Unemployed Comments on the WSJFollow

Right, of course. Until someone gives the answer you already believed must be true, it must be because each investigation was flawed.

See, I don't understand how any reasonable and informed person could begin to believe this. I can understand believing that there may be grievous flaws in the research conducted by the majority of climatologists, but the idea that there is a deliberate conspiracy is so utterly ludicrous.

Here are the top 10 companies in the world ranked by revenue (2009):
1. Royal Dutch Shell
2. Exxon Mobil
3. Wal-Mart Stores
4. BP
5. Chevron
6. Total
7. ConocoPhillips
8. ING Group
9. Sinopec
10. Toyota Motor

7 of those 10 are in the petroleum refining industry. Just those seven took in more than two trillion dollars in revenue last year. If anyone was going to orchestrate a conspiracy, you would place your bet on the piddly green energy industry?

It's stupid beyond imagining. You're not asserting that the U.S. government faked the moon landing and convinced joe sixpack of it; you're asserting that joe sixpack faked the moon landing and convinced the U.S. government of it.

Edited, Jul 7th 2010 5:48pm by Allegory

Well, I didn't see Moe reference any private or public companies. He only mentioned governments and government-funded scientists. Personally, I tend to believe scientists are, on the whole, smarter than politicians, and therefore it isn't "Joe Sixpack" faking the moon landing.

The other thing that people who are not university research scientists don't understand is that the scientists are paid to do research. They're paid to produce results. The people who pay them, i.e. the taxpayers via the university boards, really don't care if the results are what they expected or not. They're paid regardless.

This isn't like private medical research, where the people who produce the data are under enormous pressure to produce The Next Viagra, and as a result are willing to cook the data to make the drug look safer and more effective than it really is. Public university researchers are paid per project, before the project starts, not after the results are published.

Say, a university research applies for and receives a $100K grant to study the result of X chemical on the atmosphere. He is given the money. This is often separate from his salary, which is given to him to teach classes. The grant money is used for:
- Laboratory and equipment purchases and time rental
- Graduate student assistant salaries
- Travel expenditures

At the end of the year-long project, they publish results that say X chemical has no effect on the atmosphere.

Guess what? That information is just as valuable as if they had found that that X chemical did terrible things to the atmosphere, because now they can publish the study, and be cited by the EPA, which doesn't have to regulate the chemical.

And they already got paid for doing all that research.

Next year, they'll apply for a different grant, and start a different project. Or they may redo a specific aspect of the previous project.

Unlike private research firms, the positivity or negativity of the results has no bearing on how rich a climate scientist is going to get. The point is that they got results, period, and they didn't waste the money on hookers and blow. That's all the governing bodies that dole out that grant money really care about.

You're right; generalized statements don't really mean much.





Sometimes you have to get what you can from this crazy world.

Unless you can find private companies willing to altruistically repair our roadways without pay, this logic is far from universal.

We pay companies to repair roadways as a normal component of maintaining infrastructure though. We're talking about "stimulus spending", right? Smash was specifically talking about creating jobs purely for the purpose of putting money into the hands of people who would otherwise not be able to earn as much money, for the sole purpose of having them spend that money on goods and services in the economy. The theory is that the demand for products and services will somehow manage to boost the economy out of a recession.

It's a nice theory. It has never ever ever ever ever worked though. And the reason is because every single dollar you give to someone to spend has to first come from the very industries you're trying to get people to spend that money on. All you're doing is shuffling the money around. An easy example to illustrate this is if you need a ride to get somewhere, but you can't afford to pay me gas money to get there. A third party "solves" this problem by taking 20 bucks out of my pocket and gives it to you so you can hand it to me so that I can put sufficient gas in the car to get you to where you want to go. The whole demand argument is like insisting that since the car owner can pocket the difference in the amount of gas consumed and the cost of the gas as profit that he shouldn't complain.


The point that's missed is that the private economy paid the money in the first place. Even if 100% of it comes back (which it never does), the best you can do is break even. And you have the additional problem that now instead of market forces determining what gets purchased, and how much, and by whom, you have the government making those decisions. And government will *never* make those decisions in ways which are as economically efficient as the private market will. It may do so in ways which people might think as "more fair", but it will never do so in ways which cause greater economic growth over time. It can't do so. Government's interest in doing so is not to grow the economy, but to reward people who vote for them by giving them a larger share of the pie than they'd get otherwise.


That's why it doesn't work.

I didn't admit that it worked. Go back and read the whole thing. I said that it's not as bad as just paying people to not work, but it's not as good as people working jobs which do not require government funding to exist. The very fact that government has to fund a job for it to exist is strong evidence that said job does not generate sufficient value to the rest of the economy to justify itself on its own relative merits. If it did, someone would already be paying someone to do that work, wouldn't they?

When we recovered was not while we were funding huge military spending in WW2, but *after* we stopped doing so

You mean when the marginal tax rate on the top 1% of earners was raised massively to almost 90% that spurred the economy? Interesting theory. Meshes well with everything else you've posted.

Anyway, you're moronic guessing about something that takes 4 seconds to research is wrong, as usual. The economy recovered during the war, by any measure, not afterward. This is known, it's not a debatable point. Sort of like it's known that you're both ignorant and lazy. Why is debatable. Is it that you're just not that bright? Sure. Is that the only reason? Hard to say.

But again, that all comes back to the private companies. If you're a conspiring politician, you're going to side with the people who can give you campaign donations. If you're a conspiring scientist, you're going to conspire with the people who can pay you a nice salary in an advisory or consultant.

The green industry has nothing to offer anyone who like to conspire. They can't offer anything to scientists. They can't offer anything to governments. The petroleum industry has vastly more influence, orders of magnitude more influence. Any argument anyone could make for why someone would conspire to create a false dilemma about climate changes makes far more sense as an argument as to why someone would conspire to cover up climate change.

It's somewhat reasonably to believe that the majority of climate change specialists got it all screwed up, but a rational person has to accept that these people genuinely believe what they profess.

Apparently they can offer liberals some method of mind control and dependency.

Hehe. Anything over a 5 is "fun" when you're 7 floors up in an office building... This one was a "sneaker" in that it started really slow and then built up and started shaking stuff pretty well. Wasn't sure if it was going to subside or spike higher at the time I wrote that.

...maintenance on roads doesn't generate sufficient value, blah, blah, blah?

Quit while you're behind, please.