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Recent Comments by NetRunner
 | comment listing type: Top Sift for Nov 7th, 2009Friends O' the Sift Top New Lies Videos by Vote  Subscribe Top 15 Lies Sifters of All Time Top 7 Lies Sifters of the Past Week Newest Appreciated Comments        |
Dennis Kucinich Raises a Valid Point on Health Care
There's always money to kill people, or bail out big business's bad bets, but never a dime to try to save people's lives.
Rep. Todd Akin fails the pledge of allegiance
What To Do If Your Toyota Prius Accelerates Out Of Control
The e-brake in a Prius is very much set up as a parking brake. You push the pedal in, and it locks in place. I wouldn't recommend that you try to use it to slow down at highway speeds (or hardly any speed at all).
I haven't tried it, but I don't think you can even shut off the ignition at speed, either.
I'm not sure why people act like the Prius is an especially slow car. It's the same as a normal 4-cylinder mid-size sedan. Not a rocket, but easily capable of hitting 100mph, getting up to speed on highway ramps, overtaking dickheads who're only going 75 in the left-hand lane...I can vouch for all those personally.
Yes, I own a Prius. I'm sure everyone's shocked.
The new stargate on hulu.com (1sttube Talk Post)
I also liked the initial offering of V. I'm curious how many episodes it will take before the teabaggers start carrying reptilian Obama signs.
I've also been watching FlashForward. I loved the novel, and the series is definitely taking a very different direction than the novel (the Flashforward in the novel was a freak accident, not part of a shadowy plot).
I'm looking forward to the Prisoner remake that's coming in a couple weeks.
As much as I like all this new/remake Scifi, I do find myself craving a nice, predictable, upbeat Star Trek series. Everyone wants to be the new Battlestar Galactica, but no one seems to be going for that simple morality play format that Roddenberry pioneered.
I'm getting sick of antiheroes in my sci-fi.
Republicans Fail to Cut Off Alan Grayson's Floor Speech
Colbert Report 11/4/09: Formidable Opponent - Global Warming
*money
Rick Sanchez - Virginia Foxx - Cost of Healthcare vs. Terror
*money
Rick Sanchez - Virginia Foxx - Cost of Healthcare vs. Terror
When they say a health care bill will cost x billion dollars how do they come up with that figure? I'm pretty sure I'm right in my assumption that that figure leaves out the amount not spent privately on health care and insurance and that it leaves out the programs that would automatically be reduced or removed once we had a decent system. So the X billion dollars should be a very big negative number if you're being intellectually honest.
You're essentially dead on. There's no attempt in the CBO reports to gauge the non-government cost impacts of any of the health care bills.
He does mention that it would reduce the deficit, though people like Foxx say that just means it's a "stealth" tax increase.
I also think the costs listed for our wars are lowball ones, and don't include things like veterans benefits, or our basic defense spending that wasn't specifically earmarked for the war. It also doesn't mention that there were no tax increases to pay for the war -- it was pure deficit spending, with no long-run value to the American people that I can discern.
Health care, on the other hand, will be a huge long-run benefit to us, and will reduce our deficit. Seems like win/win/win, even if you insist on looking at it in purely fiscal terms.
ZOMFG THE SWINE FLU! (Blog Entry by rottenseed)
Off to the FEMA camps with him!
ZOMFG THE SWINE FLU! (Blog Entry by rottenseed)
The real issue is that even if it's only serious in 0.01% of the people who get it, it seems likely that essentially everyone will get it, and in a country with 300 million people, 0.01% is still 30,000 people. Ya know, ten times the number of people that were killed in some event eight years ago that sent us into a psycho-jihad against Muslims.
It's not the end of the world as we know it, but it is worth raising a fuss over.
The media does go overboard with it, and really goes for the sensationalism about thousands dead, and the vaccine, and the .000001% chance the vaccine will have serious side effects, and gleefully shows us video of people who fall into the 0.01% who've been hospitalized, but they aren't actually lying about its effects as near as I can tell.
Keith Olbermann To Glenn Beck: Go To Hell!
*controversy
*fear
Olbermann to Glenn Beck: "Go to Hell"
Congressman Alan Grayson on Afghanistan
Does this mean you're now against nation-building, NR?
What do you mean "now"?
I grew up hating the way the US treated other countries like chess pieces in a grand game with the Soviet Union. I certainly didn't like the Iraq war, and I'm not particularly clear on what our endgame is supposed to be in Afghanistan, though it appears neither Bush nor Obama are all that clear on that subject either.
My foreign policy preference is a lot closer to "leave people alone" than "invade and destroy other nations and set up pro-American puppet governments" as we have done so often in our recent past.
Larry King: Ron Paul vs. Michael Moore
Essentially the argument goes something like this:
That seems like trying to cure head lice with a guillotine.
