton of parameters, but hierarchal magic can take care of that. In fact, they even mention that on the official hint. It's clear to see why that would outperform ELO.
It's a pretty standard result in Game Theory that you can collude without active communication. It's equivalent to the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma problem(Though in this case, "cooperation" is bad for consumers). You can have a strategy of "tit-for-tat" that goes as follows: If your competitor lowers the price, then you'll match that price decrease. But if he doesn't, then you don't. If he raises the price, then you raise it too. If you act according to this strategy, it doesn't take long for your competitor to figure it out, and he'll raise prices to his profit-maximizing level. So long as the barriers to entry are high enough, this the end result is permanently higher prices for consumers. This doesn't require any planning or orchestration, but the effect is exactly the same.
So yes, this is where regulators should come in and force competition back in the system.
I would argue that executive pay is wildly inflated due to a cozy "good old boys" network where CEO's get to appoint the people in charge of setting their own salaries. Due to the realities of how corporate voting works, small shareholders have very little ability to complain or change things. Large Shareholders are themselves part of the network that benefits from this system and usually don't rock the boat. This allows them to secure producer surplus that would otherwise go to workers or consumers.
.
This has been a large reason that median wages have been stagnant even as productivity has increased. The workers have gotten more productive, but all of the gains have gone directly to the top. And this has had macro-economic consequences. A flood of money caused financial market instability, and consumers turned to borrowing en-masse in order to maintain their standard of living. This can be considered a major cause to our last recession.
So yes, I have every right to care. We don't live in some Econ 101 fantasy where the costs of one's actions is entirely borne by oneself.
You'll have to be more specific about what you mean by "actual costs". Running a space program is vastly different then running a university, so I don't see why they shouldn't have different cost-structures...
It's not cheaper if the payload took two years and several hundred million dollars to develop. Or if the payload can only be launched during brief windows every two years due to orbital considerations.
Slashdot Mirror
That, and ex-post-facto law isn't the most terrible thing in the world. All laws that are passed end up messing with previously established plans to some extent: An unregulated polluting factory might be built under the assumption that it will continue to be able to operate unregulated, but that isn't an argument against shutting those plants down.
And yes, I do think an ex-post-facto lifting of the liability cap would have been a good thing. The damage was done, and somebody had to pay the cost. What would have been better, seizing the money from BP, or paying for it from general tax revenue? Taxes are subject to considerable deadweight loss, while the main consequence from seizure would be that businesses would be more hesitant to take on projects that have a chance of causing considerable public harm and outcry.
Explain page 34 of http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/income.pdf
.
Ok, give me one measure where European countries don't dominate the top 20.
"As for immigration, last time I checked, the entire western world was (mostly) populated by people fleeing Europe for a better life. That Europe is better than someplace like Rwanda where the government is non-existent isn't a surprise... neither is the fact that Europe is desperate for immigrants since their socio-economic models cannot sustain themselves with the declining European native population rates. Stop pretending Europe is the be all and end all..."
That's nice. Still, Europe has net immigration with nearly every country in the world.
Not quite. Highly educated people, with post-graduate degrees, tend to lean left. But most rich people do not have them. As a whole, rich people are the most right-leaning group out there. See http://redbluerichpoor.com/blog/2008/10/amazon-usa/ .
That's a lie. Provide citations for that.
.
You would think so, but that combination tends to happen in every country. Psychological studies have shown that people with strong feelings in "justice" and revenge tend to be both Republican and religious.
,
Empirically, that's really suspect. Agricultural subsidies exist because of Republicans, while free trade is quite popular in highly democratic Washington. Clinton is the one who signed NAFTA and granted China most-favored-nation status. Meanwhile, Republicans tend to be against proper anti-trust enforcement and Democrats tend to be pretty enthusiastic about small-business subsidies.
The simpler reason is that big businesses tend to trend Republican, which is why corporate contributions have gone to Republicans over Democrats 6:1 this cycle. They do this because they are run by rich people with high tax bills, and Republicans have not agreed to a tax increase since 1991. And yes, Rich people are Republican. See http://redbluerichpoor.com/blog/2008/10/amazon-usa/ . If only rich people could vote, then Republicans would win everywhere but New York and Cali, where it'd be really close.
"A reduction on income tax doesn't make the slightest difference to the ultra-rich, who get most of their money from capital gains."
Bullshit. Most of the money from Bush's tax-cuts went directly to the rich. As far as Capital gains go, most Democrats support an increase in the capital gains tax, while not a single Republican does.
"you don't hear anything about how John Kerry reduced capital gains taxes"
How exactly did John Kerry do that? The Republicans controlled the Senate when the cuts were passed.
"how Democrats recently killed the carried interest exemption (one of their 2008 campaign promises) after they had a lot of money thrown at them by lobbyists."
If by "Democrats killed" you mean "5 or 6 Democrats out of 59 joined all 40 republicans in order to filibuster", then sure...
.
To give an example, consider all the short term stimulus measures over the summer: Most non-partisan private sector forecasters predicted that it would benefit the vast majority of companies due to the aggregate demand increase. Pull any economist, left or right, and they'd tell you it was a good idea. But the chamber of commerce fought it tooth and nail, because it would have eventually had to have been paid for by taxes from the executives of the companies. You see a similar dynamic with regard to encouraging overly right monetary policy.
.
Really? I've lived in all the big liberal cities (NYC, Boston, Miami, SF, DC), worked in the Obama campaign, and spend a lot of time hanging out in the progressive blogosphere. I have *never* met a communist, even when I lived in Moscow! And I'm not exaggerating. Not a single one, ever. I think people have been messing with you.
"And what makes the Eurocentric frame of reference the correct one? " Objectively? European countries have the highest rates of economic growth, the highest living standards, and score at the top of pretty much every quality of life metric ever designed. There's a reason so many people from Africa and the Middle east are trying to go there.
For all practical purposes, yes they are. In both the House and Senate, the most liberal Republican is to the right of the most conservative Democrat. Any attempt to say otherwise is cute bullshit.
I bet Beck didn't mention that...
That's childish. One party created a universal health-care bill that will lower insurance premiums for most of the population, cover millions of people, and reduce the deficit, at the cost of giving unnecessary money to insurance companies so that the bill could pass. The other party invaded a large country and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people for no reason whatsoever. Both parties suck, but one is a lot better then the other.
Which is why percentage of democratic vote correlates very well and positively with average educational attainment and state income per capita?
(p --> q) -/-> (q-->p)
Diverse would be a place like Miami, where 60% of the population wasn't born in the United States, and the largest ethnic group(Cubans) makes up only 30% of the population.
From a humanitarian point of view, it's not ideal. But we let these people drop cluster bombs on cities, so that's really besides the point.
Yes. I lived in Paris for six months and Moscow for a year. Most people there have also not heard of House Music.
Sometimes I suspect low UID users have a crawler that looks for people referencing low UIDs...
In general, it's good to parametrize a range of plausible models, test the assumptions of the model, and conservatively build up if it makes theoretical sense, and don't be afraid to move beyond OLS. That does a lot more to protect against over-fitting then a couple of choice statistics.This can't always be done, Machine-Learning is a necessary evil in some fields, but for something low-dimensional like financial time series or Chess? Should be doable...
I thought so too, but looking at the site, it seems relatively trivial to set up a Bayesian structural equation model that models evolution of individual player's ability. That will produce a ton of parameters, but hierarchal magic can take care of that. In fact, they even mention that on the official hint. It's clear to see why that would outperform ELO.
So yes, this is where regulators should come in and force competition back in the system.
.
This has been a large reason that median wages have been stagnant even as productivity has increased. The workers have gotten more productive, but all of the gains have gone directly to the top. And this has had macro-economic consequences. A flood of money caused financial market instability, and consumers turned to borrowing en-masse in order to maintain their standard of living. This can be considered a major cause to our last recession.
So yes, I have every right to care. We don't live in some Econ 101 fantasy where the costs of one's actions is entirely borne by oneself.
You'll have to be more specific about what you mean by "actual costs". Running a space program is vastly different then running a university, so I don't see why they shouldn't have different cost-structures...
It's not cheaper if the payload took two years and several hundred million dollars to develop. Or if the payload can only be launched during brief windows every two years due to orbital considerations.