Steve Bell on Osborne's Defeat on Tax Credit Cuts

Way too early to count Gid. out, but great to see him taken down, if only temporarily.

Science Fiction

U.S. Transportation SecretaryAttorney General Anthony FoxxLoretta Lynch Announces Unmanned AircraftGun Registration Requirement

New Task Force to Develop Recommendations by November 20

WASHINGTON – U.S. Transportation SecretaryAttorney General Anthony FoxxLoretta Lynch and FAA AdministratorATF Director Michael HuertaTodd Jones today announced the creation of a task force to develop recommendations for a registration process for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)Guns.

The task force will be composed of 25 to 30 diverse representatives from the UAS and manned aviationfirearms industry, the federal government, and other stakeholders.  The group will advise the Department on which aircraft should be exempt from registration due to a low safety risk, including toys and certain other small UASto limit any exemptions, as all guns are dangerous.  The task force also will explore options for a streamlined system that would make registration less burdensome for commercial UAS operatorshunters in rural areas.

The task force may make additional safety recommendations as it deems appropriate.  Secretary FoxxAG Lynch directed the group to deliver its report by Nov. 20.

“Registering unmanned aircraftguns will help build a culture of accountability and responsibility, especially with new users who have no experience operating in the U.S. aviation systemfirearms safely and responsibly,” FoxxLynch said.  “It will help protect public safety in the air and on the groundthe public and at home.”

Every day, the FAAATF receives reports of potentially unsafe UAS operationshandling of guns.  PilotPolice sightings of UASopen-carry guns doubled between 2014 and 2015.  The reports ranged from incidents at major sporting eventsschools and flights near manned aircraftmovie theaters, to interference with wildfirepolice operations.

“These reports signal a troubling trend,” HuertaJones said.  “Registration will help make sure that operatorsgun owners know the rules and remain accountable to the public for flying their unmanned aircrafthandling and maintaining their guns responsibly.  When they don’t fly safely, they’ll know there will be consequences.” 

While the task force does its work, the FAAATF will continue its aggressive education and outreach efforts, including the “Know Before You Fly”“Know Before You Shoot” campaign and “No Drone Zone”“No Gun Zone” initiatives with the nation’s busiest airportsschools.  The agency also will continue to take strong enforcement action against egregious violators. At the same time, it will continue working with stakeholders to improve safety to ensure further integration and innovation in this promising segment of aviationin the United States.

Secretary FoxxAG Lynch was joined by representatives from the following stakeholder groups:

• The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems InternationalThe National Rifle Association 
• Academy of Model AircraftCoalition of Gun Owners against the NRA
• Air Line Pilots AssociationSensible Republicans
• American Association of Airport ExecutivesSensible Democrats 
• Helicopter Association InternationalSensible Independents
• PrecisionHawkParents 
• AirMap/ Small UAV CoalitionTeachers 
• Consumer Electronics AssociationOrdinary Americans

To read statements in support of today’s announcement, please click here. 

For non-media inquiries, please email UASRegistration@faa.govGunRegistration@atf.gov.

Monday, October 19, 2015

- See more at: https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/us-transportation-secretary-anthony-foxx-announces-unmanned-aircraft-registration#sthash.8Jpy9SFD.dpufhttps://www.atf.gov/briefing-room/us-attorney-general-loretta-lynch-announces-gun-registration#sthash.8Jpy9SFD.dpuf


Not everything lines up of course.  Original here, and yes I do approve of the idea.

For the record, I do support Americans' right to own guns in general.  But I don't support absolutist interpretations of the second amendment, and don't think a gun-registry is a unreasonable violation of that right, anymore than background-checks, limits on the type of weaponry available*, or limits on cartridge-capacities.  Oh, and a tax on bullets.



* I know, AR-15's are cool.  So, in their way, are surface-to-air missiles.  But do you really need one to defend yourself ?

Slate/New Scientist on Obama's 'Bold' Climate Plan

Obama wants you to think his climate plan will be bold. It’s not

US president Barack Obama's much-heralded attempt to curb carbon emissions from coal-fired power stations is nowhere near enough

Later today, US President Barack Obama will unveil the final version of the centrepiece of his climate legacy: the Clean Power Plan.

It is designed to speed up the retirement of coal-fired power plants – the most carbon-intensive way of generating electricity – and could more than double the rate of their closures by 2040.

In a video preview, Obama called the Clean Power Plan “the biggest, most important step we’ve ever taken to combat climate change”. While that may be true, it’s not saying a whole heck of a lot.

