Climate Change Discussion/ split from What is the purpose of a Taekwondo form?

[dvcochran]

NAME TWO!!

$36.2M in FOIA lawsuits.
$114M in travel alone doubling any other president.
I can go on and on.

 

[dvcochran]

NAME TWO!!

Had to add Obamacare.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

$36.2M in FOIA lawsuits.
$114M in travel alone doubling any other president.
I can go on and on.

The FOIA lawsuit costs, as I understand it, are the cost of the government dealing with those lawsuits. The government doesn't have control over what suits happen, except in how opaque they are. There is some strong evidence that Obama's administration was more likely to refuse an FOIA request, though I don't know if that's because they were being more secretive or because FOIA requests filed were less normal. I can't find a ready source that indicates (clearly) one way or the other, so my default for now is that it's probably a mix of both. Given the number of those requests that came from news media, it seems quite likely they (the administration) should be held to account for at least part of that amount. In spite of that, it's interesting to note that the current rate of FOIA lawsuits is more than 25% higher than at any point in the previous administration.

Travel expenses have slowly escalated with each administration ($124M for Bush, $134M for Obama), apparently due to a combination of increasing cost of security (more equipment involved) and inflation. Numbers are incomplete on the current administration (don't yet have costs on things like Secret Service details for travel), but the numbers known so far seem to put the current First Family's travel costs out of line with past presidents (and when those other costs are known, it will almost certainly be more so).

 

[Gerry Seymour]

Had to add Obamacare.

Whether that was a good or bad thing appears to depend who you are. Most polls show the majority of Americans don't want it to go away.

Now, talk about the roll-out, and there are certainly examples there. I think much was wasted in the implementation of the program, though I favor its existence (as a jumping-off point to controlling skyrocketing medical costs).

 

[Gerry Seymour]

Just thought I'd share - apparently Darrin Bell has been following our discussion...

 

[elder999]

$36.2M in FOIA lawsuits.
$114M in travel alone doubling any other president.
I can go on and on.

Had to add Obamacare.

Judicial Watch puts Obama's eight year travel spending at $97 million, so we can apparently count on you making stuff up, but I'm pretty certain none of those has anything to do with global warming, "the green movement," or alternative (non-fossil) energy.

You seem to have difficulty staying on point. Did you attend public school?In Arkansas, perhaps?

Florida, maybe?

Just so you remember what you said:

. There have been way too many documented stories of wasted millions during the Obama administration and the green energy movement..

Now. Name two. I'm not even positing that there weren't any-just that you don't really know anything about the subject, @dvcochran

 

[Flying Crane]

Judicial Watch puts Obama's eight year travel spending at $97 million, so we can apparently count on you making stuff up, but I'm pretty certain none of those has anything to do with global warming, "the green movement," or alternative (non-fossil) energy.

You seem to have difficulty staying on point. Did you attend public school?In Arkansas, perhaps?

Florida, maybe?

Just so you remember what you said:



Now. Name two. I'm not even positing that there weren't any-just that you don't really know anything about the subject, @dvcochran

I believe Judicialwatch has a long history of making false and unsubstantiated claims on all manner of things. They’ve certainly tried to paint climate science as fraudulent and gone after climate scientists. Those accusations were, of course, investigated and deemed to have no merit.

 

[elder999]

I believe Judicialwatch has a long history of making false and unsubstantiated claims on all manner of things. They’ve certainly tried to paint climate science as fraudulent and gone after climate scientists. Those accusations were, of course, investigated and deemed to have no merit.

(Shh...using a so-called "right wing" source can be confounding....pretty sure the real figure is north of that, but less than the $114 million claimed by some...it depends upon what figures in. Air Force One supposedly costs $80000 a minute. Do official overseas trips count? IT's not relevant to climate change, anyway.....)

 

[Gerry Seymour]

Judicial Watch puts Obama's eight year travel spending at $97 million, so we can apparently count on you making stuff up, but I'm pretty certain none of those has anything to do with global warming, "the green movement," or alternative (non-fossil) energy.

I'm unclear whether that includes the so-called auxiliary costs (Secret Service, etc.) the sources I found yesterday all had figures similar to what was posted earlier.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

(Shh...using a so-called "right wing" source can be confounding....pretty sure the real figure is north of that, but less than the $114 million claimed by some...it depends upon what figures in. Air Force One supposedly costs $80000 a minute. Do official overseas trips count? IT's not relevant to climate change, anyway.....)

