Tag Archives: case

Evil Dex For the Win!

by LeilaniOgden Posted on May 22, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The Evil Dex is becoming eviller. Or perhaps more cunning. As you already know if you obsessively follow every word I write, my doctor recently switched me to a lower dose of dexamethasone. I now take only 12 mg once a week, so my sleeping should be less disrupted. Right?

Well…not so much. The problem is that the effects of dex accumulate over time, so it becomes hard to predict exactly how it’s going to work. In my case, it takes 4-5 hours to kick in and lasts for about 36 hours. But I’m taking a lower dose! So on Friday I decided to try taking it in the morning. On the bad side, that meant it would be at full strength by bedtime. On the good side, it would be worn off completely by Saturday night.

So I took the dex in the morning and then took a double dose of sleep meds at bedtime. Remarkably, this had no effect. None. I was up all night and only barely a little drowsy. This accounts for the late night blogging (remember to subtract three hours when you look at the time stamps on my posts). The silver lining to this is that my experiment had extremely clear results, so next week I’ll go back to taking the dex at night.

So why the headline? You may recall that a couple of weeks ago I promised you pictures of our Canada goose babies. That turned out to be harder than I expected. I found them again once, but the pictures I took were pretty so-so. After that, they just weren’t around. But yesterday, since I was up at 6 am anyway, I figured I’d go out and see if they were active in the morning. And they were! So later this morning I’ll regale you with a photo album of adorable Canada goslings. Never say that this isn’t a full-service blog.

Continue at source:  

Evil Dex For the Win!

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Evil Dex For the Win!

Does Donald Trump Really Have a 30% Chance of Winning?

by IonaMackinolty Posted on May 15, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Sam Wang, my go-to presidential forecaster, says Hillary Clinton would have a 99 percent chance of winning if the election were held today. But the election isn’t being held today:

Historically from 1952 to 2012, the likely range of movement in two-candidate margin from this time until Election Day has been 10 percentage points, which is the standard deviation from the 16 past elections. Therefore, even though Clinton currently leads by a median margin of 7 percent (12 national surveys) and would certainly win an election held today, she could still lose the lead, and from a purely poll-based standpoint, is only narrowly favored to be elected President in November (probability: 70%).

It is also the case that Clinton is the only candidate who is poised for a blowout. Her “plus-one-sigma” outcome (current polls plus one standard deviation) is a popular vote win of 58.5%-41.5%. Trump’s plus-one-sigma outcome is a narrower win, 51.5%-48.5%.

In chart form it looks something like this: two bell curves centered 7 points away from each other, each with a standard deviation of 10 points.

The blue span from 48.5 to 51.5 is Trump’s 30 percent chance of winning—though it’s worth noting that Wang says the standard deviation in recent elections has been more like 4 points, which would give Trump virtually no chance of winning. Nonetheless, he also says this: “But considering the upheaval in the Republican Party, a little voice tells me to open my mind to a wider range of possibilities… including a Trump win.”

James Wimberley isn’t convinced. He takes a look at various upsides and downsides of the two candidates (gaffes, oppo dumps, unusual outside events, etc.) and concludes that virtually all of them favor Hillary:

Adding these pseudo-numbers up, I get the total risks to Clinton 39, to Trump 352. Really the only more than marginally possible future events in my categories that he has going for him are ISIS pulling off a big atrocity and economic collapse in China, both at long odds. I don’t claim credibility for my particular numbers, just that overall we have to put a very fat thumb on the probability scales in Clinton’s favour. So her chances to a sensible bettor are more than Wang’s 70%, a lot more.

Comments? I’m pretty astounded that after locking up the nomination Trump has actually gotten more out of control, not more restrained. Everybody sort of assumed that when it came time to widen his appeal beyond the Republican base, he’d be smart enough to dial things back a notch, but he seems to have taken this as some kind of schoolyard challenge. The last couple of weeks he’s been crazier than ever. If this keeps up, I’d be hard put to give him more than a 1 percent chance of winning.

Jump to original: 

Does Donald Trump Really Have a 30% Chance of Winning?