As I wrote last year when the details were initially announced, many states are already well on their way to achieving the required reductions, thanks in part to a recent boom in cheap natural gas and the Obama administration’s choice of 2005 as the basis year for cuts, which was close to America’s all-time peak in carbon emissions. Obama’s plan is significant, but it’s not bold.

A previous version of the targets, announced last year, would have required states to begin implementing changes to their power-producing mix in 2020. The final version, to be announced today, gives states and utilities an extra two years. The targets will vary by state, depending on their current energy mix, and states will have flexible ways of achieving emissions reductions, including an option to join an interstate cap-and-trade scheme.

All this will be a heavy lift for some coal-intensive states, like Wyoming, but it’s being heralded as largely “business as usual” for some states, like Minnesota, that have already made significant efforts to shift their energy mix.

...

It has been calculated that the plan would shave just 6 per cent from US carbon emissions by 2030. Climate science and international equity demand the US cut emissions 80 per cent by then. We’re nowhere near that pace.

Still, this plan is not nothing. In its coverage, The New York Times includes this hopeful gem: “But experts say that if the rules are combined with similar action from the world’s other major economies, as well as additional action by the next American president, emissions could level off enough to prevent the worst effects of climate change.”

That’s a lot of hedging on which to base a climate legacy.

In fact, when compared with the climate plans of his would-be successors on the left – Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley – Obama’s ranks last in terms of ambition.

Clinton, who has frequently aligned herself with the president on climate, announced a preview of her own climate plan last week. It’s fractionally more ambitious than Obama’s, but it essentially just kicks the can forward another few years.

...

Last week, former NASA climate scientist James Hansen, fresh off a dire new warning about global sea levels, had harsh words for the slow, incremental progress that’s formed essentially the entirety of American’s climate ambition to date. “We have two political parties, neither one of which is willing to face reality,” Hansen told the Guardian. “Conservatives pretend it’s all a hoax, and liberals propose solutions that are non-solutions.”

“It’s just plain silly,” said Hansen, speaking specifically of Clinton’s planned renewable energy push. “No, you cannot solve the problem without a fundamental change, and that means you have to make the price of fossil fuels honest.”

In the end, our climate won’t care about how we fix this problem. But it’s clear that time is running out. If Obama truly wants to go all-in on climate change, he should meet Republicans where they are – as painful as that might be – and negotiate a way to pass a carbon tax.

...

If Obama really wants to make a lasting impact on global warming, he can work across the US political divide or across the Pacific in Beijing, to work toward implementing a meaningful, economy-wide carbon tax as quickly as possible. Just because such a breakthrough feels impossible doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary. 

Nice change from the coverage in most outlets, including, sadly, the BBC, which seems to have framed the discussion of Obama's plan solely in terms of his Republican opponents' view (ie, 'Radical Enviro-Nazi Obama and his War On Coal; Let's debate the two sides...'), whilst ignoring those who would argue Obama's legacy-burnishing proposals are at the very least too little, and quite likely, too late.

<Rant below the fold:>

Speaking of our Future Semi-Benevolent Dictator

Here's Hillary's super-duper Reality-driven plan for dealing with climate-change: More solar panels** and wind-turbines to power US homes.

That's it apparently.*  No mention of the need for more nuclear in the short term at least.  No mention of industry.  No mention of our destructive economic system that is inherently dependent on infinite growth in a world of finite resources.  No mention of globalisation & trade.  No mention of population-growth.  No mention of China, Russia, Canada, Brasil, Australia, etc., and that fact that nothing the US does will make a damn bit of difference without some sort of global agreement on action.

Just put a solar panel on your house, drive a Prius, and bye-bye climate-change.  And everybody gets a magical pony to boot.


This folksy aw-shucks shit made me want to vomit:

I'm just a grandmother with two eyes and a brain.

Uh, you're a Yale-educated lawyer, a millionaire, a former board-member of Walmart, the highly influential wife of a two-term president of the United States (who amongst other things did much to undermine existing efforts on climate change by outsourcing much of US industry to the far east and México), a former Senator of the United States, and a former Secretary of State.  This lil' ole' Gran'ma me shit is starting to grate.


* There is a line in the video that hints at a coming 'comprehensive agenda', but hey, I'm not the one who released this publicly as 'Hillary's plan to curb climate change'.  And if you seriously believe Hillary will take any bolder action than this, then I've got a bridge for sale.

** Just thought, hang on a minute, where are all these solar panels coming from, given that the PRC-subsidised manufacturers in China already put most US manufacturers out of business ?  On a heavily polluting container-ship over the Pacific Ocean ?

