Especially when they don't have any legislative or policy accomplishments to speak of. What's funny, in a sad sort of way, the slack jawed awe/excitement that Obama followers exhibit when fawning over a well-spoken empty suit who's main asset is his skill at delivering pablum. You know, that whole thing of, "with a little bit of hope and change we can do the impossible". Well, I think things are going to be a little more difficult than his followers expect, but I do expect things to change, just not for the better.
He was a maverick not afraid to point out the stupidity of cutting taxes while not cutting spending. Well, here's the rub. It's foolish to not cut spending, regardless of what you do with taxes.
You know that $9 trillion number you wax poetically about? That's only if you use the type of Enron accounting that would land you in a Federal pound me in the ass prison if you were a corporation. Using GAAP, the Federal government is in debt to the tune of $100 trillion. That's 1 followed by 14 zeros. That's the deficit gap between our promised non-discretionary spending, and projected tax receipts.
Raise taxes to pay off the debt? That's rich. $100 trillion represents the pre-tax household income for every working person in the United States for the next 25 years. We aren't going to tax our way out of this problem.
And note, that's to pay off just our CURRENT promised obligations under Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Prescription Drug Plan.
The only saving grace to Obama is that, judging by his platform, he's going to increase our obligations exponentially (and that's saying something after the Bush presidency), so we will bankrupt sooner, and we can hit the reset button on this socialist pandering bullshit with future generation's money.
I mean, RKBA, the right to self defense (as opposed to duck hunting) and personal responsibility aren't exactly prominent platforms of the national Democratic party.
Oh, and for the record, I'm pretty "liberal" too, in the classic "freedom" sense. Just not in the modern day class warfare, redistribute the wealth sense.
I posited no such thing You are correct. The original poster did, and I confused you with him.
It takes about a decade (can be shorter, see oil crisis and SUV glut) to significantly alter the automotive fleet, It takes a decade when we're in crisis mode and using natural market forces. Longer if we're not.
If a serious carbon tax had been phased in to replace income taxes when it was first discussed, serious shifts in
investment priorities would have long since occurred. I don't really see how raising taxes lowers costs to the end consumer. As for investment priorities, serious investments ARE occurring in alternative energy. At $140 a barrel, a lot of alternatives become economically viable. But they don't spring up overnight.
Does a a quality infrastructure take time and money? Certainly, but it's cheaper and wiser to maintain and build-out
existing services than to neglect it for something new, and to focus efforts on more efficient modes rather than
another two lanes of asphalt. Rail is superior to 18-wheelers, yet we've let that system rot away. Wonder why we let the system rot away? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that rail requires extensive capital investment to build or expand, and takes a long time, while incrementally adding transportation capacity through 18-wheelers is cheap, and quick. Of course, rail fits in better with the planned command economy that you seem to prefer.
Not signing onto
stupid plans that promote the hauling of food from a hemisphere away; if you must have strawberries in February,
freeze or can them in the summer. So you are in favor of regulating / legislating / outlawing what the consumer can get and where they can get it from. Lovely. You would've fit in back in the USSR as a commissar.
You're saying it, but you're not really backing it up. Sure I am. I just don't think you understand basic economics.
Question: what is the driver for our current high oil prices?
Answer: demand equals supply, and future demand is expected to exceed supply.
Question: Who is driving demand growth?
Answer: China and India (US and EU consumption is actually falling).
Question: What would it take to replace our current transportation infrastructure with something other than oil?
Answer: Time, money, and technology.
For example, we can't replace oil with ethanol because the EROI is too low. We'd have to completely re-do our pipeline and fuel transport infrastructure to support ethanol.
Other alternatives, like battery powered cars, need technology advances to become viable, as well as a power generation infrastructure to support it. This isn't something that the Goracle can write an Executive Order on, snap his fingers, and it magically springs into being.
Alternatives like mass transportation also requires investments in infrastructure that take time and funding.
And, in the end, it doesn't matter, because the oil you don't want to buy at $140 is being snapped up by Chinese and Indians. So you conserve, reduce your consumption, put in place your magical "policies", and in the end, India and China still drive up the price of gasoline.
The only real alternatives for reducing oil prices in the short term (and by short term, I mean over the next decade) are:
1) global recession aka demand destruction.
2) increased oil exploration and exploitation (domestic would be good, since we wouldn't have to pay an instability premium like we do for Middle Eastern oil).
3) coal liquification.
