Your video, What Happens If You Drop 30 lb of Dry Ice in a Pool, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Good idea, terrible execution.
My brother had a kegger for his 16th birthday party and we heated the pool up to 105 deg, then threw 30-40 lbs of dry ice in. That was much better than this try on an infinity pool. The pool we had was an in ground pool, and the yard had a wood fence, so the fog stuck around and built up to 2-3ft deep. Lots of people went swimming while it boiled, I suppose we're lucky we didn't have any issues from too much CO2. Good times, good times.

I think it depends on how you define "worse". I believe that Hillary is capable of being the shadowy, sleazy politician that knows the corrupt system, knows how to use/abuse it, and is 100% willing to bend it to her own goals.

Trump is a largely incompetent blowhard. He, like Hillary, says what he thinks he has to say to get the support of his base, and then flip-flops to suit his purposes. He isn't a Washington insider, he doesn't have the network of connections that Hillary does.

If Trump could be another Bush, Hillary could be another Nixon. I'm not convinced that Hillary is the lesser of two evils here.

And that's still working under the assumption that Trump would be as bad as Bush. Bush was bad, but without Dick Cheney and Karl Rove whispering in his ear, maybe he'd have been a merely incompetent president instead of a terrible one. For all the negative things that I think can fairly be said of Trump, I don't think that he's very likely to become someone's sock puppet like Bush.

I'm definitely not sure that Trump would be better than Hillary (for whatever definition of "better" one chooses), but I don't think it is cut and dry to the point of delusion for someone to see either of them as the bigger threat.

Um...we can see in the original video that no deputy is in the water, and their pants are on and dry.
If there IS this second video, why can't it be found? I've looked, no such video has been posted on YT.
"Is there ANYTHING showing deputies with muddy clothing or anything?"
"No...why would we do that? That's not evidence of anything."
He can't possibly be that stupid. It would be evidence that they tried....but that evidence does not exist because they clearly didn't try to save those girls. No one went in the water, in the video of that night it's pretty clear that NO deputy went in the water, some didn't even get out of their cars.

The deflection, trying to both blame the victims and dehumanize them, implying they don't deserve to be saved. Just plain disgusting. The solution to the issue at hand.....a new anti car theft initiative....not more/better police training.

These deputies didn't do their job, then lied about it, and are continuing to lie in the face of video evidence proving that they are lying. 3 girls died because of it.

"I covered this entire planet once."

I didn't know that and doubted it, so I googled. Link says that before around 1 billion years ago, water (ocean) covered 95% of the surface of the earth, and then continents erupted relatively quickly, geologically speaking.

However, I think that 95% coverage figure (and possibly more earlier on?) would mostly be owed to the crust and mantle being relatively flat and smooth after cooling down from being a largely molten ball very early on. Now that the earth has cooled enough to allow plate tectonics to push stuff around and create subduction zones and mountain ranges, there are too many high-elevation points (and low elevation chasms for the ocean to fill in) for the ocean to ever cover the entire earth again. Even if all of the ice on the earth melted, apparently sea level would only rise by about 70 meters / 230 feet.

So the "and I can always cover it again" bit at the end is a bit overstated. We'd almost certainly be dead as a species if conditions were extreme enough to melt all of the ice around the world, but not because of being drowned off of dry land to live on.

Why is there so much nuclear waste? Because we have so many people living in artificial environments that require tons of power.

Why is the Colorado river becoming almost drained and getting worse each year? Because of climate change, yes, but primarily because we have millions of people living in desert regions and agricultural crops like almonds that require laughable tons of water. Most of those almonds are turned into flour and milk products because people refuse to eat other food, or can't because they should be dead due to allergies.

Why are we overfishing and using such harmful methods as trawling? Because we have too many people that want a specific kind of food or can't afford a different type of food.

Could we switch everyone to insect proteins or other radical foods like spirulina? Yes, if you want riots. The technology doesn't exist that can make sustainable foods taste the same and people would go apeshit.

So to sum up, yes, we could feed people without damaging the environment, if you could get people to agree to it. Think of trying to force vegans to chomp on insects. As far as habitats, not so much. We don't have the room for the sheer numbers of people without either doing away with food producing land, destroying existing ecosystems like the rainforest, or putting them in artificially sustained areas like large cities or hot/cold desert terrain.

