Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

[jk]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

as a retired actuary, my answers are:

1. yes, as long as I could price it

2. same answer

3. spreading the risk is not the purpose of insurance. Spreading the risk only works when essentially all members of a given population are in the risk pool, whether voluntarily or by force. Insurance is risk taking by the insurer for a price much like a bookie, which is the purpose of underwriting. Much of what is now called health insurance is not truly insurance. Group Health insurance is not in general 'insurance". Those who can never afford their illnesses need to be taken care of by others, either family, friends, charity or the government.

as i understand it, the bolded text above is the reason insurance is mandatory in the recent package.

[DSpencer]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

some thought experiments:
1. suppose you had a crystal ball that allowed you to foresee all the medical events in a person's life. would you sell him insurance?
2. suppose you had a printout of someone's dna, with a list of relevant genes and probabilities of various medical events. would you sell him insurance?
3. if the purpose of insurance is to spread risk, and relieve the particular burden on those who happen to draw a bad number in the lottery of life, what is the purpose of underwriting? if knowing someone's zipcode, gender, ethnic background, height, weight, diet, habits and so on, allows you to assign probabilities of various medical events, how would price insurance? going back to the crystal ball model, if you price insurance so that it is essentially prepayment for services which will be delivered, what are you selling? and what do you want to do about people who under no circumstances can afford the services their illnesses will necessitate?

jiimbergin pretty much answered these how I would but here are my additional thoughts:

The prepayment of services is in many ways what a lot of insurance is today. Routine office visits, dental cleanings, lifelong pharmaceuticals, contacts/glasses. Buying insurance that covers things like this may perform a variety of functions: group discounts, preventative care incentives, subsidizing higher cost patients, etc but in my opinion it's not really "insurance" even though it's bundled together. What sense does it make for a transaction where I buy insurance that pays for contact lenses when I know in advance I will need them. The conclusion must be that either I pay more in premiums and/or the optometrist takes less in payment and the insurance company pockets the difference.

I think family, friends, and charities are the best options to take care of people who can't afford their treatment although those support systems have been somewhat displaced by government.

It's also worth mentioning that a huge percentage of medical conditions are the result of people's lifestyle choices. Everyone cries foul about how high risk people get denied coverage. In many (most?) workplaces the obese, heavy-drinking, smoker still pays the same premiums as the healthy co-worker down the hall and gets the same coverage. I'm not sure why that is considered fair. If on a national level, health care is too expensive, a big reason is that people are too unhealthy and it's mostly preventable.

[jiimbergin]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

some thought experiments:
1. suppose you had a crystal ball that allowed you to foresee all the medical events in a person's life. would you sell him insurance?
2. suppose you had a printout of someone's dna, with a list of relevant genes and probabilities of various medical events. would you sell him insurance?
3. if the purpose of insurance is to spread risk, and relieve the particular burden on those who happen to draw a bad number in the lottery of life, what is the purpose of underwriting? if knowing someone's zipcode, gender, ethnic background, height, weight, diet, habits and so on, allows you to assign probabilities of various medical events, how would price insurance? going back to the crystal ball model, if you price insurance so that it is essentially prepayment for services which will be delivered, what are you selling? and what do you want to do about people who under no circumstances can afford the services their illnesses will necessitate?

as a retired actuary, my answers are:

1. yes, as long as I could price it

2. same answer

3. spreading the risk is not the purpose of insurance. Spreading the risk only works when essentially all members of a given population are in the risk pool, whether voluntarily or by force. Insurance is risk taking by the insurer for a price much like a bookie, which is the purpose of underwriting. Much of what is now called health insurance is not truly insurance. Group Health insurance is not in general 'insurance". Those who can never afford their illnesses need to be taken care of by others, either family, friends, charity or the government.

[jk]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

some thought experiments:
1. suppose you had a crystal ball that allowed you to foresee all the medical events in a person's life. would you sell him insurance?
2. suppose you had a printout of someone's dna, with a list of relevant genes and probabilities of various medical events. would you sell him insurance?
3. if the purpose of insurance is to spread risk, and relieve the particular burden on those who happen to draw a bad number in the lottery of life, what is the purpose of underwriting? if knowing someone's zipcode, gender, ethnic background, height, weight, diet, habits and so on, allows you to assign probabilities of various medical events, how would price insurance? going back to the crystal ball model, if you price insurance so that it is essentially prepayment for services which will be delivered, what are you selling? and what do you want to do about people who under no circumstances can afford the services their illnesses will necessitate?