Speaking of Risky Business...

This piece seems to be making the rounds regarding the situation in Greece.  Especially this:

With respect to Greece, the precise thing that European elites did to set the current chain of events in motion was to replace private debt with public during the 2010 first “bailout of Greece”. Prior to that event, it was obvious that blame was multipolar. Here are the banks, in France, in Germany, that foolishly lent. Not just to Greece, but to Goldman’s synthetic CDOs and every other piece of idiot paper they could carry with low risk-weights. In 2010, the EU, ECB, and IMF laundered a bailout of mostly French and German banks through the Greek fisc. Cash flowed into Greece only so it could flow out to rickety banks. Now, suddenly, the banks were absolved. There were very few bad loans left on the books of European lenders, everyone was clean, no bad actors at all. Except one. There were the institutions, the “troika”, clearly the good guys, so “helpful” with their generous offer of funds. And then there was Greece. What had been a mudwrestling match, everybody dirty, was transformed into mass of powdered wigs accusing a single filthy penitent (or, when the people with their savings in just-rescued banks decide to be generous, a petulant misbehaving child).

I won't claim to understand all the economic arguments involved, but I do think it speaks well to the degree to which the EU's handling of the Greek crisis is symptomatic of an overall disintegration over the last few years in any sense of solidarity between European countries.  Not so much a Union increasingly as a real-life franchise of Big Brother, wherein the various roommates squabble more and more over time as their proximity in a shared household (to the upkeep of which the various roommates' contributions vary wildly) breeds enmity.

The complete disunity over how to handle the refugees from North Africa is another example, what with Britain refusing to participate in any apportionment of the refugee-populations, and Denmark reintroducing border-controls.

When the game was up, when the global house of credit cards collapsed in the late Aughts, European leaders had a choice. They had knowingly and purposefully brought weak states into the Eurozone, because they genuinely, even nobly, wished to build a large, strong, United Europe. When they did so, they understood there would be crises. A unified Europe, they had always claimed, would be forged one crisis at a time. The right thing to have done for Europe at this point would have been to point out the regulatory errors and misaligned incentives that encouraged profligate lending and enabled corruption and waste among borrowers, and fix those. Banks that had made bad loans would acknowledge losses. The banks themselves would have to be restructured or bailed out.

But “bank restructuring” is a euphemism for imposing losses on wealthy creditors. And explicit bank bailouts are humiliations of elites, moments when the mask comes off and the usually tacit means by which states preserve and enhance the comfort of the comfortable must give way to very visible, very unpopular, direct cash flows.

The choice Europe’s leaders faced was to preserve the union or preserve the wealth, prestige, and status of the community of people who were their acquaintances and friends and selves but who are entirely unrepresentative of the European public. They chose themselves. The formal institutions of the EU endure, but European community is now failing fast.

It is difficult to overstate how deeply Europe’s leaders betrayed the ideals of European integration in their handing of the Greek crisis. The first and most fundamental goal of European integration was to blur the lines of national feeling and interest through commerce and interdependence, in order to prevent the fractures along ethnonational lines that made a charnel house of the continent, twice. That is the first thing, the main rule, that anyone who claims to represent the European project must abide: We solve problems as Europeans together, not as nations in conflict.

...

The fact of the matter is no country, not Germany, not France, would voluntarily put up with the sort of “adjustment” that has been forced on Greece, for the good reason that gratuitous great depressions are not actually helpful to an economy. Creditors have had five years to mismanage Greece and they’ve done a startlingly effective job. Syriza has had five months to object. However much you may dislike their negotiating style, however little you think of their competence, Greece’s catastrophe was not Syriza’s work. If creditors respond to Syriza’s “intransigence” with maneuvers that cause yet more devastation, that will be on the creditors. Blaming victims for having insufficiently perfect leaders is standard fare for apologists of predation. Unfortunately, understanding this may be of little comfort to the disemboweled prey.

Europe’s creditors are behaving exactly as one might naively predict private creditors would behave, seeking to get as much blood from the stone as quickly as possible, indifferent to the cost in longer-term growth. And that, in fact, is a puzzle! Greece’s creditors are not nervous lenders panicked over their own financial situation, but public sector institutions representing primarily governments that are in no financial distress at all. They really shouldn’t be behaving like this.

I think the explanation is quite simple, though. Having recast a crisis caused by a combustible mix of regulatory failure and elite venality into a morality play about profligate Greeks who must be punished, Eurocrats are now engaged in what might be described as “loan-shark theater”. They are putting on a show for the electorates they inflamed in order to preserve their own prestige. The show must go on.

