We hear the refrain that jobs lost overseas are 'never coming back.' Yet the first time an impediment to supply appears mines get reopened, and in CA no less. Despite the fact that those workers will be paid living wages and probably have union representation you'll still be able to afford your iPhone. No, California's precious 'environment' won't be destroyed. The next time some wag claims this or that job is lost forever you'll know better.
There is an undercurrent building in the US. The effect of >70% of all imports being tariff free is too obvious to ignore any longer. The US has been trading away its prosperity for dubious diplomatic achievements for decades. People have caught on. The 'oh noes trade war!' cry won't work any more.
When you get down to it with the common leftist they'll tell you they don't want industry returning to the US. Exporting pollution to Asia is just fine with them. Their leaders never hesitate to signaway more of our trade leverage. Today the left's union allies are mostly service sector and government; they simply don't care about the industrial base.
While the big-business wing of the Republican party is all about 'free' trade, the party also harbors a buchanan wing of anti 'free' trade types. Curiously, that stripe is completely unrepresented among all of our presidential candidates today. I predict that will change; when someone that can articulate the problems inherent in trying to compete with disposable workers and indifferent regulation finally appears they will discover a broad and deep well of support.
You have to decide what type of world you want to live in......I'll take cheap and plentiful
I want a world were my environment is spotlessly clean and free of contamination, and all of my loved ones are isolated from pollutants of any sort, while at the same time the products of industry are readily available at low cost. What contaminants and pollutants are necessary to provide this should be kept away from me, preferably separated from me by an ocean or two. The costs incurred to provide the products I wish to buy should be mitigated by utilizing disposable labor in totalitarian regimes, lest the labor force become greedy and expect to enjoy my standard of living.
Should anyone that relied on domestic industry for compensation of their labor find that they have become surplus in my clean world of plenty, they should accept their decline quietly. A subsidized existence will be provided to these people by my state, and they will doubtless be grateful to have it. This gratitude will be evident when they vote to support my policies at each election, especially when I promise them an even richer subsistence.
You see, while German manufacturers and workers are busy competing 'on quality', as you say, the German government is actively protecting domestic industry from competition with China throughout the EU. German manufacturers and German workers do not have to compete with disposable Asian workers and indifferent health/safety/labor/environmental regulation.
The 'oh-noes trade war' sentiment that we get from pro-business types and Chinese ministers is a farce. We're in a trade war. We're getting our clocks cleaned. That is the real reason we have thousands of 'business' degree graduates in their late 20s shuffling around trying to 'occupy' Wall Street. The US no longer provides the real growth necessary to accommodate them. They are surplus people; their futures went to China.
If you're going to advocate policies that condemn the prosperity and liberty of people born to both you are going to face some acrimony. If that make you uncomfortable then get back to your WoW account and leave the fight to those of us with the fortitude to face it for you.
He was defrauding the government by lying about his hours to collect undue compensation. The state investigated his work habits by tracking his vehicle. He was eventually fired based on the evidence, which he does not dispute, as he is not seeking reinstatement or back pay. These employees can not be fired without extraordinary evidence; the sort produced by, say, tracking a vehicle.
He has good PR and has been successful at making the knees of people like you jerk wildly. Your reaction is the reason many, many government employees defraud the government every day with impunity. Your reaction is also why he will eventually be awarded a big fat settlement at taxpayer expense; probably something on the order of 10-15 teachers salaries.
We're also short of employers willing to foster excellent engineers.
Germany requires employers to maintain apprentice positions or incur work hours by apprentices according to established ratios of positions and work hours with non-apprentices, with specific criteria for exactly what apprentice means. This is a burden to German employers. One that they can afford because German employers are protected from competition with the sovereign subsided Asian industry with indifferent environmental regulation and disposable workers. Google "germany anti-dumping" and read all about it.
As a result of these industrial policies Germany has enjoyed steady economic growth for four decades. Only the predictable sovereign debt crises of the EU PIGS has interrupted this.
The attitude in the US is you have veteran level experience or you need not apply, you appear for work and produce at that level immediately and you do not expect to experience growth or development on our dime. This works in the US because the workforce understands that it is fungible; some company owned subsistence worker in a third world hell hole can always be used instead.
