glenra

37 ms·

241.
by glenra 12y ago
Change mostly happens on the margin in relatively small increments. Libertarians are actually making progress at legalizing pot, which is great because the war on pot has long been a gateway drug driving the increased militarization of th
242.
by glenra 12y ago
> this in no way relates to anything Hacker News is about. Disagree. It's a news story that relates to namespaces, encoding algorithms, language-independent operation, and the occasional need to hack around arbitrary bureaucratic
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by glenra 12y ago
> So your claim is that everything global warming scientists have been saying is wrong because they ignored vital evidence? Nope, my claim was only that a few things that some global warming scientists have been saying is wrong becau
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by glenra 12y ago
I'm not sure which claims you mean. The specific claim that it's significantly warmer now than it was about a thousand years ago during the MWP does mainly hinge on (a) tree rings, (b) ignoring the difference between high freque
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by glenra 12y ago
In context, that John Oliver debate segment was dumb. They took a perfectly reasonable Gallop poll result - that 1 in 4 Americans think the threat of climate change has been exaggerated - and rhetorically pretended the claim being made wa
246.
by glenra 12y ago
Profits are irrelevant. What matters are the benefits , which include the consumer surplus as well as the producer surplus. So long as coal and oil are the cheapest most reliable source of energy, using them makes the economy more effi
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by glenra 12y ago
For tree rings to tell you what you want, trees would need to have a linear growth-response pattern with respect to temperature, and they don't. It's more of an inverse U-shaped pattern. Trees in temperature-limited areas do tend
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by glenra 12y ago
Our descendants will be vastly richer and smarter and better informed than we are, so you're saying we should tax the poor to help the rich. Making energy more expensive now reduces economic progress, which is exactly the thing we need
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by glenra 12y ago
By "science has confirmed accounts", do you mean anything more than "has confirmed that some historical locations used for these stories actually existed"? If so, can you give some examples? https://en.wikiped
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by glenra 12y ago
The poor kids are the ones getting shafted by the status quo! They get "assigned" to schools that are terrible and don't even have the option to go somewhere better, even if it's just as convenient to get the kids ther
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by glenra 12y ago
That is a popular story, but I'm pretty sure it's not true. Do you have a source? I suspect you're thinking of the sort of elite academy type schools that have tough entrance exams - but those are a very tiny fraction of priv
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by glenra 12y ago
I'm an atheist, FWIW. Perhaps I did a bad job of correcting you when you kept jumping to conclusions above, but whatever my motivations are doesn't change the fact that the average private school costs less than the average public
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by glenra 12y ago
> Providing transportation with adult supervision for single parents who need to work and don't have a car to drop the kid off with. Is this really necessary? Surely a substantial fraction of kids could walk, bike, and/or take
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by glenra 12y ago
>I'm uncertain why you expect anyone to send people to Catholic schools "because cheaper"? Cheaper, better, and/or safer, yes. Sometimes it's the best available option. > Not everyone is Catholic. Sure, but no
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by glenra 12y ago
> The voters vote these people in intentionally. They campaign on it. Great, then let them! What's the matter, don't you believe in democracy? :-) > And when people like you are willing to pay the full cost, including an ext
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by glenra 12y ago
Did you consider religious schools? Catholic schools are ubiquitous and tend to dramatically pull down the average. According to stats collected at http://www.edreform.com/2012/04/k-12-facts/ : AVERAGE DISTRI
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by glenra 12y ago
> Oh? What is this great solution you have? The courts? That takes years, at which point the teacher is unemployed and may years later receive compensation. Good luck expecting that to go well. Nah, it's an institutional problem; yo
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by glenra 12y ago
>> why should teachers have more job security than anyone else? > Because otherwise a number of them would get fired every time someone from the opposing party gets elected. How would that work, exactly? It seems like on so many le
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by glenra 12y ago
The average private school costs quite a lot less than the average public school. You could spend about half as much per student and still get safer kids and happier parents. So what "external costs" are you thinking of? Going to
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by glenra 12y ago
It's also sometimes the refuge of "I'm a liberal but I know some economics." :-)
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by glenra 12y ago
You left off the other side of the equation. He says the CB income data understates income on the high end because it exclude the value of capital gains, but it ALSO understates income on the low end because it excludes the value of non-cas
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by glenra 12y ago
True. But on the bright side, Salon just managed to publish an entire article without claiming the Koch brothers are secretly behind every single view the writer dislikes. That's got to be some kind of record, right? "Salon Arti
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by glenra 12y ago
You feel like this sort of liberal should be asked: how much is enough ? When will we know that the government is spending enough on the safety net, or is your answer always that we need to spend more , no matter how much we're spe
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by glenra 12y ago
Measured in terms of individual income, inequality levels in the US have been surprisingly constant for the last 50 years. The appearance of an upward trend is purely a demographic artifact - "household" and "family&quo
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by glenra 12y ago
> Would you still have government assistance programs to subsidize workers at the low end? Those are separable concerns; I see no strong reason to immediately change the status quo in that regard. > I mean, you would expect wages f
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by glenra 12y ago
> The better solution is to make fair rules, and have the resources to apply them fairly. No, the better solution is to just open the borders and let everybody in who wants to work. Bigotry against foreigners is no less ugly than bigot
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by glenra 12y ago
> ultimately your argumentation also goes to show how important workplace safety regulations are I'm not sure if you realize that across multiple industries the rate at which worker fatality stats improved either stayed the same or
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by glenra 12y ago
The problem is that you demand support even for claims of mine that are easy for you to verify for yourself and that you have no reason to doubt. While on the flip side you never provide any numbers of your own, so it's unbalanced. But
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by glenra 12y ago
> (that is what i found incredible in the comment above - a company that offers great pay will easily find employees, but it will not choose to hire more simply because a lot of people applied, which is specific for labor markets) How
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by glenra 12y ago
> no reason for all of them, or even a majority, to loose more in benefits than they gain in higher pay. makes no sense. I'm not sure you understand the argument here: A job is a bundle of benefits. There's a money component bu

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