StrangeSox

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jul 18, 2012 -> 01:58 PM) Sounds impressive until you remember it's 4.4 million over 28 months. In a country that has how many tens of millions out of work? 4.4M over 28 months versus less than 4.4M over 144 months for the Bushes is the thrust of the argument.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jul 18, 2012 -> 01:42 PM) No, he's just been in charge of the country that isn't creating jobs. That's the counter Romney's campaign has hit pretty well. Instead of relying on his community activist experience as a reason why he'd be a good President, we've now had 3 years of him as President as a reason why he's not a good President. I guess I don't see some great advantage to this Romney/Bain thing. It's too complicated for the average voter to care about, so they're not going to care. We're talking about two very rich guys acting as though they understand the plight of an average American. "Romney made hundreds of millions which he's stashed in foreign countries to avoid taxes from outsourcing American jobs" isn't very complicated. For whatever it's worth, Nate Silver is essentially agreeing with you that this shouldn't move polls all that much, but he believes that Romney's response has only made things worse and that he'll be watching the polls for the next several weeks to see if anything shows up. I find a little bit of irony in labeling Obama as an out-of-touch rich guy considering that many on the fever-swamp right still lambaste him for being a community organizer and never having a "real job." The sitting President is definitely not in touch with the 'average Joe' once they're in office, but Obama does have a background of working directly with low-income Americans.

I don't think that response would really address the issue either from a practical standpoint or a politics standpoint. Let's start with the politics side because that's an easier case for me to make. As you've agreed, that's a powerful ad. Romney's role at Bain, Bain's role in outsourcing American jobs and Romney's continued refusal to release his tax returns coupled with his offshore banking accounts are all tied into this short ad. Responding with "but Obama has foreign investments too!" isn't going to counter that; sure, it'll give something for the pundit class to write and talk about, but that sort of response is usually received as petty whining (the Democrats are pros at these sorts of terrible responses and constantly being on the defensive). The political response needed to be quick and effective burying the concerns or effectively deflecting them back on Obama, and tu quoque rarely works for that. Pointing out that the stimulus had some funds going to non-American companies might work a little better and in a stand-alone context could be a minor point, but it still doesn't get to the heart of the issue, which leads me to the practical point. Romney's primary positive attribute in this campaign is his business experience. He knows how to create jobs because he did it in the private sector, or so the rhetoric goes. And in the process of creating these jobs he touts in his speeches and on his website, he made himself and a few others incredibly wealthy. In that process, Bain also closed a lot of companies and put a lot of people out of work; their business model is premised on generating returns for investors, not on creating jobs. What his role was at Bain and how he made money is certainly a legitimate question given what Romney is running on. For a while now, Romney has distanced himself from Bain after '99 because that it when the outsourcing and the acquire-and-close really started to pick up. But now we know different. He remained CEO and sole owner until 2002. He was paid well, twice the income of the average family, for essentially nothing if his claims are accurate; he already has "wealthy banker" image problems, and that will not help. It also fails to address the inconsistency in his statements and the filings. However, even if he truly was CEO "in name only," he still bears responsibility for the actions of Bain. He still maintained control, he still could hire and fire as he pleased, he still profited immensely. Romney had still created the culture at Bain and picked the replacements who took over for him. Pointing out that Obama has some foreign investments or foreign income completely misses the point. Obama is not running as Investor-in-Chief. Whatever foreign companies he may be invested in are not central to his platform or his message. He's never been in direct control of a company that was actively outsourcing American jobs. If the message is "jobs jobs jobs" this year, then Romney needs to answer directly for what happened to companies under Bain through 2002 until he was no longer the sole shareholder, CEO and President. Responding by pointing to Obama's foreign income from book sales looks like a weak flail. eta: crosspost with Y2HH but it's essentially the same thing. Pointing out that Obama appointed the guy from GE still doesn't address Romney's role at Bain or why he won't release his tax returns. Politically, if Romney wants "job creator" to be the headline on his resume, he needs to be able to explain the profits generated by outsourcing under his watch.