The good news is this is all going to change. The pendulum has swung so far over to one side that it can't go any further and will soon cycle back the other way. We're building our monuments in China. We're building our bridges in China. If it goes any further we'll be buying our infantry weapons from China with money borrowed from China and drop shipping them to Afghanistan.
You protect your industry and your workforce or you decline.
Self interest explains this. If cookies cease to `work' for the purposes of the ad networks then they'll make sites cease to work for those of us that thwart them. They're footing the bill for a lot of the `Internet', including the site you're reading now, so they call the shots. Since cookies still work for their purposes I get what I want with little bother, while everyone else has their every click correlated to their profile.
I don't want some grand solution that puts everyone at parity with me, because then I'll have to put up with what everyone puts up with. So stop talking about BetterPrivacy, NotScripts, etc. You're not helping.
The US is better at building airplanes than Taiwan is.
Is the US better at building airplanes than China?
This symmetry of trade is a fiction that exists exclusively inside your head. The migration of airliner manufacturing is underway now, along with anything else we can figure out how to do in Asia, including major pieces of our infrastructure. US industry has no protection from hordes of disposable Asian workers and indifferent regulation. While this situation persists the evacuation of capital to Asia, or whatever hell-hole replaces it, will continue.
I would argue that we need the additional fiscal stimulus given the weakness in the economy, and that stimulus would not be inflationary.
Would that be QE 3 or 4? How many more QEs will they bother to number before they say 'fuck it' and just print whatever the Fed thinks Wall Street wants printed?
The bubble can't be re-inflated with paper. Try actual growth and prosperity instead. Protect your workforce from competition with third world subsistence workers.
The US has been swapping trade balance for diplomatic leverage since the end of the second world war. Cold war rivalry led to all manner of one-sided trade arrangements. That pattern of foregoing tariffs to obtain cooperation continues with the drug war, the war on terror, etc. You couple that tendency with the high profitability of exporting manufacturing to nations that have little to no regulation or labor representation at the same time whole new classes of regulation are created back home and you have one inevitable result: capital evacuation.
Google the Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) sometime. Essentially everything that arrives on a pier in California has a code in the US HTS that determines the cost to import. It's an enormous document that attempts to classify every conceivable good that might be imported.
That amazing artifact is the rulebook for trading prosperity for diplomacy. If you bother to look you will learn that unless you're an 'axis of evil' type with enrichment centrifuges spinning away in some bunker, the vast majority of finished goods are tariff free. The rest have comparatively low rates that aren't yet zero only because no one bothers to import non-finished goods into the US in significant quantities, excluding fossil fuel.
Export to Europe? You pay tariff and VAT on the dock. You can't get dirty underwear into Germany for less than 14%. China is the same. They carve out stuff they can't (yet) make themselves (IT equipment comes to mind) and the rest is 8%-12% or more, plus bribes, due on arrival, or they'll call Hillary at the State Department and have your hide tacked to the wall as a warning to others.
US has been bent over and taking it hard up the poop chute for 30+ years. The thing is that these sort of circumstances tend to swing over time; the pendulum really can't go much further to one side, so it pretty much has to start moving the other way.
That point hasn't arrived yet. The US has not yet experienced the sort of trauma necessary to change minds and get out of this self-inflicted disaster. We'll need a good sovereign debt crisis and/or currency crisis to shift the entrenched interests. A couple months of no social security checks and voters will rediscover, in their usual blundering way, the importance of prosperity.
I'm not going back. You'll have to live with some fraction of the cut you got for cable/satellite service, whether via Netflix or some other distributor. Streaming is the a la carte that should have been available 20 years ago. I will not pay for a package full of dreck. Pull whatever you want. I'll live with whatever is left over. You're not getting back to $70/month. Deal with it.
You need to adopt this attitude as well. These people need to take a few pay cuts.
China is exempt from most of the significant Kyoto requirements, including any limits on CO2. So is India. So is nearly every 'developing' nation. Had it been otherwise they would never have signed on and the US would have had a lot of company among those nations that failed to ratify.
Ignorance of this is rather telling. Consider expanding your sources of information and opinion a bit. Man cannot live by lefty Kool-Aid alone.
Without restraints on imports all environmental regulation in the West is just global scale NIMBY-ism. Ignoring Asian pollution while foisting an ever tougher regime of regulation on domestic industry does not reduce the net impact; it just moves it far away.
