I would counter that the Republican party is more Demogogic and Authoritative and they see that if they stick together and vote together they will keep their seats, and also service their financiers and feather their nests politically and privately with that behavior.
You're an idiot. GWB faced continual "revolts" within his own party by "moderate" (aka turncoat) Senators like Jim Jeffords and Arlen Spectre. So much so that the Republican Congressional "majority" during Bush's 6 years never amounted for much, as the Democrats would always count on enough Republicans switching sides to maintain a filibuster on contentious issues even if there was popular support.
Contrast that with the Health Care vote, where there were 0 defections from the Democrat side of the Senate. 61 votes yes. Not a single vote no, not even from some of the supposedly conservative Blue Dog Democrats. Despite there being a solid majority against it. Despite most Senators not even having read the bill.
And you want to claim that Republicans are more Demogogic and Authoritative?
Of course a minority party is going to stick together more than a majority party, but the Democrats all fall into line like good little socialist ducks following their masters Pelosi, Reid, and Obama (and Marx and Engels and Lenin).
But the cost of adding storage isn't simply the cost of buying a hard drive and plugging it in. Typically in a corporate environment it has to be redundant storage in a drive array. In larger corporations, you are talking about EMC SAN drive arrays that are not cheap in and of themselves. The drives they put in are not $50 Seagate green drives. And, when we buy "high tier" storage, such as that for a database, we have to actually buy 3x the storage we need from an OLTP standpoint for backups and disaster recovery. So, when you get done with redundancy, backups, and disaster recovery, you aren't buying 1 TB, you are really buying 15 TB worth of drives. People that compare the cost of corporate disks to what they can buy at Fries don't really get it.
That being said, we get raped for corporate disk.
It's different if that's the cost he's paying for disk space maintenance on his desktop or laptop rather than SAN Storage space.
Seriously, the meat of climatology is pure statistics, you touch a few other fields just barely in the collection of the data, but the heart and soul of climatology is statistics and there very few climatologists with statistics degrees of any kind.
That should kind of scare you.
Why? The conclusions were reached a long time ago. All they are doing now is fitting the data to match the conclusions.
Or even worse, amateurs who do not know how to read the data using it to 'prove' nonsense.
Or maybe it's because the amateurs like Steve McIntyre have a proven track record in punching holes in statistical and computer models that the CRU and Michael Mann have been using to perpetrate their climate fraud.
Yeah, the SCOTUS that appointed a president was SUCH a model of government restraint.
That's how the Democratic narrative goes, but the reality was a *bit* different. The Florida Supreme Court kept trying to redefine election law and using variable standards until they found a result that would result in the election of Al Gore. Ironically, the only one that would have resulted in an actual Gore victory (re-count of all Florida votes instead of just targeting Broward county) is the one that Gore and the Florida Supreme Court were afraid to try. Team Gore wasn't exactly being a champion of democracy in this affair.
And in actual regards to the conservative members of the Supreme Court, they have a much better track record siding with the individual than the government as compared to the "liberal" members of the court, everything from Kelo vs Connecticut to Heller vs DC and McDonald vs Chicago. About the only thing the minority members can agree the government can't do is outlaw abortion.
Neither do the 53% of the American voting public that elected someone like Obama who in turn nominated Sotomayor and Kagan, neither one of whom think there are any restraints to government power other than that which lies in their perfect, judicial hearts. In the end, we get the government we deserve.
Your little revisionist history, of course, falls down on a couple of points.
Specifically, the Republican party NEVER supported segregation and was founded as part of the abolition movement. Democrats...well, not so much. They actively supported slavery and/or segregation through their history.
The REPUBLICAN party was instrumental in ending slavery and ending segregation. It was Eisenhower (you know, the REPUBLICAN President) who desegregated Little Rock, not the great democratic emancipators Truman or Roosevelt or Kennedy. The Civil Rights Act was the first time the Democrats stepped on the stage to be a positive factor in race. Unfortunately, it didn't represent them coming around to the moral right, but just switching sides from favoring whites at the expense of blacks to favoring blacks (and Latinos) at the expense of whites.
