Sen. Harry Reid, NV: Wildfires caused by global warming

[[email protected]]

On Oct 26, 2:29 am, [email protected] wrote:
On Oct 26, 6:06 am, James Arthur wrote:
On Oct 25, 2:52 pm, [email protected] wrote:
On Oct 25, 6:36 pm, James Arthur wrote:
[...]
We've been protecting the world since WWII. That's expensive.
But that's not where most of the money is going.
True, now. Most of our money is presently spent on ineffectual social
programs.
Not true.
http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm
Bill, that link is just plain embarrassing--no wonder you have such
wacky, misbegotten theories.

I rather liked the way they lumped the interest on the national debt
into military expenditure, on the not-unreasonable basis that this was
just paying for previous wars.

That's one of their most glaring errors--wrongly attributing all debt
to warfare.

We've spent a great deal more on welfare, Medicare, Medicaid and
Johnson's war on poverty. Social programs have been roughly 2/3rds the
budget for quite some time; by any fair measure, they deserve an equal
proportion of the debt.

That's not opinion, that's accounting...amortization.

It's opinion. Your national debt has been built up over a long time -
much longer than the period that you have been spending 2/3rds of your
budget on what you chose to classify as social programs, and you could
attribute each dollar of debt to the expenditure that incurred it.
That would be a valid system of amortization, Claiming that the debt
should be assigned on the basis of the way you spend money now is not.

(If you had three resistors dissipating heat, would you blame one for
the entire loss?)

An entirely false analogy - resistors are dissipating heat now. If you
were to talk about the heat stored in the heat sink, you could find
that one resistor had been responsible for getting the heat sink hot,
even through the other two are now dissipating as much heat.

I regard it as effectual mostly at raising the cost of medical care,
and secondarily, a means of re-distributing wealth. And it's
socialized medicine--not a road, not part of the defense of the
nation, not maintaining the means of governance, nor part of some
other Constitutional purpose.

You are indulging in the standard right-wing nit-wittery here, and
incidentally exploding any claim you might make to exceptional
intelligence (as opposed to a capacity to score well on IQ tests).

The primary purpose of a public health system is a defence against
epidemics. In order to be effective in this role it has to offer a
service to the elderly and the indigient, who are most at risk form
infectious diseases, so that they will come to the hospitals when they
get sick, rather than staying at home and infecting their neighbours
and relatives.

Socialism provides a more positive rationale for offering this
service, but intelligent self-interest works just a well. Bismark
hated socialism, and invented national insurance in part to reduce the
electoral appeal of his left-wing political opponents, but he also saw
it as something the national government ought to be doing to improve
the effectiveness of the state.

http://countrystudies.us/germany/112.htm

Of course it is--as a retirement or investment plan the system has an
appalling efficiency: a large fraction of money is lost the moment
it's sent in. IOW, a huge NEGATIVE return. If saved in their own
accounts, people would still have that money which their government
squanders, plus interest.

All retirement investment systems have that problem. Sadly, people
generally don't save on their own account, so that is a non-
solution.

I've explained why their accounting is improper. Either they're
nitwits, or blackguards.

Your explained why you think their accounting is improper. Your own
approach is equally arbitrary.

Are you a nitwit or a blackguard?

My remark was immodest and I regret it, but my god you're dense Bill--
you've still way underestimated me, you are again far off the mark,
have not understood what I said, have again misapplied a bunch of
wrong assumptions, and then woven another complicated story to
explain.

So explain why you think that you are couple of standard deviations
above "genius" level.
I've not seen your name attached to any great discovery or any other
remarkable performance, so I was pretty much compelled to assume that
you were basing the claim on the results of some IQ test or other.

Which was my point--you leap to conclusions not supported by the data.

So what conclusion should I have leapt to?

And, when your conclusion is shown conclusively to be wrong, you
equivocate.

You haven't shown that my conclusion was wrong, merely that you don't
like it.

Do provide some data to support your point of view.

If you persist even when wrong, people will think you wrong when you
persist.

So prove me wrong ...

 

[John Fields]

Clarification: By 'equivocate' here I don't mean 'dissemble,' but
'back-step, spin, re-cast, kludge, revise; tergiversate.'

I'm not accusing you of lying, and hope you didn't take it that way.
Sorry for any confusion.

 

[[email protected]]

I certainly don't like making errors, and I don't do it often - less
often than you'd like to think - but I do admit errors when I've made
them.