If there are areas where gangs are raping, murdering, and stealing with impunity because they've paid off the cops, someone who wants to improve the situation will:
A) Permanently cease law enforcement in the area
B) Replace the cops with people who will keep their oaths to the public
Why does anyone think A is the right answer when it's about corporations committing bribery?
Glenn Beck Tragically Alive After Fatal Car Accident
Is Obama Poised to Cede US Sovereignty?
First, the links in the description don't work. Youtube seems to like to mangle them, so you can't just copy/paste and expect them to come across intact.
Second, the first two links are "globalclimatescam.com", obviously a respected nonpartisan entity with a credible reputation for factual, peer-reviewed studies, and World Net Daily (whose reporting on Obama being secretly born in Kenya has been absolutely impeccable) with an article containing the analysis of renowned international environmental policy scholar Chuck Norris.
Third, the PolitiFact article on this (which Dr. Norris dismisses as "left-wing") does a pretty good job of knocking down the sovereignty claims by way of a civics lesson on how treaties get ratified and enforced under American law. That is to say, by reminding people that binding treaties need a 2/3 majority of the Senate to approve, which means 67 votes, plus the President's signature.
Fourth, the entire concern starts from the presupposition that concerns about carbon emissions are made up or at least grossly overstated, and therefore poses no alternative solution superior to cooperation amongst national governments.
Fifth, it seems to presuppose that a global government can a) form, b) be overtly anti-democratic, c) impose unpopular/overtly harmful policy on the population of not just the US, but the entire world via force, and d) not be destroyed both from within and without. As someone who generally believes in the potential for government action to engage in large, successful endeavors, I have to say, I don't think such a thing would be possible.
Sixth, the comment "Yeah - because everyone who has an opposing viewpoint is a right-wing-conspiracy-theorist-terrorist-extremist-racist-teabagger. I forgot about that, sorry." is crap. When someone who is ideologically anti-government presents a conspiracy theory about how a treaty on environmental issues will end freedom unless people "stop" Obama, it's not out of bounds to call them a right-wing extremist with a conspiracy theory endorsed by teabagger-central (World Net Daily), who is suggesting violence against people with whom they have an ideological disagreement to discourage the implementation of that ideology (a.k.a terrorism).
Racism being mixed in with this particular issue would be out of place, though vaporlock just called him a "right wing hack" which seems fairly innocuous, and not particularly racial.
The people saying that Bush would suspend the elections last year deserve the same kind of ridicule.
6 Types of Youtube Vids there are Way Too Many Of
Rape Victim Confronts A Senator Who Voted "No"
*femme
How to Read the Market's Expectations for Inflation
I find it funny that people buy into the shadow statistics website. Why are their numbers more believable than the government's?
For that matter, if TIPS gives a payout based on government-based CPI, doesn't that mean this measure becomes an effective way to gauge whether the market agrees with the officially-published CPI? If the market believes the government consistently under-reports inflation, then wouldn't it bid up the constant-value yields, and make this test show that the market expects high inflation?
It's kinda the beauty of the test -- both yields are set by market forces, but the payout for TIPS will be adjusted by the government-reported CPI, while constant-value won't be. The spread is determined entirely by market-expected worth of the TIPS vs. constant-value.
Now, this isn't a way to measure inflation, it's a way to divine what the market consensus prediction about the 10-year rate of inflation is.
The way I see it, you have four possibilities:
In this case, the constant value yield gives you an upper bound for the rate of inflation -- the market expects that security to pay back the rate of inflation + market interest of >0%.
The above is true, and the test as described can also be expected to be a reasonable predictor of the 10-year inflation rate.
In this case, we would see a high TIPS spread, but real inflation will be less than it predicts.
This is the Austrian belief. It means for some reason all the people controlling all the money in the world believe the Government's fraudulent statistics, while shadowstatistics.com, Peter Schiff and Ron Paul play the role of economic Cassandras.
I don't see why smart (and therefore most) money wouldn't bet on their predictions, if they are indeed accurate. They have no new theory, or special information, and certainly aren't keeping what they know to themselves. As a liberal, I don't see why the market not listening to their "correct" ideas doesn't violate the basic premise of why we should surrender our lives to the infallible, prescient markets, but I digress.
My judgment is that #4 would indicate not that Paul and Schiff are right, but that Karl Marx is right, and capitalism should be considered a fatally flawed system.
Mostly though, I think the evidence points to reality falling somewhere between #1 and #2. To the degree that the government is lying, the market is aware of it, and adjusting accordingly, with inflation likely to fall between the TIPS spread and the constant-value yield...and neither number is large right now.
I'm more of a free marketeer than Paul and Schiff -- I think if they really had valuable insight, more money would be moving on the basis of their theories and predictions.
What was your costume this year? (Blog Entry by blankfist)