[DSpencer]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

Libertarians in contrast desire all their rights, but without a government to regulate or enforce them.

Were it not for the bizarre focus on rights, this would otherwise be known as anarchy.

Not all all libertarians are anarchists. Many (I would guess the vast majority) do want a government to protect rights. A political philosophy with a "bizarre" focus on human rights... OH THE HORROR!!

And yes, I do bash the libertarians as represented by such fine examples of humanity as Lyndon LaRouche.

I don't know lots about Lyndon LaRouche. My understanding is that he has Marxist/Socialist/Labor party backgrounds, runs for office as a democrat and has views that are not at all typical of libertarians. I assume this is just an attempt to sling mud at a group you dislike by associating them with a political extremist. But don't just take my word for it:

"I’ve never been a Libertarian, though some people have tried to confuse me with them. I don’t know why." —Lyndon LaRouche Oct 19th 2004 (WCIN AM interview)

But I do have problems with insurance companies finding excuses not to pay, booting people out for pre-existing conditions, denying coverage for those with pre-existing conditions, etc etc - all behaviors intended to cheat on the actuarial odds.

My goal is to point out the difference between dishonest acts that defraud patients, doctors, hospitals and situations that are unfortunate but not illegal or immoral. I still think it's important to understand the details rather than just say that ins. companies are bad and therefore everything they do is bad.

Let me put it another way: if you have a terrible driving record, it is reasonable that an insurance company charge you more for providing auto insurance to you.

How often do auto insurance companies deny coverage completely to even bad drivers?

All the time. My brother can no longer get coverage through State Farm. I have State Farm for my auto and renters insurance but they won't give me an umbrella policy because my brother lives with me and they will not insure him in any way.

If you cannot understand why denial of coverage is wrong, then I cannot help you as you clearly have no idea what insurance is.

If I don't agree with your position on this issue then I'm hopeless because obviously I don't understand the issue or else I'd come to the same conclusion? Wow. Thanks for that reasoning. You may as well just type "I'm right, you're wrong" for all of your posts instead of discussing/debating.

Again, you are conflating denial of coverage with enforced coverage for all at a fixed price.

In a situation where the entire population is forced into a single plan, then this is invalid.

Equally so, if a company chooses to simply exclude the 'high risk' population from its models, then said company isn't providing insurance.

It is acting on a Ponzi scheme where those most likely to require payouts are simply booted out.

I understand the ability to vary premium payments based on risk. However, if an ins. co. estimates that a person will have a 90% chance of requiring $100k+ of medical care in the next year due to an existing condition. What are they supposed to do? Offer them premiums of $95,000 a year? It just becomes impractical.

Insuring against KNOWN outcomes is NOT the nature of insurance. The goal is to pool risk in a group where nobody knows which person will need the insurance. I do understand that insurance companies only want to insure healthy people because that's where the profit is. I also understand that health insurance is more complicated because many people have pre-existing risk factors that won't necessarily lead to expensive treatment.

There's definitely problems in our system. There's also solutions if we understand the root cause of the problems.

[flintlock]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

Some great posts btw.

The reason many don't buy into the AGW scenario is they see the "racket" forming to profit from it. Fix that and you might be able to convince more. But of course, a lot of the support for it flies out the window once you do that.

I'm always amazed at how people will pick their political affiliation, then only seek information that will support that party line. When in fact, there should be more randomness on how people's opinions fall in regard to the issues. So they are more influenced than they think they are.

It's also funny with some of these posts that assert, "How can you not see things like I do? Therefore you discredit yourself entirely!" Come on, that is neither tactful nor intelligent.

[c1ue]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

My personal take on the propaganda (i expect this to go down in flames as this is way outside my area of expertise...) is that oil companies wish to keep the debate alive as long as possible to postpone inevitable regulation and take as much profits as possible before the party is over. It is just a smokescreen.

I've posted many times on the tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars spent by various governments on AGW. Even now in 'News' there is a thread where it is noted that the Japanese government spent 6.5 trillion yen ($80 billion) in the last 6 years just on anti-AGW biomass research.

Thus it is quite unclear to me that the oil companies are the ones to blame. There's a lot of money sloshing around, and very little of it, if any, is in 'denial of AGW'.

There is, however, absolutely a dynamic at work: the natural gas companies want to push coal out of electricity generation. The oil companies actually spend far more donating to various foundations and universities than even all their indirect funding for all areas, and in turn the oil companies were the ones who spent the most money on alternative energy research prior to the last decade.

1. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, no doubt, the others aren't, only water vapor (4%). Therefore with two identical earth systems (lets forget about feedbacks/internal dynamics that may be an effect of the CO2) the one with more CO2 will trap more outgoing radiation.

This is true, but you're focusing only on the atmosphere. Through irrigation and dams, humans have significantly interfered with the 'natural' water cycle via the most powerful greenhouse gas: H20. In addition, it is very clear that there is at least some effect via surface albedo changes due to urbanization/infrastructure building (i.e. roads and houses). Then toss in the effect of agriculture: how does monoculture whether vegetable or animal differ than the previous 'natural' habitat.

The IPCC has chosen to call all of these as being insignificant compared to CO2, but their evidence is underwhelming being entirely based on computer modeling. As someone who has extensive experience in modeling - models only tell you what you can envision, unless straightened out by real life test cases.

Unfortunately, there cannot be a real life test case for a computer climate model extrapolating 100 years into the future, though the performance in the past 1, 2, 5, 10, and 20 year intervals is pathetic.

Lastly there are clearly natural cycles also in play. There are demonstrable multi-decadal cycles in ocean temperature behavior. There are decadal cycles in atmospheric currents. There are millenial cycles via the sun.

Thus to say that CO2 is the primary driver is to reframe the normal scientific question entirely. Normally a single factor amongst such a wealth of other factors has the burden of proof; somehow this has been reversed in 'climate science'.

2. Now if you include feedbacks the only mechanism that gets you out of the warmer earth argument (that has been found so far to the best of my knowledge) is if you argue, we don't know how clouds react to a warmer atmosphere, so let's assume there are more (most people just assume it will stay the same in the absence of knowing). More white stuff around the planet (clouds) that reflect the sun. It could work that way. However, you add more clouds, you change where is sunny, where is cool, where it rains, where it snows so even if you kept the planet about the same temperature, you changed the climate...

This again is focusing on a specific aspect related to CO2. Yes, the net effect of clouds can be either positive or negative, and there is no known method right now of either modeling or empirically measuring cloud feedback either way - though the 'consensus' assumes it is positive.

Some of these other effects include:

1) How much loss due to entropy? The models are all kilometer scale, but the fundamental behavior is all molecular scale. Also a factor in the 'butterfly effect'

Normally this is insignificant, but the warming effect due to CO2 're-absorption' is so small that it is on a similar scale as entropic losses throughout the climate system.

2) How much energy dissipated via tornados/hurricanes/typhoons?

These effects all funnel high energy air into the upper atmosphere and thus increase energy radiation into space - unclear if these scale up or down in number (there is no pattern either way), or in energy with greater temperature/atmospheric energy (Again, no pattern in total hurricane energy). Note that neither hurricane incidence nor energy has clearly increased as a function of CO2 or anything else except El Nino, but the energy lost via pumping warm air into the upper atmosphere can/should increase - because these storms function due to temperature differential, but energy radiation is a function of absolute temperature.

3) How do rainfall patterns change with temperature, if at all? This area is totally chaotic: more evaporation could mean more rain or higher water vapor in the atmosphere (in reality it has been stable/dropping). Or, warmer atmosphere could mean less water vapor and more rain. Or more rain could change surface albedos higher/lower via plant growth.

There are literally dozens of other, likely smaller effects.

The ultimate point is: whether CO2 is involved or not - it is quite unclear what the net climate feedback is, but historical evidence absolutely points toward a slight negative. There has never been a documented historical example of CO2 preceding a temperature increase; in contrast there are many periods where temperature fell even as CO2 level rose.

2. The CO2 in the atmosphere is due to burning fossil fuels (we can carbon date it).

Yes, and it also came from the atmosphere to start with. CO2 levels in the past were far far higher (10x or more).

3. Any extra CO2 that we don't burn can green the earth to a point (plants need other stuff too and eventually that becomes limiting) but we are already measuring that a bunch is being absorbed by the oceans (again, we know it is ours by carbon dating).

CO2 in the atmosphere also greens the earth. Tons of documentation showing how plants in higher CO2 environments grow faster.

4. Oceans CO2 levels are critical for all kinds of things having to do with the bio-geo-chemistry of the planet, making shells is a big one, can't do it with too much CO2, they just dissolve.

