JayB

I can't. The Supreme court is a group of political appointees whos confirmmations were largely based on back room deals. As proven in 2000, the supreme court cannot issue a non-partisan ruling. Well - there you have it. I think it's a tragedy of epic proportions that we aren't living in a country in which the structure and function of our government were conceived and debated by a bunch of ill-read hacks like Jefferson, Madison, Adams, et al and not by the likes of Doug.

' Read "The Federalist Papers," and the debates that occurred during the Constitutional Convention and it's hard to support the claim that they thought that structure and function of the government that they were establishing were of little importance for preserving the rights and liberties they'd just secured.

Congress says A, executive says B - the Supreme Court will probably have the final say. I can live with that.

Channel all campaign contributions through blind trusts which are prohibited from disclosing the identity of the donors to the said fund. Heard it discussed on the radio today. Seems like it might be relatively easy to work around, "Hey - notice that extra $10 million in your blind trust? Yea, that was from us..." But it seemed like an interesting idea nonetheless.

I live in fear of that stuff.

Second that bro - I have disability insurance but couldn't live on 60% of my salary very easily I found some good general information on disability coverage at this site: http://www.about-disability-insurance.com/articles.html Probably worth finding a book on the subject if you want to cover all of the ins and outs of DI coverage. I imagine that's what I'll do when the time comes to get policies on our own.

I don't have any doubt that the statistics are accurate, but I wonder how many of the bankruptcies were the result of medical expenses that were uncovered and were simply too large for the families affected by the illness to cover with their incomes, and how many were the result of the income lost due to disability resulting from the illness. It seems as though looking at bankruptcies resulting from an illness in a child, then looking at the impact in single versus dual income families would provide some insight. I'd imagine that in the absence of disability coverage, missing even one or two months of income would be potentially devastating for most families, especially young families with children and those on the lower half of the earning's distribution curve. It seems like this is an important issue to sort out, as even if all medical expenses are covered, being out of work for several months on account of a disability caused by the illness could easily lead to bankruptcy.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/321150_index25.html?source=mypi

Less spectacular outdoor attractions that are less crowded than most of the stuff in CO. If the job is good enough, it might be worth the tradeoff.

So do you get your "kinky" gear online at The Bondage Superstore, or at the Hot Topix kiosk at the mall?

Postcards from the "Dungeons and Dragons" of adult past-times... after at least five decades of ever-expanding permissiveness, now rendered about as edgy and transgressive as the Parker Brothers Oija Board . All that's lacking are the polyhedral dice and official rulebooks. "Mistress Glamthoria the Dragonslayer regrets to inform you that you have rolled a 9, which means that you must imbibe four hearty-draughts of the tincture of flacipel, and endure three more lashings..."

Pie-higher = less dumb than your argument based on your map. GDP of Arkansas = Pakistani GDP Population of Arkansas = 1/62nd of Pakistan's.

My point is that in a country this rich and resource-hungry, expanding supply of certain resources can only supplicate demand temporarily. Expansion is the holy grail of a growing economy, but ceases to be an option once resources are limiting (which is what I meant by "static supply"). There will always be high demand for water, especially in a desert metropolis. The sooner they figure this out, the better, because no matter how many rivers they divert into Phoenix, even if the can afford to, they will always be short on water. They will have severely molested the environment in an attempt to escape this fact, and in the end, they will have to learn to conserve anyway. Might as well leave the rivers alone and figure it out sooner than later. The concept of "limiting resources" that are completely insensitive to the effects of price, substitutes, devices that increase efficiency, etc doesn't jive with reality terribly well. If the savings that result from using a particular resource more efficiently justify the costs, then it will happen, but not before then. The future is unpredictable, and making investments based on incorrect predictions about the scarcity and expense of a particular resource based on simple extrapolations from known data gets exponentially more difficult the further one moves from the present, and asset mis-allocations made on the basis of such predictions can be quite expensive. Someone who magically got their hands on stats that showed the total value of video game sales for the 1990-2006 time interval in 1982, then promptly ran out and invested their own life savings and $100k hard-money loan into Atari stock would likely have been rather disappointed with the return that their investment generated.

Yes, the moondance is a perfect icon for your fatuosity. The goods New England used to produce are being produced elsewhere in the world, and that production is polluting just as much it did when it was in America. Arguing over the $ value of manufacturing output is completely irrelevant to this argument unless you've suddenly decided you no longer need cloths. As for your "everywhere" argument - you wouldn't want to spend time on the industrial sites of Western New York. the "statehouse" has forced to deal with the burden of bankrupt companies who laid the burden of cleaning up their mess on the state. The younger western states aren't particularly caring about that - there's noway UT can deal with the water demands of it's population in the future, that hasn't stopped their growth plans. The percentage of the total tax-burden that's used to fund environmental clean-ups in this part of the country make up a miniscule portion of the total tab, and has little or nothing to do with either the fate of the plants that you are lamenting or the absence of anything to replace them.

