USA Election season 2012

[OverbounD]

If you are like me, you agree with a lot of Obama's social agenda. However I am also glad that the Republicans won the house in 2010. This is because as in 1994 this may lead to a balanced budget. I sort of think of them as a necessary evil in that regard. But now that the economy is slowly kicking up again and election season is coming around again its time to get politically active again.

Once election season comes closer I plan on voting democrat and knocking on doors for Obama. I'd really like to see Obama's agenda continue he's reducing nuclear arms, providing affordable heath care for people who are poor like me, democracy in the middle east.

Yeah, the economy isn't where we'd like it. Yet its getting better and presidents really don't have near as much control over that as we're led to believe.

I'm also open to hearing from Republicans and your thoughts. I myself consider myself an independent and while I mostly vote democrat I do sit out elections I want republicans to win and am not completely against voting republican. I'd just like to hear your guys thoughts and hope you guys are politically active.

[DimensionWarped]

I don't even know what I want out of the political system anymore. I'm so utterly and completely disillusioned with the whole thing that all I can figure is that I want some kind of radical change, and that's not going to come about regardless of who becomes president and who wins the next congressional elections.

I'm not planning to vote. I don't care enough about the issues that really make people vote for one party or another like global warming, civil rights, abortion, immigrants, etc. All I want is general prosperity and that's something both parties promise and never do a thing to deliver.

It's too bad big research and development organizations aren't especially malleable, otherwise it would be feasible to do something like divert the large amount of money that goes to R&D for weapons (I used to work R&D for weapons by the by for anyone who remembers) to work on internal improvements and technology that goes somewhere beyond "Hey, check out how potent this warhead is. It explodes and sends out about 200,000 flachettes (see: aerodynamically balanced nails) killing everyone in a 700 foot radius behind light armor."

Now, the problem with wanting to just change all of that overnight is obvious... even if you had the capacity to do such a thing, engineers are specialized and you can't just tell someone who makes bombs one day to start working on new equipment for maintaining roads, or working on solving the energy crisis.

EDIT: Honestly, I think the government would do well to start making open source initiatives a prerogative. If instead of for instance, purchasing Microsoft Office for every single computer in every school, government office, congressional facility, court house, library, etc. in the nation, and keeping it up to date every year, they spent a millionth of that on putting some government-employed programmers into the LibraOffice team to build it up to the same spec as Microsoft Office and use that on every government computer, you'd already be talking extraordinary savings. I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that Microsoft makes a billion dollars off of Microsoft Office every year just from the government. To put it simply, I think the government would do well to figure out every software package that they need to buy in mass and then figure out how much money it would cost to simply have it made for them rather than having it licensed to them, and maybe consider giving it out to the nation as a whole since we would have payed for it at that point.

[OverbounD]

My answer to that is I don't think you can believe in climate change without voting democrat because what they predict is quite scary. That said a meteor could slam into the earth tomorrow or and volcano could erupt under my feat as I type this. But we prepare for what we can.

[Sockman]

I'll just do what I did in 2008: Vote "Satan, Prince of Darkness" as a write-in candidate.

The way I see it, the election is going to go one way or another:

Obama gets reelected, and I have to put up with 4 more years of whiny neocons predicting the End of America!

Some Republican prick manages to catch the interest of the American people long enough to get voted into office, leading to 4 years of whiny leftist hippies predicting the End of America!

[Serephim]

I really dont know how the fuck global climate change is even a debate anymore. Anyone who's even mildly done research on it (or looked into what they're saying we are actually doing that's causing the problem) should automatically be a believer.

[DimensionWarped]

A believer in what exactly? That the climate changes? That CO2 emissions by people have a direct correlation with temperatures? Or do you mean that everyone should automatically believe the doomsday theory that if we don't curtail emissions by 20XX that the planet will turn into Water World?

A lot of it has a perfectly sound scientific basis, but thanks to a combination of factors, you have a bunch of politically charged people who either want to say "this absolutely does not exist" who are idiots and you've got a bunch of other politically charged people saying "This will almost certainly be the end of the Earth as we know it" and who are also idiots. We don't live in a disaster movie, the birds aren't going to stop dropping dead out of the sky because the temperature rose a few degrees over the course of a century flipping the magnetic poles causing Earthquakes which unleashed an ancient Mayan plague that was sealed underground for centuries.

That said, it could mess with some crops and make the South an even hotter, more miserable place to live during the Summer.

[Serephim]

The idea that our Co2 emissions are ridiculously high, and that it's heating up the planet, that as it heats up the planet, other feedback cycles in turn continue to heat up the planet until the climate no longer is able to sustain itself as it is, and thus rapidly changes in order to reach equilibrium. I found a video from a singular guy on Youtube who explained this pretty damn throughout without trying to sound like a discovery channel documentary on "when meteors strike".

It wasn't so much what he said was going to happen as a result that was nearly as eye opening as to what he said they're claiming is the cause. Basically, if oil is the result of millions and millions of years of the planet REMOVING CO2 from the air, then we're doing the exact opposite, except in the course of the industrial revolution up into now. (Which is less than 300 years.)

If that's scientifically sound, and CO2 is actually as potent of a greenhouse gas as it is, being only 0.04% of the composition of the atmosphere and still causing measurable effects, then the warming debate....well, shouldn't really even be one.

And if our climate DOES just decide to start to radically change one day...well, i dont expect the world to catch on fire, or giant hurricanes to freeze oceans, but if it starts screwing with our plants, the economy of the planet is going to get one staggering assault to the balls. It would undoubtedly affect the entire planet if entire seasons of agriculture in America just halted, or forests were suddendly subjected to a climate they are not suited to survive in.

[DimensionWarped]

The planet/climate isn't a living thing. It doesn't do homeostasis. Oil isn't the result of 'removing CO2 from the air', it's the result of decomposition reactions involving organic matter coupled with location in an environment high in temperature and pressure. See, CO2(44g/mol) naturally falls from the air because it is denser than most of the gasses which make up the air such as O2(32g/mol) , N2(28g/mol), and H2O(18g/mol) *disclaimer, those atomic weights are from memory and may not be 100% correct. Just in the right neighborhood*

And CO2 isn't remarkable because it's CO2, it's remarkable because it's something industry has been determined to be able to have an impact on. The actual predicted rises from CO2 concentrations exploding aren't that high on an absolute temperature scale. They just seem a lot higher because we don't base our day to day lives on absolute scale. We think in the 250 to 310 Kelvin range. Really though, an equivalent concentration of CO2 to water vapor, there isn't a whole lot of difference in terms of overall contribution to the greenhouse effect.

And by the way, there should always be scientific debate on prospective effects of an acknowledged problem. The concensus on global warming pretty much just adds up to "global warming is here, carbon dioxide is involved, and since the industrial revolution, there is a strong correlation on human industry and concentration of CO2 in the air." The projections 50 years out are still all over the place and the actual effect of temperature change goes anywhere from 'biomes are going to move around' to 'total uninhabitability of most of the planet.' And there are lots out there with a lot of money trying to push for the extremes in both directions.

Besides, the answers picked by politicians to solve these problems have been uniformly stupid so far. Heavy regulation of industry simply helped industry move to where regulations were less strict, production of ethanol for gasoline turned out to produce more emissions than it prevented, about the only good things to come out of it so far are the electric car initiatives and encouraging people to recycle, which wouldn't even have been much of an issue if we weren't collectively eating and drinking massive amounts of shitty snack foods and excessively sugary beverages out of disposable containers.

[Serephim]

If CO2 is such a heavy element then it wouldn't be a very good of a greenhouse gas. And compared to other elements it isn't, but you make it sound like it just isn't a factor at all. Atomic weight isn't going to stop CO2 from behaving like a gas. And even if it does fall, it's still going to do what it does.

The climate may not be alive, but something does not have to be alive for it to exhibit characteristics of something that achieves homeostasis. The consensus is that the climate, as unpredictable as it is, has a degree of long-term predictability that allows us and the rest of the biosphere to adapt to it. The concern is that us heating up the planet by however many few degrees we can is going to reach a threshold of factors where the climate can no longer stay stable in the pattern we know now and shift into another one. The issue is that people over-exaggerate everything they are saying to the point where it's another "Jay-Z works for the illumaniti" or "HAARP are doing experiments to control the population" or something. But to say that it simply cannot equate to significant consequences based on skepticism because of those who over-exaggerate is...well, foolish.

The tipping point for me actually looking into consequences of global warming came from looking into the feedback cycles they explain. Like the few degrees that are melting the freshwater icecaps from greenland altering the ocean conveyor belt...which wouldn't in any way doom us(says NASA), but it would have an impact on our climate. And of all the factors that keep our temperatures the way they are, if something changes in one area, it's likely to change in another, which will continue until things are "stable".

Im no scientist, and i know that there are far too many variables in this situation for me to make any serious claims. The weather systems are just too complex for any of us outside of the research loop to really comment on. But when people are just like "CO2 FALLS GLOBAL WARMING IS A NATURAL CYCLE IT AINT THAT BAD AND ITS CORPORATE FEAR MONGERING", then they're really no better than the people who are dooming the planet. IMO it just opens you up for more severe damage if you decide to ignore it and get hit with consequences, which is undoubtedly what's going to happen if there are any serious consequences regardless.

I remember you yourself complaining about how people have been scared shitless out of using Atomic Power by people who bitch and moan about radiation and the plant somehow morphing itself into an atomic bomb once it gets hot. As a result, we're stuck using what i would assume is a much less efficient and more pollutant form of energy. I dont see how the global climate change debate is any different. There are drawbacks to sitting on both sides. But i believe it's the media and their interests that force us to end up sitting on either side, instead of actually figuring shit out like we need to.

God forbid a meteor ever ends up heading towards the planet with significant risk of hitting it. We're all going to die.