Some malcontent editorializes about US citizens and you take as fact. Wow. Just Wow.
I've driven in France extensively. Aggression and lack of cooperation are not incompatible with the roundabouts that are endemic to France. On the road the french are impatient and unforgiving and do not hesitate to exploit timid drivers. The common US driver is no match for any given frog in the lack-of-cooperation department.
The little basement dweller that wrote that crap is naive about the world.
$250,000 7th Annual Heinz Award $50,000 29th Annual Common Wealth Awards $1,000,000 (split three ways) Dan David Prize $100,000 Sophie Prize $25,000 Nierenberg Prize $5,000 AAAS Award
That is prize money, a.k.a income, not research grant money.
As far as the perjury goes, the "taken advocacy positions with respect to the Kyoto protocol or the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change" bit has no legal significance. A prosecutor would have to prove that some actively was advocacy and that Soon knew about it and understood it to be advocacy. Good luck with that.
What we're doing is insane. And yes, it _is_ our fault.
Indeed. Open border trade agreements with third world kleptocracies. Flailing around the middle east while smugglers trade fire with our skeletal border security. Legal indifference toward illegal immigrants and the businesses that exploit them. We have much to answer for.
the armored vehicles are not a game changer. 'While the "narco-tanks," as the vehicles are often called, make for great blog fodder and provide entertaining videos, seeing their rise as a significant escalation in Mexico's drug war would be wrongheaded,' writes Corcoran. 'In the end, the "tanks" are a sexy narrative, but these mistaken notions about the criminals' "military might" not only inflate the power of Mexico's groups far beyond any reasonable assessment, they also obscure the problem, and its potential solutions
That is one of the finest weasel word specimens ever. Actual weaponry intruding on the chattering class's 'narrative' and 'obscuring' their spin on the problem and its 'potential solutions.' Tragic. Might take a whole week or so to retrofit this inconvenient development into the Blame America First litany.
The network will exist and function well regardless of the fate of Verizon et al. because there are vast numbers of rate payers that will pay for service. It just may not be capable of floating a powerful, vertically integrated company and its army of lobbyists and Hollywood power brokers.. It would, instead, exist among smaller, less powerful and more focused organizations that make their money by competing for rate payers, rather than exclusive media contracts, collusion and tax manipulation.
Our nation has been through this multiple times now. Eventually you get monopolies. Whether though well intentioned public policy or lawful aggregation in the market, you end up with huge beasts haunting the halls of power for their own benefit, if not survival.
You break them up. You define geographic or market boundaries and you slice them up. The natural boundaries for network operators are geography AND product; there is no need or benefit to a vertically integrated COMCASTDISNEYBELLSOUTHTIMEWARNERUNIVERSALAT&T monster. Let the content producers make content and the network operators sell bits. Common carrier.
Obvious, simple and correct. Politically feasible? Not with numpties like you walking around.
Legislating physics doesn't work. California was supposed to have a 100% emissions free new vehicle fleet eleven years ago. Maybe obviating ~20% of all US base load power generation is possible without getting voted out of office for a generation. Good luck with that.
Nuclear power isn't dead. It isn't even dying. China made obligatory noises about 'reviewing' nuclear projects after Fukushima Construction has not actually halted and nothing has been canceled. Ultimately it will amount to a couple siting changes and little else. Sweden is pushing back at German nuclear energy policy changes and has no intention of abandoning its own nuclear energy. Neither will France.
Germany is the victim of a large amount Chernobyl fallout, so nuclear is a bad word in German politics. Germany's neighbors, on the other hand, are not uniformly following Germany's lead. It is rather likely that Germany will find itself replacing some of its lost generation capacity with foreign nuclear power.
As for the US? Investors are not going to put up billions of dollars for pressure groups to play with in court for twenty years; that money is going to China. Nothing is going to happen one why or the other until after the currency collapse and breakup. We're a debtor nation balkanized around our welfare state, so we don't get to build, replace or otherwise change much of anything until long after the public debt bubble pops.
The power generation system you have now will be what you have in 2026. If you're lucky.
