StrangeSox

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jun 22, 2011 -> 04:31 PM) This, of course, assumes that we'll get back to some semblance of pre-2007-2008, which is not a guarantee at all. If we'll never get the economy back to 2007 levels there's absolutely no reason to be concerned about pensions being underfunded in the future.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 22, 2011 -> 04:05 PM) Thankfully there is no such thing as externality costs to climate change. If there was some sort of carbon cap or tax, that'd be "good" power.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 22, 2011 -> 04:00 PM) Last I read, Ft. Calhoun, the one that was really at risk of flooding, has successfully been shut down and probably will remain that way for much of the year. That's not what I read in the AP article. The way I read it was...maintenance is lagging, the plants are getting older, and the NRC is turning the other way rather than requiring the level of maintenance that should be necessary in safely operating plants that are aging. Yeah Calhoun is offline. They just came out of an outage recently* (actually, they never powered up after the outage), so they can't even really take advantage of this. It's something like $1M/day they're not producing (general rule-of-thumb). We had to wait about 7 or 8 months last year for the river to drop low enough to get some measurements on a pipe, and it was already unusually high back in March. The NRC (and industry group NEI) says "no we're not." I honestly do not have the expertise or information to judge the accuracy of the claims and haven't seen much independent analysis.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 22, 2011 -> 03:53 PM) There's a classic technique here though...it's to overwhelm a person with numbers that they don't have any context for. They're spending "$5 billion in year x" and the amount they've spent has gone up every year. Well duh, with aging plants the amounts you spend on maintenance should go up. Is $5 billion a lot? I have no idea, and I have no basis even in the NEI's full letter to evaluate whether that is a high rate of maintenance or a lagging rate of maintenance at thsoe facilities. It's like telling me "Adam Dunn is making $14 million a season" and asking me what place the White Sox are in. Fair enough, but the AP article makes it seem like plants don't do any maintenance at all. Fort Calhoun and Cooper are in danger of flooding. Both are on the Missouri river. http://iowaindependent.com/57641/flood-wat...ot-yet-critical

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 22, 2011 -> 11:17 AM) Their response is equally disconcerting. "But look how much money we're spending. These are big numbers. We must be doing a good job." Well that was to illustrate that they're spending a ton of money on safety (and security). They also claimed to be correcting many factual errors, like the fact that INPO really does track industry-wide safety and operational incidents.

I recognize two names on that list.

Maybe? Please move it if it was.

Dorf (law professor) with some comments on the Walmart decision: http://www.dorfonlaw.org/2011/06/some-obse...-mart-case.html

On the heels of the fabulous, open and transparent McKinsey study that claimed 30% of employers (might) drop insurance within two years is another study that actually did release it's methodology. Shockingly, this one is in line with every other independent study, leaving McKinsey as the outlier again: 3% drop in two decades. Hey, what's a couple of orders of magnitude and a few decades between friends, right? Oh, and the number of uninsured drops to nearly zero.

Serious People refuse to discuss any form of revenue increase to close the budget gap.

Might be worth more later on. Don't see anything wrong with her selling it, though. Yeah, it's a cool item and it's pretty personal, but $11,000 to feed and clothe your kids is more important than a framed letter.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jun 22, 2011 -> 11:12 AM) Well, as i've said before, pot wouldn't be included. And i'm not discounting the fact that it's important to have that safety position exception. I'm just pointing out that we've made exceptions to that constitutional right before, so it's not some right that is never excluded in favor of a societal goal or policy. Yeah but there's not really a good reason here aside from "saving money" which is a dubious claim anyway. And pot would be included in all of these laws and policies, like the one you bemoaned the CHA from dropping. How will this save money? You need to test a whole lot of non-users to find the users, and testing isn't free. Studies I've seen show the costs in the range of tens of thousands for every user caught. Nothing about intelligence there, but you keep rejecting data in favor of anecdotes from police friends in Chicago. Also not sure how not using drugs automatically leads to getting off of public assistance. We're back to your "poor people are lazy drug users" idea. Nah, but you're just saying "I don't care, I know some police, there's no way this could be true!" You're not raising legitimate concerns wrt the sample or the methodology. Can you address how the methodology is flawed and why your "stories from police friends in Chicago" is a better measure of drug use in areas with a lot of public aid versus areas with low public aid?

Hey guys I said 'disproportionately represented' and all of the data seem to back that up!

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 20, 2011 -> 12:38 PM) Nothing to see here. Edit: Just a comment. This is a real impressive, detailed, thorough bludgeoning of the NRC by the AP. I'd consider contributing to them if they had a "paypal" link on the side for this one. That's disconcerting. The NEI's and the NRC's responses can be found here: http://www.powergenworldwide.com/index/dis...AP-article.html

World's oceans in 'shocking' decline T

Also wanted to address this from before: Doesn't matter, since we're talking about drug testing. The sampling is the same across the board. Do you have reason to believe those on welfare would under-report more than those who aren't? What do you base your perceptions of non-welfare drug use levels on?

