Webs’ Random Ideas

… and for a darn good reason too!

As promised, “California sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday for denying its first-in-the-nation greenhouse gas limits on cars, trucks and SUVs.” At least fifteen states will support California in the lawsuit, including 13 of those that have either adopted or are in the process of adopting the rules.

Good for them I say and the 13 other states! It’s about time someone stepped up to Bush’s cronies, or for that matter showed an interest in caring about the environment. Most of what Bush has done (which is actually nothing up to this point) and talked about doing has gone from denial, to making sure the science is correct (another form of denial) to accepting the science is correct… but still doing nothing… Yes it is confusing. How you can see Global Warming as a problem and accept the science that shows it, and yet do nothing is beyond me?

It’s obvious Bush has not yet seen any real evidence for Global Warming. If he has, he would know most of this already. Global Warming is a serious issue that needs immediate attention.

It also appears this Cali lawsuit isn’t the only thing the head of the EPA should be worried about…

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by California democrat Henry Waxman — a prominent critic of industry influence on the Bush administration’s science policies — has launched an investigation into the EPA’s rejection of California’s attempt to reduce automotive greenhouse gas emissions.

Good Ol’ Waxman is on the hunt to get to the bottom of things. If you missed the whole issue of why Cali is suing, read this LA Times article.

The Bush administration Wednesday denied California’s bid to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles, dealing a blow to the state’s attempts to combat global warming and prompting an immediate vow from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to take the decision to court.

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Stephen L. Johnson denied the state’s request to implement its own landmark law, noting that an energy bill signed by President Bush earlier in the day would go a long way toward reducing emissions throughout the United States. The bill provides the most significant increase in vehicle fuel economy standards in more than three decades.

Basically the Bush Girly-men are trumping state rights by saying Cali has no right to set their own limits, look at the bold section right above to see the EPAs argument. WTF kind of reason is that?!?! It makes no difference how good the Federal bill is. If a state wants to set their own limits on top of the Feds, it’s their decision. As the Governator states:

It is unconscionable that the federal government is keeping California and nineteen other states from adopting these standards. They are ignoring the will of millions of people who want their government to take action in the fight against global warming. That’s why, at the very first legal opportunity, we’re suing to reverse the US EPA’s wrong decision. California has always been a leader in protecting the environment, and we will do everything in our power to continue that proud tradition.

Well just chalk “State’s Rights” up on the chalkboard of what makes Bush the worst president in history… oh wait. We already have chalked that one up.

Sorry for the long delay in posting, but I have been on vacation and such…

Anyways, here’s a funny South Park clip on why debating ID is pretty pointless.

A few things I want to discuss in this post are statistics, economics, and sociology and how these fields are intertwined as we look at tax data.

The following link takes us to Marginal Revolution where the issue of what the rich pay in Federal Taxes is being discussed. The discussion revolves around an inserted graph of which comes from this link on “Historical Effective Federal Tax Rates.” Apparently the source of which is the Congressional Budget Office, but I have not verified this personally.

The Marginal Revolution site has some great examples of Stats not lying, but telling the truth, and people lying. Basically people on that post are drawing all sorts of wild conclusions about a simple graph. Like the one person replying to “Student” saying:

More importantly, one argument that politicians seem to trot out regularly is that taxes on the rich should not be cut because the middle class is being “squeezed.” But the data suggest that the middle class is, if anything, getting a good deal in terms of what they pay in relative to their share of total income.

This is an utterly absurd argument to make. The data only shows that Rich pay more into federal tax. Nothing else. To make a statement like the one above, more data is needed. For as others have suggested, the graph doesn’t show all the other tax data, like payroll tax, etc.

One criticism of Bush’s tax plan was that he is only giving back money based on what people pay into the Federal tax system. But most people in the middle class will end up paying more in payroll tax than in Federal tax. So the argument above is ludicrous at best.

Another absurd notion is that the rich are somehow at a disadvantage because they pay more into the federal system. Ha! It’s a complete crock of shit because the tax break the rich get is absurd when compared at any level. Percentage wise the top 1% get back nearly 50% of what is given back in tax credits… hmm…

Let’s look at tax cuts another way, using simple economics. The richest 1% save over 98% of all money saved in the US as of 2002, and I would imagine that number hasn’t changed much since then, but for now it’s the best number I got. Money saved by individuals does very little to spur economic growth because it doesn’t give incentives for industries or businesses to grow, and it doesn’t spur growth by creating wealth for industries or businesses. Now this isn’t completely true, some investing and savings will spur growth, such as government bonds. But the yield on these are not as high as other opportunities so when a family of for that pulls in a billion a year gets a close to a million in tax cuts, they tend to drop the money in different savings investments, not government bonds.

Plus we also know from any Economics 101 class in college that the lower 50% of the income bracket spend the majority of money spent in the US and that the top 1% spend very little. This makes sense when looking at that savings data. A wise man once said, they rich don’t get rich don’t become rich by spending their money.

Anyways, so knowing this why would one assume that a tax program that gives nearly 50% of all money in the program to the richest 1% would help spur economic growth? The data does not support this assertion. What it does support is the idea when someone in the upper 1% bracket gets their million dollar tax cut they will save it. Put it in a high yield account and make interest off it.

One reason why I rarely get involved with such forums though is because of comments like the following…

If the so-called “fair-minded”, “egalitarians” really gave a “damn” about “equality”. They’d propose a tax system where the bottom quintile has an effective tax rate of 35% and the top quintile has an effective tax rate of 2.5%. That way they’d both be paying for equal shares of the government.

