the most important election of your lifetime: 2012 american general election thread

I'm gonna give Romneybot the robodoubt and assume he's conflating Obama's recent attacks on Romneybot's business practices with Obama's other "excuses" for why the economy has not improved faster.

except for the ATM machines thing, that must be a disc-read-error.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/44/Abort_Retry_Fail.PNG

i'm glad you've come around on nader. fuck him.

oh, I get it. "Middle East policy," koff koff

ATM machines, tsunamis, China, Europe. It’s always something.

the last three are all things that are all universally regarded as a drag on american growth

the "ATM machines" comes from an interview Obama gave where he made an essentially conservative point that much of unemployment is not cyclical but systemic -- there used to be lots of bank tellers but now there are ATMS so we don't have the same kinds of entry-level jobs in that role. (this may not be strictly true in the case of the ATM & banks but the point is exactly the one conservative economists have arguing)

conservatives of course did their thing and now "ATMs" is another punchline for obama being a crybaby, a dolt, shiftless, etc etc.

you don't hear romney complaining about technology replacing jobs, natural disasters and dramatic shifts in the world economy

It's a difficult line to walk and I think both sides are doing a mediocre job, although Romney more so. There is a set of manufacturing jobs that does need to be in the US, but at the same time, there's a certain amount of systemic job loss. Somehow the republicans think restructuring companies to pull the maximum profit out Bain-style is cool, but the government funding education or job training is bad because ??

On the flip side, I heard two separate coal miner news items in the same week -- one about the incidence rate of black lung disease going up because mines are supposed to self-monitor dust and they're gaming the system. On the other hand, a coal miner interviewed later in the week insisted that Obama is to blame for lessened demand in the coal industry.

Black lung and employment for all!

"...he’s always looking for someone out there: ATM machines, tsunamis, China, Europe. It’s always something.”

Uh, maybe a craven, beholden do-nothing Congress that prefers unemployment to real nationalism? I mean, I understand the Romneybot's point and perhaps jobs are better outsourced and Americans should be doing things in a global economy that they're more economically competetive at but there was a time when business and the Republican party thought the country should be financed by tariffs, ffs.

On the other hand, a coal miner interviewed later in the week insisted that Obama is to blame for lessened demand in the coal industry.

I was listening to this same story, and I turned to my wife and said, "Watch, that statement will go completely unchallenged." It sort of did and sort of didn't.

yup, west virginia is deeply hostile territory to obama right now, they blame his EPA for strangling coal. some new regs have gone into effect but not nearly enough to make a dent.

xp really? the story i heard (on NPR) was pretty clear about it -- funny enough the culprit is fracking. natural gas used to be twice as expensive as coal, now it's half as expensive. plants are switching over like crazy. it's a huge change. we're living in a very different country almost overnight when it comes to energy, it's wild.

there are lots of questions about fracking obviously, but i'm kinda agnostic right now tbh. burning gas is cleaner than burning coal; getting it out of the ground might still be cleaner too.

there are better ways to get natural gas out of the ground than fracking, they're just slower/more expensive

otoh less coal/more fracking = less GHG pollution, plus more dead people from contaminated water, it's a win/win!

i thought the water-contamintion evidence was equivocal

I'm a glass-half-full-of-contaminated-water kind of guy

Yeah, but half-full of less contaminated air

nader's comments on obama are embarrassing in the extreme and make me wish he'd retired from public life 12 years ago but the shit he did in the '60s and '70s is unparalleled and it really can't be overstated what a hero he was. funny to think that the ppl who hated him most before 2000 were right-wing shits and libertarians.

^^ and yet, there is a minority of people who are vocal about any third-party candidate who speaks to a handful of issues they agree with (and they ignore others) who would support both Nader and later Ron Paul

Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn't want to appear like Jesse Jackson?

This is all a fair Nader critique until he gets here. Perhaps he should leave the Uncle Tom insinuation aside and not worry about the motivation but the actions. Maybe it's because Obama's a savvy politician or a scared one. I don't particularly care about good intentions or motivation if the results are good and that critique would be fair game in my book.