2 & 3 allow us to use our existing infrastructure, although there are significant time lags involved there as well. Regardless, 2 & 3 are not something that would be supported by Gore.
Long term, we need to switch to nuclear energy. Also not supported by Gore.
In other words, your theory that Gore would have resulted in lower gas / oil prices is unsupported by readily available facts. You claim policy is a fix, but I challenge you to articulate exactly how that mechanism would work and what kind of time frame we're talking about.
No, it wasn't the terrorists I was worried about, it was the reactionary government who used the attack as an excuse to grab more power. Good luck with that;-). Usually the government wins these kinds of things. I doubt they will treat the left-wing overthrow the government types much better than they treated the right-wing overthrow the government types.
Also, as a registered Democrat, you have to realize that you're in the minority with respect to gun ownership. Not that there is anything wrong with that. It's actually refreshing to see some Democrats rediscover the 2nd Amendment as an individual rather than a "collective" (aka government) right.
Perhaps because we might have started investing in rational energy and transportation policies? (Congress willing) Policies are poor drivers for trillion dollar infrastructure issues, money and the market does. Overhauling our energy and transportation infrastructure represents a HUGE, multi-decade investment. The best thing for that, really, is the high prices we are currently seeing, because it makes alternatives to oil economically viable. Absent the market driven high prices, you wouldn't have any motive for the innovation nor the huge investment in infrastructure that it would take to move off oil.
Moreover, Gore the Green Weenie would most likely welcome high oil prices considering his views on the internal combustion engine. That's neither here nor there. Sure it is. Gore is not the poster boy you are looking for in order to fight high oil prices, since he's against the whole oil-internal combustion engine paradigm, at least with respect to the proletariat (since I believe that Gore is still burning about 5x the US household average in electricity, is still being driven around in big black SUVs, and jet setting across the globe...obviously him and his fellow limousine liberals live a lifestyle different than from what they advocate and presumably would legislate).
Basically, what I'm saying is, Gore or Bush or Kerry, we'd still be looking at $140 barrel of oil today and $4 gas.
Actually, I regard you as a typical rightwing lunatic Given the incoherence of your post, I regard you as just another blathering slashdot left wing idiot. Not remarkable enough to land up on my foe list.
It's a fact that Congressional Democrats have en bloc opposed just about every domestic energy initiative over the past 30 years that didn't have something to do with ethanol or solar or wind. Not that there is anything wrong with that per se, just don't bitch about high gas prices when you guys have worked, and worked hard and successfully, to kill any new refineries being built or domestic exploitation of our own oil resources.
As for Bush, I'm not really a big fan, aside from his Supreme Court picks with Alito and Roberts. So much opportunity wasted with that guy. But me not liking him is a far cry from the self-imposed delusion that left wing nutjobs commit when they claim and actually believe that GWB wasn't a legally elected President.
I don't think 9/11 would have happened under a Gore presidency. Right. Because Osama would've recognized a fellow progressive. Never mind that the 9-11 guys were already in place and training during the Clinton administration. Never mind that Clinton being in office didn't stop the Cole bombing, or the African embassy bombings. The Goracle would've cured all. He's that good.
End results? Other nations would have a much higher opinion of the US; our economy would not be in nearly so bad shape; gas would not be above $4/gallon Interesting. Why do you think this? All I'm hearing is "peak oil" and "futures speculators" in regards to oil prices. I think $140 bbl of oil would be here regardless of who was President. Moreover, Gore the Green Weenie would most likely welcome high oil prices considering his views on the internal combustion engine.
Democrats in Congress have been the bane of just about every oil related bill that's come up for vote for the last 30 years. Alaskan exploration and drilling, offshore exploration and drilling, continental exploration and drilling, shale oil exploitation, coal gassification, all these have been shot down by 85-90% Democrats against, 85-90% Republican for. It's hard to be in the driver seat with regard to oil when you have to buy the bulk of it from autocrats in Venezuela, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.
Oh yeah, one more thing. Bush didn't lose a presidential election. Get over it.
Dennis Kucinich is an attention whore who has no principals other than serving himself, which isn't anything distinguishing compared to the average Senator.
Kucinich is notable for: running Cleveland into the ground while he was mayor, race baiting while he was mayor, being a left-wing nutcase, and having a wife who is taller and much more attractive than he is.