Nature used to take care of these situations via epidemics or natural selection. We have adapted to the point where we can beat most epidemics (although soon we will be hit with something bad if we look at the super bacteria we are creating) and we protect the people who should be dead against their own stupidity.

Climate change isn't going to kill this planet first, the sheer population rise will wipe it out much sooner than that. By 2030 it is estimated we will have 8+ billion people, by 2050 close to 10 billion. Exponential growth is going to suck this planet dry as a bone. The day is coming when we will HAVE to start supplementing food with non-standard food types and soon after that we will wipe out most of the living food items on this planet like a horde of locusts.

OK, true, that is what you said, but I fail to grasp the difference.
Once an animal is dead, it cares just as little as one that was never alive, no?
As long as the method of execution is fear and pain free, I don't see the problem.

Killing a 364 day old baby wasn't called murder historically....and many people do call abortion murder, so it's not cut and dry. Neither is this subject, people's opinions about life, death, pain, animals, etc all go into the equation. There is no right and wrong answer, nor is there a single way a person should 'feel' about it, nor should they be made to feel guilty if they don't agree with any one set of feelings.

Looking at the water temps for N Cali, it's about 10 degress C (or ~50f) in winter?

That's cold, but not unmanageable. Get yourself a good semi-dry wetsuit (including booties, gloves and hood), pair it with some merino thermals and you'd be sweet as.

Well, cheers for sticking with it anyway, I really appreciate it.

It's a one hour talk on the deficit in particular, and most of what she says is based on MMT principles that would add another 5 hours to her talk if she were to explain them. With neoclassical economics, you can sort of jump right in, given how they are taught at schools and regurgitated by talking heads and politicians, day in and day out. MMT runs contrary to many pieces of "common sense" and since you can't really give 10 hour talks everytime, this is what you end up with – bits and pieces that require previous knowledge.

I'd offer talks by other MMT proponents such as William Mitchell (UNSW), Randy Wray (UMKC) or Michael Hudson (UMKC), but they are even less comprehensible. Sorry. Eric Tymoigne provided a wonderful primer on banking over at NEP, but it's long and dry.

Since I'm significantly worse at explaining the basics of MMT, I'm not even going to try to "weave a narrative" and instead I'll just work my way through it, point by point.

@notarobot

"Let's address inequality by taking on debt to increase spending to help transfer money to large private corporations."

You don't have to take on debt. The US as the sole legal issuer of the Dollar can always "print more". That's what the short Greenspan clip was all about. Of course, you don't actually print Federal Reserve Notes to pay for federal expenses. It's the digital age, after all.

If the federal government were to acquire, say, ten more KC-46 from Boeing, some minion at the Treasury would give some minion at the Fed a call and say "We need $2 billion, could you arrange the transfer?" The Fed minion then proceeds to debit $2B from the Treasury's account at the Fed (Treasury General Account, TGA) and credits $2B to Boeing's account at Bank X. Plain accounting.

If TGA runs negative, there are two options. The Treasury could sell bonds, take on new debt. Or it could monetise debt by selling those bonds straight to the Fed – think Overt Monetary Financing.

The second option is the interesting one: a swap of public debt for account credits. Any interest on this debt would be transfered straight back in the TGA. It's all left pocket, right pocket, really. Both the Fed and the Treasury are part of the consolidated government.

However, running a deficit amounts to a new injection of reserves. This puts a downward pressure on the overnight interest rate (Fed Funds Rate in the US, FFR) unless it is offset by an increase in outstanding debt by the Treasury (or a draw-down of the TT&Ls, but that's minor in this case). So the sale of t-bonds is not a neccessity, it's how the Treasury supports the Fed's monetary policy by raising the FFR. If the target FFR is 0%, there's no need for the Treasury to drain reserves by selling bonds.

Additionally, you might want to sell t-bonds to provide the private sector with the ability to earn interest on a safe asset (pension funds, etc). Treasury bonds are as solid as it gets, unlike municipal bonds of Detroit or stocks of Deutsche Bank.