You've noticed the vanishingpartyaffiliationphenomenon. This appears most blatantly when a leftist politician is the subject of some scandal; you may search high and low but you won't find the party affiliation mentioned by the media. That is left exclusively to the detractors, who are then found to be 'uncivil' or some such.
Given the current disposition of the US congress, the same bias manifests itself as using the term "congress" only when the malcontents are pleased. All other times we get "house republicans."
cheap consumer-level goods that places like China and Vietnam are currently specializing in
Nothing Apple makes is 'cheap.'
Your understanding of the situation is badly out of date. China is forging the components of engines and drive trains and refining the ore to feed those activities. They're burning more coal than the US and that energy is going into HEAVY industry. The heaviest industries on Earth.
GM is selling more cars in China than it is in the US. In case you really are as out of touch as you appear to be, GM is NOT filling container ships on the west coast of the US with new cars and shipping them to China. The cars are built IN CHINA. The Chinese won't tolerate any other arrangement.
The Chinese consume most of the finished vehicles produced (18+ million in 2010), but components (engines, transmissions, etc.) are exported by the container ship full and many major auto manufactures are building heavy components there. The strikes that occurred in early 2010 were at Toyota, Honda and Ford subsidiary component plants, among others.
They're also building airliners, nuclear reactors, earth moving equipment, ships, advanced warplanes and semiconductor foundries. The mines, forges, refineries and furnaces that make it all possible are Chinese as well.
The US is where GE, GM, Caterpillar and Westinghouse executives keep their wives; a legacy industrial nation with lots of legacy capacity and negligible new development. And no, it isn't sustainable; we've got 2-4 years before the creditors put an end to the US debt circus, then we'll pull this.
Widespread use of this will make marketers focus on new tracking techniques. As it is they rely on cookies that are easily eradicated with simple tools, but are usually left alone by users. They don't have to remain that easy to thwart. They won't if all their analysis goes to hell 24h after 10.3 is released and auto-installed everywhere.
Pointing out Dan Rather is all too easy when the left gets upset at the Internets for failing to fall in line. A more recent (yesterday) example; we've been hearing for weeks about the 'challenge' to conservatives in Canada. The BBC says the race has tightened and Canadian voters will throw the conservative bums out!
Wisconsin voters hate the new Governor and his anti-union crimes. The media has the polls to prove it! That's why incumbent judge Prosser will get voted out. Except he didn't.
Lets not forget NPR execs schlepping around with purported Muslim Brotherhood types, spouting off stereotypical nonsense right out of the moonbat echo chamber. These are the numpties running the media. Mustn't question their credibility...you stupid knuckle dragger.
The MSM is spin. Mostly statist left wing spin, with some equally heinous counter spin from the right (Fox et al.) That the non-existent credibility of our media doesn't somehow instantly dispel all "birther" conspiracy is a surprise to fools alone.
So, 10 or 15 years ago, when everyone began being raised isolated from anything remotely dangerous, not allowed outside, and were pandered to to be sure they didn't have their feelings hurt when we tried to teach them to spell... we foresaw an entire generation of children that would be too stupid to do anything, and so spoiled and coddled to that they would expect the world to care for them and give them everything they want.
Some knew then we would end up with kids that would never really understand basic science well enough to go into university and not be completely wrong about how things work. Chemical free chemistry sets? No surprise there. We now have a generation that has been raised entirely with safety scissors, glitter, and nothing but comforting reassurance that it's OK to spell words any way you please, and have never cared about the sum of 2+2.
"Doomed as a species" was brought to mind. The places that didn't intentionally educate their children to be simpletons now have the advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
We hear the refrain that jobs lost overseas are 'never coming back.' Yet the first time an impediment to supply appears mines get reopened, and in CA no less. Despite the fact that those workers will be paid living wages and probably have union representation you'll still be able to afford your iPhone. No, California's precious 'environment' won't be destroyed. The next time some wag claims this or that job is lost forever you'll know better.
There is an undercurrent building in the US. The effect of >70% of all imports being tariff free is too obvious to ignore any longer. The US has been trading away its prosperity for dubious diplomatic achievements for decades. People have caught on. The 'oh noes trade war!' cry won't work any more.
When you get down to it with the common leftist they'll tell you they don't want industry returning to the US. Exporting pollution to Asia is just fine with them. Their leaders never hesitate to sign away more of our trade leverage. Today the left's union allies are mostly service sector and government; they simply don't care about the industrial base.