Another absurd notion, the idea the middle class and poor somehow use and depend on the government more than the rich. It’s an idea that stems from “The World Revolves Around Me” philosophy, also known as Libertarianism. And I have my reasons for disliking Libertarianism. The third link there gets into the issues of the rich.

I’m still not sure what tax system I would implement, but from what I have read progressive systems work better. As in pay based on what you make. I have written before about Flat Tax but there are too many problems and not enough answers for me to support that cause.

This is pretty cool and exciting news. Apparently the ancestor to the whale has been discovered.

Whales are known to be descended from land-dwellers but the “missing link” has been a mystery until now. Although Indonyus, as it is known, looks nothing like the whales of today, it shares certain anatomical features.

The structures of its skull and ear are similar to those of early whales, and like other animals that spend a lot of time in water, it had thickened bones that provided ballast to keep its feet anchored in shallow water.

Scientist at one point suspected hippos may be the descendant, but fossil records do not go far enough back to give that conclusion.

DNA studies show that hippos are in fact closely related to modern whales. They do not appear in the fossil record, however, until about 15 million years ago, some 35 million years after the cetaceans originated in south Asia.

Found via Greg Laden…

Some curse words is all, but still you may not want to view this during work.

This sums it up for me

Found Via Corpus Callosum…

Apparently so, click here to read.

Maddeningly enough, though, that’s not where it ends. Under partly cloudy conditions a phenomenon sometimes called the “broken-cloud effect” can come into play, resulting in higher UV levels than a clear sky would produce, and so a greater risk of sunburn — or worse. A survey conducted at six U.S. sites in 1994 found that cumulus clouds could raise surface UV-B measurements by 25 percent, and in 2004 Australian researchers reported that the specific UV-B frequencies associated with DNA damage were up to 40 percent stronger under somewhat cloudy skies.

Why does this happen? Scientists aren’t positive, but there seem to be two key mechanisms here: (1) UV rays bouncing off the sides of dense clouds, and (2) rays getting redirected as they pass through wispier clouds. Conceivably (as an American Scientist article suggested last year), a combination of thin refracting clouds up high and puffy reflecting clouds down low could result in a major UV boost at ground level. Throw in an aggravating factor or two — say, a blanket of snow to knock the rays around some more — and you’re on the bullet train to sunburn city.

I heard this a couple times from multiple people and now I have a little more evidence to back it up.

Found via ***Dave…

Hillary’s strong stance on global warming issues has lead to her putting out some new plans if she were president…

Clinton is calling for an improvement in the fleet-wide fuel economy standard to the tune of 55 miles per gallon by the year 2030.

[…]

Though questions of plausibility linger, Clinton has outlined several specific measures to achieve the high benchmarks, including the issuing of $20 billion of “Green Vehicle Bonds” for U.S. automakers to use in retooling their plants with technology that would output more efficient vehicles. Clinton would also grant a $10,000 consumer tax credit as a purchase incentive for plug-in hybrids. She would also allocate $2 billion for investment in battery research and add 100,000 plug-in hybrids to the federal fleet by 2015.

I wish I could say I think this will be enough, but I just can’t. While I like what Clinton is doing and I will never knock it, it just sucks that what she proposes is the best yet, and it really just falls short of what we need to be doing. More and more scientists are ever growing worried, and it still seems people just don’t care. It seems people would rather worry about short term costs than long term sustainability for some odd reason.

What I hope will happen, is that the next presidential candidate will come in from a platform of what they are going to do, but drastically step up the measures once in office.

Orac has an interesting article about a debate happening at the University of Connecticut between homeopathy and well… science and reason I guess. Homeopathy is the ridiculous notion and I will let you read about it here.

So is there anything to debate, no. I think those creating this debate want to use it as an opportunity to show the nonsense of the topic. But there is a problem with this and Orac points it out beautifully…

The fact is, pseudoscientists, pseudohistorians, and cranks desperately want to debate accepted experts in the field in which they apply their crankery. The reason is simple. While, knowingly or (more commonly, unknowingly) they crap on science and the scientific method, at the same time they desperately crave its validation and acceptance.
[…]
This is because getting a scientist to agree to a debate allows them to portray their pseudoscience as being on equal footing with accepted science, or at least in the same ballpark. Thus, simply being seen on the same stage on an equal footing with a respected scientist, is a victory for the pseudoscientist. Regardless of what actually happens in the debate, it is a virtual certainty that the crank and the supporters of crankery will trumpet it as a “victory” or, at the very minimum, as a “validation” that science is beginning to take them seriously.

The bold section above pretty much sums it up. There are plenty of studies done showing the flaws in the topic, all this debate is going to do is give the cranks a leg to stand on by allowing them to say, “See we are debating science…” Having a debate on issues that are not scientifically accepted or discussed in scientific literature is misrepresenting information in that area or field.

Or to explain it how a medical scientist did in Richard Dawkins’ “Enemies of Reasons” series, (when referring to homeopathy) (keep in mind this is poorly paraphrased) “It’s really terrible, and for us disheartening, that we can spend 10 years presenting research on a drug or a procedure to get it introduced. And to have those working in homeopathy say what we are doing is bunk and have no problem getting in their ideas.” Basically it’s a slap in the face for those that do real science to see the progress of homeopathic ideas.