Balta1701

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Mar 11, 2011 -> 08:22 AM) When did it start so I can do the math and see where it will be in X hours? 2:46 p.m. Tokyo time, US Eastern is 14 hours behind that, so just after midnight.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 11, 2011 -> 07:26 AM) Except in this case, this very directly hurts the lowest classes way more than it hurts corporations. Elasticity of gasoline is very low anyway, let alone for the poor. This is essentially a new tax on the poor if subsidies go away. It is the same thing with farm subsidies. Except per capita gas consumption does go down quite a bit once you get to the poverty line. Cars are actually much more of a middle class luxury. Especially the urban poor...they don't own cars.

Tsunami arrival time map.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Mar 10, 2011 -> 11:10 PM) Well that's true enough. But that seems to be the way of things these days. Tax them or cut breaks they receive and they merely pass the costs to the consumers. That's become the problem in taking such things away that they've grown used to having, and in part, this is how they retain these freebies, because the government knows they'll make the people pay, an the people, in turn, may blame the government. Of course, if basic economics is valid...then cutting tax breaks should lead to some increase in costs, but it should be much smaller than what the tax break costs because competition should force the price down to a minimum profitable level above production costs. Of course, if the energy companies operate as an illegal monopoly, then you're 100% right.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Mar 10, 2011 -> 10:43 PM) Point is they wouldn't cut dividends, they'd pass it onto the consumers. To think otherwise is crazy. Keep in mind the rest of the world doesn't have these "tiny subsidies" as you call them and they pay 5$ a liter for gas...while we pay 3.50$ per gallon, which is quite a bit more than a liter. Those subsidies are a big part as to why gasoline is much cheaper here. All I do know is that when Lybia has problems, which supply 2% of the worlds oil, none of which comes here, oil prices rocket, and excuses are made as to why, in a repeating fashion, everytime something happens there, only to come crashing back down months later when everyone realizes it didn't affect anything. I'm betting that cuttingthese subsidies would have a similarly stupid effect here. If not, who cares...it's surprising to me they've never been cut then. No, Petrol is $5 a liter in other countries because they tax it at a gigantic rate so as to take cars off the roads, not because of subsidies. Subsidies are a small fraction of sales. The taxes they collect are the difference.

QUOTE (whitesoxfan99 @ Mar 10, 2011 -> 10:06 PM) Hinrich is not and has never been a great defender. How exactly are you defining Great?

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Mar 10, 2011 -> 09:00 PM) Removing those oil subsidies would probably crash our economy, and destroy all the work Obama and Co. have done to get us out of the recession. I bet it would result in instant 8$ per gallon gas and a hysteria over oil prices worldwide, thus crushing the economy under a wave of skyrocketing prices on anything and everything because of outrageous delivery costs, etc. WTF? Not a chance in Hades. Oil is a multi-trillion dollar revenue industry. The investment levels each year are in the trillions of dollars. Those extra few tens of billions of dollars make for nice dividend payments, but in the long run, they don't impact the companies at all.

QUOTE (elrockinMT @ Mar 10, 2011 -> 06:13 PM) I would expect Teahan's value and the team need to inflate and he will stick with the team. Who?

Our run of minor league injuries does continue unabated.

At least we can stop hearing talk about dumping Teahen and breaking camp with DV.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 10, 2011 -> 12:42 PM) You have to go with the Lakers. I don't see how anyone would pick the Heat in that game. The Lakers now have their twin towers back, temporarily healthy, and playing at a high level. That was what they were missing earlier in the season, and in particular that is the biggest weakness of the Heat.