While the big-business wing of the Republican party is all about 'free' trade, the party also harbors a buchanan wing of anti 'free' trade types. Curiously, that stripe is completely unrepresented among all of our presidential candidates today. I predict that will change; when someone that can articulate the problems inherent in trying to compete with disposable workers and indifferent regulation finally appears they will discover a broad and deep well of support.
You have to decide what type of world you want to live in......I'll take cheap and plentiful
I want a world were my environment is spotlessly clean and free of contamination, and all of my loved ones are isolated from pollutants of any sort, while at the same time the products of industry are readily available at low cost. What contaminants and pollutants are necessary to provide this should be kept away from me, preferably separated from me by an ocean or two. The costs incurred to provide the products I wish to buy should be mitigated by utilizing disposable labor in totalitarian regimes, lest the labor force become greedy and expect to enjoy my standard of living.
Should anyone that relied on domestic industry for compensation of their labor find that they have become surplus in my clean world of plenty, they should accept their decline quietly. A subsidized existence will be provided to these people by my state, and they will doubtless be grateful to have it. This gratitude will be evident when they vote to support my policies at each election, especially when I promise them an even richer subsistence.
or [the US could] compete on quality like the Germans
Does that mean the US will get to impose hundreds of anti-dumping duties on Chinese imports like Germany?
EU extends China anti-dumping duty for barium carbonate
EU levies stiff anti-dumping tariffs [on ceramic tiles]
Chinese exporters regret EU anti-dumping duties on Chinese-made screws, bolts
Germany's SolarWorld expects anti-dumping complaints vs China
EU Hits China with Anti-Dumping Duties on Paper
EU greenlights anti-dumping duties on Chinese light bulbs
EU Extended Anti-Dumping Duties on Chinese Bicycle Imports
You see, while German manufacturers and workers are busy competing 'on quality', as you say, the German government is actively protecting domestic industry from competition with China throughout the EU. German manufacturers and German workers do not have to compete with disposable Asian workers and indifferent health/safety/labor/environmental regulation.
The 'oh-noes trade war' sentiment that we get from pro-business types and Chinese ministers is a farce. We're in a trade war. We're getting our clocks cleaned. That is the real reason we have thousands of 'business' degree graduates in their late 20s shuffling around trying to 'occupy' Wall Street. The US no longer provides the real growth necessary to accommodate them. They are surplus people; their futures went to China.
App tax! Make the top third pay their fair share.
If we could actually have a clam (sic) and reasoned discussion
Not in this lifetime.
Aug 29, 2011: Al Gore compares climate deniers (sic) to racists
If you're going to advocate policies that condemn the prosperity and liberty of people born to both you are going to face some acrimony. If that make you uncomfortable then get back to your WoW account and leave the fight to those of us with the fortitude to face it for you.
What reasons
He was defrauding the government by lying about his hours to collect undue compensation. The state investigated his work habits by tracking his vehicle. He was eventually fired based on the evidence, which he does not dispute, as he is not seeking reinstatement or back pay. These employees can not be fired without extraordinary evidence; the sort produced by, say, tracking a vehicle.
He has good PR and has been successful at making the knees of people like you jerk wildly. Your reaction is the reason many, many government employees defraud the government every day with impunity. Your reaction is also why he will eventually be awarded a big fat settlement at taxpayer expense; probably something on the order of 10-15 teachers salaries.
Thanks. You've been a big help.
we're short of excellent engineers
We're also short of employers willing to foster excellent engineers.
Germany requires employers to maintain apprentice positions or incur work hours by apprentices according to established ratios of positions and work hours with non-apprentices, with specific criteria for exactly what apprentice means. This is a burden to German employers. One that they can afford because German employers are protected from competition with the sovereign subsided Asian industry with indifferent environmental regulation and disposable workers. Google "germany anti-dumping" and read all about it.
As a result of these industrial policies Germany has enjoyed steady economic growth for four decades. Only the predictable sovereign debt crises of the EU PIGS has interrupted this.
The attitude in the US is you have veteran level experience or you need not apply, you appear for work and produce at that level immediately and you do not expect to experience growth or development on our dime. This works in the US because the workforce understands that it is fungible; some company owned subsistence worker in a third world hell hole can always be used instead.
