Re: Hurricane Bertha

bill.sloman@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Jul 14, 2:25 am, Joerg <notthisjoerg...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Jul 13, 2:15 am, Joerg <notthisjoerg...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Jul 13, 12:01 am, Joerg <notthisjoerg...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Jul 12, 12:46 am, Joerg <notthisjoerg...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Jul 10, 3:32 am, Joerg <notthisjoerg...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Richard The Dreaded Libertarian wrote:
On Tue, 08 Jul 2008 10:56:32 -0500, Bit Farmer wrote:
bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Jul 8, 8:09 am, Jim Thompson <To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-I...@My-Web-
Site.com> wrote:
Hurricane Bertha...
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gVWjsPEiqe1tEu2mhBIRaxxGi8owD91P3HM80

<snp>

The Dutch and the Germans have more effective social security systems
than the US, and that does cost money
How do you know that?

It shows up in the public health statistics - the USA is roughly level
pegging with Cuba, and well behind the industrialised European
countries.


Please provide a credible link. Cancer mortality is hugely higher in Europe. So is lots of other nasty stuff. Much of the medical technology I've worked on over here has never even been tried in engineering groups in Europe. Such as:

http://www.volcanocorp.com/products/ivus-imaging/index.asp


Have you lived in the US? Not all that glitters is
gold. Case in point: I had always paid up my old age medical benefit
(what Medicare is in the US). Then politicians in Germany elected to
"melt off" (a.k.a. steal) those credits _paid_ in the first half of the
career. Bang, doors shut. In the US that is called theft.

That I don't know anything about. What I do know is that the German
public health statistcs are up there with the best in the world, so
their politicians seem to be doing something right. If you can afford
US medical insurance, you get very good health care - albeit at around
twice the price that the Germans and French pay for a similar quality
of care - but your impoverished neighours are at liberty to catch
every infectious dsease known to medical science, and all too prone to
avoid going to the doctor because they can't really afford it.


Again, we need a credible link here.


It pays off. The coloured kids of US servicemen who grew up in Germany
after WW2 weren't noticably disadvantaged, while the legitimate kids
of the same coloured servicemen growing up in the US dropped
progressively further behind their white contemporaries every year.
Care to present some proof, examples, links?

That one came from Herrnstein and Murray's "The Bell Curve" which has
been analysed to death.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

The thesis of the book seems to be based on an inept statistical
analysis, but that particular fact survived unscathed. My copy of "The
Bell Curve" is back in Nijmegen, so I can't quote their reference for
the claim.


To be honest and no pun intended, I am pretty shocked and saddened you use that book as an argument.


The children of the poor in the U.S. don't get enough of the right
food to take full advantage of what education is on offer, and a
disproportionate number of them grow up to be unemployable.
Huh? Everyone here can get all the healthy food they want. In our
community it is several churched (including ours) that runs a food
closet. And yes, you can get food there even if you'd be an atheist.

In your particular community this may well be true. It doesn't seem to
be true for the country as a whole.


Everyone poor in the US is entitled to free food stamps. You can't buy cigarettes or alcohol with them but you can buy lots of fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, and so on. People with an unhealthy diet eat so poorly because the chose to, not because they have to.


Right wing commentators make a great fuss about the "dependency
culture" which is a myth, and ignore the damage done to the children
of the poor by inadequate social security.
I have seen dependency or entitlement mentality first hand in the
Netherlands. Kids saying openly "Why should I apply for a job? Then I
have less money in my pocket that I do on welfare. It would be stupid."
That did it for me and I packed my bags.

5% of the population is more or less insane, and they are prone to say
things like that. ...


Absolutamente not. I knew these kids, I knew they parents, I knew the environment they were brought up in. All very normal. But they were plain lazy because of this watering can dole out scheme. So I chose not to support that and move on.


... The Melbourne poverty survey - done in the late
1960's - found a very different pattern. Basically anybody sane enough
to hold down a job really wanted to work, but there were a wide
variety of circumstances where people couldn't get into a situation
where they could work. For a while I went out with one of the people
working on the detailed data, and was at a party with her when she
dumped a load of examples of the way things could go wrong on some
reactionary twit who though that the unemployed were all idle
shirkers. The relationship didn't last, but I know she went on to a
successful academic career.

... Everybody has long since learned the lesson that
it pays to let the free market provide any service that isn't a
"natural monopoly". Transport systems do tend to be natural monopolies
- it doesn't make sense to have duplicated independent rail, road or
canal networks - and for these sorts of services, government-run
systems do seem to serve the community better than privately owned
systems.
Like the gvt subsidized train "system" here. Yeah, right. We go
everywhere by air and that's all corporate run.
Who make very sure that their tame legislators don't subsidise the
train system to a point where it could offer an attractive and
competitive service, as it does in continental Europe, and did in the
UK until Thatcher (who hated trains and never used them) privatised it
into a condition where it barely works, to the benefit of the
corporate run airlines who were "contributing to the Conservative
Party funds".
Airlines aren't gvt funded out here. They must weather the free market.
Some like Southwest Airlines do that very well, others not so well.

They'd all do less well if the train system was better.


In America we do not believe in huge subsidies. Although they happen, mostly in the farming sector.


<snip>
Al Gore's "The Assault on Reason" has a fair bit to say about this
kind of self-indulgent foolishness
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Assault_on_Reason
Sorry, this guy does not have credibility in my eyes anymore.
So you too have been suckered by Exxon-Mobil's propaganda ...
Nope. you don't remember the hockey stick scare?
You really have been suckered. The temperature rise was real enough,
but Mann's crime was to modify a well-known statistical technique - in
a fashion that he should have realised was wrong - to make his graphs
illustrating the point look better than they should have done. It was
perfectly ordinary human error, but the anti-global warming
propagandists have blown it up out of all proportion, and nitwits like
Eeyore carry on as it is was evidence of extensive and systematic
fraud by the whole IPCC, which is as daft a conspiracy theory as any
you can find.
Modify is too close to "falsify".

It wasn't a scheme you'd use to get a specific result you wanted. It
had the effect of giving unjustified extra weight to the data
sequences that showed the sort of global warming that everybody could
see was going on, but the reviewers had to dig very deeply into the
way Mann's modified version of the procedure worked to show that the
extra weight was unjustified and excessive.


ROFL! I sure didn't have to dig deep.


What's all that peer review fuss about anyhow if they don't even catch such egregious "errors"?

The peer review system is only as good as the reviewers, and it took
some deep and tedious digging into his data and results to find out
how and where he'd screwed up. Try doing some refereeing sometime. It
isn't easy.


I _did_ peer reviewing for some time.


No wonder he lost credibility.

Deservedly so. The people who don't want to believe in global warming
try to extend his loss of credibility to the entire IPCC, which is
something of a stretch.


The IPCC has released a lot more stuff and comments of dubious quality.


I think I found something similar in the sea level
graph, have written to the university where that came from. Anxiously
waiting for the answer. Will post here if I get it. Also if I don't ...

The usual way of registering doubt is to send a "comment" to the
journal that published the data - it is usually refereed by the same
people that refereed the original paper. If they think you've got a
valid point the comment will be published in a later issue of the
journal. I think I've had six published so far - four of them in The
Review of Scientific Instruments.


Same here, in my case mostly in EMBC (IEEE). But: Most other journals are inaccessible to non-academians because they impose very high subscription fees. All you get is some graphs on a web site or in a newspaper where you just know they are wrong. Then all you can do is write to the institute behind it. Which is what I did on Friday.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
.

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