And lest you think "nut-case" is hyperbole:
"The smell of roses drew him out to my balcony where, when he looked up, he saw a gigantic triangular craft, silent, and observing him. It hovered, soundless, for 10 minutes or so, and sped away with a speed he couldn't comprehend. He said he felt a connection in his heart and heard directions in his mind." As for his principals...all you have to do is look towards his stance towards abortion (which has changed repeatedly...as a Congressman, he was one of the more reliable anti-abortion votes, "rabid" I think is the word that was used).
I mean, come on. If the guy was really so principled, would he have gone from a Catholic, rabid abortion foe to a "lets flush all the babies down the toilet" progressive so quickly for political expediency?
Yeah, because the communists were all about feeding the poor. Funny though, how countries like the USSR, China, and Cambodia had famines shortly after going Communist. Those damn kulaks, just sabotaging the people's revolution.
Small government? With a budget of $3 trillion and counting, I'd hate to see what the government looks like when the "big government" folks get their hand on it. Small government went out of style with FDR. It's since become a platitude with no basis to reality, sorta like "winning the war on drugs".
Anyone who would run the NRA which specializes in spreading misinformation and pushing an 'all or none' mentality rather than reasonable discussions on gun control -- has lost all credibility for being anything other than an effective mouth piece. The NRA is only an "extreme" organization when considered from the perspective of an anti-gun individual. The NRA has frequently colluded with anti-gun politicians and compromised away gun rights.
"Reasonable discussions" with gun prohibitionists usually revolve around "which additional class of guns are we going to outlaw today?"...which is why most in the pro-gun crowd aren't too interested in having a reasonable discussion. In fact, the entire gun-control argument is one pretty much entirely based off of sensationalist hysterics.
It's a shame he wasted it on something so destructive. I rest my case. Why should I bargain away my rights with the likes of you?
He's a pile of shit and he does more to hurt the causes he ostensibly supports than he does to help them. He's a disgusting, lying scumbag, and we don't need him. I think you just summed up the general problem with the majority of the serious players in the Democratic party.
Your post doesn't really contradict my point. It takes years to build a brand reputation, but very little time to destroy it, and one of the fastest ways to do so is the "race to the bottom" of shaving costs by reducing quality, either in the final product or the support of that product.
Your two examples, Ford and GM, are sitting over a rapidly declining percentage of the US and global market, largely due to inroads by Toyota, which has built a carefully crafted brand revolving around reliability, and Toyota is making good inroads into the truck market as well (and I own a F150, for what it's worth).
If Ford did not outsource, for example, it would have to make everything from the drills for the oil, the refineries for the gasoline, the machines to make the steel and the chips and the plastic, really, recreate the entire economy and in doing so lose the efficiencies that come with shared costs. Oh yeah, forgot something. How well is Ford doing these days? Last time I checked, not so well. When your exchange is lower quality in exchange for a better looking bottom line, Wall Street may love you for a while, but eventually the consumer figures it out and moves to another company.
In that vein, outsourcing a call center might actually result in -better- customer service. If a place in India has 200,000 people answering the phones, they are going to get the economies of scale that even Dell could not possibly get. If your goal is economies of scale, then yes, off-shoring to an Indian call center will likely result in your company saving money in the short run while burning bridges with potential repeat customers.
But if your company goals and selling point is best-in-class customer support, then probably not so much. And many of the ballyhooed benefits of off-shoring are grossly over-rated, and I speak from first hand experience. In a software development off-shoring model, you get a lower overall FTE cost in exchange for a longer time to market and a lower quality of delivery.
In the call center world, you get people with poor English skills and frustrated end users. Dell's motivation is that, well, these customers have already paid us their money. The problem is, when it comes time to buy a new computer next year, these same folks might pay an extra $50 to get a computer made by someone else who didn't offshore their call center folks to India.
If you don't want to pay the bill, don't make use of the services. If you don't agree to pay taxes, go live somewhere else, you have no right to live here. Yep, that would be a big win for the state of Washington. Never mind the net beneficial impact that having tens of thousands of high paid Microsoft employees living and working in Washington state brings to the local economy, or the spin off effect of servicing those people. Let's cut off our nose to spite our face by forcing Microsoft out of the state! That'll teach them to incorporate in another state to lower their direct tax burden (which is perfectly legal, btw, and done by every multi-state, multi-national corporation out there, not to mention there are lots of corporations which do their business exclusively in one state, but incorporate in Nevada for the same reasons).
If Slashdot wanted to "perpetuate the status quo", they would not make public comments the centerpiece of the site. Instead, they would do what most right-wing bloggers do, which is not allow any comments at all, or worse, moderate the comments to only allow those that are in agreement. Now that's how to perpetuate the status quo. Uh huh. Like Democratic Underground or Daily Kos doesn't do exactly the same thing? Yeah, it's just those evil Republicans that support censorship. No one would ever drop the ban hammer on DU for deviating from the party line.
Slashdot Mirror
Especially when they don't have any legislative or policy accomplishments to speak of. What's funny, in a sad sort of way, the slack jawed awe/excitement that Obama followers exhibit when fawning over a well-spoken empty suit who's main asset is his skill at delivering pablum. You know, that whole thing of, "with a little bit of hope and change we can do the impossible". Well, I think things are going to be a little more difficult than his followers expect, but I do expect things to change, just not for the better.
What makes you think I'm an Obama supporter?
You know that $9 trillion number you wax poetically about? That's only if you use the type of Enron accounting that would land you in a Federal pound me in the ass prison if you were a corporation. Using GAAP, the Federal government is in debt to the tune of $100 trillion. That's 1 followed by 14 zeros. That's the deficit gap between our promised non-discretionary spending, and projected tax receipts.
Raise taxes to pay off the debt? That's rich. $100 trillion represents the pre-tax household income for every working person in the United States for the next 25 years. We aren't going to tax our way out of this problem.
And note, that's to pay off just our CURRENT promised obligations under Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Prescription Drug Plan.
The only saving grace to Obama is that, judging by his platform, he's going to increase our obligations exponentially (and that's saying something after the Bush presidency), so we will bankrupt sooner, and we can hit the reset button on this socialist pandering bullshit with future generation's money.
Don't worry, Obama will bring hope and change.
So you are saying you are a Republican?
I mean, RKBA, the right to self defense (as opposed to duck hunting) and personal responsibility aren't exactly prominent platforms of the national Democratic party.
Oh, and for the record, I'm pretty "liberal" too, in the classic "freedom" sense. Just not in the modern day class warfare, redistribute the wealth sense.
Question: what is the driver for our current high oil prices?
Answer: demand equals supply, and future demand is expected to exceed supply.
Question: Who is driving demand growth?
Answer: China and India (US and EU consumption is actually falling).
Question: What would it take to replace our current transportation infrastructure with something other than oil?
Answer: Time, money, and technology.
For example, we can't replace oil with ethanol because the EROI is too low. We'd have to completely re-do our pipeline and fuel transport infrastructure to support ethanol.
Other alternatives, like battery powered cars, need technology advances to become viable, as well as a power generation infrastructure to support it. This isn't something that the Goracle can write an Executive Order on, snap his fingers, and it magically springs into being.
Alternatives like mass transportation also requires investments in infrastructure that take time and funding.
And, in the end, it doesn't matter, because the oil you don't want to buy at $140 is being snapped up by Chinese and Indians. So you conserve, reduce your consumption, put in place your magical "policies", and in the end, India and China still drive up the price of gasoline.
The only real alternatives for reducing oil prices in the short term (and by short term, I mean over the next decade) are:
1) global recession aka demand destruction.
2) increased oil exploration and exploitation (domestic would be good, since we wouldn't have to pay an instability premium like we do for Middle Eastern oil).
3) coal liquification.
2 & 3 allow us to use our existing infrastructure, although there are significant time lags involved there as well. Regardless, 2 & 3 are not something that would be supported by Gore.
Long term, we need to switch to nuclear energy. Also not supported by Gore.
In other words, your theory that Gore would have resulted in lower gas / oil prices is unsupported by readily available facts. You claim policy is a fix, but I challenge you to articulate exactly how that mechanism would work and what kind of time frame we're talking about.
Also, as a registered Democrat, you have to realize that you're in the minority with respect to gun ownership. Not that there is anything wrong with that. It's actually refreshing to see some Democrats rediscover the 2nd Amendment as an individual rather than a "collective" (aka government) right.
Moreover, Gore the Green Weenie would most likely welcome high oil prices considering his views on the internal combustion engine. That's neither here nor there. Sure it is. Gore is not the poster boy you are looking for in order to fight high oil prices, since he's against the whole oil-internal combustion engine paradigm, at least with respect to the proletariat (since I believe that Gore is still burning about 5x the US household average in electricity, is still being driven around in big black SUVs, and jet setting across the globe...obviously him and his fellow limousine liberals live a lifestyle different than from what they advocate and presumably would legislate).
