79185 pts ยท December 31, 2011
I'm the kind of person that doesn't like to write about myself.
I don't want to speak too confidently here, but if that was a major/likely problem, then we'd have observed it with existing pipeline attacks. Both in this war but also with Ukraine's attacks on Russia's petroleum sector.Again, I don't want to speak too confidently, but based on that I would assess that either (a) that doesn't happen, or (b) it does happen but to a smaller degree than expected or it is less meaningful than assumed.
My understanding is that pipelines are rather difficult to do substantial damage to with bombs/missiles. They're easy, quick, and affordable to repair. The ability to attack a pipeline itself wouldn't be of much strategic value.He's deluding himself anyway. The gulf states would almost certainly construct pipelines that go through Oman instead. It's shorter to build, closer to their main customers, and is likelier to be friendly to them for longer.
You're right, but it's helpful to frame these things correctly. The goal for each of them is not truly to convince the other. It's to convince their audience.How well did he do convincing the people who were unsure of the correct answer? That's the real litmus test.
To go with your comment: it's a lot easier to break things than to fix them. It takes far more legislative work to address America's problems than it does to do what republicans have been doing lately.
I don't think we can truly pass terribleness on that way. Reagan was horrible in his own right, but he doesn't atemporally inherit Trump's awfulness simply by being a political antecedent.Otherwise we'd have to go back and declare Nixon the worst, because he led to Reagan, who led to Bush who led to Bush Jr. who led to Trump. Except we'd not have had Nixon without Eisenhower. So now by that logic Eisenhower is worse than all of them. I don't think anyone agrees with that in practice.
They don't make more profit from this, which is the whole point... Which you agree with in your own comment. How is saying "they don't profit from this" equivalent to "carrying water" for them to "make more profits" ?You attack me for something and then immediately invalidate it. Do you not see the contradiction?
They want it because it costs them nothing and makes them look good. We encourage it on a societal level because even though the company gets to look good, it also does increase the total charitable donations made. Which society has deemed to be desirable.Personally I never make those in-store donations. I like to be very specific in what I donate to. But it's not some complex/corrupt process where they get free money out of it.
Never heard of them before, so I cannot comment on that. But if the counter response is that businesses "can profit by breaking the law" then it's a bit irrelevant to the point I'm making. Which is that the current tax deduction structure does not increase business profits for charitable actions.
The benefit is money going to a charity, in case you missed that part.
Yes. They do not gain profit by being able to deduct charitable donations. They end up exactly where they were without any donations going through them.
Pet peeve of mine: companies do not benefit from tax deductions for others' charitable donations. The tax deduction means they don't pay a tax on the money brought on for the donation.As example: you donate $1 to Business for a charity. Business sends that $1 to the charity. Without a deduction, Business pays a marginal tax on that $1. With a deduction, Business pays no tax on that $1. For Business, their finances are exactly the same whether you donate + they deduct, or not + no deduct.
Saying the people who "founded NASA" is really twisting history into a pretzel. NASA was formed out of the bones of NACA (founded 1915) and parts of NCL and ABMA.You're taking the results of Operation Paperclip and the importance of people like von Braun and painting it as Nazis being intentionally deeply coded into the DNA of the agency from the beginning. Which isn't accurate. They willingly turned a blind eye to former Nazi members to get an edge, which isn't the same thing.
The odds of successfully finding those eggs are 3,720 to 1!
The biggest danger, IMO, isn't that it takes us a while to learn our lesson and fix our mistakes.It's that the learning of lesson is not permanent. It gets forgotten in time. So many corrections from the past worked so wonderfully that future generations have decided that those corrections aren't needed any more. Just look at the rise of opposition to vaccines. We did such a great job reducing the prevalence of so many viruses and diseases that idiots think that the vaccines are bad.
She's adorable. I hope the treatment is able to work and give you more years with her! Fingers crossed that she beats the odds and becomes the second one to respond to cabergoline.