To quote Randy Wray: "And, indeed, treasury securities really are nothing more than a saving account at the Fed that pay more interest than do reserve deposits (bank “checking accounts”) at the Fed."

Point is: for a government that uses its own sovereign, free-floating currency, it is a political decision to take on debt to finance its deficit, not an economic neccessity.

"Weimar Republic"

I'm rather glad that you went with Weimar Germany and not Zimbabwe, because I know a lot more about the former than the latter. The very, very short version: the economy of 1920's Germany was in ruins and its vastly reduced supply capacity couldn't match the increase in nominal spending. In an economy at maximum capacity, spending increases are a bad idea, especially if meant to pay reparations.

Let's try a longer version. Your point, I assume, is that an increase in the money supply leads to (hyper-)inflation. That's Quantity Theory of Monetary 101, MV=PY. Amount of money in circulation times velocity of circulation equals average prices times real output. However, QTM works on two assumptions that are quite... questionable.

First, it assumes full employment (max output, Y is constant). Or in other terms, an economy running at full capacity. Does anyone know any economy today that is running at full capacity? I don't. In fact, I was born in '83 and in my lifetime, we haven't had full employment in any major country. Some people refer to 3% unemployment as "full employment", even though 3% unemployment in the '60s would have been referred to as "mass unemployment".

Second, it assumes a constant velocity of circulation (V is constant). That's how many times a Dollar has been "used" over a year. However, velocity was proven to be rather volatile by countless studies.

If both Y and V are constant, any increase in the money supply M would mean an increase in prices P. The only way for an economy at full capacity to compensate for increased spending would be a rationing of said spending through higher prices. Inflation goes up when demand outpaces supply, right?

But like I said, neither Y nor V are constant, so the application of this theory in this form is misleading to say the least. There's a lot of slack in every economy in the world, especially the US economy. Any increase in purchases will be met by corporations with excess capacity. They will, generally speaking, increase their market share rather than hike prices. Monopolies might not, but that's a different issue altogether.

Again, the short version: additional spending leads to increased inflation only if it cannot be met with unused capacity. Only in an economy at or near full capacity will it lead to significant inflation. And even then, excess private demand can easily be curbed: taxation.

As for the Angry Birds analogy: yeah, I'm not a fan either. But all the other talks on this topic are even worse, unfortunatly. There's only a handful of MMT economists doing these kinds of public talks and I haven't yet spotted a Neil deGrasse Tyson among them, if you know what I mean.

We'll email you your piece of pizza.



Don't want it to get all moldy or dried out.

The idea of the wrap is to stop rain from damaging the hay, so I doubt it would let moisture out either. The bale shouldn't rot though, since part of the process is that you only bale dry grass (or you risk a haystack fire).

The other way of storing grass is to cut it green and ferment it into silage.

Touche, I shouldn't have left GWAR out, although I still haven't seem them live technically. They were rained out this summer at Riot Fest and all we got was a ton of fake blood shot out over everyone and a brief glimpse of their costumes. I think their equipment was probably damaged even, it went from dry as their set started to a torrential downpour traveling horizontal in seconds.

Kiss was a little before my time, so I haven't had the urge to go see them live, although I do enjoy their music and influence.

My list was only bands I've seen live =P

Here in Germany its easy to have a direct comparison. Winter tires are pretty much mandatory in the Winter. The difference is huge. You cant use summer tires or allseason ones on lots of snow. You will get stuck. With Winter tires you will have no problems except in the harshest conditions here only spikes or chains will help. But even there you will have it much easier with Winter tires than with summer ones.

Also, due to my high powered car, I easily notice when temperatures get too low for summer tires. They will start spinning much easier even on dry pavement. That starts at around 8C. Winter tires wont spin easily even at minus temperatures.

And yes, some people have season cars. One for Winter and one for warmer seasons. But thats mostly because they dont want to ruin the good season one, because its more valuable to them (mostly old timers, young timers, convertibles, sports cars).

You know I'm not sure, we get plenty of both, with cold and dry for the main event and then wet and slushy when it's all over. ( but then if you're not wet and slushy when it's done then you're probably not doing it right. *badum-pssh*)