James Arthur hasn't - in fact - shown that I've made an error. He
doesn't like the conclusions I've drawn but he hasn't adduced a
scintilla of evidence to show that I'm wrong.

If he can produce such evidence then I certainly will admit that I'm
wrong, but I'll be a bit surprised if he can come up with anything
convincing.

 

[krw]

More like "goal post relocation".

 

[JosephKK]

[email protected] [email protected] posted to
sci.electronics.design:

Happily, the case for global warming is being made by scientists,
who are permanently open to continued testing, extension and
refinement.

The case against global warming is essentially made by exaggerating
the importance of the issues being raised by those scientists
engaged in that process of testing, extension and refinement, in
much the same way that creationists and "intelligent designers" mine
the biological literature for differences of opinion,

You should note that John's URL points to the minority pages of the
senate committee on the enviroment and public works. The majority
pages present a rather different opinion.

You clearly dis-understood. It is politics. A casual glance at the
data shows that the current northern hemisphere warming trend is
still well below the noise floor.

 

[John Larkin]

"Weasel."

John

 

[JosephKK]

[email protected] [email protected] posted to
sci.electronics.design:

Happily, the case for global warming is being made by scientists,
who are permanently open to continued testing, extension and
refinement.

The case against global warming is essentially made by exaggerating
the importance of the issues being raised by those scientists
engaged in that process of testing, extension and refinement, in
much the same way that creationists and "intelligent designers" mine
the biological literature for differences of opinion,

You should note that John's URL points to the minority pages of the
senate committee on the enviroment and public works. The majority
pages present a rather different opinion.

Oh my hell, science by majority vote? Is that what you are saying?

 

[krw]

That's one of their most glaring errors--wrongly attributing all debt
to warfare.

We've spent a great deal more on welfare, Medicare, Medicaid and
Johnson's war on poverty. Social programs have been roughly 2/3rds the
budget for quite some time; by any fair measure, they deserve an equal
proportion of the debt.

The numbers (either Sloman's pack of lies, nor the Federal numbers)
don't show the state and local portions of social welfare either.

That's not opinion, that's accounting...amortization.

(If you had three resistors dissipating heat, would you blame one for
the entire loss?)
No, he'd blame George Bush.

I regard it as effectual mostly at raising the cost of medical care,
and secondarily, a means of re-distributing wealth. And it's
socialized medicine--not a road, not part of the defense of the
nation, not maintaining the means of governance, nor part of some
other Constitutional purpose.

Not only is it redistribution of wealth, but it's redistribution of
wealth from the poorest to the richest.

Of course it is--as a retirement or investment plan the system has an
appalling efficiency: a large fraction of money is lost the moment
it's sent in. IOW, a huge NEGATIVE return. If saved in their own
accounts, people would still have that money which their government
squanders, plus interest.

And businesses would have use of the money (thus pay that interest).

I've explained why their accounting is improper. Either they're
nitwits, or blackguards.

Sloman is the latter, so what do you expect him to come up with?

<IQ crap snipped>

 

[James Arthur]

On Oct 27, 4:46 pm, [email protected] wrote:

On Oct 26, 7:25 pm, James Arthur wrote:
On Oct 26, 2:29 am, [email protected] wrote:
On Oct 26, 6:06 am, James Arthur wrote:
On Oct 25, 2:52 pm, [email protected] wrote:
On Oct 25, 6:36 pm, James Arthur wrote:
[...]
We've been protecting the world since WWII. That's expensive.
But that's not where most of the money is going.
True, now. Most of our money is presently spent on ineffectual social
programs.
Not true.
http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm
Bill, that link is just plain embarrassing--no wonder you have such
wacky, misbegotten theories.
I rather liked the way they lumped the interest on the national debt
into military expenditure, on the not-unreasonable basis that this was
just paying for previous wars.

That's one of their most glaring errors--wrongly attributing all debt
to warfare.

We've spent a great deal more on welfare, Medicare, Medicaid and
Johnson's war on poverty. Social programs have been roughly 2/3rds the
budget for quite some time; by any fair measure, they deserve an equal
proportion of the debt.

That's not opinion, that's accounting...amortization.

It's opinion. Your national debt has been built up over a long time -
much longer than the period that you have been spending 2/3rds of your
budget on what you chose to classify as social programs, and you could
attribute each dollar of debt to the expenditure that incurred it.
That would be a valid system of amortization, Claiming that the debt
should be assigned on the basis of the way you spend money now is not.

