If I hadn't already commented in the article, I'd mod you up. Finally, someone who knows what they're talking about and doesn't want to post some knee-jerk denialist garbage.
This isn't like that. Stratospheric cooling due to heat trapped in the troposphere is an easy phenomenon to see and is clearly related to the basic expectations of global warming.
The CFCs are still a problem that had lessened, but because of abnormal temperatures in the Arctic, their remaining effects were magnified a great deal.
This is a spurious argument. There's no "should" here. Life has been affecting the climate since nearly the beginning, and vice versa. That we're doing it is no worse than any other life form changing the climate, local or global. The difference between now and history is that we are able to determine that our activities are going to change the climate in a way that's likely to be detrimental to our life and to other life forms that we care about, and we've also determined that we can avoid that outcome. Other than that, there's nothing *wrong* with climate change.
Actually, all the things you listed except for global cooling have been problems and have either been addressed, or we've learned to live with them. Overpopulation is a problem, even if it's not in your neck of the woods. A lot of the world is poor and has too many people living in cramped quarters to effectively provide for them. Acid rain is still a problem, though mitigated by programs to reduce SO2 output, but nobody talks about it because it's not exciting enough to be newsworthy. The ozone problem was fixed to a degree because we actually took action and reduced or eliminated the usage of chemicals that lead to ozone depletion.
The common thread in all these things, though, is not that we had fake problems, but that the media presented them as worse or further reaching than they were, and then stopped reporting on them once they weren't fun anymore. The folks who actually deal with these problems continued to do so and either made progress, or haven't really, but you don't hear about it because we've just come to accept the negative results. We're okay with India and China because that's just how it is and those aren't our countries, so we don't really have a stake in changing them. That doesn't make it not a problem.
Well, except for the fact that CO2 is actually fairly effective at absorbing IR in certain windows, so it's not a minimal effect. Moreover, the change in energy budget from increase CO2 has knock-off effects on the other, more potent greenhouse gasses, specifically H2O. It's these positive feedbacks that drive a lot of the climate change, not just the direct effects of CO2, although those aren't minimal either.
The cold is not in the troposphere, it's in the stratosphere. Cold stratosphere is usually correlated with warm temperatures in the troposphere, which is exactly what we've had, and has had a lot to do with the greater than average ice melt this season.
You are conflating the ease of the protocol for transmitting information to rules about how the content should be used. Because the protocol makes it really easy, therefore, it's okay to just take other people's content. I think my house analogy holds. An unlocked door makes it really easy to get into the house. In fact, it's even designed that way (for easy access to the house). I might even want other people to come to my house, including people I don't know, under the right circumstances. I don't want them to come in at any time and take all my stuff for their own use. By your logic, I would have to make it really hard for them to do that, and if I didn't, then I am basically granting them access to my house.
Where is this "Take Me" sign? I don't see anywhere in the technology of the web the virtue that you should take other people's stuff and use it as your own. Yeah, linking to it is fine, and that's easy to do and built right in.
This is to be contrasted with your reasonable right to take any content from the internet that you can access and then use privately as you please. In much the same way, you are free to buy a book, tear pages out, scan and make copies of it and plaster your walls with those copies, write notes in the pages, etc., so long as you don't try to pretend the content in the book is yours and sell it or distribute it as such. If you want to scrape a site and keep it on your harddrive so you can view it when you don't have wifi, I see no problem with that.
Ugh. Just because they are publicly viewable does not mean you can take their content and put it up on your site for your own purposes. If you leave your house door unlocked, it is NOT okay for someone to enter your house and take what they want.
It's likely to be a shortening of "electric service bill" or something like that. It's certainly an established usage. It's not clear to me that "electric" is intended to be an adjective modifying "bill", but rather part of a compound.
Yes, I think they should shoulder more of the burden. They are the primary beneficiaries of the system. They practically own it anyway. Why shouldn't they pay for it? Who cares what x, y and z are in the sentence "the top x% own y% of the wealth and pay z% of the taxes" when x is small and y is large? I don't give a fuck that instead of owning 90% they own 66%. The numbers are suspect anyways because a lot of the folks who have a great deal of wealth don't pay much in income taxes by way of loopholes, or just not getting paid in a traditional way, but instead through means that don't result in federal income taxes kicking in. So it doesn't really matter if it's 90% or 66%. They own a lot of the wealth and they ought to pay for that. It isn't punishment for being rich, it's simply asking that those who have the most, benefit the most from the system, pay the most to maintain it. I may have said this in a previous post, but I don't have a beef with the rich, so much as the politicians who seem to be doing their damnedest to destroy the middle class and coddle those who already have everything. It doesn't make sense.
