OT: Well this is slightly eerie

[about regulations and regulatory burden]

Sounds like a made-up number, of course. Recall, there is value in oysters, in safety, in pollution reduction, and you cannot presume to make an economic decision on the basis of cost. One must consider both cost, and benefit, and have available some kind of alternative.

That 'one dollar out of eight' might, or might not, be complete nonsense, but it cannot, alone, drive a rational person to a decision.

I have no idea what cost 'safety regulation' adds to my own work, but I'm usually willing, even happy, to take safety precautions (and to advise others to do likewise).

Sure, we all know the great scientists who upended the common thinking of their time. These are *exceptions*. That's why we all know them by name.

Jeroen Belleman

Damn, but you are a tedious old git. That sounds like a real drag to be.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

John Larkin tediously posts denialist propaganda, which he doesn't happen to understand well enough to realise that it is empty propaganda, and then has the nerve to complain that other people are tedious?

A certain lack of insight there.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Actually, we don't. Don M. Yost reassigned the infra-red spectrum of boron trichloride on the basis of his measurements of the heat capacity of boron trichloride back in the 1930's, and I doubt if you knew his name.

It wasn't a large correction, but it did happen - that's how science works.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney 
>  
> Jeroen Belleman

Just wait 'til the snowflakes figure out American Indians were living in the stone age, in poverty; regularly raided and massacred their neighbors; practiced slavery, child labor; brutalized women and traded them as chattel; and regularly moved to escape their own trail of eco-destruction.

(And they burned fossil fuels.)

(I'm native American so I get to say all of that. You can't.)

Yep, let's look for the worst in people who died generations ago, and bemoan how their statues are victimizing us. That'll advance society!

Cheers, James Arthur

:

So did all our ancestors, at one point or another.

Don't be stupid. I know you are making one of your dim-witted rhetorical po ints, but your status as a Tea Party political activist trumps and ancestra l right that you think you might have inherited, until you disinherited you rself by signing on with a Koch-brothers-funded subversive organisation.

James Arthur idea of "advancing society" seems to involve a blind acceptanc e of Bastiat's sillier ideas. It's a bit ironic that Bastiat die of TB in 1

850, and James Arthur is doing his level best to restore TB as threat to th e health of modern Americans. Some "advances" do seem to be headed in quite the wrong direction.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Do you own a casino?

If the British hadn't been so awful to the Irish, I wouldn't exist. If the Colonies and the US hadn't imported slaves, most (all?) African Americans alive now would never have been born.

Everything that happened made us us.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

$1.75 trillion a year in 2008, according to the Small Business Administration.

2008 GDP was about 14 trillion dollars, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis: 1.75/14 = 12.5%. Q.E.D.

An enormous waste of human potential.

Regulations are mostly page after page of legalese written by twenty-four year old government lawyers who've never held a shovel or swung a pick. Most of them are all about regulating fellow humans, and nothing about making us safer.

It's a sure bet that most of the people so positive we need more regulations haven't ever read one, and wouldn't be able to understand one if they tried.

That is, they have no idea what they're defending (and would be horrified and outraged if they ever had to comply with one).

Cheers, James Arthur

You clearly have a lot of people that you ought to sue.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Yes! Well not really, but I feel like we've all sort of hit the jackpot just surviving GLOBAL WARN^hMING.

Yep. Odd how Howard Zinn made only America--the place where people are best off--bad.

Cheers, James Arthur

: c

,

tion.

James Arthur does like to use the phrase "that which was to be demonstrated " when he hasn't actually demonstrated anything".

James Arthur presumably bases this absurd claim on the - equally nonsensica l - underlying claim that government doesn't do anything right, so all the money that they have collected in taxes is utterly wasted.

If pushed, he will admit that defense spending is a good idea - even if mon ey spent on defense merely averts unfortunate things that would happen if y ou didn't spend it.

This is a point of view most often adopted by people who want to dump their toxic waste in the nearest river or bay.

So what? Technical regulations are highly technical, and you need the right college degree to know why they are necessary, or what they are regulating . That doesn't invalidate the regulations, or make them any less necessary.

