Re: Sen. Harry Reid, NV: Wildfires caused by global warming

On Oct 28, 6:40 pm, James Arthur <dagmargoodb...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 27, 4:46 pm, bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:





On Oct 26, 7:25 pm, James Arthur <dagmargoodb...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Oct 26, 2:29 am, bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:

On Oct 26, 6:06 am, James Arthur wrote:
On Oct 25, 2:52 pm, bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Oct 25, 6:36 pm, James Arthur wrote:

[...]

We've been protecting the world since WWII. That's expensive.

But that's not where most of the money is going.

True, now. Most of our money is presently spent on ineffectual social
programs.

Not true.

http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm

Bill, that link is just plain embarrassing--no wonder you have such
wacky, misbegotten theories.

I rather liked the way they lumped the interest on the national debt
into military expenditure, on the not-unreasonable basis that this was
just paying for previous wars.

That's one of their most glaring errors--wrongly attributing all debt
to warfare.

We've spent a great deal more on welfare, Medicare, Medicaid and
Johnson's war on poverty. Social programs have been roughly 2/3rds the
budget for quite some time; by any fair measure, they deserve an equal
proportion of the debt.

That's not opinion, that's accounting...amortization.

It's opinion. Your national debt has been built up over a long time -
much longer than the period that you have been spending 2/3rds of your
budget on what you chose to classify as social programs, and you could
attribute each dollar of debt to the expenditure that incurred it.
That would be a valid system of amortization, Claiming that the debt
should be assigned on the basis of the way you spend money now is not.

(If you had three resistors dissipating heat, would you blame one for
the entire loss?)

An entirely false analogy - resistors are dissipating heat now. If you
were to talk about the heat stored in the heat sink, you could find
that one resistor had been responsible for getting the heat sink hot,
even through the other two are now dissipating as much heat.

Here's the actual data:

http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/reports/additionaltable3.pdf

summarized here:
http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/hp603.htm

The U.S. 2007 budget was
$2,731 billion ($2.7e12), of which only

$500 billion was for defense,
$69 billion for Homeland wasted-money nonsense, and some other
pittance for the war.

That total is less than the $614 billion spent by HHS (Medicare,
Medicaid, and a few of the manifold assistance programs) alone, not to
mention

But the expenditure on Medicare isn't ineffectual, nor is it a social
program.

I regard it as effectual mostly at raising the cost of medical care,
and secondarily, a means of re-distributing wealth. And it's
socialized medicine--not a road, not part of the defense of the
nation, not maintaining the means of governance, nor part of some
other Constitutional purpose.

You are indulging in the standard right-wing nit-wittery here, and
incidentally exploding any claim you might make to exceptional
intelligence (as opposed to a capacity to score well on IQ tests).

The primary purpose of a public health system is a defence against
epidemics. In order to be effective in this role it has to offer a
service to the elderly and the indigient, who are most at risk form
infectious diseases, so that they will come to the hospitals when they
get sick, rather than staying at home and infecting their neighbours
and relatives.

Socialism provides a more positive rationale for offering this
service, but intelligent self-interest works just a well. Bismark
hated socialism, and invented national insurance in part to reduce the
electoral appeal of his left-wing political opponents, but he also saw
it as something the national government ought to be doing to improve
the effectiveness of the state.

http://countrystudies.us/germany/112.htm

$586 billion on Social Security,

of which $486 billion is on old age and survivor insurance, which
isn't ineffectual

Of course it is--as a retirement or investment plan the system has an
appalling efficiency: a large fraction of money is lost the moment
it's sent in. IOW, a huge NEGATIVE return. If saved in their own
accounts, people would still have that money which their government
squanders, plus interest.

All retirement investment systems have that problem. Sadly, people
generally don't save on their own account, so that is a non-
solution.

$52 billion on food stamps,

which isn't ineffectual

$21 billion on farm subsidies,

That isn't a social program - it's just buying votes in rural areas.

$42 billion on housing subsidies,
$43 billion on unemployment...

So, your information is wrong on its face--those idiots don't know how
to count, much less account.

They do know how to account - its just that you don't like the way
they look at the expenditures. And your accounting strikes me as no
less partisan, albeit in the opposite direction.

I've explained why their accounting is improper. Either they're
nitwits, or blackguards.

Your explained why you think their accounting is improper. Your own
approach is equally arbitrary.

Are you a nitwit or a blackguard?

But that wasn't what I meant. More of your military spending goes on
preparing for the next war - based on the assumption that it is going
to be a replay of the last war - rather than on protecting the world
from current threats. You'd like to think that the weapons that you
have got are an effective means of protecting the world, but your
opponents aren't all that fond of attacking you where you are
strongest, and tend concentrate on subverting hearts and minds - an
area where you don't spend anything like enough money where it would
be useful.

Europe has reaped the benefit while we've shouldered the burden. Willingly.

That's the way you like to see it.

You're welcome.

I'd like to say we should withdraw, but I'm only 95% sure Europe would
survive it. And we kind of like you guys.

As customers, and suppliers.

No, we just plain like you, grouchy though you might be. We are your
sons and daughters but a generation or two removed(*), we are kindred
spirits in this great democratic experiment, and we like your cheese.

I'm sure the affection is reciprocated, and I'm equally sure that it
has virtually no relevance to the way you spend your money (as in
garrisoning your forward defence posts).

(*) (It seems Graham and I are clansmen. (Which explains his dashing
good looks...))

And intellectual incapacity.

Oh baloney--another one of your bankrupt theories. Graham's plenty
smart. Runs in the family. Not that it matters, but I clear genius
with several sigma to spare; iterate the requirement, and I make the
second cut.

You do well on IQ tests. Fine. So do I and so does every member of
Mensa. There may be a few false positives in there somewhere. In fact
scoring over 140 on an IQ test - which is what most people are
claiming when they claim to be above the "genius" level, just means
that you, along with some 0.25% of the population, are above the level
where regular IQ tests give meaningful results. Scoring 150 doesn't
place you another standard deviation above the herd - it just means
that you found the test easy. There are around a million people in the
U.S. who would score above 140 on the regular tests, but nobody has
put together a test that will spread them out along the tail of the
bell curve and calibrated it so that an extra ten points on the score
would correspond to another standard deviation.

My remark was immodest and I regret it, but my god you're dense Bill--
you've still way underestimated me, you are again far off the mark,
have not understood what I said, have again misapplied a bunch of
wrong assumptions, and then woven another complicated story to
explain.

So explain why you think that you are couple of standard deviations
above "genius" level.
I've not seen your name attached to any great discovery or any other
remarkable performance, so I was pretty much compelled to assume that
you were basing the claim on the results of some IQ test or other.

Which was my point--you leap to conclusions not supported by the data.

So what conclusion should I have leapt to?

And, when your conclusion is shown conclusively to be wrong, you
equivocate.

You haven't shown that my conclusion was wrong, merely that you don't
like it.

Do provide some data to support your point of view.

If you persist even when wrong, people will think you wrong when you
persist.

So prove me wrong ...

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

.

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