Losing to candidates in safe districts by smaller margins doesn't make them less insane. You make their party less insane by removing them from power. That is done by focusing effort and resources on seats where victory is reasonably doable.Making Boebert win reelection by +8 instead of +15 or whatever won't make her sane. Winning the house with 20-40 pickups, winning the senate, winning governor's offices in NV, GA, and IA, winning a trifecta in WI, AZ, MN, MI -- that will make a difference.
The worry isn't how good our candidate is for this seat. It's that it's a super blood red seat. Trump won CO-04 by a 58-40 vote. Even in the 2018 blue wave republican statewide candidates were winning CO-04 by 20 points.Donating to candidates is good, but the biggest impact is by focusing on people who have less "exciting" opponents but are in more winnable seats. Go to Sabato Crystal Ball or Cook etc. and pick some tossup and/or Lean R seats. Your money will go a lot further.
The time where the location people sat on a bus was a political statement is still within living memory.I wish we were better at progressing as a society, but it's always going to be a struggle to move forward as quickly as we'd like while much of the last generation of people angry about inclusive changes are still alive and voting.
Reminds me of an old SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/teleportation
It's probably being fed by a very similar dataset. Generative AI is fed training data to guide it on what to generate based on input.A better model can only do so much if the training data is garbage.
Iran was a US ally during the Nixon admin. The ghost of Reagan makes far more sense.
Oh on a personal level I would 100% support that.For my "their wealth would still grow" bit, that's really massaging the messaging to ensure public support is still there. There are still a lot of people that will get up in arms at the idea of taxing the super ultra obscenely wealthy into merely ultra obscenely wealthy. So pitching it that way maintains support for a still great improvement.
Depends on how much you imagine...There are 989 billionaires in the US worth $8.4T according to Forbes. I cannot find an exact number but for the wealthy, assets growing at >5%/year should be abundantly trivial. More like 8-10% realistically.A 2% wealth tax on assets >$1b would bring in ~$150b/year. Their wealth would still grow tremendously every year! That's about 0.8% of GDP in 2025. Being able to reduce the deficit by nearly a full percentage point of GDP would be huge.
As an aside: the reason the senate prediction odds are the way they are is because of two factors. (1) The senate is biased towards conservative parties due to current US voter coalitions. (2) Only 1/3 of the senate is up at a time, and the 1/3 that is up this year is a horrible combination for democrats. Only 2 republican seats are in blue/purple states. Everything else is in a red state. The only reason democrats have a chance at 4+ senate seats now is because of how unpopular the GOP is.
Murkowski is very much a conservative, but she's absolutely willing to tell her fellow republicans no and stick to it. She lost her primary to a far right loon in 2010 and won the general election as a write-in. Ever since then she's been comfortable being a more typical Bush-era conservative and sticking to that general ballpark.She's still very conservative, but generally can be counted on to vote no when she says she'll vote no.
US has two levels of gas tax. Federal gas tax is 18.4 cents/gallon. Average price right now is ~$3.50/gal. Works out to about 5%. That is what would be affected by this legislation if it happened (it probably won't). On top of that there are state taxes on gas, which would be unaffected. State taxes vary from 8.95 cents/gal (Alaska) to 87.32 cents/gal (California). Most states are ~30 cents.Europe charges much higher fuel taxes than the US does.
We've refused to raise the gas tax for over 30 years. It's about 5% of current gas prices. The share it represents in gas prices is small enough now that it wouldn't significant affect the situation.Beyond being a dumb idea for the reasons stated, even if those reasons weren't present it would still be a dumb idea because it doesn't actually accomplish anything.
The inefficiency of our current healthcare system is about the same size of our GDP as the military budget. If we had a healthcare system as cost-efficient as Canada's, we could ~double the military budget with the savings.
Albinism is genetic as I understand it. Once it's established that one reindeer in a group is albino, it's known that the genetic conditions exist for it in other reindeer born of that family. That would mean the odds are not at all independent and that the chances will go up dramatically once one is born.
That's been a complaint of mine for a while!In my head I multiply all the tonnages by 5 to make it make sense. A 500 ton Atlas sounds more appropriate to me. Sometimes I prefer multiplying by 10, but usually I go with 5.In this case though I was referencing a specific meme video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73zK-PjmyKY
I don't want to speak too confidently here, but if that was a major/likely problem, then we'd have observed it with existing pipeline attacks. Both in this war but also with Ukraine's attacks on Russia's petroleum sector.
