You realize that you’re holding him to a higher standard than you live by, right?
The sad part is you aren’t stupid, Rand is stupid. But you, you’re obviously smart. You just want to believe shit that may be in the minority but agrees with your biases. It’s frustrating, because you appear have a first rate mind constrained by rigid ideology. [/sincere_for_once]
It is interesting that enemies are more friendly.
BTW I do agree that it is not fair to dump on **Sam **just because he is Canadian.
(There are other reasons to get on his case, so lets not lose focus) 
But Sam, you still haven’t answered the question…why DO you hate America??? :eek:
-XT
I lost the fight at home? I take it you’re unfamiliar with Alberta?
I think it is the lack of universal health care access in the USA…
I keed, I keed. 
(On edit: and seeing the last reply from Sam… Yes, so far you lost Sam. 
)
I’ll give you the Honduras thing. I didn’t want to see another Chavez, and that’s what Honduras would have had. I also didn’t want to see the Honduran people go through what the Venezuelans are going to go through before that clown is out of power.
But as for Climate Change, you do recall that A) I believe that climate change is happening, and B) I agree that man is helping to cause it. That’s not ‘denialist’. My real issues with climate change policy is that it won’t work. It’s pie-in-the-sky, it won’t make anything better, and it will simply cause even more economic chaos.
I also think that projections of what the climate will be in 100 years, which are necessarily based on economic projections 100 years forward, are little more than guesses. As we’ve seen in the last two years, economic conditions change rapidly.
It’s because we’re soaking up all the *Liberty *on the continent. Sorry fellas.
It’s that fucking Justin Bieber.
I was going to ignore this, but you’ve got me curious: Just what conspiracy theory am I pushing?
I’ll agree with you about the suckitude of the policies (in pretty much every country). One problem IMO, is that until recently, the deniers and those with their heads stuck firmly in the sand (waves at Rand Rover) held sway at the higher levels of political power (hello Republicans). This meant that any policy about climate change was controlled by big business, and was simply lip service at best, doomed to fail, or actively obstructionist at worst.
And yes, I also think its great that Canada has embraced debt reduction, which has then resulted in lower taxes and a solid economy. And I’m also very pleased with the soclal liberalism that we enjoy; freedom from religion in government, rights for gays, a decent social safety net, and serious discussions about tackling poverty.
Austrian Economics, baby. 
Or I could say you’re just plain old, down home wrong.
There is no such “fight”, fight’s over, it was a draw. Thesis smacked right into antithesis, and then there was a great deal of roaring and screaming, and the synthesis is gradually dawning on us. Pining away for a “free market” that has never existed is nostalgia without history, it never happened.
Similarly, state control of demand is clearly not superior to consumer control of demand, so long as economic access can be made reasonably just. And, as I’m sure you know, “free market” hooha has frequently been little more than an excuse to leave money and power in the hands to which it is accustomed.
We might have room for you over here on the conservative wing of the extreme left. You could lecture the hotheads, give them a stern talking to, give them the benefit of your age and wisdom. I’d do it myself, but I have too much fun to be a very convincing scold.
Well done, Sam. Not everyone ignores your arguments
The problem with that point of view is that indeed it leads one to support coups at the drop of a hat. As I said before** the peaceful change of the government in Chile** (from socialist government to a conservative one) demonstrated how misleading that point of view is. It is the people that has to decide when silly guys like Chavez should go, not the military.
Well you really fooled many then.
There were very, very long pieces posted by you that supported many denialists points. Specially when they criticized the conflicts of interests of the scientists.
What do we have now?
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/08/northgate_another_retraction.php
Retractions and apologies, to him and exoneration to the ones implied in “Climategate”
As for economic chaos, My point has been that even I can identify several stupid efforts going on, but it is silly to assume most will create economic chaos, unfortunately many politicians here (specially the Republicans) deny that there is any AGW going on, and therefore **ALL **efforts are being opposed to.
That is criminal IMHO.
The climate blogger at “Only in it for the gold” (the title is making fun of one of the most misleading points of the denier media) points out that the ones demanding that nothing should be done are not understanding how researchers actually see the current and future risks.