The good news is this is all going to change. The pendulum has swung so far over to one side that it can't go any further and will soon cycle back the other way. We're building our monuments in China. We're building our bridges in China. If it goes any further we'll be buying our infantry weapons from China with money borrowed from China and drop shipping them to Afghanistan.
You protect your industry and your workforce or you decline.
Over here you may observe the iphone enabled twit-verse moan about Cantor proposing rollbacks of environmental regulation.
Environmental regulation without trade balance is international NIMBYism, folks.
why are we standing by
Self interest explains this. If cookies cease to `work' for the purposes of the ad networks then they'll make sites cease to work for those of us that thwart them. They're footing the bill for a lot of the `Internet', including the site you're reading now, so they call the shots. Since cookies still work for their purposes I get what I want with little bother, while everyone else has their every click correlated to their profile.
I don't want some grand solution that puts everyone at parity with me, because then I'll have to put up with what everyone puts up with. So stop talking about BetterPrivacy, NotScripts, etc. You're not helping.
The US is better at building airplanes than Taiwan is.
Is the US better at building airplanes than China?
This symmetry of trade is a fiction that exists exclusively inside your head. The migration of airliner manufacturing is underway now, along with anything else we can figure out how to do in Asia, including major pieces of our infrastructure. US industry has no protection from hordes of disposable Asian workers and indifferent regulation. While this situation persists the evacuation of capital to Asia, or whatever hell-hole replaces it, will continue.
I would argue that we need the additional fiscal stimulus given the weakness in the economy, and that stimulus would not be inflationary.
Would that be QE 3 or 4? How many more QEs will they bother to number before they say 'fuck it' and just print whatever the Fed thinks Wall Street wants printed?
The bubble can't be re-inflated with paper. Try actual growth and prosperity instead. Protect your workforce from competition with third world subsistence workers.
The US has been swapping trade balance for diplomatic leverage since the end of the second world war. Cold war rivalry led to all manner of one-sided trade arrangements. That pattern of foregoing tariffs to obtain cooperation continues with the drug war, the war on terror, etc. You couple that tendency with the high profitability of exporting manufacturing to nations that have little to no regulation or labor representation at the same time whole new classes of regulation are created back home and you have one inevitable result: capital evacuation.
Google the Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) sometime. Essentially everything that arrives on a pier in California has a code in the US HTS that determines the cost to import. It's an enormous document that attempts to classify every conceivable good that might be imported.
That amazing artifact is the rulebook for trading prosperity for diplomacy. If you bother to look you will learn that unless you're an 'axis of evil' type with enrichment centrifuges spinning away in some bunker, the vast majority of finished goods are tariff free. The rest have comparatively low rates that aren't yet zero only because no one bothers to import non-finished goods into the US in significant quantities, excluding fossil fuel.
Export to Europe? You pay tariff and VAT on the dock. You can't get dirty underwear into Germany for less than 14%. China is the same. They carve out stuff they can't (yet) make themselves (IT equipment comes to mind) and the rest is 8%-12% or more, plus bribes, due on arrival, or they'll call Hillary at the State Department and have your hide tacked to the wall as a warning to others.
US has been bent over and taking it hard up the poop chute for 30+ years. The thing is that these sort of circumstances tend to swing over time; the pendulum really can't go much further to one side, so it pretty much has to start moving the other way.
That point hasn't arrived yet. The US has not yet experienced the sort of trauma necessary to change minds and get out of this self-inflicted disaster. We'll need a good sovereign debt crisis and/or currency crisis to shift the entrenched interests. A couple months of no social security checks and voters will rediscover, in their usual blundering way, the importance of prosperity.
I'm not going back. You'll have to live with some fraction of the cut you got for cable/satellite service, whether via Netflix or some other distributor. Streaming is the a la carte that should have been available 20 years ago. I will not pay for a package full of dreck. Pull whatever you want. I'll live with whatever is left over. You're not getting back to $70/month. Deal with it.
You need to adopt this attitude as well. These people need to take a few pay cuts.
China is exempt from most of the significant Kyoto requirements, including any limits on CO2. So is India. So is nearly every 'developing' nation. Had it been otherwise they would never have signed on and the US would have had a lot of company among those nations that failed to ratify.