Again, I don't want to speak too confidently, but based on that I would assess that either (a) that doesn't happen, or (b) it does happen but to a smaller degree than expected or it is less meaningful than assumed.
My understanding is that pipelines are rather difficult to do substantial damage to with bombs/missiles. They're easy, quick, and affordable to repair. The ability to attack a pipeline itself wouldn't be of much strategic value.
He's deluding himself anyway. The gulf states would almost certainly construct pipelines that go through Oman instead. It's shorter to build, closer to their main customers, and is likelier to be friendly to them for longer.
You're right, but it's helpful to frame these things correctly. The goal for each of them is not truly to convince the other. It's to convince their audience.
How well did he do convincing the people who were unsure of the correct answer? That's the real litmus test.
To go with your comment: it's a lot easier to break things than to fix them. It takes far more legislative work to address America's problems than it does to do what republicans have been doing lately.
I don't think we can truly pass terribleness on that way. Reagan was horrible in his own right, but he doesn't atemporally inherit Trump's awfulness simply by being a political antecedent.
Otherwise we'd have to go back and declare Nixon the worst, because he led to Reagan, who led to Bush who led to Bush Jr. who led to Trump. Except we'd not have had Nixon without Eisenhower. So now by that logic Eisenhower is worse than all of them. I don't think anyone agrees with that in practice.
They don't make more profit from this, which is the whole point... Which you agree with in your own comment. How is saying "they don't profit from this" equivalent to "carrying water" for them to "make more profits" ?
You attack me for something and then immediately invalidate it. Do you not see the contradiction?
They want it because it costs them nothing and makes them look good. We encourage it on a societal level because even though the company gets to look good, it also does increase the total charitable donations made. Which society has deemed to be desirable.
Personally I never make those in-store donations. I like to be very specific in what I donate to. But it's not some complex/corrupt process where they get free money out of it.
Never heard of them before, so I cannot comment on that. But if the counter response is that businesses "can profit by breaking the law" then it's a bit irrelevant to the point I'm making. Which is that the current tax deduction structure does not increase business profits for charitable actions.
The benefit is money going to a charity, in case you missed that part.
Yes. They do not gain profit by being able to deduct charitable donations. They end up exactly where they were without any donations going through them.
Pet peeve of mine: companies do not benefit from tax deductions for others' charitable donations. The tax deduction means they don't pay a tax on the money brought on for the donation.
As example: you donate $1 to Business for a charity. Business sends that $1 to the charity. Without a deduction, Business pays a marginal tax on that $1. With a deduction, Business pays no tax on that $1. For Business, their finances are exactly the same whether you donate + they deduct, or not + no deduct.
Saying the people who "founded NASA" is really twisting history into a pretzel. NASA was formed out of the bones of NACA (founded 1915) and parts of NCL and ABMA.
You're taking the results of Operation Paperclip and the importance of people like von Braun and painting it as Nazis being intentionally deeply coded into the DNA of the agency from the beginning. Which isn't accurate. They willingly turned a blind eye to former Nazi members to get an edge, which isn't the same thing.
The odds of successfully finding those eggs are 3,720 to 1!
The biggest danger, IMO, isn't that it takes us a while to learn our lesson and fix our mistakes.
It's that the learning of lesson is not permanent. It gets forgotten in time. So many corrections from the past worked so wonderfully that future generations have decided that those corrections aren't needed any more. Just look at the rise of opposition to vaccines. We did such a great job reducing the prevalence of so many viruses and diseases that idiots think that the vaccines are bad.
She's adorable. I hope the treatment is able to work and give you more years with her! Fingers crossed that she beats the odds and becomes the second one to respond to cabergoline.
Losing to candidates in safe districts by smaller margins doesn't make them less insane. You make their party less insane by removing them from power. That is done by focusing effort and resources on seats where victory is reasonably doable.