The insinuation that Obama should more specifically address poverty issues in the african american community because he is black is kind of a bad rhetorical cul-de-sac to drive into

ATM machines are a valid object of hate: lookit their withdrawal charges!

But Sununu seemed to take it a step further, telling reporters at one point, "I wish this president would learn how to be an American."

loooool

dogwhistle.gif

wonder what Jay Nordlinger thinks

http://www.softwarereality.com/soapbox/images/DogEars.jpg

I wish Sunnunu would spend more time learning to be a patriotic American, too, instead of a partisan who prefers ideology to country.

requiem for a sunnunu

Ideology is not quite what's bugging him or any of them, as Cheney's telltale praise for O last year hinted.

burning gas is cleaner than burning coal; getting it out of the ground might still be cleaner too.

warning - tldr; but

there are good reasons to be very skeptical about this. the burning of natural gas itself may emit fewer greenhouse gases, but the exploitation of natural gas creates leakages of methane. natural gas is mostly composed of methane. methane is a greenhouse gas that is much more "efficient" than CO2 at trapping heat. Methane is 25 times more efficient than CO2 trapping heat over 100 years, and 100 times more efficient than CO2 trapping heat over two decades. the efficiency of methane in the immediate years following its release into the atmosphere becomes even more important when you consider the need to avoid triggering feedback loops.

the percentage that's used in analyses of methane leakage has grave implications for estimates of climate change. the standard estimate of methane leakage is 2.4%. that's EPA's official figure. but the data supporting 2.4% (and especially the sub-2.0% estimates which industry of course support) are thin, and more recent studies and samples have found much higher leakage rates, including a NOAA sample in Colorado that measured 4% methane leakage.

a recent study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) concluded that "the substitution of gas for coal as an energy source results in increased rather than decreased global warming for many decades". the model used in the study included all sorts of factors that are normally excluded, including methane leakage from fracking. that leakage turns out to play a huge role: "The additional CH4 from leakage adds to the radiative forcing of the climate system, offsetting the reduction in CO2 forcing that accompanies the transition from coal to gas."

just wanted to throw all that out there because it's being taken for granted (even by many if not most environmentalists and activists) that the switch from coal to natural gas is an improvement. i'd be very skeptical of that, and of course throw in the boilerplate "what we REALLY need to be doing is aggressively reducing overall energy consumption with energy efficiency and scaling up clean energy as quickly as possible, on a Manhattan Project/Apollo Program level of commitment and urgency" argument.

let me tell you, energy efficiency is a very hard concept to sell...

especially when the president isn't effectively describing the problem of climate change or the solution

we are so fucked

yah but if you're good you'll go to heaven

let me tell you, energy efficiency is a very hard concept to sell...

Remember how it went when he tried to encourage people to keep their tires inflated.

I'm resisting the urge to get up on my I DO THIS FOR A LIVING hobbyhorse but I meant it's extremely difficult to get people/institutions/organizations to even understand the concept that if they spend X amount of $$ on energy efficient equipment/operations, they will both save X amount of dollars as well as reduce demand for the grid, and that the payback for doing this is exponentially better than investing in a new power plant or coal mine.

people are fucking stupid.

oh, feel free

this is like my shopping for ceiling fans and realizing that while I hated the look of many of them at big box home improvement stores, the energy efficiency part was worse -- for moving the same amount of air, you can get a fan that does a much better job, but it might be $300 - $400 instead of $180 or something. But if you figure out how many hours you're going to run it and the energy usage... good god, why would I buy some ugly cheapass fan?