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Does Donald Trump Really Have a 30% Chance of Winning?

BP takes Colorado to court and wins millions in tax breaks

by GiseleUrquhart Posted on May 11, 2016

BP takes Colorado to court and wins millions in tax breaks

By on May 11, 2016Share

It’s not too often one comes across a brand-new fossil fuel handout in 2016, but the Colorado Supreme Court just delivered the oil and gas industry a fat one. In a case pitting BP against the state’s Department of Revenue, the Court decided in late April to authorize some hefty tax deductions for the oil and gas giant. Taxpayers are now on the hook for up to $100 million in payments to BP and other companies this year — and since the ruling sets a precedent, they’ll take the hit in perpetuity.

As a company extracting natural resources in Colorado, BP must pay a severance tax to the state. However, natural gas extractors are allowed to deduct costs they can attribute to “transportation, manufacturing, and processing.” In the case, originally filed in 2005, BP argued that foregone dollars that the company “could have earned had they invested in other ventures rather than in building transportation and processing facilities” should count as these types of costs.

In other words, BP alleged that the money they theoretically could have earned, had they spent it elsewhere, represented a deductible cost to the company. And the Colorado Supreme Court agreed.

“It is absolutely a subsidy,” said Jessica Goad, communications director at Conservation Colorado. But Colorado is by no means alone in offering breaks to oil and gas companies. The United States spends some $20 billion in national fossil fuel production subsidies annually.

Colorado already has the lowest effective severance tax in the West. Under state law, oil and gas companies are able to count property taxes against severance tax payments.

In a last-ditch effort to disallow this kind of deduction under state law, Colorado House Democrats introduced a bill on Monday — but it died a procedural death on Tuesday night. Colorado’s legislative session ends on Wednesday. “It’s hard to write a brand new bill that solves a brand new problem in three days,” said Goad.

BP and others will continue to collect this windfall unless the legislature returns to the issue next session.

Share

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

Visit link: 

BP takes Colorado to court and wins millions in tax breaks

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, Oster, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on BP takes Colorado to court and wins millions in tax breaks

There’s More to "Improper Payments" Than Meets the Eye

by TristaBancks59 Posted on May 11, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Here’s an interesting thing. I was browsing over at The Corner and came across a post from Veronique de Rugy, who was unhappy about the federal government’s rate of improper payments, which totaled $137 billion last year. That’s fair enough. Here are the six worst programs:

This is the kind of thing that liberals should care about too—in fact, we should care about it more than conservatives if we want people to trust government to handle their tax dollars competently. Still, it got me curious. What exactly does this mean? $137 billion in waste and fraud last year? As it turns out, no. Here’s one interesting methodological tidbit:

Another prevalent misunderstanding is that all improper payments are a loss to the government, but that is not always the case. For example, although most of the $137 billion in improper payments was caused by overpayments (payments that are higher than they should have been), a significant chunk of that total amount was caused by underpayments (payments that are lower than they should have been). The difference between these two amounts (that is, overpayments minus underpayments) equals the net amount of payments that improperly went out the door.

Huh. So if the feds overpay Joe $10 and underpay Jane $10, that counts as $20 in improper payments. This is a reasonable thing to track, since we’d like all the payments to be correct, but it doesn’t give us much insight into how much money we’re losing to improper payments. My guess based on a bit of googling is that underpayments are a smallish part of the whole number, but for some reason there’s no official tally of this. Roughly speaking, though, you can probably shave 10-20 percent off the top and get pretty close.

What else? There’s this:

Also, many of the overpayments are payments that may have been proper, but were labeled improper due to a lack of documentation confirming payment accuracy. We believe that if agencies had this documentation, it would show that many of these overpayments were actually proper and the amount of improper payments actually lost by the government would be even lower than the estimated net loss discussed above.

An entire payment is labeled improper if complete documentation is not available. This appears to account for somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-60 percent of all improper payments. Most likely, though, once the documentation is in place, the vast majority of these payments turn out to be correct.

Put this all together, and the net value of genuinely improper payments is probably about $50 billion or so. Still high, but not quite as outrageous as it seems at first glance.