Making Boebert win reelection by +8 instead of +15 or whatever won't make her sane. Winning the house with 20-40 pickups, winning the senate, winning governor's offices in NV, GA, and IA, winning a trifecta in WI, AZ, MN, MI -- that will make a difference.
The worry isn't how good our candidate is for this seat. It's that it's a super blood red seat. Trump won CO-04 by a 58-40 vote. Even in the 2018 blue wave republican statewide candidates were winning CO-04 by 20 points.
Donating to candidates is good, but the biggest impact is by focusing on people who have less "exciting" opponents but are in more winnable seats. Go to Sabato Crystal Ball or Cook etc. and pick some tossup and/or Lean R seats. Your money will go a lot further.
The time where the location people sat on a bus was a political statement is still within living memory.
I wish we were better at progressing as a society, but it's always going to be a struggle to move forward as quickly as we'd like while much of the last generation of people angry about inclusive changes are still alive and voting.
Reminds me of an old SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/teleportation
It's probably being fed by a very similar dataset. Generative AI is fed training data to guide it on what to generate based on input.
A better model can only do so much if the training data is garbage.
Iran was a US ally during the Nixon admin. The ghost of Reagan makes far more sense.
Oh on a personal level I would 100% support that.
For my "their wealth would still grow" bit, that's really massaging the messaging to ensure public support is still there. There are still a lot of people that will get up in arms at the idea of taxing the super ultra obscenely wealthy into merely ultra obscenely wealthy. So pitching it that way maintains support for a still great improvement.
Depends on how much you imagine...
There are 989 billionaires in the US worth $8.4T according to Forbes. I cannot find an exact number but for the wealthy, assets growing at >5%/year should be abundantly trivial. More like 8-10% realistically.
A 2% wealth tax on assets >$1b would bring in ~$150b/year. Their wealth would still grow tremendously every year! That's about 0.8% of GDP in 2025. Being able to reduce the deficit by nearly a full percentage point of GDP would be huge.
As an aside: the reason the senate prediction odds are the way they are is because of two factors. (1) The senate is biased towards conservative parties due to current US voter coalitions. (2) Only 1/3 of the senate is up at a time, and the 1/3 that is up this year is a horrible combination for democrats.
Only 2 republican seats are in blue/purple states. Everything else is in a red state. The only reason democrats have a chance at 4+ senate seats now is because of how unpopular the GOP is.
Murkowski is very much a conservative, but she's absolutely willing to tell her fellow republicans no and stick to it. She lost her primary to a far right loon in 2010 and won the general election as a write-in. Ever since then she's been comfortable being a more typical Bush-era conservative and sticking to that general ballpark.
She's still very conservative, but generally can be counted on to vote no when she says she'll vote no.
US has two levels of gas tax. Federal gas tax is 18.4 cents/gallon. Average price right now is ~$3.50/gal. Works out to about 5%. That is what would be affected by this legislation if it happened (it probably won't). On top of that there are state taxes on gas, which would be unaffected. State taxes vary from 8.95 cents/gal (Alaska) to 87.32 cents/gal (California). Most states are ~30 cents.
Europe charges much higher fuel taxes than the US does.
We've refused to raise the gas tax for over 30 years. It's about 5% of current gas prices. The share it represents in gas prices is small enough now that it wouldn't significant affect the situation.
Beyond being a dumb idea for the reasons stated, even if those reasons weren't present it would still be a dumb idea because it doesn't actually accomplish anything.
The inefficiency of our current healthcare system is about the same size of our GDP as the military budget. If we had a healthcare system as cost-efficient as Canada's, we could ~double the military budget with the savings.
Albinism is genetic as I understand it. Once it's established that one reindeer in a group is albino, it's known that the genetic conditions exist for it in other reindeer born of that family. That would mean the odds are not at all independent and that the chances will go up dramatically once one is born.
That's been a complaint of mine for a while!
In my head I multiply all the tonnages by 5 to make it make sense. A 500 ton Atlas sounds more appropriate to me. Sometimes I prefer multiplying by 10, but usually I go with 5.
In this case though I was referencing a specific meme video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73zK-PjmyKY