Amy Davidson ‏@tnyCloseRead
Is it odd that Romney keeps talking about the 2002 Olympics as if they were an epochal event in world history?

ha yes this is kinda strange behavior

yeah my landlady (rip) refused to replace the (1940s-era) toilet that kept breaking even though every single plumber was like get a new toilet and you will make up the difference in your water bill in six months

well just extrapolate your consumer-level experiences to the building operations level (air conditioning, hot water heating, huge lighting systems, etc.) and factor in the idiocy endemic to large organizations like property management firms and investment banks and state governments and let your imagination run wild.

and of course, utilities, don't forget them! you need strict market controls in place to motivate utilities to sell you less power instead of more.

ugh

I feel like the company I work for is reasonably far-sighted far as such things go, but due to property tax and accounting laws, we're not building any more office buildings -- we're selling land to a property management company that then builds a building, partially to our specs, and then we sign a contract indefinitely renting the building.

well just extrapolate your consumer-level experiences to the building operations level (air conditioning, hot water heating, huge lighting systems, etc.) and factor in the idiocy endemic to large organizations like property management firms and investment banks and state governments and let your imagination run wild.

I just want to kiss you for your posts itt today Shakey Mo. Working with higher education institutions on how to make their building/new additions/alterations more energy efficient is maddening. You just run around in circles with some of these decision makers:

me: "You'll save 20-24% on your energy costs for running those fume hoods for the next ten years, at least."

them: "But its costs 2% more than that cheaper control system!"

me: "Do you not see the math?"

I mean, I used to work with developers who would flip thier buildings immediately so you could never get them to give shit one about future energy savings but its beyond frustrating to work with institutions that will be in their facilities FOREVER and still refuse to look past the fact that, yes, the first costs will be slightly higher.

I can't even begin to imagine trying to convince people of these things on any sort of large scale.

well tbf most universities are planning on being shuttered after next spring term

lol, i guess there's that

actually its more like a "my entire department is retiring next year so i can push the problem down the road and look like i saved $$$$ before i get out of here"

i thought the water-contamintion evidence was equivocal

i didn't see this until now, re: fracking, and i don't feel like derailing with another tl;dr but i wouldn't describe the evidence as equivocal. people are really being sold a bill of goods with fracking. the collective facepalm on this in 20 years is going to...uh...smack loudly and hurt a lot.

btw, due to an onslaught of acquisitions over the past several years, exxon-mobil is now the world's largest holder of natural gas reserves. they are totally cool with a big transition to natural gas. just something to keep in mind when you an exxon-mobil ad run before and after every network news segment

at least here in California we have a functioning regulatory system, and (in the case of universities) forward-thinking executive leadership and priorities - the problem, increasingly, is getting the money to pay for projects. Convincing a bank or other financial entity to loan you the money for an energy efficiency project on the condition that you will pay them back out of the money you save on your electricity bills (am grossly oversimplifying here btw) ... it's just a really hard concept for investment banker-types to grasp. If it's not a mortgage or a credit card with an accompanying exorbitant interest rate, they don't understand how they're going to make any money, or even get their money back.

apologies for thread derail to all bored participants, we can take this to the energy thread I guess....

i'm always expressing astonishment that huge companies have somehow managed to get the lower-middle class to fight tooth and nail against their own interests, to the benefit of rich people, to the point of inspiring a bunch of people to don late 18th century revolutionary garb and stand on street corners trying to get people to honk horns. big oil/fossil fuel is pulling the same trick, only the net is much larger. it's managed to fool just about everyone.

i'm always expressing astonishment that huge companies have somehow managed to get the lower-middle class to fight tooth and nail against their own interests,

nail on the fucking head here, it really is amazing to watch people fight so hard against things that would totally benefit them!

i mean, its one of the greatest con jobs i've ever watched unfold.

theres another aspect to people 'fighting against their interests' which is that people have other interests than just like material comfort, they also have idealogical and moral interests which may out weigh other concerns, in fact when someone who we agree with puts ideology before material enrichment we generally applaud them - not saying people arent ever tricked or w/e but theres more going on than just that, they may actually deeply believe that its important for corporations to be able to put particles in the air or w/e and theyre willing to sacrifice for that

oh, that's totally true and a good point, but i guess i was pulling out of context a little and including some larger societal issues, like disadvantaged people fighting against financial aid programs and stuff like that.

yeah lots of ppl hate teh gays, brown people, "liberals" more than they hate being unemployed

even better if you can find a way to blame the ppl you hate for your unemployment