Basically, what I'm saying is, Gore or Bush or Kerry, we'd still be looking at $140 barrel of oil today and $4 gas.
It's a fact that Congressional Democrats have en bloc opposed just about every domestic energy initiative over the past 30 years that didn't have something to do with ethanol or solar or wind. Not that there is anything wrong with that per se, just don't bitch about high gas prices when you guys have worked, and worked hard and successfully, to kill any new refineries being built or domestic exploitation of our own oil resources.
As for Bush, I'm not really a big fan, aside from his Supreme Court picks with Alito and Roberts. So much opportunity wasted with that guy. But me not liking him is a far cry from the self-imposed delusion that left wing nutjobs commit when they claim and actually believe that GWB wasn't a legally elected President.
Democrats in Congress have been the bane of just about every oil related bill that's come up for vote for the last 30 years. Alaskan exploration and drilling, offshore exploration and drilling, continental exploration and drilling, shale oil exploitation, coal gassification, all these have been shot down by 85-90% Democrats against, 85-90% Republican for. It's hard to be in the driver seat with regard to oil when you have to buy the bulk of it from autocrats in Venezuela, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.
Oh yeah, one more thing. Bush didn't lose a presidential election. Get over it.
Dennis Kucinich is an attention whore who has no principals other than serving himself, which isn't anything distinguishing compared to the average Senator.
Kucinich is notable for: running Cleveland into the ground while he was mayor, race baiting while he was mayor, being a left-wing nutcase, and having a wife who is taller and much more attractive than he is.
And lest you think "nut-case" is hyperbole:
"The smell of roses drew him out to my balcony where, when he looked up, he saw a gigantic triangular craft, silent, and observing him. It hovered, soundless, for 10 minutes or so, and sped away with a speed he couldn't comprehend. He said he felt a connection in his heart and heard directions in his mind." As for his principals...all you have to do is look towards his stance towards abortion (which has changed repeatedly...as a Congressman, he was one of the more reliable anti-abortion votes, "rabid" I think is the word that was used).
I mean, come on. If the guy was really so principled, would he have gone from a Catholic, rabid abortion foe to a "lets flush all the babies down the toilet" progressive so quickly for political expediency?
How many Democrats own guns?
So how many non-totalitarian Communist governments have there been?
Yeah, because the communists were all about feeding the poor. Funny though, how countries like the USSR, China, and Cambodia had famines shortly after going Communist. Those damn kulaks, just sabotaging the people's revolution.
Small government? With a budget of $3 trillion and counting, I'd hate to see what the government looks like when the "big government" folks get their hand on it. Small government went out of style with FDR. It's since become a platitude with no basis to reality, sorta like "winning the war on drugs".
"Reasonable discussions" with gun prohibitionists usually revolve around "which additional class of guns are we going to outlaw today?"...which is why most in the pro-gun crowd aren't too interested in having a reasonable discussion. In fact, the entire gun-control argument is one pretty much entirely based off of sensationalist hysterics. It's a shame he wasted it on something so destructive. I rest my case. Why should I bargain away my rights with the likes of you?
Your post doesn't really contradict my point. It takes years to build a brand reputation, but very little time to destroy it, and one of the fastest ways to do so is the "race to the bottom" of shaving costs by reducing quality, either in the final product or the support of that product.
Your two examples, Ford and GM, are sitting over a rapidly declining percentage of the US and global market, largely due to inroads by Toyota, which has built a carefully crafted brand revolving around reliability, and Toyota is making good inroads into the truck market as well (and I own a F150, for what it's worth).
But if your company goals and selling point is best-in-class customer support, then probably not so much. And many of the ballyhooed benefits of off-shoring are grossly over-rated, and I speak from first hand experience. In a software development off-shoring model, you get a lower overall FTE cost in exchange for a longer time to market and a lower quality of delivery.
In the call center world, you get people with poor English skills and frustrated end users. Dell's motivation is that, well, these customers have already paid us their money. The problem is, when it comes time to buy a new computer next year, these same folks might pay an extra $50 to get a computer made by someone else who didn't offshore their call center folks to India.
Raich vs Gonzales says otherwise.
Yes, but one can make a pretty persuasive argument that the more violent followers of Jehovah were going against his teachings.