They'd be even more horrified and outraged if they were forced to spend thr ee or four years at a university before being allowed to take part in the d ebate.

Regulations exist to regulate potentially dangerous processes. If you want to get into a business that involves these processes, you need to know what you are doing, or hire people who do know what you need to do.

The invisible hand of the market does an absolutely rotten job of stopping people who don't know what they are doing from endangering their neighbours .

We've been burning fossil carbon for centuries, and dumping the CO2 produce d in the atmosphere. This has produced anthropogenic global warming and is now making it worse.

Your moronic political ideas require that you ignore the problem, and bleat about over-regulation when anybody gets serious about doing anything about it.

The political logic involved is that the Koch brothers will make less money if the digging up of fossil carbon for sale as fuel is discouraged. You hi de this financial interest and claim that you are defending the free market , just as the tobacco peddlers did.

Self-interest masquerading as a defense of liberty ...

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

ote:

be

ier

You've survived it so far. California doesn't see many tropical hurricanes

but enough global warming might change that.

most_Always_Do_Better

The problem with the USA is that people who are best off are very much bett er off than the rest of the population - it is a very unequal society - and this inequality is associated with some particularly unfortunate side effe cts.

Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett are medical epidemiologists, rather t han sociologists or economists, so they pay more attention to establishing the correlation between high inequality and bad outcomes than do on the cau sal mechanisms (which are real enough). James Arthur writes them off as ign oring American exceptionalism, which is to say he goes in for hand-waving r hetoric, as usual.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

They held BLACK slaves and fought for the Confederacy, too. Horrors!

Sure I can. I don't give a rat's ass about political correctness.

But people 200 years ago should have been perfect humans, like the snowflakes.

Dear students:

As your graduation day approaches, I would like to announce a change in policy regarding the annual Year Book. Since the Year Book is a monument to you all, and since you believe monuments should reflect the worst in people, all future Year Books will include every negative fact our records contain about each of you. We will also include any negative information that can be found in public documents such as police records. Your classmates, neighbors, and extended family members will be invited to contribute.

Sincerely, your Dean of Political Correctness

Tom Del Rosso neglects the fact that satire has to be a least vaguely plausible.

The idea of a secondary school having a Dean of Political Correctness is grossly implausible, and the idea that Year Book would be anything less than pure flattery is even more so.

History is supposed to be "warts and all" but in practice always reflects the prejudices of the historian doing the compilation (which is what make the gospels so particularly unreliable).

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

That is not untrue. Back in college a friend told me this was possible given the right storm. It just took 40 more years to happen.

You may be right about Sandy. But by your own admission, these few storms don't tell you anything about the trend. If I buy 100 1k ohm, 1% resistors and of the first 10 I measure half are above 1010 ohms, I can be pretty confident the batch is out of spec. Likewise we can see how the hurricane seasons progress and determine if they are getting worse. But then you will still not believe any of the evidence because it doesn't "feel" right to you and science is all about feelings.

--

Rick C 

Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms, 
on the centerline of totality since 1998

Are you irrelevant? No point in asking questions which have no answer.

--

Rick C 

Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms, 
on the centerline of totality since 1998

e:

t's not if, it's when"

do

e design.

o pipe in here. I've heard a few random meteorologists while listening to the radio and TV say something to the effect that Harvey, Katrina and Sandy were likely the way they were because of warming ocean temperatures, cause d by climate change. But, you denier dumbasses know better than them.

c most medical professionals are involved in a massive conspiracy to screw everyone, too.

s

rs

It's more likely that you are being sold stuff selected from a particular b in on the 2% production line. Anything from from 980R to 1k02 can be sold a s 2%.

Anything between 990R to 1k01 can be sold as 1%. Anything between 995R and

1k005 can be sold as 0.5%. If they get the mean resistance a little too hig h, most of the 1% bin is going to be in the 1k005 to 1k010 range.

ill

you

The difficulty is determining whether there's a real trend or just an impro bable sequence of unusually intense storms. Given enough years, statisticia ns can assign probabilities to the two different hypotheses, but it makes m ore sense to look at the underlying physics.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney