What do you expect from a nation whose national anthem asks a question?--Alaric Phlogiston
Eight California cities and counties, including Richmond, which is home to a large Chevron refinery, have filed lawsuits against a range of oil, gas, and coal companies seeking billions of dollars to help pay for past and future damages linked to climate change. On January 25 the city of Boulder, Colorado took legal action to force fossil fuel companies to cover the costs of damages caused by severe past and future weather events. The City of New York sued five big oil companies, including ExxonMobil, BP and Shell, for damages related to Hurricane Sandy in 2012. According to Mayor Bill de Blasio, greenhouse gas emissions from the production and consumption of fossil fuels precipitated a change in global climate that caused the storm to hit the city.
We simply have a lower demand for cause and effect now.
We simply have a lower demand for cause and effect now.
It is difficult to imagine that the large data companies, after being exposed for their incredible power and influence, will not have jealous politicians start to initiate controls and regulations over them in the guise of righteousness.
NPR (3/22) reports the US is “undercounting opioid-related overdoses by 20 to 35 percent, according to a study published in February in the journal Addiction.” NPR reports that data from death certificates “move from coroners and medical examiners to states and eventually the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” which reports more than 42,000 people died from opioid-related overdoses in 2016; but “an analysis of overdoses that weren’t linked to specific drugs” puts the number of opioid overdose deaths “closer to 50,000.”
A tariff (or its equivalent) generally ends up being paid by domestic purchasers, since they translate into a higher domestic price. Foreign producers pay the tax, but get reimbursed by the higher price they can charge in the protected market. It is precisely to increase the domestic price they get that domestic producers lobby for the tariff.
So tariffs are in essence a domestic tax.
So tariffs are in essence a domestic tax.
“Let’s be a dragon today.” This was the advice given the girl before she won the snowboarding pipe event in the Olympics, by her father.
Re: high school shootings. Sooner or later we will do what democracies do best, attack the problem with aggressive symbolism. We will then reward ourselves with debating why the symbolism did not work and divert ourselves with fine-tuning it.
Madness and freedom are a bad mix. So are freedom and science.
This is from Zeynep Tufekci in Wired: "In the 20th century, the US passed laws that outlawed lead in paint and gasoline, that defined how much privacy a landlord needs to give his tenants, and that determined how much a phone company can surveil its customers. We can decide how we want to handle digital surveillance, attention-channeling, harassment, data collection, and algorithmic decisionmaking. We just need to start the discussion. Now."
So it's not companies responding to public outcry that should fix this situation. Tufekci wants some government intervention to fix it. Which means, almost certainly, censorship. And, ironically, the author seems to think that the source of government's spying on its public is just the one to fix companies who spy on the public.
So it's not companies responding to public outcry that should fix this situation. Tufekci wants some government intervention to fix it. Which means, almost certainly, censorship. And, ironically, the author seems to think that the source of government's spying on its public is just the one to fix companies who spy on the public.
Who is....Hedy Lamarr?
Lemieux notes:
"The Enlightenment was the European ideological movement that, in the 17th and 18th century, emphasized reason, human flourishing, and individual liberty. It provided the intellectual foundation of the American Revolution. It brought the individual at the center of the social, economic, and political scene. Even when Enlightenment thinkers developed arguments for the state, their goal was to secure the individual's property or to found the state on "the consent of every individual," as John Lock wrote. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith writes "an individual," "the individual," or "individuals" nearly a hundred times.
....the Wall Street Journal's Saturday Essay was adapted from a forthcoming book by Steven Pinker, the well-known Harvard University psychologist, titled "The Enlightenment Is Working." The essay celebrated the Enlightenment's values and their impact on today's life. Against the usual gloom, Pinker argued that never has the world been more democratic, wealthier, and more promising for.... For whom? That's what was surprising in Pinker's piece: nowhere does the word "individual" appear. But there are many "people" and "nations."
Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government. -Jeremy Bentham, jurist and philosopher (15 Feb 1748-1832)
"The U.S. record suggests that indeed “progress was the great staple of the country.” Traditions, class lines, embedded history – all these dominated technology in the United States far less than they did in those nations from which the immigrants came. Few Americans asked the status or heritage of anyone who proposed a new procedure, a new product. They asked, rather: will it work? That pragmatic attitude led to a persistent development of better items – from an apple corer to save work for the housewife, to a compound engine that drove steamships faster."-- Wesleyan University economic historian Stanley Lebergott
That said, progress is probably not enough for most, but it certainly is better than stagnation and decline.
"Frankly, the United States is under attack," Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told the Senate Intelligence Committee, adding that Russia is attempting to "degrade our democratic values and weaken our alliances."
Coats said Russian President Vladimir Putin was emboldened by Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential elections and is targeting the midterms.
"There should be no doubt that (Putin) views the past effort as successful," said Coats who was joined Tuesday by the nation's other top intelligence officials, including CIA Director Mike Pompeo, National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2008/10/downside-of-tolerence.html
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steeleydock.blogspot.com
"ACORN had been given a compelling incentive, as CRA allowed the organizations to collect a fee from the banks for their services in marketi...
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The prominence of political opinions of athletes and celebrities is partly because of simple name recognition but is also because intelligent political explanations are few and far between and anything will fill the void. Murdering school children should stimulate some serious discussion but does not. That is a very bad sign.
There a story about inherited experience that is shocking. It is a difficult topic as epigenetics might confuse matters. Just when everything seems straight-forward, Lamarck emerges again. Here is one article from Scientific American.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fearful-memories-passed-down/
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www.scientificamerican.com
Latest news and features on science issues that matter including earth, environment, and space. Get your science news from the most trusted source!
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The FBI said on Friday that it mistakenly didn’t investigate a credible and specific tip about the teenager charged with storming into a Florida high school and killing 17 people. But don't worry; when they get a lot more power they'll do better.
There is an odd contradiction between the declared wish to live and let live — “diversity!”, “don’t judge!” — and the actual behaviour, which is ruthlessly and priggishly judgmental. They never stop drafting acts of uniformity, always in the name of the collective against the individual. The minority of one is the most oppressed minority of all.--Ridley:
Interesting story: The death of Russian citizens in Syria from a US coalition strike last week, which has been played down by both Moscow and Washington, has exposed the role of Russian mercenaries in the multi-front conflict.
"....following the passage of NAFTA, Michael Kinsley wrote In that “when a $16-an-hour American loses his job to a $3-an-hour Mexican,” fairness and political prudence dictate that he be compensated for his loss.
Maybe Kinsley is right regarding political prudence, but fairness seems to dictate just the opposite. Here we have an American who has devoted his life to charging the rest of us $16 for something we ought to have been able to buy for $3. What fairness dictates is that he and others who have benefited from protectionism should compensate the majority of their countrymen who have borne the burden."---Steve Landsburg
Hedy Lamarr, apart from having been one of the best-looking women in the world, was the co-inventor of a gyroscopic system for guiding submarine torpedoes. She apparently was a brilliant mind.
An interesting observation by Will: "The last surge of infrastructure spending, in the Obama administration's stimulus, taught a useful lesson: Because of the ever-thickening soup of regulations, there are no "shovel-ready" projects. So, such spending cannot be nimble enough to ameliorate business cycles."
So government meddling hinders government meddling?
New research into the world's most famous medieval manuscript, the Book of Kells, has revealed a surprising new possibility: the manuscript may be two separate works, created a half century apart and later combined.
It is good to see so many public figures announce their opposition to school shootings.
Since 1950, our increasing longevity — an amazing 10 extra years of life for the average American — has been mainly the result of pharmaceutical breakthroughs. Americans consume about 46% of the world's brand-name drugs but are responsible for 70% of patented drugmakers' profits. France, Norway, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Italy and other government-run health systems buy identical American drugs at bargain prices — usually half what Americans pay. These state-run health systems often threaten to exclude a drug from their country entirely, even if it could save lives, to extract a deep discount. Norway barred Roche's breast cancer drug Perjeta until the company slashed the price far below what Medicare pays.
AAAaaaaaannnnnndddddd......a graph:
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