US Politics Mega-thread - Page 426

On September 12 2013 13:24 sam!zdat wrote:
I'm the communist around here rememebr? Why are you telling this to me? Impose a wealth tax and nationalize the shale oil, if we must dig it up which it seems we must

On September 12 2013 13:24 sam!zdat wrote:
I'm the communist around here rememebr? Why are you telling this to me? Impose a wealth tax and nationalize the shale oil, if we must dig it up which it seems we must

On September 12 2013 13:32 IgnE wrote:
You can't just keep injecting money to keep up with runaway debt accumulation. There is no infinite growth cure. The system is fucked.

Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook struck back on Wednesday at critics who have charged tech companies with doing too little to fight off NSA surveillance. Mayer said executives faced jail if they revealed government secrets.

Yahoo and Facebook, along with other tech firms, are pushing for the right to be allowed to publish the number of requests they receive from the spy agency. Companies are forbidden by law to disclose how much data they provide.

During an interview at the Techcrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Mayer was asked why tech companies had not simply decided to tell the public more about what the US surveillance industry was up to. "Releasing classified information is treason and you are incarcerated," she said.

Mayer said she was "proud to be part of an organisation that from the beginning, in 2007, has been sceptical of – and has been scrutinizing – those requests [from the NSA]."

Yahoo has previously unsuccessfully sued the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court, which provides the legal framework for NSA surveillance. In 2007 it asked to be allowed to publish details of requests it receives from the spy agency. "When you lose and you don't comply, it's treason," said Mayer. "We think it make more sense to work within the system," she said.

Zuckerberg said the government had done a "bad job" of balancing people's privacy and its duty to protect. "Frankly I think the government blew it," he said.

On September 12 2013 13:33 IgnE wrote:



Shale oil is a farce. A temporary bubble at best.

On September 12 2013 13:53 IgnE wrote:
Here's a pragmatic idea. Stop subsidizing fossil fuels now. Start subsidizing solar, wind, and battery technologies.

In short, I believe that for democracy to work there needs to be a certain level of personal responsibility. For people to get what they want means that they have to think clearly about what they want and do research in order to make an informed decision. This is not only the case with political voting, but also in arranged vs. self-selected marriages, getting slotted into a university based on your grade vs. applying for universities yourself, etc. I don’t think Chinese people are ready for a democracy because I don’t think that most of the population wants to take this kind of personal responsibility and do the necessary work. I am definitely not saying that this is an innate quality of Chinese people as a race or anything like that – factors that create this kind of laxity might include having too much pressure heaped on young people growing up due to the competitive nature of university entrance exams, and so they have learned to take breaks and cut corners when they can instead of being proactive and seeking more work to do. If there was suddenly a multi-party system in China and people over 18 were suddenly asked to vote, most people wouldn’t know what to do or care enough to do the work of choosing whom they support. ***** Last year, when a professor from Australia visited the college I was working at, the Foreign Affairs staff took this teacher, me, and the only other foreign teacher out to dinner. I don’t even remember what we were talking about before, but at some point the head foreign affairs staff said to the Australian teacher, “Chinese people don’t really want democracy, you know.” There was a slightly awkward pause after this, where I made a face and stopped eating, and then the other foreign teacher quickly stepped in to say that yes, China seems really capitalist now, and everyone hurriedly started talking about earning money instead.

On September 12 2013 13:58 xDaunt wrote:

Uh, what? For all intents and purposes, there's virtually an unlimited amount of shale oil and gas in the US (like 200+ years worth for domestic consumption). As long as the price of oil stays above $70 per barrel (very likely), shale oil is here to stay until new energy technology replaces it. Last I checked, that technology doesn't exist yet.

On September 12 2013 13:59 xDaunt wrote:

How many more Solyndras do we need? I've lost count of how many of those companies have gone bankrupt already.

On September 12 2013 14:12 IgnE wrote:



The only reason shale production is booming right now is because it's massively subsidized by wall street. Of course wall street and the media want you to think that there's an unlimited amount of shale oil and gas in the US. They are heavily invested in it.

Shale wells lose something like 90% of their capacity with a couple years. Thousands of new wells have to be drilled every year just to continue current production at a current cost of $42 billion a year, just in well drilling, and all subsidized. An extra snag is that quality oil "plays" are pretty rare, and most of the currently known quality oil plays are already being drilled, with rapid rates of depletion.

Not to mention that shale gas is extremely low EROI (energy return on investment). It's not like oil, which is basically liquid gold, since it costs so little in energy resources to get it out of the ground (i.e. oil spouts that you see in movies like _There Will Be Blood_ where oil literally shoots out of the ground). When you are spending a lot of energy to get a diminishing return back, you can't sustain production.

On top of all of that, the companies that are pulling up shale gas privatize the profits while distributing the costs of production, including environmental damage, to the rest of society. It's a temporary bubble at best, as you will see over the next decade.

On September 12 2013 11:53 sam!zdat wrote:
are you serious? You think you can just print money infinitely and everything will be okay? We have no exit strategy for QE and it's not doing anything except paying banks to hold cash and inflating equity values. It's a hostage situation basically

I love how people have been convinced that monetary policy doesn't matter and anyone who thinks it does is a crazy person

On September 12 2013 14:44 sam!zdat wrote:
'math can handle it.' official motto of jonny b's psychohistorical society