I ask you this: what would be the ideal tax structure in your world? How much should the various income groups and wealth groups pay and for what reason should they pay what you suggest?
I personally think that income ought to be taxed at a slightly lower rate that currently on a progressive scale, and instead we ought to tax non-earned income and non-business assets at a fairly high rate, with additional taxes on large profits by corporations, here or abroad (if you do business in this country, you pay for the right to do business here). That would need to be tweaked according to the realities of the those forms of income and wealth, but the overall goal is to punish hoarding and seeking out obscene profits and personal gains at the expense of the system. If you are spending that money on job creation, corporate growth, infrastructure, etc., then you shouldn't be punished.
Another alternative is to reconsider the tax system. Instead of being a system of penalizing "bad behavior" from the point of view of the government or the prevailing ideology, it ought instead to be simply a system to pay for the public good. Everyone has to pony up, but the system is to benefit everyone. It's not punishment or penalization, it's just the cost of doing business and living here. Workers cost money, goods cost money, having a stable nation with good infrastructure costs money too. It saddens me that the GOP language has turned the discussion on its head. Angry liberal talking points are often not much better, unfortunately.
Someone has to pay for this country. It isn't vilifying the rich so much as vilifying the silly policies that say that those who own most of the wealth in this country, make most of the income, control most of the resources and derive the most direct and indirect benefit from the government and its services shouldn't have to pay the most for all that. You speak as if it's wrong that the wealthiest pay 85% of the taxes collected, even though they own 90% of the assets of this country.
What's your point? That poor people don't pay as much in taxes, in absolute terms, as the upper and middle classes? Is it that even by pure percentage, the poor pay less? Duh. Nobody's arguing the opposite. But it is true that for a poor person, having, say 25% of your income spent on taxes, leaves a lot less left over in real terms than what a middle or upper class person would have left over. Say a poor person makes 500 bucks a month (number pulled from ass). If 25% goes to taxes, then they have 375 left over, which might not be enough to cover rent and food. A person making 2000 bucks a month with the same tax rate would have 1500 left over, which probably certainly covers rent and food and gives them some left over for other bills and disposable income.
It strikes me as strange that it's apparently anathema to have even the slightest discussion about raising taxes a little on the upper class, but it's okay to talk about how the poor just aren't being taxed enough, like that would help them or make a dent in the deficit. You can't get blood from a turnip. I'd be willing to agree that people on the upper end of poor maybe could be moved into a tax-paying bracket so long as that doesn't come with a massive decrease in public services that we, and especially they rely on.
I know, but many folks act like that's the only thing that matters and that it's just a travesty that the poor "don't pay" any taxes and so therefore, they are getting a completely free ride.
I get the value of economies of scale with large corporations, but with technology in play, it isn't as big of an advantage as it used to be. We really should be investing in small to medium-sized businesses and have very few large corporations. The latter rarely do a good job of creating new technologies or really, new wealth. Up-and-coming businesses come up with the new ideas and generally are more efficient (because they have to be to survive). Of course, large companies have the ability to, say, throw a billion dollars at a risky idea and even have it fail and still have the company survive (albeit not without pissing off the shareholders). On the balance, however, it seems best to focus our efforts on the middle class, small and medium-sized businesses and let the rich fend for themselves. After all, they hold all the power and wealth, so they don't need to be coddled (don't need to be gutted either, of course).
Poor often don't pay federal income taxes, but they do pay other taxes, and considerably more, relative to what they make and the wealth they have, than the middle and upper classes.
Slashdot Mirror
Where did I post knee-jerk denialist garbage?
We're warming ON TOP of the post-Little Ice Age warming. You are attacking a strawman.
If I hadn't already commented in the article, I'd mod you up. Finally, someone who knows what they're talking about and doesn't want to post some knee-jerk denialist garbage.
