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Saturday Afternoon Chess thread 01-16-2021
Ace of Spades Pet Thread Saturday Gardening and Puttering Thread, January 16 [KT] Thread before the Gardening Thread, January 16 [KT] Saturday Morning Coffee Break EMT 1/16/21 Sing For Your ONT! Quarantine Cafe: The Grifties Edition Matt Gaetz Reads Insurrectionist Democrats the Riot Act As Fox News' Ratings Fall Below Those of Disney's "Pedophile Picnic" and Bravo's "AIDS Roadshow," It Leaks Word That It Might Fire Its CEO Cutting The Cord And Email Security
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June 24, 2010
Pretendustrial Terrorism: Green Jobs Critic Receives Parcel From "Green" Company: Dismantled, But Otherwise Operational, BombA company did this? Spain’s Dr. Gabriel Calzada — the author of a damning study concluding that Spain’s “green jobs” energy program has been a catastrophic economic failure — was mailed a dismantled bomb on Tuesday by solar energy company Thermotechnic. His study found what you'd expect it to find, but with rigorous methodology: that "green jobs" cost far more money than comes back out of them through economic effects, and that, therefore, are a money sink, and a not-insignificant one, as each taxpayer in Spain is measurably poorer due to massive subsidies of such mockupations in pretendustries. The whole stupid idea that "Green Jobs" will produce other, real jobs is insane from the outset. Whenever someone pitches this, they'll claim, sure, we're throwing money into this nonprofitable pretendustry requiring lots of subsidies (funsidies?), but hey, employment will go up. In a trivial sense this is correct: If we replace a coal-burning electricity plant, employing 200, with a giant hamster-wheel affair in which 2000 people jog all day to produce energy, sure, I guess we've increased employment at that particular situs 1000%. But that is anti-wealth -- it ignores the secondary effects of people having to pay 1000% more salaries for their energy than they used to. And the entire history of wealth in the entire history of man is the story of fewer men and fewer man hours to produce the same number of goods. If our economy becomes twice as efficient, producing exactly twice as many goods as it once did, for the same investment of manpower, then we have become exactly twice as wealthy. We now have twice as many goods at the prices we used to pay for half as many. It is ridiculous to keep asserting, contrary to basic common sense, that if we reverse the wealth-producing effect of increasing efficiency, and make ourselves less efficient -- with basic goods now requiring two, three, or five times as much as they once did -- that we will become wealthier. We won't. We'll become poorer. Of course we will. How could it be otherwise? In what society, ever, did basic goods (food, shelter, energy) become more labor-intensive and more expensive and yet that society became wealthier? By this logic we should abandon technologically-advanced farming methods and go back to hunter-gather societies. After all, if you increase the number of people required to feed the nation to hunter-gatherer levels-- like, say, to 98% of the total population-- you've really increased the hell out of employment in that sector, haven't you?
And so they sent him a bomb. As Mel Brooks said, "How are we going to protect our phoney-baloney jobs?" Well, with bombs, I guess.
In other words, the vandal, far from being penalized, should be rewarded by the government for doing his part to keep the government running. Later some other economics studied this curious claim and found it to be, in economic terms, strictly retarded. Obviously so. As it failed to take into account that the shopkeeper now had to charge his customers higher prices to cover the cost of the broken window, and thus they each had their own wealth diminished (and if he had to keep on replacing the window, that shopkeeper would find his wealth greatly diminished, as he'd go bankrupt). The Green Jobs Fallacy is almost exactly like the Broken Windows Fallacy, in that both posit that somehow, if everything costs a lot more due to waste (and destruction), somehow we all wind up richer. Call it the Broken Solar Panel Fallacy, then. In World War II, the Germans had to synthesize a lot of fuels (at a much higher expense than petroleum) because the Allies substantially cut off their petroleum supplies. Did the Germans become richer during the war due to having so many manhours diverted to synthesizing fuel out of canola oil (or whatever)? Did Adolf Hitler ever say, "Wow, thank God the Allies are cutting off our oil shipments. This canola-to-fuel industry is really keeping our economy humming nicely!" No, he did not. And no, they were poorer. Because thousands of people who otherwise might have been fashioning goods for sale were instead diverted to chemical plants to make an expensive synth fuel.