Something about this whole exercise seems kind of weird to me, though. We’re only a few months into 2016 and we already have numbers for FY2015. That’s fast work—too fast to be anything but a preliminary cut at flagging payments that might be incorrect. But how many of them really are incorrect? Nobody knows. For that, you’d have to wait a year or two and then re-analyze all the payments in the sample.

I’d be a whole lot more interested in that. $137 billion makes for a fine, scary headline—especially when the headline leaves the vague impression that this is all due to fraud and waste—but why don’t we ever get a follow-up number that tells us how much the feds ended up paying improperly once all the documentation is rounded up and the final audits are done? Wouldn’t that be a better number to care about?

View original:  

There’s More to "Improper Payments" Than Meets the Eye

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on There’s More to "Improper Payments" Than Meets the Eye

A Vote For Not-Trump Is a Vote For Hillary

by WendellReuter Posted on May 7, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Jay Nordlinger is confused at the idea that if he doesn’t vote for Donald Trump, he’s effectively voting for Hillary Clinton:

People tell me that, if I don’t vote for either Trump or Hillary, I’m voting for Hillary. My first response is, “So?” My second response is, “What are you smoking?” If it’s true that, if I don’t vote for either Trump or Hillary, I’m voting for Hillary, why isn’t it equally true that I’m voting for Trump? You see what I mean? How come Trump doesn’t get my non-vote? Why does just Hillary get it?

Am I missing something?

Perhaps it’s this: Perhaps people think that Trump has some kind of claim on my vote, because I’m a conservative (and, until earlier this week, I was a Republican)….

Let’s stop right here. I think I see the problem. If not-Trump voters are distributed randomly, the effect would indeed be small. That’s what happened with Ross Perot in 1992. But if millions of people who otherwise would have voted for the Republican nominee are defecting, then the effect is large and decidedly non-random. You really are effectively voting for Hillary since there’s no plausible third-party candidate to take votes away from her.

And it doesn’t even take millions. Ralph Nader effectively elected George W. Bush in 2000 with only a few thousand votes in Florida. It wasn’t his intent, and the odds against it were high, but nonetheless that’s how it worked out.

This is all predicated on the fact that Nordlinger almost certainly votes for Republicans most of the time and for Republican presidential candidates all the time. I’m pretty sure that’s true. And if millions of formerly loyal Republicans stay away from the polls or vote for Gary Johnson or just leave their ballots blank, then Hillary is a shoo-in. I kinda hate to be the one making this case, but there’s really no way around this.

See original article here:  

A Vote For Not-Trump Is a Vote For Hillary

Posted in alternative energy, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A Vote For Not-Trump Is a Vote For Hillary

Democrats Have a Class Gap. Republicans Have a Generation Gap.

by KianBittner Posted on April 28, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

What are the big fault lines within the Democratic and Republican parties? According to a recent Pew report, Democrats have a class gap: Democratic elites are far more liberal than less educated members of the party. But there’s not much of a generation gap: old and young voters are pretty similar ideologically.

Among Republicans, it’s just the opposite. They have a huge generation gap, with older voters skewing much more conservative than younger voters. But there’s no class gap: their elites are in pretty close sync with the party base. The raw data is here, and the chart below shows the magnitude of the difference:

This is interesting, since the most talked-about aspect of the Democratic primary was the astonishingly strong preference of young voters for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. But why did they prefer Bernie? The obvious answer is that they’re more liberal than older Democrats and therefore preferred his more radical vision—but the Pew data says that’s not the case.

So what is the answer? The age gap could still explain a bit of it, since young Democrats are a little more liberal than older Democrats. And the class gap could also explain a bit of it, since Bernie voters tend to be both young and well educated. But even put together, this doesn’t seem like enough.

Obviously there was something about Bernie that generated huge enthusiasm among younger voters. But if it wasn’t ideology, what was it?

Originally posted here: 

Democrats Have a Class Gap. Republicans Have a Generation Gap.

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Democrats Have a Class Gap. Republicans Have a Generation Gap.