Regardless of whether you agree with him politically or not, from a technical standpoint (for lack of a better word), that ad is several notches above your typical political ad. You can appreciate a skilled polemicist even if you ultimately disagree with their message. As for the merit, "I was a Successful Business Man" is Romney's entire campaign. Of course his tenure at Bain is going to be brought up as it is his main qualification. Romney really was incredibly successful at Bain; he made an awful lot of money for himself and investors, which isn't inherently wrong or evil. But this ad is a response to his ongoing refusal to release his tax returns and then the discrepancies between what he told elections officials in Mass in 2002, what SEC filings said and what he's told the public for the last several years. For some reason, his campaign had no plan at all on how to address this, so they've been left reeling since, demanding apologies and retroactively retiring. As I see it (and this is borrowed from a compilation of others' thoughts), Romney doesn't exactly have a good way out of this. Even if he left Bain and was CEO in name only, he was still receiving a $100k salary for doing nothing which won't sit well and he was still President and sole stockholder. He still retained as much control over the company as he wanted and profited immensely from the work Bain did between '99 and '02. He still is responsible for the people he picked to run his company and for the culture that existed prior to his departure that enabled those deals to continue. He cannot simultaneously claim to have the Business Man experience while shirking all responsibility for what that experience entailed. The buck still stopped in Romney's bank accounts at the end of the day. Now, an ideologically consistent way out of this would be to mount a robust defense of the 'destructive capitalism' that Bain and other companies engaged in. But so far they aren't doing that, and the deeper they keep digging the hole they're in, the faster they close off that line of defense. Who knows if a strong defense of financial capitalism would really resonate with a public who's still suffering from the financial collapse and is seeing more and more banking scandals, but at least it would give them a shot and wouldn't look as weak as they do now. They needed to have a strong answer for this in place months ago, and its baffling that they seem caught so unprepared.

FWIW the WS doesn't exactly give a completely accurate picture of Box's objections. If you click through to the original story, Box seems to be expressing the sentiment that Obama hasn't been liberal enough, a sentiment shared by myself and BS. On another note, by the Obama campaign is exceptionally well-done.

Sounds like shack might be able to comment on that one?

Another banking scandal, this time it's HSBC knowingly laundering drug cartel money. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/nils-pr...s?newsfeed=true

McCain's 2008 Research File on Romney: http://www.scribd.com/doc/78582788/McCain-2008-Oppo-File

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Jul 17, 2012 -> 11:50 AM) What caused the previous rapid rises, and further, what then caused it to fall on it's own since we weren't here to interfear? I'm not a scientist...and I don't pretend to be. I simply reject the modern idea because it's happened before, and will happen again...with or without us. But you've already admitted in the first sentence that you don't know what the current understanding of the causal factors are. Your rejection is not based on knowledge of the subject. I'm not an expert in the field and am not speaking as one. I did, however, link you to a site that covers many of the aspects of climate science as well as many of the standard 'skeptic' arguments. If you want to know why your "it's happened before" position is unsupportable, go read the link. You are certainly not the first person to come up with this objection. There are some scientists who disagree, yes. It's a very limited number, however, similar to the percentage of scientists who reject evolutionary biology or the HIV-AIDS link. In short, cranks on the fringe. Even those who went into a major study as heavily skeptical of the mainstream claims have found, after examining the data, that AGW is very real. Documentaries are meaningless in this context and I've honestly never seen An Inconvenient Truth. Arguments against AGW are not automatically dismissed but systematically examined and then refuted, either by pointing out bad data, shoddy methodology or over-reaching conclusions. You do get to a point where counter-arguments are dismissed out-of-hand simply because they're weak and unoriginal; this is more applicable to pop-science arguments than actual scientific contributions, however.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Jul 17, 2012 -> 11:33 AM) No, I'm rejecting it based on the fact that it's happened before *we* were here to cause the CO2 emissions are you blaming. That is very logical. See, the thing is, thousands of scientists who work on this around the globe also realize (and in fact were the ones to discover!) that there's been global warming before. They've studied these previous warming trends as well as our own. They've developed robust and remarkably accurate models based on paleoclimate and our current situation and the conclusion that thousands of individuals around the globe have come to is: CO2 is the major driver of the current warming and we are the major factor in the current imbalance. That the climate has warmed in the past doesn't actually say anything about our ability to cause it to warm now. In fact, by finding instances in the past of CO2 driving climate change, we find a causal mechanism and can apply it to our own actions. If we know that CO2 rose rapidly at some point millions of years ago and led to global warming, then we can reasonably conclude that our adding of a significant amount of CO2 into the atmosphere will cause similar warming. eta: did you read the link I provided earlier that specifically addresses this claim?