Even after the so-called "Southern Strategy", Republicans have never tacitly or surreptitiously embraced segregation as a platform. The South going Republican has more to do with the Democratic party going urban socialist, which is not exactly the demographic profile of the South. This is also why the hotbeds of racial segregation and slavery like Iowa, Kansas, and the Dakotas haven't exactly been electing many Democrats these days. The Democrats are the party of the big city socialist. Flyover country (and that includes the south) need not apply.
In this election cycle, the Democratic candidate is sure to lose anyway. They are running against a popular Republican incumbent in a predominately Republican state in an off-cycle year when Democrats are not exactly very popular judging by poll numbers.
A more likely reason for Alvin Greene winning is the presumptive favorite, Rawls, had a 4% favorable name recognition among Democrats within the state, as reported here:
The main differences between a nuclear weapon and a conventional one are that conventional weapons rely on chemical energy and usually require an oxidizer of some kind, which may or may not be built into the explosive compound itself.
Most explosives "explode" by explosive decomposition. The oxidation is a very small component of the energy release. This is true for just about every nitrated explosive out there.
Now, the fuel slurry in FAEs is a little bit different beast, but FAEs are more properly considered high speed conflagrations.
So if your landlord wants you to pay the rent, he is suddenly a socialist and taxes you? I am impressed.
No, you are stupid. In the case of someone paying rent to a landlord, there is an actual exchange of money for services.
The government taking money away from Exxon-Mobile or BP for oil drilled offshore in international waters and giving it to welfare babies and social security for illegal aliens is socialism.
Taxes are a component of socialism. They are also the vehicle by which the unproductive steal from the productive, which is ultimately what socialism is all about. You can't support a multi-trillion dollar bloated Federal bureaucracy without taxes.
If you want to bitch about private gains and public/socialized losses, bitch about Goldman Sachs.
I never stated anything about nationalization of BP
Yeah, I mistook you for another responder. My bad.
How are even at all close to "totalitarian socialism"?
We are a hell of a lot closer to totalitarian socialism than we are to anarchic capitalism. How close we are is a matter of opinion. I would argue the government's actions with respect to GM and Chrysler, where they screwed the bondholders out of equity and instead rewarded the unions without recourse to bankruptcy court and in violation of existing contracts and contract laws suggests were are a lot closer to being in a dictatorial socialist situation than not. As to the oil companies...well, Obama just hasn't gotten around to liquidating them yet...just like it took Chavez a while to get around to nationalizing the steel companies (which he is now doing). Like Rahm Emanuel said, let no crisis go to waste.
We let them get away with very little regulation. Heck, we do not even require a competent safety system on these rigs
This has nothing to do with socialization. Venezuela doesn't have a great safety record with their oil rigs, and they are pretty socialist. The USSR wasn't exactly a paragon of safety either. Most hard left socialist countries have a pretty piss poor safety and environmental record.
Your understanding of the words leaves more than a little bit to be desired. Socialism has a much broader definition than state ownership of the means of production.
You make the mistake of thinking that socialism is a binary on/off switch. It's a spectrum. We happen to be closer to the "totalitarian socialism" side of the fence than the "anarchic capitalism", at least as far as the oil industry is concerned.
Here's a handy dandy quote from Wikipedia on Socialism:
Socialism is not a concrete philosophy of fixed doctrine and programme; its branches advocate a degree of social interventionism and economic rationalisation (usually in the form of economic planning), but sometimes oppose each other. A dividing feature of the socialist movement is the split between reformists and revolutionaries on how a socialist economy should be established. Some socialists advocate complete nationalisation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange; others advocate state control of capital within the framework of a market economy.
Oh, and since you appear to be suggesting nationalization as some sort of panacea, you should note that nationalized companies don't exactly have sterling safety records, nor are they all that efficient at generating revenue. Most of the time the money gets slaked off into the Swiss bank accounts of unelected bureaucrats. Although, fear not, we are rapidly heading towards a banana republic, so nationalization of the oil companies shouldn't be too far behind the planned seizure of IRAs and 401ks to prop up the failing dollar.