(The writer is making fun at the guys of “Red vs Blue” that use Halo characters in their sketches.)
And the 0.7 C rise is what we have right now.
Economically speaking it seems to me that not doing the proper thing will be more disastrous to the world economy than doing something about it now.
I should clarify my position a little: I believe that the best evidence we have is that man-made climate change is happening. However, I believe there is more uncertainty around that conclusion than you probably do. I’m still open to evidence proving otherwise. I think the basic science is solid. I think the mechanism for heat retention is pretty obvious. I’m not so convinced that we understand the feedback mechanisms of climate well enough to project our measured trends particularly far into the future.
I think climate change models suffer from the same problem as our current economic models - they’re only as good as the assumptions you bake into them, and the climate, like the economy, is a complex system with feedback loops and millions of variables. Iterated over time, small changes in assumptions or missed variables can cause huge changes in output. So I am skeptical of their accuracy as you project farther forward into the future.
In addition, the estimates for carbon consumption over the next 100 years require estimates of economic output, and that’s a pretty hard thing to pin down. It also ignores technological change and discontinuities like breakthrough technologies. So I’m not convinced of the value of the forecasts, either.
This doesn’t mean climate change isn’t happening. It means it’s very hard to get from there to being able to figure out how much it’s going to cost us, and therefore how much we should spend to prevent it.
I agree with everything you just said. I love Canada. I think we swung too far to the left in the Trudeau years, and we’ve been recovering from that for a long time, but since then we have had relatively steady economic leadership from both parties. We have slowly reduced our size of government in the most sensible way - by just not growing it quite as much as GDP over a period of a decade and a half. Credit to Liberals and Conservatives both. Even the NDP in Manitoba has run a tight ship.
The result is that we have the most stable economy in the world, a deficit that’s only 2.5% of GDP in the middle of a recession, and we’ve positioned ourselves to attract business and investment in the 21st century.
Not only are our taxes low, but they’re structured very well. They’re less progressive than they are in the U.S. because we have a 5% sales tax, while our overall tax burden is roughly the same or slightly less after next year. We have low corporate taxes, dividend taxes and capital gains taxes. We have no inheritance tax, but instead we sensibly tax inheritance income like other income.
I also agree with our social policies. Alberta was the model for welfare reform in Canada, and was also the model for welfare reform in the U.S. Since then, I think our welfare policy has been about right. I’m a firm supporter of gay rights. I even think our health care system is preferable to what the Americans just concocted. Especially since we give our provinces more control and allow them to adapt to their own economic conditions and we allow a significant amount of private services.
I think we can do better liberalizing our drug laws - it’s entirely possible that the U.S. will get legalization of marijuana before we do. And I am a big opponent of our hate speech laws. Canada’s not perfect. We could drop our provincial trade barriers and shipping subsidies and farm price supports, for example. But the big picture looks pretty good.
There was a time when I seriously considered moving to the U.S about 20 years ago. That was partly because I was running a business and at the time our city had an NDP mayor who hated business and I had offers to take it south. But we got rid of her eventually, and Alberta under Klein moved to the right, and I was happy. I’m not so thrilled with the Stelmach government, but that problem looks to be fixing itself.
Austrian economics is a conspiracy theory? You lost me on that.
I’m not a pure Austrian anyway. I think they were right about information, complexity, and the impossibility of efficient centralized decision-making. I think they’re right to reject the modeling of production, demand and labor as aggregates for modeling purposes - too much information is lost that way. I think they are right to put their focus on the ‘real’ underlying economy and what happens when monetary and fiscal policy create distortions in the real economy.
If that’s a conspiracy theory, I guess I’m guilty. I still don’t get the conspiracy, though.
Shit, I did this mild pitting because your OP was a crap partisan hack job.
And still waiting for those cites where you were bashing Bush for being fiscally irresponsible (that whole cutting taxes and skyrocketing spending). Ya, and called Bush out for simply taking the whole Iraq costs off the government balance sheet.
And where do you blog all at Austrian economics from? You’re new to that meme on the boards?