Ignorance of this is rather telling. Consider expanding your sources of information and opinion a bit. Man cannot live by lefty Kool-Aid alone.
Without restraints on imports all environmental regulation in the West is just global scale NIMBY-ism. Ignoring Asian pollution while foisting an ever tougher regime of regulation on domestic industry does not reduce the net impact; it just moves it far away.
Says a lot about America
Some malcontent editorializes about US citizens and you take as fact. Wow. Just Wow.
I've driven in France extensively. Aggression and lack of cooperation are not incompatible with the roundabouts that are endemic to France. On the road the french are impatient and unforgiving and do not hesitate to exploit timid drivers. The common US driver is no match for any given frog in the lack-of-cooperation department.
The little basement dweller that wrote that crap is naive about the world.
NASA’s Hansen asked to account for outside activities
$250,000 7th Annual Heinz Award
$50,000 29th Annual Common Wealth Awards
$1,000,000 (split three ways) Dan David Prize
$100,000 Sophie Prize
$25,000 Nierenberg Prize
$5,000 AAAS Award
etc. etc.
By April, 2011 his (publicly known) prize money amounts to $683,000
That is prize money, a.k.a income, not research grant money.
As far as the perjury goes, the "taken advocacy positions with respect to the Kyoto protocol or the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change" bit has no legal significance. A prosecutor would have to prove that some actively was advocacy and that Soon knew about it and understood it to be advocacy. Good luck with that.
No, but the malcontents sure try one's patience.
What we're doing is insane. And yes, it _is_ our fault.
Indeed. Open border trade agreements with third world kleptocracies. Flailing around the middle east while smugglers trade fire with our skeletal border security. Legal indifference toward illegal immigrants and the businesses that exploit them. We have much to answer for.
the armored vehicles are not a game changer. 'While the "narco-tanks," as the vehicles are often called, make for great blog fodder and provide entertaining videos, seeing their rise as a significant escalation in Mexico's drug war would be wrongheaded,' writes Corcoran. 'In the end, the "tanks" are a sexy narrative, but these mistaken notions about the criminals' "military might" not only inflate the power of Mexico's groups far beyond any reasonable assessment, they also obscure the problem, and its potential solutions
That is one of the finest weasel word specimens ever. Actual weaponry intruding on the chattering class's 'narrative' and 'obscuring' their spin on the problem and its 'potential solutions.' Tragic. Might take a whole week or so to retrofit this inconvenient development into the Blame America First litany.
hell yeah. fuck verizon
Fuck you and your straw man.
The network will exist and function well regardless of the fate of Verizon et al. because there are vast numbers of rate payers that will pay for service. It just may not be capable of floating a powerful, vertically integrated company and its army of lobbyists and Hollywood power brokers.. It would, instead, exist among smaller, less powerful and more focused organizations that make their money by competing for rate payers, rather than exclusive media contracts, collusion and tax manipulation.
Our nation has been through this multiple times now. Eventually you get monopolies. Whether though well intentioned public policy or lawful aggregation in the market, you end up with huge beasts haunting the halls of power for their own benefit, if not survival.
You break them up. You define geographic or market boundaries and you slice them up. The natural boundaries for network operators are geography AND product; there is no need or benefit to a vertically integrated COMCASTDISNEYBELLSOUTHTIMEWARNERUNIVERSALAT&T monster. Let the content producers make content and the network operators sell bits. Common carrier.
Obvious, simple and correct. Politically feasible? Not with numpties like you walking around.
Legislating physics doesn't work. California was supposed to have a 100% emissions free new vehicle fleet eleven years ago. Maybe obviating ~20% of all US base load power generation is possible without getting voted out of office for a generation. Good luck with that.
Nuclear power isn't dead. It isn't even dying. China made obligatory noises about 'reviewing' nuclear projects after Fukushima Construction has not actually halted and nothing has been canceled. Ultimately it will amount to a couple siting changes and little else. Sweden is pushing back at German nuclear energy policy changes and has no intention of abandoning its own nuclear energy. Neither will France.
Germany is the victim of a large amount Chernobyl fallout, so nuclear is a bad word in German politics. Germany's neighbors, on the other hand, are not uniformly following Germany's lead. It is rather likely that Germany will find itself replacing some of its lost generation capacity with foreign nuclear power.