Here you have a point--the amount of blame for any annual deficit
should be apportioned year-by-year according to each category's
proportion of that year's budget.

OTOH, it's preposterous to say that all defense spending is spent on
warfare. Comparing war- and peace-time figures clearly illustrates
that point. So, properly, your link should only attribute *excess*--
not all--defense spending to warfare.

Also, a large part of defense spending comes back as revenue -- taxes
on profits and wages -- offsetting something in the vicinity of 25-40%
of the amount actually spent. When it comes to apportioning deficits
this revenue should properly be deducted.

Anyway, the site's methods and figures being absurd on their face, I
didn't previously bother with the minutiae. Since you insist on
pressing the point, I took several hours and investigated.

I complied the following data with the most generous possible
assumptions in your favor: a) that all defense spending is for war,
and b) that defense spending does not produce any offsetting revenue.

Consider this an engineer's guide to the question; an approximation,
not perfect, but close enough for our purposes.

=======
RESULTS, adjusted to 2004 dollars per the Consumer Price Index data:
=======
(view tables in Courier font)

Historical Budget Data from Congressional Budget Office (1).
Inflation adjustment figures per US Bureau of Labor Statistics'
Consumer Price Index data (2)


TOTAL EXPENDITURE, 1962-2004, (all figures in 2004 dollars)
===========================================================
Social Security 12,541 x 10^9 dollars
Medicare 5,079 "
Medicaid 2,432 "
Income Security 4,301 "
Other Retirement
and disability 4,099 "
Defense 15,699 "
------
TOTAL of above 44,151 "

TOTAL, all outlays,
for all purposes 62,269 "


PUBLIC DEBT 1962-2004, (all figures in 2004 dollars)
==========================================================
Total debt, 1962 $1,552 "
Total increase in debt,
1962-2004: $8,554 "

Total portion of increased debt apportionable
to defense (3): $2,096 "


==========
CONCLUSION
==========
Even if we assume all debt existing in 1962 was war debt, and all
defense spending since 1962 has been for warfare, the two together are
about $3,600 x 10^9, roughly 1/3rd of the current U.S. national debt.

So: attributing 80% of the interest on the nation debt to past
warfare--or even defense spending--is WRONG.