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Jul 17, 2012 -> 11:32 AM) I want cleaner air, cleaner water, cleaner forests...I don't care what they have to do in order to accomplish it, either...and if it means that by proxy, CO2 also drops, fine. But I don't care about CO2 if it doesn't affect air or life quality, since I don't believe we caused the warming trend that's occurring. I think it would have occurred whether we were here or not. CO2 will not necessarily drop by proxy and it will not drop nearly as much as it needs to if the overwhelming majority of the scientific community is correct. Which is exactly what I was saying earlier: we are not addressing the problem, and you yourself don't even believe it's a problem in the first place. To address CO2 will require an economic burden. What the science shows is that the burden of "do nothing" is likely to be much, much higher. I know you think it would have occurred regardless, but there really isn't any good evidence to support that.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Jul 17, 2012 -> 11:15 AM) And I still feel that my reason to reject the concept of AGW is logically sound. I still believe man, with his nearly limitless ego, really wants to be the cause of climate change. I just don't believe we are...I think it's a natural occurance based on the fact it's happened before...and will happen again, with or without us. I'm also not rejecting that we CAN contribute to it...I just believe the amount we actually do contribute is so minimal it doesn't matter. But in our infinite search for self importance, we would like to believe we're making a bigger dent in the universe than we actually are. There's nothing really logical about that argument, though. You're rejecting the entire field of climatology based on your supposition on some egotistical drive of scientists to believe that man is the cause. That's not really an argument at all, to be honest, and it doesn't even attempt to address any of the actual data and modeling.

Not necessarily. Cutting pollution at plants (and in car engines) generally involves utilizing some form of chemical reaction (catalytic converters), re-burning the gas or other processes. For instance, your typical coal plant emissions controls will have scrubbers that significantly reduce SO2, particulates and mercury (though they still pollute terribly) without doing a thing about CO2. Your car now has multiple catalytic converters and a complex emissions gas re-circ system, but it doesn't cut down on CO2. At the end of the day, it's still a chemical reaction. You need to produce heat to boil water to generate steam to turn a turbine to generate electricity. Generating X amount of heat will always require burning Y amount of coal and producing Z amount of CO2. Efficiencies in the heat transfer/steam generation process can help reduce the amount of fuel needed to produce a certain amount of electricity, but even at unity (i.e. perfect and complete transfer of all energy from the burning coal into electricity), we're still going to have high levels of CO2 emissions. If we want to control those emissions, we need specialized equipment like carbon scrubbers or we need sequestration. These options are available in industrial power settings, but not for automobiles.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Jul 17, 2012 -> 10:43 AM) I support those large scale changes now, not because I believe we are the main contributor to rising global temperatures, but because why pollute when you don't have too? If better, more efficient methods for our factories exist today, which would cut emissions/pollution, I'm all for implementing them for the sake of our own health and for cleaner air. Not because I believe it's going to save the world. I'm not rejecting the world-wide scientific understanding of anything other than the idea that *we* are the main cause of global warming. I *do* reject that claim/idea. Because warming trends, even severe ones, have occurred before we existed...and they will occur AFTER we've existed. I do *not*, however, reject the idea that we pollute, needlessly or even carelessly, and there are better modern methods that could be used cut said pollution for the sake of our air quality, etc. But if you don't believe that CO2 is the significant driver of global warming, then there's no reason to cut CO2 emissions. It doesn't impact air quality. If AGW is not a significant thing, then there's no reason to impose carbon caps or C&T; there's no externality there that we need to capture. We can reduce other pollution emissions in other ways with less cost without worrying about CO2 if that's our concern Warming trends have occurred in the past, and yes, they'll occur in the future, but that's not a reason to reject the concept of AGW. Of course scientists who have been studying this for decades have considered what happened in the past; paleoclimatology is the grounds for a lot of our understanding of climate systems in the first place.