The main problem with the whole rational actor / game theory theories is the problem of incomplete information. You can have actors that are acting rationally within their framework of limited information but irrationally when complete information is considered. There were several times when the world was on the brink of catastrophic nuclear war, and all it would have taken is a bit of bad luck to send things over the edge.
All it takes is one miscalculation. After North Korea or Iran acquire strategic capability, and look upon a weak US President (who may or may not be Obama) and decide they will not do anything if they invade South Korea / Iraq respectively...and now that they have a strategic deterrent, that will constrain US response to harshly worded UN denouncements.
US decides to respond militarily, and faced with conventional defeat, Iran or North Korea decide to respond with some sort of nuclear strike. And, unfortunately, if you don't have some sort of BMD before they obtain this capability, then it's too late. BMD is, as the critics point out, non-trivial. The nuclear proliferation cat is out of the bag (but it still requires the resources of a nation-state to acquire them)...if we do not want to be held hostage by a balance of terror, then we should be investing in counter-measures, to include BMD.
Last I checked, Blackwater was founded by the son of a billionaire, who, rather than living a life of privilege, joined the Navy Seals and served his country honorably. What exactly have you done to compare that qualifies you to slander them by alleging that they would be willing to purchase a black market nuke and detonate it in San Diego? Talk out of your ass on Slashdot? Yeah, that's what I thought. Nothing.
Sure there isn't. Nations like North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, India, and China are spending billions of dollars into research and development on ballistic missiles just for the sheer enjoyment of research. Not because they would ever threaten to use or actually use them.
Slashdot Mirror
I would counter that the Republican party is more Demogogic and Authoritative and they see that if they stick together and vote together they will keep their seats, and also service their financiers and feather their nests politically and privately with that behavior.
You're an idiot. GWB faced continual "revolts" within his own party by "moderate" (aka turncoat) Senators like Jim Jeffords and Arlen Spectre. So much so that the Republican Congressional "majority" during Bush's 6 years never amounted for much, as the Democrats would always count on enough Republicans switching sides to maintain a filibuster on contentious issues even if there was popular support.
Contrast that with the Health Care vote, where there were 0 defections from the Democrat side of the Senate. 61 votes yes. Not a single vote no, not even from some of the supposedly conservative Blue Dog Democrats. Despite there being a solid majority against it. Despite most Senators not even having read the bill.
And you want to claim that Republicans are more Demogogic and Authoritative?
Of course a minority party is going to stick together more than a majority party, but the Democrats all fall into line like good little socialist ducks following their masters Pelosi, Reid, and Obama (and Marx and Engels and Lenin).
But the cost of adding storage isn't simply the cost of buying a hard drive and plugging it in. Typically in a corporate environment it has to be redundant storage in a drive array. In larger corporations, you are talking about EMC SAN drive arrays that are not cheap in and of themselves. The drives they put in are not $50 Seagate green drives. And, when we buy "high tier" storage, such as that for a database, we have to actually buy 3x the storage we need from an OLTP standpoint for backups and disaster recovery. So, when you get done with redundancy, backups, and disaster recovery, you aren't buying 1 TB, you are really buying 15 TB worth of drives. People that compare the cost of corporate disks to what they can buy at Fries don't really get it.
That being said, we get raped for corporate disk.
It's different if that's the cost he's paying for disk space maintenance on his desktop or laptop rather than SAN Storage space.
Seriously, the meat of climatology is pure statistics, you touch a few other fields just barely in the collection of the data, but the heart and soul of climatology is statistics and there very few climatologists with statistics degrees of any kind.
That should kind of scare you.
Why? The conclusions were reached a long time ago. All they are doing now is fitting the data to match the conclusions.
Or even worse, amateurs who do not know how to read the data using it to 'prove' nonsense.
Or maybe it's because the amateurs like Steve McIntyre have a proven track record in punching holes in statistical and computer models that the CRU and Michael Mann have been using to perpetrate their climate fraud.
That's funny you mention "big oil", because BP is a big financial backer of the CRU.
Guess who stand to benefit from a cap and trade regime? The oil companies. They are the players primed to exploit the trading of carbon credits.
Yeah, the SCOTUS that appointed a president was SUCH a model of government restraint.