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jun 22, 2011 -> 10:32 AM) "Safety-sensitive" is a constructed exception to a constitutional right. Society has determined that it's important to make sure that police officers and others in "safety sensitive" positions are drug-free, constitutional rights be damned, and suspicions or evidence of actual drug use be damned. That's somehow ok, but ZOMG don't stereotype people in public housing!! Yes, maybe you should figure out why they're "safety-sensitive" positions and why drug abuse in those positions could have a serious impact on the welfare of others. Compare to the risks of someone on WIC or the clerk at the DMV smoking pot. Minorities are disproportionately represented in welfare pools. So anything that targets welfare targets them disproportionately. You also keep referring to inner-city Chicago anecdotes from police to justify your stereotypes. I'd say that providing people with some basic sustenance instead of letting them die (or having them turn to crime to feed their family!) is beneficial to society, so I don't see your distinction as anything but cognitive dissonance. Also lol 'small government' libertarian/conservative arguing against having to piss into a cup while other should based on "benefit to society" You've never taken a statistics or data sampling class, have you? Do you at least recognize that the experience of your police buddies in the worst parts of Chicago probably don't extrapolate to the population at large? That what they tell you isn't going to be a representative sampling of all CHA residents or even everyone they interact with but with the ones that stand out? That it provides zero information regarding drug use anywhere else? That the plural of anecdote is not data? That you're just hand-waving away an actual study because it doesn't agree with your pre-conceived notions of welfare recipients and the poor in general that are based on some anecdotes from police at best? That it falls hand-in-hand with your previous stereotyping of the poor as lazy, unmotivated drug addicts who make bad decisions and just don't work/try hard enough to get ahead?

QUOTE (CrimsonWeltall @ Jun 22, 2011 -> 10:22 AM) True, but I also doubt that people in interviews are going to be 100% honest about their illegal drug use, especially if they think it might affect their public assistance. Possibly, but police generally deal with criminals or high-crime areas. Even if their anecdotes formed a representative sample of all the people in CHA housing, it still forms a terribly skewed data set. But the sampling is the same for welfare and non-welfare, so I'm not sure how much more likely a middle-class family is going to be to admit drug use. They risk their job, family, etc.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jun 22, 2011 -> 10:06 AM) So we can come up with some random exception and call it "safety-sensitive" positions, but we can't create another for this purpose? Not sure that "safety-sensitive" is a "random exception" Hmm, anecdotes from police. Wonder if there's any sort of sample bias, confirmation bias or "lack of rigorous, nation-wide" data there? It's not just poor urban blacks that get welfare btw. Thank you for falling into the trap even after I explicitly explained it and admitting that you stereotype welfare recipients based on what some police friends of yours in Chicago tell you.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 22, 2011 -> 09:59 AM) Quit projecting your stereotypes. I sure don't know many poor people who are buying homes. I was referring to the bills that pop up somewhat regularly test drug test welfare, food stamp, housing assistance etc. recipients, not your novel proposal to drug test every American.

In other news, the PPACA accidentally includes a few extra million early retiree seniors in Medicaid by excluding SSI disbursements from income.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 22, 2011 -> 09:44 AM) The idea that somehow we are saving money without testing is just silly. If they are addicts, or turn into them eventually, who do you think is paying for treatment and prison anyway? The quicker you stop a problem, or even prevent it, the better. If you stop even one percent of people from starting to use because they are afraid of losing their incomes, much like employees who won't use, or quit using, because they fear the drug test, you have won in the long run. I don't think there's really any expected preventative effect here. Maybe if you're talking about testing just about every single American, but lol goodbye 4th amendment. The testing isn't cheap, and you're going to test a whole lot of people who are clean to catch the small percentage that aren't. Isn't it interesting that these drug-tests-for-aid proposals always focus on programs for the poor?

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jun 22, 2011 -> 09:44 AM) It is a bulls*** argument because it's not consistent. Think of other public officials like cops. There's ZERO suspicion of them doing drugs, yet they have to submit to random drug tests. Why isn't that an unreasonable search and seizure? There's actually a pretty clear standard for those drug tests. They need to be "safety-sensitive" positions, which cops, firefighters etc. fall under. http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/oct96/niaaa-23.htm "Proportions of welfare recipients using, abusing, or dependent on alcohol or illicit drugs are consistent with proportions of both the adult U.S. population and adults who do not receive welfare, report National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism researchers in the November American Journal of Public Health." BTW you forgot to answer my question re: your mortgage tax deductions. When can you be expected at the clinic for the testing?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 22, 2011 -> 09:40 AM) Funny, no one has a problem with those things in the Health Care debate. This is just receiving a government service even. We aren't even talking about a mandatory requirement of life. There was mandatory drug testing based on stereotypes in the health care debate? Or is this a really weak link to the insurance mandate, which isn't anything at all like having to take a piss test regularly or otherwise getting cut off from government programs/aid?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 22, 2011 -> 09:38 AM) Everything really. I have no idea what you're even trying to get at here. btw my tactic of getting you to advocate for testing poor minorities but not middle and upper-class people backfired because you actually agreed to testing everyone for everything. Kudos for that, at least.