You can call Krugman a liberal all you want. Calling him a librul economist is fucking dishonest bullshit. I’ve called you on this before.
And by the way, I spent about 10 minutes trying to find the Palin stuff I remember. The search doesn’t work well enough to do so and I’m not going to waste more than 10 minutes on such drivel that stank the first time around. However, I did find this really nice gem
Circa March 2008 but first a disclaimer. Ya, sure, you can cherry pick any poster with 20,000 posts and make 'em look like an ass. This was just happenstance, but ironically appropriate now.
“First, the assumption that things are horrible and going to get worse is not not necessarily valid. The economic problem the U.S. faces right now is somewhat transitory - the financial crisis will pass eventually. Structurally, the U.S. economy is in better shape than most. The U.S. has lower taxes and higher productivity than most other countries. The population isn’t as old as it is in Europe and Japan. It’s somewhat isolated from radical Islamic extremism, which I think is going to be a huge problem for Europe in the next decade.”
It’s interesting to me how we Americans are supposed to be intimately familiar with all the internecine goings on in countries far across the sea, and we get roundly excoriated when we don’t. Now without regard to the fact that the average person in England, France or Spain most likely doesn’t know any more about, say, Australia, than we do about them (and really, how many people in other countries keep up with what’s going on in other counties across oceans and thousands of miles away?), we have Sam being criticized and Pitted for doing the very thing that so many of the board’s liberal intellectual-wannabes insist that Americans should do: become knowledgeable about what’s going on in countries other than their own.
I’d wager that Sam knows more about more aspects of American economics and government than at least 95% of Americans do. I’d also wager the everyone here could learn a lot from his posts - if not on one subject, than most certainly on others.
But no. As soon as the board’s liberal posters see that a conservative poster has made some assertion or observation, the SDMB hive mind dictates that it has to be shouted down at all costs - with the result, in this case, that the conservative poster in question is getting flamed for the very behavior that many of the board’s American and foreign posters claim they should be engaging in the first place.
Perhaps it would be more honest if the board’s American and foreign posters were to assert that stupid, ignorant Americans are notoriously lax in learning about the superior leftist aspects of European counties and failing to adopt similar points of view themselves. Because that’s what the complaint that Americans don’t know enough about the rest of the world is really all about.
So I have to say it’s most amusing to see conservative posters get criticized around here for being “partisan” their views. This board has a bad case of Dan Ratheritis (explained by Bernard Goldberg in his book Bias: How the Media Distort the News) - it’s members view everyone in the country (and on this board) as being either reasonable, right thinking American citizens…or right-wing nutjobs! There’s no room for dissent or disagreement in the liberal mind. No consideration at all given to the possibility that someone might simply see things differently and have different concerns or beliefs about the right way to approach things. Nope, it’s the liberal way or the highway when it comes to the left in this country, and to the majority of posters to this board.
And it’s this ideological rigidity that leads to the hypocrisy that shows up time and time again around here, and which leads to such amusements as Americans being criticized for not knowing enough about foreign countries, and then being criticized for knowing too much about foreign countries if they happen to be a conservative.
I’ve been accused more than once by elucidator of being a “conservative gadfly who delights in pricking the hypocrisies of the left” and I really need to work on that. The pickings are too easy.
What I understand is that most of the predictions by the IPCC **remove **feedback mechanisms that are not clearly understood yet.
This is the reason why many researchers criticize the IPCC for being too conservative.
The much criticized CRU in England actually uses a model that is also used in weather. I can tell you that they are becoming more confident on it as it is improved.
The problem here is that there is no mechanism or system that would make this assumption possible, IOW this is wishful thinking. I would be happy if that was so, but CO2 and other greenhouse gases continues to rise.
But that is the problem I see, you are trying to ignore the bigger point that I’m making here. The point is that your concerns are coming from denier media and blogs that repeat those items repeatedly, so many times that there are several sources and databases set up to answer those repeated to death points.
There was a reason why I said that your positions are copy and paste regarding this issue, and the evidence is that most of your concerns were dealt already even in published science journals.
Ok, if it so easy then maybe you can find the climate modelers that report that there is no AGW.
Even a caveman could do it…