That's how the Democratic narrative goes, but the reality was a *bit* different. The Florida Supreme Court kept trying to redefine election law and using variable standards until they found a result that would result in the election of Al Gore. Ironically, the only one that would have resulted in an actual Gore victory (re-count of all Florida votes instead of just targeting Broward county) is the one that Gore and the Florida Supreme Court were afraid to try. Team Gore wasn't exactly being a champion of democracy in this affair.
And in actual regards to the conservative members of the Supreme Court, they have a much better track record siding with the individual than the government as compared to the "liberal" members of the court, everything from Kelo vs Connecticut to Heller vs DC and McDonald vs Chicago. About the only thing the minority members can agree the government can't do is outlaw abortion.
Actually I am a foreigner that happens to dislike your government, the exact person from whom your troops are "protecting" you.
I live in US, do some very productive work, and most likely did more to improve Americans' lives than all your military combined.
And you are humble to boot.
Neither do the 53% of the American voting public that elected someone like Obama who in turn nominated Sotomayor and Kagan, neither one of whom think there are any restraints to government power other than that which lies in their perfect, judicial hearts. In the end, we get the government we deserve.
Are you really equating our troops to mob hitmen?
Are you really that big of a piece of shit?
Your little revisionist history, of course, falls down on a couple of points.
Specifically, the Republican party NEVER supported segregation and was founded as part of the abolition movement. Democrats...well, not so much. They actively supported slavery and/or segregation through their history.
The REPUBLICAN party was instrumental in ending slavery and ending segregation. It was Eisenhower (you know, the REPUBLICAN President) who desegregated Little Rock, not the great democratic emancipators Truman or Roosevelt or Kennedy. The Civil Rights Act was the first time the Democrats stepped on the stage to be a positive factor in race. Unfortunately, it didn't represent them coming around to the moral right, but just switching sides from favoring whites at the expense of blacks to favoring blacks (and Latinos) at the expense of whites.
Even after the so-called "Southern Strategy", Republicans have never tacitly or surreptitiously embraced segregation as a platform. The South going Republican has more to do with the Democratic party going urban socialist, which is not exactly the demographic profile of the South. This is also why the hotbeds of racial segregation and slavery like Iowa, Kansas, and the Dakotas haven't exactly been electing many Democrats these days. The Democrats are the party of the big city socialist. Flyover country (and that includes the south) need not apply.
In this election cycle, the Democratic candidate is sure to lose anyway. They are running against a popular Republican incumbent in a predominately Republican state in an off-cycle year when Democrats are not exactly very popular judging by poll numbers.
A more likely reason for Alvin Greene winning is the presumptive favorite, Rawls, had a 4% favorable name recognition among Democrats within the state, as reported here:
http://publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com/2010/06/greene-situation.html
In another words, Rawls was as much of a non-entity as Alvin Greene.
Yes. The government is paying most of your tuition.
You misspelled taxpayers.
Speaking of which, I paid $5500 in property taxes last years (and a big chunk of that goes to the juco).
Cost of summer Microeconomics class at the local juco: $110, including fees.
Cost of new economics textbook for class at juco bookstore: $140.
Something is seriously dislocated when the book costs more than the course.
Keke.
The main differences between a nuclear weapon and a conventional one are that conventional weapons rely on chemical energy and usually require an oxidizer of some kind, which may or may not be built into the explosive compound itself.
Most explosives "explode" by explosive decomposition. The oxidation is a very small component of the energy release. This is true for just about every nitrated explosive out there.
Now, the fuel slurry in FAEs is a little bit different beast, but FAEs are more properly considered high speed conflagrations.
So if your landlord wants you to pay the rent, he is suddenly a socialist and taxes you?
I am impressed.
No, you are stupid. In the case of someone paying rent to a landlord, there is an actual exchange of money for services.
The government taking money away from Exxon-Mobile or BP for oil drilled offshore in international waters and giving it to welfare babies and social security for illegal aliens is socialism.
Taxes have never been socialist.
Taxes are a component of socialism. They are also the vehicle by which the unproductive steal from the productive, which is ultimately what socialism is all about. You can't support a multi-trillion dollar bloated Federal bureaucracy without taxes.