Technically, all Presidential trips are considered "official" - it was deemed long ago that the President is never off-duty. And the costs seem really high when we just look at the numbers, but we have to figure several things that are entirely out of the President's control: cost of Secret Service (including "advancing" the destination), cost of operating AF1, etc. Any of us could make the same trips on a chartered Gulf Stream with 8 of our closest friends and spend only a fraction what it costs for Presidential travel - most of which is not within Presidential control.

 

[dvcochran]

Judicial Watch puts Obama's eight year travel spending at $97 million, so we can apparently count on you making stuff up, but I'm pretty certain none of those has anything to do with global warming, "the green movement," or alternative (non-fossil) energy.

You seem to have difficulty staying on point. Did you attend public school?In Arkansas, perhaps?

Florida, maybe?

Just so you remember what you said:



Now. Name two. I'm not even positing that there weren't any-just that you don't really know anything about the subject, @dvcochran

Personal attack much? If you had actually been reading this thread instead of throwing out your cheap punches you would already know my lengthy education and what kind of work I do. Like I said to one of the other posters, you are not going to win this argument literally, figuratively, morally, or any other way. The best we can do is agree to disagree.
Your very petty stab of where I attended school and specifically calling out a particular states speaks volumes to the kind of person you apparently are to everyone reading this thread. Good job.

 

[dvcochran]

Whether that was a good or bad thing appears to depend who you are. Most polls show the majority of Americans don't want it to go away.

Now, talk about the roll-out, and there are certainly examples there. I think much was wasted in the implementation of the program, though I favor its existence (as a jumping-off point to controlling skyrocketing medical costs).

I agree medical costs have to be curtailed. But they have increased at a faster pace since 2009. And the end users, the doctors and medical professionals have suffered along with everyone else. The approach makes no sense to me. Instead of using the proven supply and demand model, the pharmacy and medical suppliers (hospitals, insurance, equipment, etc....)have heavily played the lobbyist and political lever to make a monster as bad as the IRS. I am not sure anyone actually knows what it cost to take a patients blood pressure, let alone to open heart surgery. Way too many double cost standards. It kind of seem to me the thinking heads feel that if they can get a big enough bucket of money through enforcement (socialism) it will work. Simply not true in a free country.

 

[elder999]

Personal attack much? If you had actually been reading this thread instead of throwing out your cheap punches you would already know my lengthy education and what kind of work I do. Like I said to one of the other posters, you are not going to win this argument literally, figuratively, morally, or any other way. The best we can do is agree to disagree.
Your very petty stab of where I attended school and specifically calling out a particular states speaks volumes to the kind of person you apparently are to everyone reading this thread. Good job.

You still haven't answered my question....prove my point much?

 

[elder999]

According to ice shelf recordings of the last 2000 years, which is as far back as they could go, CO2 did not start going up appreciably until about 1750. Then it started really taking off. Still hardly enough time to understand what is really going on. A lot of people are up in arms about information gathered in the last 50-100 years. While we are able to gather greatly more pertinent information today, it still takes time. A lot of time to understand what is going on.

What book did you get that out of? One from the sixties, no doubt, due to underfunding of your public school, or perhaps "quality" homeschooling...

As I've posted elsewhere, many times in these discussions:

Because isotopic fractions of the heavier oxygen-18 (18O) and deuterium (D) in snowfall are temperature-dependent and a strong spatial correlation exists between the annual mean temperature and the mean isotopic ratio (18O or D) of precipitation, it is possible to derive ice-core climate records. The record based on an ice core drilled at the Russian Vostok station in central east Antarctica was obtained during a series of drillings in the early 1970s and 1980s and was the result of collaboration between French and former-Soviet scientists. Drilling continued at Vostok and was completed in January 1998, reaching a depth of 3623 m, the deepest ice core ever recovered . The resulting core allows the ice core record of climate properties at Vostok to be extended to about 420,000 years.

The strong correlation between atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations and Antarctic temperature,is confirmed by the extension of the Vostok ice-core record. From the extended Vostok record, scientists have concluded that present-day atmospheric burdens of carbon dioxide and methane seem to have been unprecedented during the past 420,000 years. Temperature variations estimated from deuterium were similar for the last two glacial periods.

You can see a lot about it here, because we don't just "disagree," or "agree to disagree":

I'm right, and you're wrong.

And, er....everyone here knows who I am, and what I've done for my career. You should have a look, and start basing scientific arguments on scientific facts, instead of ....whatever it is you're basing them upon.

 

[Flying Crane]

(Shh...using a so-called "right wing" source can be confounding....pretty sure the real figure is north of that, but less than the $114 million claimed by some...it depends upon what figures in. Air Force One supposedly costs $80000 a minute. Do official overseas trips count? IT's not relevant to climate change, anyway.....)