As for the US? Investors are not going to put up billions of dollars for pressure groups to play with in court for twenty years; that money is going to China. Nothing is going to happen one why or the other until after the currency collapse and breakup. We're a debtor nation balkanized around our welfare state, so we don't get to build, replace or otherwise change much of anything until long after the public debt bubble pops.
The power generation system you have now will be what you have in 2026. If you're lucky.
You've noticed the vanishing party affiliation phenomenon. This appears most blatantly when a leftist politician is the subject of some scandal; you may search high and low but you won't find the party affiliation mentioned by the media. That is left exclusively to the detractors, who are then found to be 'uncivil' or some such.
Given the current disposition of the US congress, the same bias manifests itself as using the term "congress" only when the malcontents are pleased. All other times we get "house republicans."
They know you notice. They just don't give a damn.
cheap consumer-level goods that places like China and Vietnam are currently specializing in
Nothing Apple makes is 'cheap.'
Your understanding of the situation is badly out of date. China is forging the components of engines and drive trains and refining the ore to feed those activities. They're burning more coal than the US and that energy is going into HEAVY industry. The heaviest industries on Earth.
GM is selling more cars in China than it is in the US. In case you really are as out of touch as you appear to be, GM is NOT filling container ships on the west coast of the US with new cars and shipping them to China. The cars are built IN CHINA. The Chinese won't tolerate any other arrangement.
The Chinese consume most of the finished vehicles produced (18+ million in 2010), but components (engines, transmissions, etc.) are exported by the container ship full and many major auto manufactures are building heavy components there. The strikes that occurred in early 2010 were at Toyota, Honda and Ford subsidiary component plants, among others.
They're also building airliners, nuclear reactors, earth moving equipment, ships, advanced warplanes and semiconductor foundries. The mines, forges, refineries and furnaces that make it all possible are Chinese as well.
The US is where GE, GM, Caterpillar and Westinghouse executives keep their wives; a legacy industrial nation with lots of legacy capacity and negligible new development. And no, it isn't sustainable; we've got 2-4 years before the creditors put an end to the US debt circus, then we'll pull this.
Widespread use of this will make marketers focus on new tracking techniques. As it is they rely on cookies that are easily eradicated with simple tools, but are usually left alone by users. They don't have to remain that easy to thwart. They won't if all their analysis goes to hell 24h after 10.3 is released and auto-installed everywhere.
Pointing out Dan Rather is all too easy when the left gets upset at the Internets for failing to fall in line. A more recent (yesterday) example; we've been hearing for weeks about the 'challenge' to conservatives in Canada. The BBC says the race has tightened and Canadian voters will throw the conservative bums out!
Reality: Canada's Conservatives score massive election win. The media had gotten so carried away that "the scale of victory came as a surprise."
Wisconsin voters hate the new Governor and his anti-union crimes. The media has the polls to prove it! That's why incumbent judge Prosser will get voted out. Except he didn't.
Lets not forget NPR execs schlepping around with purported Muslim Brotherhood types, spouting off stereotypical nonsense right out of the moonbat echo chamber. These are the numpties running the media. Mustn't question their credibility...you stupid knuckle dragger.
The MSM is spin. Mostly statist left wing spin, with some equally heinous counter spin from the right (Fox et al.) That the non-existent credibility of our media doesn't somehow instantly dispel all "birther" conspiracy is a surprise to fools alone.
So, 10 or 15 years ago, when everyone began being raised isolated from anything remotely dangerous, not allowed outside, and were pandered to to be sure they didn't have their feelings hurt when we tried to teach them to spell ... we foresaw an entire generation of children that would be too stupid to do anything, and so spoiled and coddled to that they would expect the world to care for them and give them everything they want.
Some knew then we would end up with kids that would never really understand basic science well enough to go into university and not be completely wrong about how things work. Chemical free chemistry sets? No surprise there. We now have a generation that has been raised entirely with safety scissors, glitter, and nothing but comforting reassurance that it's OK to spell words any way you please, and have never cared about the sum of 2+2.
"Doomed as a species" was brought to mind. The places that didn't intentionally educate their children to be simpletons now have the advantage.
How much of this was fear of litigation, and how much was fallout from anti-chemical hysteria?