The only places where pollution hasn't declined relative to output are the very same countries where decades of horrid mismanagement or repression are still working their magic. But - sure - manufacturing hasn't become more efficient anywhere, so it stands to reason that the amount of pollution generated per unit output hasn't changed a bit over time either.

Think JayB has never opened his eyes when driving through upstate new york. He could quickly see they've neither output nor employment in manufacturing. The same with textile plants in New England I've driven all over New England, and Upstate New York, while casting my gaze on an infinity of old mills and often paddle through the remains of dams once used to power the Mills there. If there's any lingering effective demand for whatever it is that they made, it's clear that someone somewhere else can make whatever they were making more efficiently or with better value for the consumer, or both. The real question is why both manufacturers and the people that they once employed have fled New England/Upstate like they were on fire, and I think that this has less to do with changes inside the Mill-House than it does with changes inside the Statehouse. Hooray for declining employment in the manufacturing sector. Weee.... I haven't seen the data set for manufacturing output from New England, but I'd be surprised to see an absolute decline, much less one that fell as precipitously as manufacturing employment, even after accounting for all of the micro-mill carnage.

Yes, obviously the population growth has equilibrated in the most developed countries. It is of course a clever insult to imply ignorance of this fact by reference to Malthus (whom I haven't read, but whose narrow models are obviously dated). While our population may be leveling off, we are still highly dependent on other forms of growth--supply, consumption, investment, interest, etc. The economy has functioned beautifully as a grand pyramid scheme, as long as broad economic growth is guaranteed. The limit to this is what I allude to by mention of zero-sum. What happens when there is no more 'free money?' Aren't we already ignoring this to the tune of 9 trillion? The 'tragedy of the commons' manifests in water usage when even a relatively small population manages to consume so much of the supply that it becomes scarce. The usage explodes to fill the limit of supply. Any increase in the supply results not in less scarcity, but in more consumption. The same model fits for many other resources. The basic assumption this allows is that at equilibrium, water will always be scarce. Any attempt to escape this equilibrium, such as the diversion of rivers to irrigate the growth potential of Phoenix, is deluded. Surely it is time to draw the line, and let the system of market principles that you mention go to work in the context of a static supply. Infinite cost-free resources as the sole driver of economic growth and a static set of resources that are completely insensitive to price, effective demand, etc in a single post. Bravo. Now, a moment of silence as I extinguish my whale-oil lamp in despair.

So there are no environmentalists in non-wealthy countries? That's a rather fatuous statement. Industrial pollution got substantially worse up until the mid 70s/80s when they oversea'd all of their jobs. Same with farming. The pollution just moved elsewhere. Until we can move production off-planet it's not a particularly relevant argument. There are doubtless people who care about their environment all over the world, but my contention is that their level of concern diminishes as their income approaches bare-subsistence or below-subsistence levels, and that their ability to effect positive environmental change is a function of many variables, virtually all of which change favorably with increasing prosperity. I think someone is confused by the difference between manufacturing output and manufacturing employment American Manufacturing Output

The only reason that those sites were even noticed, let alone investigated and dealt with is because the US had the wealth necessary to do so and a citizenry capable of taking effective action. It's quite difficult to argue that the condition of the environment in New York or New England has done anthing but improve since the late 19th century.

Yes - anyone who has read or heard of Malthus is familiar with these arguments. They've been around for a while. Neither population-growth nor resource consumption or production per-capita is a static variable that's insensitive to other inputs. Fertility is already at or below the replacement level throughout the developed world, and falling virtually everywhere else where the economy is expanding. As resources become more scarce, the price goes up, and people either change their habbits or use new technologies to reduce their consumption of them, or find substitutes. The only places where the environment gets trashed to the point where they can no longer support their population are those where the economy has been so hobbled by a combination of socialism and/or incompetence and corruption that they cannot produce enough to generate the revenues necessary to pay for food, clothing, etc - let alone generate the additional funds necessary to provide for drinking-water systems, sewage treatment, cooking fuel other than trees, food other than the local wildlife, etc.

In Colorado, it's illegal to collect water from your roof. I'd imagine that in Colorado this is a water rights issue more than anything else. I'm pretty sure that it would be easy to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the total surface area of all of the roofs in a given drainage and show that the effect of residential rainwater harvesting on total runoff would be negligible, but even in the event that it wasn't, some greywater recycling seems like it would be unaffected by those regs. Looks like commercial systems that allow drainwater from showers and washing machines for toilet-flushing run about $1200-$1500, plus probably $300 for shipping, and whatever installation costs - which is probably somewhere around $400-$600 I'd imagine. I don't have any idea what our water bill is, but as things stand now I can't imagine that installing one of these deals pencils out for most families, but I expect that would change in the event that water rates increased substantially. http://www.greenbuildingsupply.com/Public/Energy-WaterConservation/GreywaterSystems/index.cfm

Just imagine what'll happen when we can no longer light our homes with whale-oil lanterns, or heat our homes with timber, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. The end is nigh....