Another complete fabrication. The 'acidification' being spoken of is from something like 8.0 to 7.8 - i.e. basic, not acidic. Besides historical CO2 levels being 10x higher when present day corals were evolved, the ocean itself varies in pH well beyond this delta. This is a complete scare tactic.

5. CO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas because it's absorption spectra falls in a gap (one of the few) that water vapor doesn't cover. Where there is less water vapor (where it is colder and the air is dryer) CO2 becomes a HUGE player. AKA the poles. The poles are white. If you melt them, they become dark and absorb more sunlight and you heat up the surface pole water (on top of having more greenhouse gases up there to warm things up). The poles are where the surface water gets dense enough to sink to the bottom of the ocean and drive the upwelling that gives us nutrients to feed the plant life on the surface that makes all the oxygen for us to breath. If you warm up that water, it may not sink. So water won't rise up somewhere else, so maybe no more oxygen? Who knows.

Again, overfocus on CO2. The Arctic has been ice free several times in the past 100 years, yet no 'tipping point' was reached - furthermore historically there have been numerous cases of ice-free Arctic periods.

The research extant actually indicates that Arctic Ice is much more a function of wind patterns than temperature; Lindzen for example has noted that the increase in Arctic temperatures actually has to do with the periods between summer and winter, i.e. summer and winter temperatures are the same, it is autumn and spring which are warmer.

Similarly in the Antarctic, whatever warming purportedly occurs (and there has been documented example of peer review blocking going on there), the temperatures at worst are varying from -65 to -64...hardly a recipe for disastrous melting.

Your views on 'climate science' are admirable, but I would note that your beliefs have been shaped by the 'consensus' more than you realize.

[flintlock]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

Just out of curiosity, how would you describe your own political views? You seem very intent on bashing libertarians.



Is this "reality" based on anything other than your authoritative assertion?

Does this reality apply to all insurance companies or simply health care?



Yes, they are crooks, no doubt about it. They have rigged legislative/judicial system to protect themselves, for example McCarran–Ferguson Act. Most of what you mention are deceptive or fraudulent practices. I spend a good deal of my time dealing with these issues. I also would benefit from more sick people having insurance. Nonetheless, I still don't understand why not providing insurance to people who you know in advance will cost more than they will pay in premiums is somehow illegal or immoral.

Excellent post.

[Jill Nephew]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

Thank you EJ for the encouragement to post. Even more surreal to have a direct response! With that encouragement, i will add a bit more to the mix...

You wrote: "Maybe as I get farther down the road in my research I’ll discover that the idea behind AGW, that explains the pattern of bullhorn propaganda..."
My personal take on the propaganda (i expect this to go down in flames as this is way outside my area of expertise...) is that oil companies wish to keep the debate alive as long as possible to postpone inevitable regulation and take as much profits as possible before the party is over. It is just a smokescreen.

You wrote: "It is generally agreed that in the last 100 years atmospheric CO2 increased from 270 to 388 parts per million, an increase of 30% of a gas that is 0.039% of an atmosphere that is 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, and 0.93% argon. So while the 30% change in CO2 contributes only 0.0118% to the total, CO2 may play a crucial role in the ecosystem such that even small variances can result in out-sized changes in the ecosystem, never mind a 30% increase in 100 years. Whether that result is heating or cooling of the atmosphere, or some other impact, as you say, is immaterial"

I don't want to slide into a big climate debate thing here, but there are some things you can hang your hat on.
1. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, no doubt, the others aren't, only water vapor (4%). Therefore with two identical earth systems (lets forget about feedbacks/internal dynamics that may be an effect of the CO2) the one with more CO2 will trap more outgoing radiation.
2. Now if you include feedbacks the only mechanism that gets you out of the warmer earth argument (that has been found so far to the best of my knowledge) is if you argue, we don't know how clouds react to a warmer atmosphere, so let's assume there are more (most people just assume it will stay the same in the absence of knowing). More white stuff around the planet (clouds) that reflect the sun. It could work that way. However, you add more clouds, you change where is sunny, where is cool, where it rains, where it snows so even if you kept the planet about the same temperature, you changed the climate...
2. The CO2 in the atmosphere is due to burning fossil fuels (we can carbon date it).
3. Any extra CO2 that we don't burn can green the earth to a point (plants need other stuff too and eventually that becomes limiting) but we are already measuring that a bunch is being absorbed by the oceans (again, we know it is ours by carbon dating).
4. Oceans CO2 levels are critical for all kinds of things having to do with the bio-geo-chemistry of the planet, making shells is a big one, can't do it with too much CO2, they just dissolve.
5. CO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas because it's absorption spectra falls in a gap (one of the few) that water vapor doesn't cover. Where there is less water vapor (where it is colder and the air is dryer) CO2 becomes a HUGE player. AKA the poles. The poles are white. If you melt them, they become dark and absorb more sunlight and you heat up the surface pole water (on top of having more greenhouse gases up there to warm things up). The poles are where the surface water gets dense enough to sink to the bottom of the ocean and drive the upwelling that gives us nutrients to feed the plant life on the surface that makes all the oxygen for us to breath. If you warm up that water, it may not sink. So water won't rise up somewhere else, so maybe no more oxygen? Who knows.