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Saturday Afternoon Chess thread 01-16-2021
Ace of Spades Pet Thread Saturday Gardening and Puttering Thread, January 16 [KT] Thread before the Gardening Thread, January 16 [KT] Saturday Morning Coffee Break EMT 1/16/21 Sing For Your ONT! Quarantine Cafe: The Grifties Edition Matt Gaetz Reads Insurrectionist Democrats the Riot Act As Fox News' Ratings Fall Below Those of Disney's "Pedophile Picnic" and Bravo's "AIDS Roadshow," It Leaks Word That It Might Fire Its CEO Search
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The (Almost) Complete Paul Anka Integrity Kick
Primary Document: The Audio
Paul Anka Haiku Contest Announcement Integrity SAT's: Entrance Exam for Paul Anka's Band AllahPundit's Paul Anka 45's Collection AnkaPundit: Paul Anka Takes Over the Site for a Weekend (Continues through to Monday's postings) George Bush Slices Don Rumsfeld Like an F*ckin' Hammer Top Top Tens
Democratic Forays into Erotica New Shows On Gore's DNC/MTV Network Nicknames for Potatoes, By People Who Really Hate Potatoes Star Wars Euphemisms for Self-Abuse Signs You're at an Iraqi "Wedding Party" Signs Your Clown Has Gone Bad Signs That You, Geroge Michael, Should Probably Just Give It Up Signs of Hip-Hop Influence on John Kerry NYT Headlines Spinning Bush's Jobs Boom Things People Are More Likely to Say Than "Did You Hear What Al Franken Said Yesterday?" Signs that Paul Krugman Has Lost His Frickin' Mind All-Time Best NBA Players, According to Senator Robert Byrd Other Bad Things About the Jews, According to the Koran Signs That David Letterman Just Doesn't Care Anymore Examples of Bob Kerrey's Insufferable Racial Jackassery Signs Andy Rooney Is Going Senile Other Judgments Dick Clarke Made About Condi Rice Based on Her Appearance Collective Names for Groups of People John Kerry's Other Vietnam Super-Pets Cool Things About the XM8 Assault Rifle Media-Approved Facts About the Democrat Spy Changes to Make Christianity More "Inclusive" Secret John Kerry Senatorial Accomplishments John Edwards Campaign Excuses John Kerry Pick-Up Lines Changes Liberal Senator George Michell Will Make at Disney Torments in Dog-Hell Greatest Hitjobs
The Ace of Spades HQ Sex-for-Money Skankathon A D&D Guide to the Democratic Candidates Margaret Cho: Just Not Funny More Margaret Cho Abuse Margaret Cho: Still Not Funny Iraqi Prisoner Claims He Was Raped... By Woman Wonkette Announces "Morning Zoo" Format John Kerry's "Plan" Causes Surrender of Moqtada al-Sadr's Militia World Muslim Leaders Apologize for Nick Berg's Beheading Michael Moore Goes on Lunchtime Manhattan Death-Spree Milestone: Oliver Willis Posts 400th "Fake News Article" Referencing Britney Spears Liberal Economists Rue a "New Decade of Greed" Artificial Insouciance: Maureen Dowd's Word Processor Revolts Against Her Numbing Imbecility Intelligence Officials Eye Blogs for Tips They Done Found Us Out, Cletus: Intrepid Internet Detective Figures Out Our Master Plan Shock: Josh Marshall Almost Mentions Sarin Discovery in Iraq Leather-Clad Biker Freaks Terrorize Australian Town When Clinton Was President, Torture Was Cool What Wonkette Means When She Explains What Tina Brown Means Wonkette's Stand-Up Act Wankette HQ Gay-Rumors Du Jour Here's What's Bugging Me: Goose and Slider My Own Micah Wright Style Confession of Dishonesty Outraged "Conservatives" React to the FMA An On-Line Impression of Dennis Miller Having Sex with a Kodiak Bear The Story the Rightwing Media Refuses to Report! Our Lunch with David "Glengarry Glen Ross" Mamet The House of Love: Paul Krugman A Michael Moore Mystery (TM) The Dowd-O-Matic! Liberal Consistency and Other Myths Kepler's Laws of Liberal Media Bias John Kerry-- The Splunge! Candidate "Divisive" Politics & "Attacks on Patriotism" (very long) The Donkey ("The Raven" parody) |