This isn't like that. Stratospheric cooling due to heat trapped in the troposphere is an easy phenomenon to see and is clearly related to the basic expectations of global warming.
The CFCs are still a problem that had lessened, but because of abnormal temperatures in the Arctic, their remaining effects were magnified a great deal.
This is a spurious argument. There's no "should" here. Life has been affecting the climate since nearly the beginning, and vice versa. That we're doing it is no worse than any other life form changing the climate, local or global. The difference between now and history is that we are able to determine that our activities are going to change the climate in a way that's likely to be detrimental to our life and to other life forms that we care about, and we've also determined that we can avoid that outcome. Other than that, there's nothing *wrong* with climate change.
So because the media can't portray complex scientific problems correctly means that global warming or the ozone hole aren't actually issues?
Actually, all the things you listed except for global cooling have been problems and have either been addressed, or we've learned to live with them. Overpopulation is a problem, even if it's not in your neck of the woods. A lot of the world is poor and has too many people living in cramped quarters to effectively provide for them. Acid rain is still a problem, though mitigated by programs to reduce SO2 output, but nobody talks about it because it's not exciting enough to be newsworthy. The ozone problem was fixed to a degree because we actually took action and reduced or eliminated the usage of chemicals that lead to ozone depletion.
The common thread in all these things, though, is not that we had fake problems, but that the media presented them as worse or further reaching than they were, and then stopped reporting on them once they weren't fun anymore. The folks who actually deal with these problems continued to do so and either made progress, or haven't really, but you don't hear about it because we've just come to accept the negative results. We're okay with India and China because that's just how it is and those aren't our countries, so we don't really have a stake in changing them. That doesn't make it not a problem.
Well, except for the fact that CO2 is actually fairly effective at absorbing IR in certain windows, so it's not a minimal effect. Moreover, the change in energy budget from increase CO2 has knock-off effects on the other, more potent greenhouse gasses, specifically H2O. It's these positive feedbacks that drive a lot of the climate change, not just the direct effects of CO2, although those aren't minimal either.
The cold is not in the troposphere, it's in the stratosphere. Cold stratosphere is usually correlated with warm temperatures in the troposphere, which is exactly what we've had, and has had a lot to do with the greater than average ice melt this season.
You are conflating the ease of the protocol for transmitting information to rules about how the content should be used. Because the protocol makes it really easy, therefore, it's okay to just take other people's content. I think my house analogy holds. An unlocked door makes it really easy to get into the house. In fact, it's even designed that way (for easy access to the house). I might even want other people to come to my house, including people I don't know, under the right circumstances. I don't want them to come in at any time and take all my stuff for their own use. By your logic, I would have to make it really hard for them to do that, and if I didn't, then I am basically granting them access to my house.
Where is this "Take Me" sign? I don't see anywhere in the technology of the web the virtue that you should take other people's stuff and use it as your own. Yeah, linking to it is fine, and that's easy to do and built right in.
This is to be contrasted with your reasonable right to take any content from the internet that you can access and then use privately as you please. In much the same way, you are free to buy a book, tear pages out, scan and make copies of it and plaster your walls with those copies, write notes in the pages, etc., so long as you don't try to pretend the content in the book is yours and sell it or distribute it as such. If you want to scrape a site and keep it on your harddrive so you can view it when you don't have wifi, I see no problem with that.
Ugh. Just because they are publicly viewable does not mean you can take their content and put it up on your site for your own purposes. If you leave your house door unlocked, it is NOT okay for someone to enter your house and take what they want.
There's a joke in here about information via obscurity and Slashdot readers' tendency to read nothing but the headline, but I can't get it to work :-/.
I don't think you even read the article.
No, he meant vestibular (having to do with the various balance systems in the head) and it's definitely *not* vestigial.
What conflict would that be?
It's likely to be a shortening of "electric service bill" or something like that. It's certainly an established usage. It's not clear to me that "electric" is intended to be an adjective modifying "bill", but rather part of a compound.
