Balta1701

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Dec 17, 2009 -> 02:58 PM) Even in the most cartoonish portrayals I have seen of Ozzie in here, that would be utterly pointless, since Vizquel's value is in his defense. That is so not going to happen. I'm going to bookmark this post.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Dec 17, 2009 -> 08:41 PM) No they haven't. Not all of them, but a lot of them got the sham version.

Yankees looking at Nick Johnson

Every time I hear Wendell Potter talk, it just makes me more frustrated to read the vehement defenses of the insurance companies you see here.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Dec 17, 2009 -> 03:39 PM) That's all nice... they could and should get that same verdict under a military tribunal. They just want to make a spectacle of this. Doesn't the fact that we've already tried them in completely phony and totally illegitimate military tribunals provide a reason to try doing it in a better way?

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Dec 17, 2009 -> 09:05 AM) Well, they DO have a cool governor. And you know how in middle school you elected the cool kid to run student government, and 3 weeks later the school was bankrupt, closed, and on fire?

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Dec 17, 2009 -> 07:24 PM) Generally, you don't do it to your own caucus. Gees, you go to great lengths to protect your own. There's always some "good" reason for your view. Lieberman's on the same side as Franken?

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Dec 17, 2009 -> 12:53 PM) And using that trail of dots, you can sort of predict where the next one would be, and further, based on the location of the plume and what not, probably get a vague idea of WHEN they'd go off again. Couldn't you? To within an error of a million years or so, sure. The 1st eruption on the Yellowstone site was 2 million years ago, the 2nd was 1.2 million years ago, the 3rd was 640,000 years ago. That would imply a 600,000 or so year recurrence interval if things were that simple. They aren't. Lots of other things are necessary to build up a big eruption; certian cooling conditions and mineralogical conditions in the crust. Good example is the hydrothermals in Yellowstone right now. They've been extra, extra active for the last 100,000 years or so. They're pumping out so much heat right now that if they kept going at this rate, within the next 500,000 years they'd probably cool the whole magma chamber. Can't say we know why it's so active of a system right now.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Dec 17, 2009 -> 04:05 PM) lol. The fed bank is now responsible for fiscal policy as well? Eh, might as well be for as well as Congress and the President handle it. Yup. Thank Goodness Alan Greenspan recognized how tenuous the surpluses were in 2001 and therefore advocated a program of sound fiscal policy.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Dec 17, 2009 -> 05:01 PM) god dammit. (note to self: google "astral plane") Didn't it take you longer to type this post than to actually do the googling?

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Dec 17, 2009 -> 10:23 AM) This goes back to my very point on the subject -- we need to carefully study all of these alternatives before we just start using them. Throwing tons of money into poor technologies only to have to go back and REDO it all in future because we realize how shortsighted and stupid it was is NOT the answer to our problems. We have to be smart about it. Otherwise we are repeating the same mistakes we made when we hooked the world on oil -- I mean, back when we did that it seemed like a damn good idea...and it was cheaper than the alternatives! The flaw in this logic though is that it assumes what we're doing right now has no flaws, such that there is no negative consequences to doing this waiting that you try to advise. This is of course wrong. Your argument is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Wanted to post this yesterday but was on a plane. I agree with this.

Kap's ahead of me? H. Christ, that's what moving and AGU will do to your post count.

If Omar Vizquel serves as a regular DH for this team I'll kill Craig T. Nelson.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Dec 16, 2009 -> 06:44 PM) Right, but what if there was some monster eruption such as the one in AD 79? 79 AD wasn't actually a monster eruption in terms of size. 1815 tambora was, at least on a scale of what humans have seen (largest in the last 10000 years. A reasonable estimate for Tambora's CO2 emissions in 1815 would be about 3000 MT of CO2. Human emissions annually are still 10 times that. Even if I'm off by a factor of 5, human CO2 emissions still are much, much larger.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Dec 16, 2009 -> 06:32 PM) Ok, well this is why I stay out of this thread for the most part. I thought I saw something on the History Channel about Mt. Vesuvius releasing something like 30,000 times the CO2 into the atmosphere in one second that we have produced in the last 130 years. Apparently this would not have the same results as what we are currently causing, however. My mistake. You've actually got the right number you just have the sources backwards. Right now, human-related CO2 emissions are about 130 times the annual volcanic CO2 production rate. Sinngle eruptions usually don't change this flux all that much.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Dec 16, 2009 -> 06:11 PM) Sure. Now that they actually filibuster something, it's "evil". What a partisan hack thing to say. That's not what I said at al, or at least not what I was trying to say. What I said was that changing the rules would be judged as evil. Thus, because the rules are unchangeable, you're wrong, and the Senate can't do anything about those efforts.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Dec 16, 2009 -> 06:14 PM) Right. That's why it's a lame argument. I DO think it's ridiculous they are trying him in Manhattan though. Why spend the hundreds and hundreds of millions in security just to do it there? Why not utilize a federal district that isn't in the most congested area of the world? Would it genuinely be cheaper to do so somewhere else?