If you want to bitch about private gains and public/socialized losses, bitch about Goldman Sachs.
I never stated anything about nationalization of BP
Yeah, I mistook you for another responder. My bad.
How are even at all close to "totalitarian socialism"?
We are a hell of a lot closer to totalitarian socialism than we are to anarchic capitalism. How close we are is a matter of opinion. I would argue the government's actions with respect to GM and Chrysler, where they screwed the bondholders out of equity and instead rewarded the unions without recourse to bankruptcy court and in violation of existing contracts and contract laws suggests were are a lot closer to being in a dictatorial socialist situation than not. As to the oil companies...well, Obama just hasn't gotten around to liquidating them yet...just like it took Chavez a while to get around to nationalizing the steel companies (which he is now doing). Like Rahm Emanuel said, let no crisis go to waste.
We let them get away with very little regulation. Heck, we do not even require a competent safety system on these rigs
This has nothing to do with socialization. Venezuela doesn't have a great safety record with their oil rigs, and they are pretty socialist. The USSR wasn't exactly a paragon of safety either. Most hard left socialist countries have a pretty piss poor safety and environmental record.
Your understanding of the words leaves more than a little bit to be desired. Socialism has a much broader definition than state ownership of the means of production.
You make the mistake of thinking that socialism is a binary on/off switch. It's a spectrum. We happen to be closer to the "totalitarian socialism" side of the fence than the "anarchic capitalism", at least as far as the oil industry is concerned.
Here's a handy dandy quote from Wikipedia on Socialism:
Socialism is not a concrete philosophy of fixed doctrine and programme; its branches advocate a degree of social interventionism and economic rationalisation (usually in the form of economic planning), but sometimes oppose each other. A dividing feature of the socialist movement is the split between reformists and revolutionaries on how a socialist economy should be established. Some socialists advocate complete nationalisation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange; others advocate state control of capital within the framework of a market economy.
Oh, and since you appear to be suggesting nationalization as some sort of panacea, you should note that nationalized companies don't exactly have sterling safety records, nor are they all that efficient at generating revenue. Most of the time the money gets slaked off into the Swiss bank accounts of unelected bureaucrats. Although, fear not, we are rapidly heading towards a banana republic, so nationalization of the oil companies shouldn't be too far behind the planned seizure of IRAs and 401ks to prop up the failing dollar.
Privatized profits. Socialize losses!
Except that the government makes more off taxes on oil and it's downstream products than companies like BP make in profit on oil.
The summary and the article are wrong. A 100 km asteroid impacting would pretty much sterilize the crust.
The main problem with the whole rational actor / game theory theories is the problem of incomplete information. You can have actors that are acting rationally within their framework of limited information but irrationally when complete information is considered. There were several times when the world was on the brink of catastrophic nuclear war, and all it would have taken is a bit of bad luck to send things over the edge.
All it takes is one miscalculation. After North Korea or Iran acquire strategic capability, and look upon a weak US President (who may or may not be Obama) and decide they will not do anything if they invade South Korea / Iraq respectively...and now that they have a strategic deterrent, that will constrain US response to harshly worded UN denouncements.
US decides to respond militarily, and faced with conventional defeat, Iran or North Korea decide to respond with some sort of nuclear strike. And, unfortunately, if you don't have some sort of BMD before they obtain this capability, then it's too late. BMD is, as the critics point out, non-trivial. The nuclear proliferation cat is out of the bag (but it still requires the resources of a nation-state to acquire them)...if we do not want to be held hostage by a balance of terror, then we should be investing in counter-measures, to include BMD.
Last I checked, Blackwater was founded by the son of a billionaire, who, rather than living a life of privilege, joined the Navy Seals and served his country honorably. What exactly have you done to compare that qualifies you to slander them by alleging that they would be willing to purchase a black market nuke and detonate it in San Diego? Talk out of your ass on Slashdot? Yeah, that's what I thought. Nothing.
Sure there isn't. Nations like North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, India, and China are spending billions of dollars into research and development on ballistic missiles just for the sheer enjoyment of research. Not because they would ever threaten to use or actually use them.