First We Piss You Off, Then We Ask You For Money

by DorisVAWvf Posted on April 22, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Ah, Twitter. Here’s something I got last night after writing a post about Hillary Clinton’s fondness for military intervention:

My Bernie cesspool! Regular readers were amused, since I’ve written dozens of posts supportive of Hillary. But no one should get a free pass. If Hillary Clinton is too fond of military intervention for my taste, then it’s best to say so. That’s especially true during a primary campaign, when it might actually make a difference.

MoJo’s head honchos agree, and they make their case in “Why We’re Tough On The Candidates You Like: The Case For Offending Some Of The People, All Of The Time”:

Mother Jones is a reader-supported nonprofit, and that means we rely on donations and magazine subscriptions for 70 percent of our annual budget. It also means that by April 30, we need to raise $175,000 from readers like you to stay on track.

So the easiest thing to do, in some ways, would be taking it easy on our election coverage so as not to upset any of you while we’re asking for your support—we know Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders appeal to a lot of our readers. But taking it easy on anything is not in our DNA; in fact, it’s exactly the opposite of what (we think) you want us to do.

….Two years ago, when few were talking about Clinton’s links to the fossil fuel industry, we did a major investigative feature on her support for fracking as secretary of state; now her links to the fossil fuel industry are a big issue. Last summer, we ran the first in-depth piece on Sanders’ political evolution (and put an illustration of him on Mount Rushmore on the cover of our magazine); it took months for other major outlets to take him seriously. Since then, we’ve both covered the breaking news in the race and dug deeper on the strong points and weak points of both candidates—because that’s the job you want us to do.

Check it out and join the comments on the Facebook post if you’re so inclined. And if you want to support this kind of journalism, both in the magazine and here on the blog, help us out by pitching in a few bucks today for our spring fundraiser. You can give by credit card or PayPal.

Source article: 

First We Piss You Off, Then We Ask You For Money

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on First We Piss You Off, Then We Ask You For Money

The FBI Spent More Than $1 Million to Hack One Potentially Useless Phone

by ToniCBOYqghsh Posted on April 21, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

It turns out the FBI’s 11-hour solution to its huge public fight with Apple didn’t come cheap.

FBI director James Comey said on Thursday that the agency paid more than $1 million to unnamed private-sector hackers for help in unlocking the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. The FBI first attempted to make Apple write software that would allow law enforcement to unlock the phone quickly, but the company refused and said the request could unconstitutionally expand government authority. The case sparked an uproar over digital privacy as well as a major court battle, which stopped only when the FBI announced it had received the hackers’ help and withdrew its order to Apple.

Comey, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, didn’t give a specific price for the hack, but said it cost the agency more than he would make in the next seven years of his term as director. The FBI director makes at least $181,500 a year by law, putting the cost of the hack at a minimum of $1.27 million, by Comey’s estimate. An FBI press officer could not confirm the accuracy of Comey’s estimate or provide a specific cost.

“It was worth it,” Comey told the audience in Aspen. But it’s not clear how much value the hacking method or the phone actually has. Comey has repeatedly said that the method used to break into the phone would work only on an iPhone 5C running iOS 9, like the San Bernardino phone, and that Apple could discover and fix the security flaw that allowed the hack to work. And on Tuesday, CNN reported that the phone “didn’t contain evidence of contacts with other ISIS supporters or the use of encrypted communications during the period the FBI was concerned about.” The FBI argues the lack of information is valuable evidence in and of itself.

Link to original: 

The FBI Spent More Than $1 Million to Hack One Potentially Useless Phone

Posted in Anchor, cannabis, Casio, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The FBI Spent More Than $1 Million to Hack One Potentially Useless Phone

For the 97 billionth time: Yes, there is a 97 percent consensus on climate change

by AdriannQCD Posted on April 13, 2016

For the 97 billionth time: Yes, there is a 97 percent consensus on climate change

By on 13 Apr 2016commentsShare

You know how some parents have to check their kids’ bedrooms for monsters every night, even though they know there aren’t any monsters, and deep down, the kids probably know that too? Well, a bunch of researchers effectively just checked the bedroom of every climate denier for lack of consensus on anthropogenic global warming, and just like the mom peering into her kid’s closet for the 100th time, they came up empty.

There IS a scientific consensus on climate change, and it DOES hover around 97 percent, according to a study published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters. The unsurprising results come not from another superfluous survey of scientists and scientific papers, but rather, a survey of those surveys. Meaning the study’s authors, Merchants of Doubt co-author Naomi Oreskes among them, basically just double-, triple-, and quadruple-checked under the bed, beat a dead horse, banged their heads against a wall, wrote up their findings, and managed to do it all while not screaming, “WE JUST DID THIS YESTERDAY. NOW SHUT UP AND GO TO SLEEP!”

That’s because little Suzy is irrational, and so is a lot of America. Despite what people like Ted Cruz want you to believe, we are warming up the planet, and unless we do something about it, Suzy and her little friends are in for a rough future.

Surveys of scientists or studies reporting this not to be the case either conflate experts with non-experts or falsely equate a “no position” stance with denial or uncertainty, the new meta-survey shows. One survey of economic geologists, for example, found only a 47 percent consensus. But that’s a pretty meaningless result, because if Ben Carson taught us anything, it’s that someone can be a smart, well-respected expert in one field and a complete idiot in another.

Now, it’s tempting to just ignore people who deny this clear consensus. Many of them aren’t interested in facts and never will be, so why waste our energy? Because these people aren’t operating in a bubble. They’re using this false narrative to keep the public in a state of confusion and thus hinder any serious effort to address this problem.

John Cook, the lead author on the new study and a fellow at the Global Change Institute at The University of Queensland, wrote about this danger today in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He said that years of misinformation and doubt from conservatives have seriously skewed the public’s understanding of where scientists stand on climate change. Just last year, he noted, a survey revealed that a mere 12 percent of Americans knew that the consensus was above 90 percent.

For those of us who think about climate change all day every day, this is pretty hard to believe. But it’s the sad truth, and it’s why we have to continue looking for monsters and beating dead horses. Fortunately, the more the world starts to change, the harder it’s going to be for people to hide behind false or misleading studies. And if that doesn’t give you hope, then maybe this clip of Bill Nye making infamous merchant of doubt Marc Morano squirm will:

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

Source: 

For the 97 billionth time: Yes, there is a 97 percent consensus on climate change

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on For the 97 billionth time: Yes, there is a 97 percent consensus on climate change

Kids clear key hurdle in their federal climate change lawsuit

by DaneMartinez Posted on April 8, 2016

Kids clear key hurdle in their federal climate change lawsuit

By on 8 Apr 2016commentsShare

Should kids be able to sue for a safe climate? A federal judge just said yes.

Last month, in Eugene, Ore., a district court heard 21 youth plaintiffs’ arguments as to why their case should proceed to trial. The kids allege that by failing to act on climate change, the U.S. government — including the president and a handful of federal agencies — have violated several of their constitutional rights. As we reported in March:

The complaint alleges violation of the kids’ Fifth Amendment rights to due process and equal protection. By failing to act on climate change, it argues, the government discriminates against youth as a class. Without access to a healthy climate, they’re deprived of their fundamental rights to life, liberty, and property.

The complaint is also built on the public trust doctrine, a carryover from English common law that says a government has the duty to protect certain natural resources and systems on behalf of current and future generations. “It originated with Emperor Justinian in Rome,” Alex Loznak, a 19-year-old plaintiff, explained to the press. “It’s reflected in the Magna Carta, the writings of Thomas Jefferson, and cited in U.S. court decisions dating back to the 1800s.”

Backed by a slew of fossil fuel interests, the Justice Department filed a complaint arguing for the case’s dismissal. Now, with the new decision in hand, the 21 youth plaintiffs will head back to federal court for a proper hearing.

Said lead attorney Philip Gregory in a statement, “This decision is one of the most significant in our nation’s history.” If the kids win in the big leagues, that might actually be true.

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

Read article here: 

Kids clear key hurdle in their federal climate change lawsuit

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Kids clear key hurdle in their federal climate change lawsuit