Oh yeah, it’s a complete straw man even on a good day.

 

[Flying Crane]

Whether that was a good or bad thing appears to depend who you are. Most polls show the majority of Americans don't want it to go away.

Now, talk about the roll-out, and there are certainly examples there. I think much was wasted in the implementation of the program, though I favor its existence (as a jumping-off point to controlling skyrocketing medical costs).

I was laid-off last year and lost my benefits. For a few months I had to pay full price for medical insurance for myself, my wife, and our 5-year old son because the income I had already earned (and no longer had due to the lay-off) was high enough that I did not qualify for the discounts. Once the new year began, I qualified for discounts, paying about 1/3 of what I was paying before the first of the year.

I love Obamacare because we would not be able to afford insurance at all while we re-tool and figure out new careers.

At the same time I hate it because it does not go far enough in making insurance affordable and accessible and it is still a lot of money.

Obamacare was intended to be more than it is. Getting it through congress cut away a lot of what would have made it much better. But that discussion strays much farther into Politics than we are supposed to go, so I’ll leave that alone.

 

[Flying Crane]

Personal attack much? If you had actually been reading this thread instead of throwing out your cheap punches you would already know my lengthy education and what kind of work I do. Like I said to one of the other posters, you are not going to win this argument literally, figuratively, morally, or any other way. The best we can do is agree to disagree.
Your very petty stab of where I attended school and specifically calling out a particular states speaks volumes to the kind of person you apparently are to everyone reading this thread. Good job.

Who comes on the Internet and tries to “win” an argument??

 

[Gerry Seymour]

I agree medical costs have to be curtailed. But they have increased at a faster pace since 2009. And the end users, the doctors and medical professionals have suffered along with everyone else. The approach makes no sense to me. Instead of using the proven supply and demand model, the pharmacy and medical suppliers (hospitals, insurance, equipment, etc....)have heavily played the lobbyist and political lever to make a monster as bad as the IRS. I am not sure anyone actually knows what it cost to take a patients blood pressure, let alone to open heart surgery. Way too many double cost standards. It kind of seem to me the thinking heads feel that if they can get a big enough bucket of money through enforcement (socialism) it will work. Simply not true in a free country.

We've tried the supply and demand model. Unfortunately, it has led to the US having the highest health care costs in the world, without getting commensurate results (we rank well down among the most developed countries). Countries that use regulation to control costs (either via single-payer, government production of generics, or other means) seem to be getting better value than us. I've yet to see a recommendation using the supply and demand model that seems to have much promise.

I agree ACA hasn't been a resounding success. However, it's also not true that everyone has suffered. Many people have benefited from it. The biggest issue at present is that the two parties (we REALLY need a competitive 3rd party) seem to spend most of their energy around the topic on blocking each other, rather than trying to craft solutions together. The first step away from the old model was bound to be problematic. As would any other start-over solution.

And I've recently seen some articles that seem to contradict my previous understanding about rising health care costs under the ACA:
Everyone Agrees Obamacare Prices Have Been Rising Rapidly. But Everyone Is Wrong.
See for Yourself If Obamacare Increased Health Care Costs
Here's What's Happened to Health Care Costs in America in the Obama Years

Interesting reads, though there seems to be some conflicting calculations among them.

 

[elder999]

We've tried the supply and demand model. Unfortunately, it has led to the US having the highest health care costs in the world, without getting commensurate results (we rank well down among the most developed countries). Countries that use regulation to control costs (either via single-payer, government production of generics, or other means) seem to be getting better value than us. I've yet to see a recommendation using the supply and demand model that seems to have much promise.

I agree ACA hasn't been a resounding success. However, it's also not true that everyone has suffered. Many people have benefited from it. The biggest issue at present is that the two parties (we REALLY need a competitive 3rd party) seem to spend most of their energy around the topic on blocking each other, rather than trying to craft solutions together. The first step away from the old model was bound to be problematic. As would any other start-over solution.

And I've recently seen some articles that seem to contradict my previous understanding about rising health care costs under the ACA:
Everyone Agrees Obamacare Prices Have Been Rising Rapidly. But Everyone Is Wrong.
See for Yourself If Obamacare Increased Health Care Costs
Here's What's Happened to Health Care Costs in America in the Obama Years

Interesting reads, though there seems to be some conflicting calculations among them.

All of which has nothing to do with global warming....

 

[Flying Crane]

All of which has nothing to do with global warming....

Yeah, one participant in this thread has repeatedly thrown up distractions and smokescreens.