QUOTE (hitlesswonder @ Mar 10, 2011 -> 05:24 PM) Is "anti-worker" meant to be sarcastic? Public workers will no longer be forced to contribute dues to a union via automatic payroll deduction. And in the bigger picture, you get lower taxes and more private sector jobs across the state...I think this bill is pro-worker. Unless the state's education system or infrastructure deteriorate because those positions pay worse going rates and thus attract progressively lower quality employees.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Mar 10, 2011 -> 05:09 PM) Actually, some states, including Wisconsin, have Recall provisions for just this purpose. There are currently petitions being filed on a bunch of the GOP state legislators there (and some Dems too), such that they'd have to face an election again this fall. FWIW, my last experience with a recall election produced some of the worst politics I've ever seen, so I'm hesitant to consider that a reasonable solution even in the Wisconsinan case.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 10, 2011 -> 02:53 PM) Climate science really kicked off in the 90's, right? Mann's famous hockey stick, which has been largely confirmed I believe, was from 98 or 99. I know it sounds weird, but five years ago was 2006. That's several years after Inconvenient Truth and the follow-up blockbuster documentary, The Day After Tomorrow. Depends on how you define "Climate science". If you define it solely as "projecting the future using high-powered computer models", yes, because that's when computer power got to that level. However, geologists have been doing good climate science for centuries now. Climate Science in geology involves recognizing and interpreting the rock record, and plenty of that is still done. Recognizing that there were large glacial events, that was over a hundred years ago. Recognizing the repeating glacial cycles happened in the early part of this century. Milankovich did his work in prison in the early part of the 20th century, calculating solar cyclicity based on gravity. Recognizing and counting the numbers of glacial cycles in the Pleistocene happened in the middle part of the century. Recognizing large glacial events in the rock record, like in the Permian and in the Cryogenian, that happened in the early part of the century. Putting those in a Plate Tectonics context happened in the 60's and 70's. Snowball Earth concepts came out in the 1980s. The idea that CO2 is a greenhouse gas has been known probably since the 1800's when the gas and its absorption features were identified. The idea that humans were pushing up the atmospheric CO2 rapidly through industry was understood by the best people in the early 1960's, because they had the early Mauna Loa measurements then and they figured out quite quickly where it was going. They also started cleaning up other atmospheric pollutants (with the clean air act) at this time, once they realized it was killing a lot of people. You have the date for the first hockey stick paper correct, but that was just one in a long series. Kyoto was in 1998, so people have been pushing on doing something about this problem for several decades.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Mar 10, 2011 -> 11:03 AM) You can probably say it's been studied for 4 centuries now...but just because a small segment of science studies something doesn't mean much progress was made. More progress on this science has been made in the last 5 years than in the prior 35 before it. To me, that's the definition of scientific infancy. As for reasonable doubt, that's what having a brain and using it is for. Really, no.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 10, 2011 -> 09:06 AM) Yeah it sounds like the end around in Wisconsin had a holding penalty and is getting called back. The cool thing in Indiana is the minority leader is from Michigan City, and is a guy I know pretty well. I am getting the lowdown first hand on the Dems side. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the maneuver was approved by the courts eventually.

Orioles 1b Derek Lee underwent an MRI today after a previous wrist injury flared up. They're already talking like they don't expect him to be ready to start the season.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Mar 9, 2011 -> 09:27 PM) and then the corporation that paid taxes on the profits. lol Really?

Link

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Mar 9, 2011 -> 05:39 PM) I'm not even dismissing the fact that humans contribute, I just don't believe we contribute as much as many alarmists want us to believe/accept. The question in reply is...can you back that up with evidence?

The Rangers talked about moving Neftali Feliz to the rotation for about 3 weeks. He's on his way back to the Closer's spot where he says his arm feels more comfortable. Which is, I'm going to guess, the path Chris Sale is following.

Anything else more concrete about Peavy?

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Mar 9, 2011 -> 03:49 PM) What???? He's missing time now so his injury can completely heal and it doesn't affect his performance during the season or cause him to miss more time in the summer. I think he went after Greinke there because ZG's injury did not happen while playing baseball.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Mar 9, 2011 -> 03:39 PM) But the question isn't "is the earth warming." It's "is the earth going to continue to rise to the point where we kill ourselves because of what we've caused." That's not accepting science for one purpose and discounting it for another. Yes, it is...because when a change happens, like a sudden shift in climate...if you accept the principles of inductive reasoning/science, you accept that there must be a mechanism by which it happened, and that mechanism can be understood with sufficient data. You're not allowed to just hypothesize that a change is a natural trend that just happens unless you can explain why the trends happen. Give you an example. We have evidence that we've gone through ~7 cycles of glacials/interglacials over the past 800,000 years. The step you guys are getting is accepting that, but not going farther. The next step in the science was to figure out how that happens...changes in the Earth's orbital parameters enhanced by atmospheric (CO2) feedbacks. We can finish the next step, and then make predictions about how things happen when we do large-scale experiments (like increasing atmospheric CO2 massively) on our own.

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Mar 9, 2011 -> 03:32 PM) i keep seeing Watson lurking in here. Has he been banned from posting in this thread? I'm actually at the Lunar and PLanetary Science conference, so my posting has been a mite sparse.