Transportation still remains the leading source of CO2 emissions. Our engines are much better now, but cars also weigh a hell of a lot more due to both increased comfort and features and increased safety (airbags, ABS, Traction, Stability, more robust chassis, bigger brakes, etc. etc.). You could get 40+MPG cars in the 80's because they were lighter. We were steadily increasing the total amount of fuel consumed every year until the crash. I know you're a non-believer to "a degree," and that rejection of the world-wide scientific understanding of the issue is part of the problem. Could you ever see yourself supporting the large-scale changes we need to address this since you don't even believe it needs to be addressed at that level?

We haven't really started to address it, no. It's hard when something like 50% of the country denies that the problem even exists. We're still putting out increasing amounts of CO2 over the last several decades. If we were really addressing the problem, doing what we need to do, we'd be drastically cutting emissions, not talking about Keystone. This report contains the most recent estimates I've seen. There's a slight dip in the last few years due to the economy crashing, but we aren't doing anything to really reduce emissions.

my friend is doing one of those crazy all-three-movies-in-a-row shows Thursday night. I'll be seeing it on IMAX Sunday afternoon

QUOTE (bigruss22 @ Jul 14, 2012 -> 03:44 PM) Where do you guys for auto loans? I'd like to be able to go to a dealer with at least a different financing option in hand, but I don't have much of a credit history since I am fresh out of college but I figured this would be a good time to start that credit history anyways. I do know that my credit score is >750. I got mine through a credit union.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jul 13, 2012 -> 09:28 AM) Whoa, on the train this morning I hit 3/4 of the way through Book 3 of Game of Thrones (A Storm of Swords)....holy crap.

They're definitely a nicer car than the GTO, just not worth $25k to me.

QUOTE (Iwritecode @ Jul 13, 2012 -> 09:58 AM) Agree with both posts. Low interest rate, 10 year/100,000 mile warranty and only 72 miles on the odometer when I drove it home where the reasons I went with a brand new car. Be careful with those warranties. You have to get every single thing in the scheduled maintenance done by the dealer for them to last that long.

QUOTE (scenario @ Jul 12, 2012 -> 10:09 PM) Favorite car I ever owned... a Taurus SHO. Shed a tear when I sold that one. The new Taurus SHO is pretty sweet. Over 300 HP, AWD, a decent interior and good looks to boot.

QUOTE (Melissa1334 @ Jul 12, 2012 -> 10:29 PM) the only thing that sucks about these cars is that theyre v8's , waste too much gas. my brother has a beautiful 04 pontiac gto and it only gives him a little over 12 mpg I average about 17mpg in mine in my stoplight commute. Luckily it's only 5-6 miles.

QUOTE (scenario @ Jul 12, 2012 -> 09:45 PM) If I was a young single guy... this would be one of my cars. http://www.cars.com/go/search/detail.jsp?listingId=68310282 I understand GM is going to reintroduce the G8 next year. 6.0L V8 Read reviews on this. Hell... I still may go out and buy one. lol That's an awful lot of money for that car IMO. You can pick up a low-miles GTO with an LS2 for $15k.

QUOTE (Cknolls @ Jul 13, 2012 -> 07:19 AM) "Now that I am out of gov't., I can tell you what I really believe.... Central banks are now so heavily influencing asset prices that investors are unable to ascertain market values....this influence is especially evident with the Fed's purchase of gov't. bonds, which has made it impossible for investors to use bond prices to learn anything about markets." ----Kevin Warsh, former member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Resrerve Keep pumping boys!! I would love for someone to ask Bernanke in his HH testimony if he would provide proof that the FED does not intervene in the equity mkts through the NY dealing desk. the entire system is rigged