I dunno. Seems like a potential powder keg to me. There are a lot of moving parts that can go off the rails, and this is just a few of the many and as mentioned before, just the subset we stumbled upon so far poking around measuring stuff.

With all that, I believe part of what has fueled the AWG debate is the climate models. The policy makers asked the climate scientists to be fortune tellers (IPCC), and i believe the scientists should have told them (IMHO) sorry, that's not my job.

But instead, the modellers began trying to become fortune tellers.

Unfortunately in academia, once a sub-field is set up it becomes self funding and hard to kill. If it were up to me, i would kill that wing of academia (boy, talk about sticking my neck out!). The problem is, that the modellers have given the impression that the earth system is predictable on climactic time scales and chaotic systems simply are not. The issue is that, there are all kinds of thresholds, feedbacks and tipping points (a couple mentioned above) or simply things we have observed in the climate history that we cannot quantify enough to put in a model but concerns us, that simply are not captured. A good example - the sliding of an ice sheet off of bedrock. When does that interface become slippery enough for that sheet to go? Not really possible to model, could happen today or effectively never. Clouds and their feedbacks, impossible problem, have to wait and see.

Any climate change is a bad change, we want the climate (the average of the weather) to be stable because societies are built on them. Animals and plants can migrate and adjust their numbers, cities, water supplies, structures at sea level, agriculture, not so easy. To me the climate debate has always been first an economic one, funny how it got spun to the be the opposite.

Some other culprits in the AGW mess (from my perspective) is the organizational structure of academia. First, merit shouldn't be based on unique research for earth science. Experiments need to be coordinated across groups, repeated in a tedious and ongoing manner perhaps at the expense of new findings. Not very exciting for academics. Should be more of an 'earth corps' where people could volunteer and learn how science is done and maintain a weather station or some soil samples somewhere on the planet. Instead, we kind of fudge that climate science research and USGS has got that area covered. But really, they don't. So the data is nowhere what it could be.

Another problem is that academia is broken into silos. If academia was set up so that reviews went across disciplines and even to the general professional public, a lot of stuff would be cleaned up. For instance, if you wanted to publish a climate modelling research paper you would have a non-linear dynamics (math/computer science) expert review your paper as well as meteorologists. Either field may find your work essentially unpublishable, whereas the climate modelling community may think it is grand. If you want to publish a paper on paleoclimatology you may have to have it reviewed by statisticians, which may find your signal to noise so high that there is nothing you can conclude. If you want to publish an IPCC prediction, you may have to have it reviewed by a philosophy of science expert who would inform you that you are not answering scientific questions but speculating and placing bets.

Within the silos the academy is competitive and hierarchical by design and does not always promote the best person to be the leader of the field (it is almost impossible to displace a dictator, you will never get a group of scientists to rebel against a leader in the field that controls all the research money and yet does rotten science - weirdly, it happens).

I believe it should be replaced by a different organizational structure all together and I believe in many ways the internet is allowing that to happen in many areas. So much empirical and good data and lots of people learning how to interpret it. People like yourself self-educating across fields and gaining credibility and audience. People like me with no economic background, barely able to follow the arguments here, but grasping enough that i seem to be in the rare position to have preserved and grown my capital this past decade and stay ahead of the ball (let me take a moment to say - thank you EJ!). From what i am seeing, i don't believe the academics can keep up.

You wrote: "That is the commercial application of it; the social value is inestimable going into the kind of period we are entering now. It merits serious consideration, but there are major downsides for the writer in my position besides the cost of creating economic and market forecasting competition."

I'm not sure what other downside you are concerned about. I am guessing that to think outside the box, you have to be a closet revolutionary. And to mix with the folks you have to mix with, you have to keep a lid on it.