Yes, I think they should shoulder more of the burden. They are the primary beneficiaries of the system. They practically own it anyway. Why shouldn't they pay for it? Who cares what x, y and z are in the sentence "the top x% own y% of the wealth and pay z% of the taxes" when x is small and y is large? I don't give a fuck that instead of owning 90% they own 66%. The numbers are suspect anyways because a lot of the folks who have a great deal of wealth don't pay much in income taxes by way of loopholes, or just not getting paid in a traditional way, but instead through means that don't result in federal income taxes kicking in. So it doesn't really matter if it's 90% or 66%. They own a lot of the wealth and they ought to pay for that. It isn't punishment for being rich, it's simply asking that those who have the most, benefit the most from the system, pay the most to maintain it. I may have said this in a previous post, but I don't have a beef with the rich, so much as the politicians who seem to be doing their damnedest to destroy the middle class and coddle those who already have everything. It doesn't make sense.
I ask you this: what would be the ideal tax structure in your world? How much should the various income groups and wealth groups pay and for what reason should they pay what you suggest?
I personally think that income ought to be taxed at a slightly lower rate that currently on a progressive scale, and instead we ought to tax non-earned income and non-business assets at a fairly high rate, with additional taxes on large profits by corporations, here or abroad (if you do business in this country, you pay for the right to do business here). That would need to be tweaked according to the realities of the those forms of income and wealth, but the overall goal is to punish hoarding and seeking out obscene profits and personal gains at the expense of the system. If you are spending that money on job creation, corporate growth, infrastructure, etc., then you shouldn't be punished.
Another alternative is to reconsider the tax system. Instead of being a system of penalizing "bad behavior" from the point of view of the government or the prevailing ideology, it ought instead to be simply a system to pay for the public good. Everyone has to pony up, but the system is to benefit everyone. It's not punishment or penalization, it's just the cost of doing business and living here. Workers cost money, goods cost money, having a stable nation with good infrastructure costs money too. It saddens me that the GOP language has turned the discussion on its head. Angry liberal talking points are often not much better, unfortunately.
Someone has to pay for this country. It isn't vilifying the rich so much as vilifying the silly policies that say that those who own most of the wealth in this country, make most of the income, control most of the resources and derive the most direct and indirect benefit from the government and its services shouldn't have to pay the most for all that. You speak as if it's wrong that the wealthiest pay 85% of the taxes collected, even though they own 90% of the assets of this country.
What's your point? That poor people don't pay as much in taxes, in absolute terms, as the upper and middle classes? Is it that even by pure percentage, the poor pay less? Duh. Nobody's arguing the opposite. But it is true that for a poor person, having, say 25% of your income spent on taxes, leaves a lot less left over in real terms than what a middle or upper class person would have left over. Say a poor person makes 500 bucks a month (number pulled from ass). If 25% goes to taxes, then they have 375 left over, which might not be enough to cover rent and food. A person making 2000 bucks a month with the same tax rate would have 1500 left over, which probably certainly covers rent and food and gives them some left over for other bills and disposable income.
It strikes me as strange that it's apparently anathema to have even the slightest discussion about raising taxes a little on the upper class, but it's okay to talk about how the poor just aren't being taxed enough, like that would help them or make a dent in the deficit. You can't get blood from a turnip. I'd be willing to agree that people on the upper end of poor maybe could be moved into a tax-paying bracket so long as that doesn't come with a massive decrease in public services that we, and especially they rely on.
I know, but many folks act like that's the only thing that matters and that it's just a travesty that the poor "don't pay" any taxes and so therefore, they are getting a completely free ride.
This.
I get the value of economies of scale with large corporations, but with technology in play, it isn't as big of an advantage as it used to be. We really should be investing in small to medium-sized businesses and have very few large corporations. The latter rarely do a good job of creating new technologies or really, new wealth. Up-and-coming businesses come up with the new ideas and generally are more efficient (because they have to be to survive). Of course, large companies have the ability to, say, throw a billion dollars at a risky idea and even have it fail and still have the company survive (albeit not without pissing off the shareholders). On the balance, however, it seems best to focus our efforts on the middle class, small and medium-sized businesses and let the rich fend for themselves. After all, they hold all the power and wealth, so they don't need to be coddled (don't need to be gutted either, of course).
Poor often don't pay federal income taxes, but they do pay other taxes, and considerably more, relative to what they make and the wealth they have, than the middle and upper classes.
I'm surprised this was the only comment about BSG. My first thought was "they finally found evidence for cylons!"