This is not really Bernie Sanders, but interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sElz_P6QsZo
Monday, May 29, 2017
Wednesday, May 24, 2017
Friday, May 5, 2017
Minimum wage.
My cousin's kid is a single mother, makes $12 an hour working in a warehouse, and could no longer afford her apartment and had to move in with her mother.
The disparity of wealth in this country is pretty bad, and becomes really obvious when you have poor family living in a below average state.
The liberal argument is that putting more money in the hands of poor people would stimulate the economy, because they would spend it.
I am going to take a position slightly different than my normal libertarian conservative view.
My thinking that a gradual increase might be beneficial, such as a 25 or 50 cent increase per year. This would be useful even just as an experiment, to see if the negative consequences outweigh the beneficial ones.
I am looking at this from a moral perspective. If you ask someone to work for less than a living wage, which I have done, not only does this seem like slavery, but someone else has to supplement that person's living. It might be a family member, or food stamps (which Walmart suggested to their employees that they apply for), or low income housing. Somebody is paying the bill somewhere.
I see the opposite side of the argument. Pay people too much and they have no incentive to better themselves.
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
Monckton's Mathematical Proof - Climate Sensitivity is Low
I don't pretend to understand the math, which he doesn't bother to explain, but if the math presented here is correct, then this could be one of the most significant findings of our lifetime.
Lord Monckton is a bit wordy, so I created the link above to start 27 minutes into the video where he gets to his main points.
This seems to give credence to my earlier observation that existing data suggests a relatively low climate sensitivity. Other people have noted that predictions of large climate sensitivity are not supported by the observations.
Lord Monckton sees the climate debate as a struggle between freedom and those who oppose it, and he sees this as a conspiracy. Although I am also concerned about how climate alarmism will impact our freedom, it really should be a separate issue from the climate science, because it could bias how we view this. However, it is possible that the alarmists are also biased.
I also watched some other videos by climate alarmists who noted that if we don't act we will face dire consequences. These same videos further claimed that the reason we don't act is that the threat is not very visible to us. It is not the same as seeing a tiger coming at you, but these videos claim that the threat is real nevertheless.
If the alarmists are correct, then I certainly want to know that. I tried to find a refutation to Monckton's recent claims above, but I think that it is too soon. I hope that the science community takes this seriously and either refutes Monckton's math or confirms it. The consequences to us either way are quite significant, and we need good sound science in to determine the correct course of action.
There are a couple of other factors that I have commented on before, but are almost never mentioned by anybody else. The first is that nuclear fusion as a power source will very likely happen in our lifetime, which in my opinion will make the entire argument mute. The second is that a technique called iron fertilization would allow us to remove as much CO2 from the atmosphere as we want.
In other words, if you argue that the Earth has a low climate sensitivity to CO2, you are also arguing for a low climate sensitivity to other influences such as solar irradiance, orbital changes, and volcanic emissions. In fact, as shown in Figure 1, the climate is less sensitive to changes in solar activity than greenhouse gases. Thus when arguing for low climate sensitivity, it becomes difficult to explain past climate changes. For example, between glacial and interglacial periods, the planet's average temperature changes on the order of 6°C (more like 8-10°C in the Antarctic). If the climate sensitivity is low, for example due to increasing low-lying cloud cover reflecting more sunlight as a response to global warming, then how can these large past climate changes be explained?
https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity-advanced.htm
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