QUOTE (iamshack @ Dec 16, 2009 -> 06:16 PM) Well that's good to know. From my extremely uneducated perspective, it seems as though the best approach is some combination of cheap fixes that actually accomplish some kind of inroads, coupled with creating renewable energy systems focused on eliminating only the resources we are depleting most quickly (or with the shortest supply), and combine that with preparations for the consequences of rising sea levels, adverse weather patterns caused by changing ocean currents, etc., etc. Correct me if I'm wrong, Balta, but say we throw all our resources at global warming over the next 50 years and somehow, through the grace of all that is good in this world, we get the situation under control to where the effects of global warming are not such that our modern way of living is too adversely changed....isn't there going to be some sort of natural phenomenon that wipes all this progress out eventually anyways? And when I say that, I mean with absolute certainty such an event will occur, and soon (within the next few hundred years most likely). Would you agree with that assessment? It's actually fairly remarkable how stable the climate has been for the past 8000 years or so prior to the industrial revolution. The climate system actually probably has adapted in a way that humanity itself became a feedback for a large portion of human history; if humans burnt too many forests for agriculture, suddenly they'd wind up with a shift in weather that would kill a bunch of humans. In terms of a natural phenomenon "Wiping out the progress" we'd make, to me, that means that we'd wind up having something that the earth does that drives CO2 back up rapidly despite us undertaking successful mitigation efforts. Based on everything we know currently about the climate and CO2 reservoirs on earth, there really isn't a way to do that. The only ways that you can drive a large release of additional CO2 through a natural process is through warming; if you warm permafrost, it melts and releases a bunch of methane. Something like this may have happened a couple times in earth's history, but it happens on the order of once every 10-50 million years, not every few hundred, and it takes a major change to really make it happen. There's really no volcanic means to do it, and in fact volcanoes usually go the other way and wind up being brief bursts of cooling. In 1816, there was the "Year without a summer", and that was caused by what was probably the largest volcanic eruption in the last 10,000+ years. You certainly can get larger eruptions, but they're much rarer. My impression is that humanity has probably already stabilized the climate for the last 8000 years or so, and natural events that are plausible just aren't large enough to disrupt that for more than a year or two (yeah, those can be bad years, but then the planet recovers). The only thing that can really produce huge changes is what we're doing to atmospheric CO2 right now.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Dec 16, 2009 -> 11:59 AM) The problem is if they aren't doing risk management correctly, then when they fail, its a much bigger impact with these enormous firms than it otherwise would be. If they knew that they were too big to fail after bailouts like LTCM, then they were doing quite well in their risk management, because they knew they couldn't lose.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Dec 16, 2009 -> 12:33 PM) Even if it's not criminal there should be personal liability on those people. I can't imagine that some of the heads of those institutions would get off if someone brought a suit for breach of their fiduciary duties, but it hasn't happened yet, and I'm not sure why. Well you guys certainly follow this stuff closer than I do, but in my passive reading about the economy I just don't see any active response to what happened. What has the government done to make sure this won't happen again? All I see is proposed legislation like this McCain thing. Has anything actually been passed? Did the SEC get more funding to actually enforce it's own laws? Are they taking anonymous and non-anonymous tips of wrongdoing seriously? In a general sense it just seems like "Wall Street" made billions, lost billions, were bailed out, and now are back to business as usual. A few of the things you ask about are actually in the bill the House just passed in some way, but the odds are that the bankers have already found ways around the language. There is supposed to be added whistle-blower rewards, an agency designed to evaluate and rate consumer financial products in the way that other products on the shelf at the store get checked for safety, an ability for the government to unwind these to big to fail institutions, and a systemic risk regulator. But...between the fact that the bankers have really good lobbyists and the fact that it hasn't gone up against the 60 vote requirement in the Senate yet...IMO the odds of any of it actually getting through the Senate are low. Health insurance companies aren't nearly as powerful as the banks, and look how easily they've bought the Senate. They're really trying to get back to business as usual as fast as possible.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Dec 16, 2009 -> 06:09 PM) The Democrats run the Senate. If they cared about the troops so much, they could have slotted time for that bill, but they want to shift the blame. It won't work. This is the Senate. No, they can't. They can only do that if they do the evil thing and break all the rules, which is, as I said, evil.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Dec 16, 2009 -> 04:31 PM) The difference is that those people don't have XX millions who follow them in a life-time war against an enemy. I think it's a lame argument, but essentially by taking these people away from a military protected institution you're supposedly inviting more of an opportunity for them to attack somewhere in the US. Say by taking over a nearby grade school and holding people hostage until they release them. Say guard number 1 and 2 have kids in that school, they may be more willing to let them go. The chances of something like that happening have to be about .000001% though. What's to stop someone who wants KSM released from taking over a grade school now? Proximity doesn't exactly matter there.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Dec 16, 2009 -> 05:43 PM) Are there solid studies available which measure the cost-benefits of only taking the least-expensive precautions available to prevent global warming, and funneling all the rest of the money into taking all precautionary measures available for what scientists are predicting the consequences of global warming will be? Yes. One of the things we've been saying is that it's really expensive to do what Jim Hansen says we need to do; actually somehow go back down to 350 ppm CO2, but it is really, really, really cheap to bring CO2 close to stability with time, because you get so much of the money back easily by doing things like increasing energy efficiency and building windmills instead of coal plants. The real issue winds up being how you measure some of the benefits. How do you measure the benefit of cleaner air in general, including everything like lower health care costs that might result? How do you measure the benefit of not having to rely on the middle east for such a large fraction of our energy. How do you measure the potential costs of the worst case scenario, when the worst case scenario is a flooded seaboard.