With best regards,
James Arthur

~~~~~~~~~~~~
NOTES
(1) Appendix F of the CBO publication The Budget and Economic
Outlook: Fiscal Years 2006 to 2015,

released on January 25, 2005.

(2) ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt, 26-Oct-2007

(3) = sum [1962..2004] of [(defense / budget) * deficit]

 

[James Arthur]

==========
CONCLUSION
==========
Even if we assume all debt existing in 1962 was war debt, and all
defense spending since 1962 has been for warfare, the two together are
about $3,600 x 10^9, roughly 1/3rd of the current U.S. nation debt.

Groan--the hazards of posting late and bleary-eyed. Please amend to:

Even if we assume all debt existing in 1962 was war debt, and all
defense spending since 1962 has been for warfare, the two factors
together would contribute about $3,600 x 10^9 (roughly 1/3rd) to the
current U.S. national debt.

So: attributing 80% of the interest on the national debt to past
warfare--or even defense spending--is WRONG.

James Arthur

 

[James Arthur]

More like "goal post relocation".

I admit--despite myself, this made me laugh out loud.

Best,
James Arthur

 

[James Arthur]

The numbers (either Sloman's pack of lies, nor the Federal numbers)
don't show the state and local portions of social welfare either.

Excellent point--my figures do not reflect the full extent of the
matter.

Cheers,
James Arthur

 

[Simon S Aysdie]

Rubbish. The point about education is that it changes you, if it
works. Socks you can put on and take off, and give to someone else to
put on and take off, but you have to work hard to acquire an
education, and once you've got it you can't take it off and give it to
somebody else. You can teach what you know to other people - if you've
got the talent, and someone pays you to keep you alive while you are
doing it, but you can't stack it up and sell it in bulk,

That is extent of your beef? That human capital is not an end
consumer product? (And I reckon it actually is in many instances.)

You've always got that option.

Maybe people could do that if the government didn't take so much away,
and distort the prices of the eduction market so badly. No one knows
what education of any particular sort "ought" to cost (what it is
"worth"). That was my sole point: the price system is distorted.

 

[Simon S Aysdie]

Selling education doesn't work quite the same way as selling socks and
bread.

Sure, selling cars, coffee, and futures are different from education
and each other too. The one thing about different is they aren't the
same. laughs

If you can't see the difference, your opinion isn't worth attending
to.

I don't see the difference in any way that is not trivial.

 

[[email protected]]

That is extent of your beef? That human capital is not an end
consumer product? (And I reckon it actually is in many instances.)

Simple-minded "perfect market" thinking doesn't work too well with
simple consumables like socks and bread. It works even less well with
an intangible product like education.

Maybe people could do that if the government didn't take so much away,
and distort the prices of the education market so badly.

So, how do they distort the prices in the education market?

And how does this make individual study any more difficult? Formal
education is a lot easier than studying on your own, simply because in
formal education someone structures the course for you, and monitors
your progress through it. How does your "government intervention" make
this even more difficult?

No one knows what education of any particular sort "ought" to cost (what it is
"worth"). That was my sole point: the price system is distorted.

If nobody knows how much education ought to cost, how can you know
that the price system is distorted?

 

[[email protected]]

Sure, selling cars, coffee, and futures are different from education
and each other too. The one thing about different is they aren't the
same. laughs

You are assuming that a free market is the only possible way to
estimate the value of an activity.

If you wanted to treat education in this way, the education process
would be an expensive process applied to students, whose costs would
be the those of building and maintaining the schools and paying the
teachers. The product would the value added to the successful students
- which varies enormously from student to student, and tends to
increase as the students get older and further removed from the
educational system.

Students making rational choices would try to minimise their
espenditure on the educational process and go for short courses that
maximised their chances of coming out qualified for a high-paying job.

This wouldn't necessarily give us the number of medico's, lawyers,
engineers and historians that our society needs to keep working, and
ignores the fact that the students have to like medicine, law,
engineering or history in order to stick at their courses long enough
to learn enough to be useful.

The government may be "distorting the market", but the real distortion
is looking at the process as a market.

 

[James Arthur]

Simple-minded "perfect market" thinking doesn't work too well with
simple consumables like socks and bread. It works even less well with
an intangible product like education.



So, how do they distort the prices in the education market?

By subsidizing it.

Cheers,
James Arthur

 

[[email protected]]

There's an unmarked snip here - we were talking about self-
instruction.

By subsidizing it.

That's the mechanism. What is the nature of the distortion in the
prices and the "market"?

Is the distortion caused by subsidy of itself bad?

The intended effect of the government subsidies is that more students
get an education, and the education they get is better. There are -
unsurprisingly - a lot of academic studies that show that investment
in education gives very high returns, albeit unpredictably and over
the longer term, so it isn't a field where venture capitalists are
likely to want to put their money, though they are happy enough to
invest in the industries created by the unpredictable results of
subsidised education and research.

Think about the wealth created by the Bell Telephone Labs, effectively
dismantled when the rump of the Bell Telephone company had to conform
to shareholder expectations.

 

[[email protected]]

[email protected] [email protected] posted to
sci.electronics.design:








You clearly dis-understood. It is politics. A casual glance at the
data shows that the current northern hemisphere warming trend is
still well below the noise floor.

A casual glance at the data may well suggest that the current northern
hemisphere warming trend is still well below the noise floor - 0.7
degrees Celcius is about a tenth of the day-to-night variation around
here.

More careful examination shows it to be a real - in the sense of
statistically significant - effect. Finding a generally acceptable way
to filter out the predictable variations in temperature to get a
visually persuasive display - the famous "hockey stick" - is rather
more difficult.

 

[[email protected]]

[email protected] [email protected] posted to
sci.electronics.design:









Oh my hell, science by majority vote? Is that what you are saying.

I was merely pointing out that the URL in question did represent a
minority view. In science, the majority doesn't have to be right, but
the anti-global warming minority doesn't look much like a group of
ground-breaking revolutionaries. In fact they look and behave very
much like ideologically motivated reactionaries - they have a lot in
common with the creationists and intelligent designers who don't
believe in evolution.

As Richard Henry points out, the ranking senator on the committee is a
fundamentalist right wing nut case

http://www.impactpress.com/articles/winter06/bestwinter06.html

There are less partisan assessments available on the web, but they all
report much the same facts - Senator James Inhofe is the guy who gets
quoted when reporters want to satirise U.S. opinion.