But I agree whole-heartedly that now is the time to put a lot on the line to build social value. It is a heroic act. And i think sometimes that we forgot what those are in this country (more of the propaganda that made us all shameless materialists).

I am biased, I quit my job a year ago as a software engineer in silicon valley working for an up and coming start-up to build and self fund a non-profit web application to attempt to harvest and grow the net amount of human wisdom and constructive future thinking and agency. To me collective human capital as character strength is the only way out of this mess we are in. I guess to support my point, i looked into an academic collaboration and was told by a professor in the closest related field that "most people from the outside are not happy with the pace and rigidity of academia and eventually prefer to work alone".

Maybe the whole system of education has made itself obsolete by its arrogance and protectionism.

[Chomsky]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

EJ,

How does your thinking diverge from Chomsky's in _Manufacturing Consent_?

Thanks for asking this question. It perhaps obviously was the first thing that came to mind when EJ mentioned this book idea.

[AlexPKeaton]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

EJ,

How does your thinking diverge from Chomsky's in _Manufacturing Consent_?

[Chris Coles]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

May I presume to give an answer. As a creative, it took me many years to learn to understand that, with many calls for "creativity" there comes a moment in time where the brain tells us to "shut up and sit down to think". It truly is quite impossible to answer every question without running the very real risk of being sent 'Nuts' in the process. So my guess here is EJ simply wants to use his time to what he views as his best advantage.

I'm going to stick to my own personal mandate that, if it is clear I have placed my proverbial "foot" in it; then I should have the common decency to acknowledge that.

But thank you EJ for putting me in my place with such comprehensive answers to others questions.

[LargoWinch]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

Perhaps in the context of "In a social democracy all roads lead to inflation" OR "Thou shall not steal ... except by majority vote" - attributions unknown

I've always instinctively trusted the "mob" over the intellectuals; it is an almost intuitive inclination, which is likely shared by most. Perhaps Bernays knew this too and saw that a frontal assault could not be used b/c it would be recognized, and thus saw the subtlety of propaganda as the way.

How about a website along with the book? A practical and real time site that tackles the propaganda associated with and promulgated by various interests groups on a variety of topics. Showing the vested interests on each issue and dissecting conclusions to reveal the false/questionable premises and fallacious conclusions. "iPropaganda.com"?

Good one, but one needs to understand its target audience, hence I suggest: "Dancing with the Bullhorn"

[Bill_G]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

Don't the monied interests within the FIRE represent a political "Oligarchy" of sorts?

[c1ue]

Re: Next Bubble or Last Hurrah? - Part I: Stocks and houses - Eric Janszen

C1ue, I have to suspect that you do not live very high up in the Northern hemisphere. Here in the UK the weather has changed quite dramatically over the last fifty years. Rainfall has increased more than 25% year on year; temperatures are rising; spring is showing very good signs of coming very early this year. But all that being said; the only thing that might change your mind is perhaps when sea levels suddenly rise, as I am, personally, sure they will. So let us leave the debate until we have something that will settle the matter. Except that, as they say, the frog is in the pot and the water is getting hotter year by year and if sea levels do suddenly rise by, say, 30 feet, then civilisation as we know it comes to an abrupt end, and this debate will be the least of our concerns.

That's funny, because the Central England Temperature record - the single longest continuous temperature record on earth - disputes your view:

http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/

Yes, there has been some warming, but only in the last 20 years. And furthermore it should be noted that there is no clear trend prior to this period - especially given the CET began roughly at the low point of the Little Ice Age.

This is highly inconvenient as this graph in no way resembles atmospheric CO2 buildup.

This doesn't even get into 2010 being in the 2nd coldest winter in CET history which was posted here on iTulip:

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthr...th-eastern-U.S.

Then there's sea level rise: yes, again as temperature increases, sea level rises.

But the rise has been very small and consistent - and appears to be slowing down, not speeding up:



Even at the prior rate, we're talking about 1 foot in 100 years. Hardly a catastrophe.

As for spring coming early - time will tell. Certainly the winter hasn't been mild as has been forecast for the past 3 years.

Again, I have no objection to alternative energy.

But alternative energy can be grid-parity - i.e. at or below existing grid energy costs - without the imposition of massive regressive taxes.

Trying to force a mandate via shoddy science, trying to stampede the herd into a specific political goal - this is neither objective nor rational.

It is demagoguery.