Austerity may or may not be a viable option* for a country like the UK, but Greece is not the UK.  Greece's GDP is in freefall, and its ability to repay debtors will only worsen even more the longer this is dragged out, no matter what reforms are put in place.  It needs to be able to default, with all the consequences that brings, and/or inflate its currency.  If we had any sense we'd have let it do so long ago.  But Deutschland et al want to maintain the image of Europe, the illusion.  And letting Greece default or exit the Euro makes for bad optics.

Of course, were this truly a Union, then the debts of one would be the debts of all...


* Last time I checked, most patients who received a treatment of leeching didn't actually die.

Nick Clegg's Annihilation Lap

Watching this reminds me of my ongoing reaction to the hullabaloo regarding the Supreme Court's decisions on so-called 'ObamaCare', aka the ACA.  I don't want the fascist asshole Republicans to get their way in denying insurance to people by constantly attacking the healthcare-law they christened 'Obamacare' despite it being modelled on their own party's proposals in the 'nineties for an alternative to the plan of the Clinton administration.  But the law still sucks.  It's still flawed.  It's functionality still depends upon forcing people to hand over money involuntarily to massive corporations.  And people will still die for lack of coverage, and/or the inability to pay.

Still, arguably horrible law as it is, missed generational opportunity at real reform as it may represent ('May' ?  Who the fuck are we kidding ?), the fact is that people can obtain healthcare in the United States now who couldn't before, and who might not have been able to shortly if the Supreme Court had agreed with the latest (completely bullshit) attack on the ACA.

What did Nick Clegg's sellout buy any one ? The idea that he prevented a global economic meltdown by getting into bed with the Tories is absurd -- Every nation on Earth faced similar political considerations, including the far-more financially significant United States, but where else did a political party feel the need to sell out generations' worth of political principle for short-term power ?  And if the Lib-Dems had not done a deal with the Tories, what ?  What evidence was there at the time even remotely suggesting that there could be catastrophic outcomes without the coalition ?  What evidence since ?

It pains me to watch this, because I'm inclined to like Nick Clegg, to root for the Liberal Democrats.  Even now.  Even despite all that fucker has done to destroy his own party's brand.  And especially as the so-called Labour party seems divided between possibly genuinely loony Marxists like Corbyn and complete right-wing frauds like the rest of the scumbags vying for leadership.

And that's all I have to say.  I feel the need to say something witty, something controversial perhaps, but no, this asshole just makes me sad.  His incompetence, his idiocy, his vanity...all of it...just...makes...me...sad.

Steve Wozniak: Robots Will Make Us Their Pets

Apple’s co-founder: We’re all going to be robots’ pets one day

by Benjamin Snyder     @WriterSnyder     JUNE 25, 2015, 12:23 PM EDT 

Apple AAPL -0.46% co-founder Steve Wozniak thinks we’re all probably going to become robots’ pets.

Speaking at a recent technology conference, Wozniak said that at first the thought of artificially intelligent beings in charge of everything scared him. But now it’s a comforting thought.

Fast forward hundreds of years to when robots are in charge. At that time, humans will probably be treated in a similar fashion to dogs, Wozniak said during an event at the Freescale Technology Forum 2015 in Austin, Texas.

“It’s actually going to turn out really good for humans,” he added. “And it will be hundreds of years down the stream before [artificially intelligent beings would] even have the ability.”

“They’ll be so smart by then that they’ll know they have to keep nature, and humans are part of nature,” he continued. “So I got over my fear that we’d be replaced by computers.”

Wozniak believes robots will helps us because we’re the “gods originally.”

More like animals in a zoo surely ?  If the motivation is preservation of humans as a part of nature.

And even if the robots did treat us like dogs, a lot of us treat dogs...really really horribly.  And if they treated us the way the more 'humane' in society treat dogs, they would still be...restricting our population, neutering us to control our breeding, restricting our movements, controlling out interaction with other humans, strictly controlling our diets, and euthanising us when we got sick or old.  Awesome future you've got mapped out for us there, Woz !

And the 'we're the "gods originally"' stuff is just wishful thinking, as is the rest of it.

What Wozniak really needs to conquer his existential angst, and what this is a form of, is religion.  In this case, it's one involving the fetishisation & worship of technology, and the faith in technology always being there for us, always leading to a brighter future.  A common, but often disappointing faith.

I'd suggest maybe...Buddhism instead ?

Speaking of...

HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH !