I agree it's fair to argue there is an incentive in science, fudge statistical methods so your findings are more significant and warrant publishing in a scientific journal. But this is an incentive across science, and it hasn't stopped scientific progress as by nature, the process is self correcting when contradictory studies come out especially in a busy area such as climate science. The cost of falsifying studies or having your study contradicted is also significant however.

If you want to talk incentives though, consider the benefits to spreading doubt about climate change by the fossil fuel industry. 7 out of 10 of the largest revenue generating companies in the world are in oil. The industry stands to lose some $30 trillion from climate change in the next 25 years. Paying a PR firm to promote an agenda, paying researchers to dummy up research with a pre-determined anti-climate change conclusion is chump change to them. The cost to them are negligible if they disguise the source of funding sufficiently (e.g. funnel it through a business lobby).

Meanwhile any impropriety on the part of some climate scientists has not shaken the 97% consensus on climate change.

http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

No, you make one fatal error. You are comparing Clinton supporters with Bernie supporters. That is incredibly incorrect and it makes me shudder. You should compare Clinton to Trump supporters---ie., the entire republican party has sided with him, minus a few who will vote third party. Clinton supporters are exactly like that. Bandwagon, that's me! Not to degrade them but put a D in their mouths and they are happy.

On the other hand, Bernie supporters have more integrity and are tired of the funnel-effect of the lesser of two evils bullshit whereby more evil comes to our voting booths.

So yeah, maybe 1% of Clinton supporters will be mad and vote elsewhere (Like Jill) but what, 25% of Sanders will? Yeah...not quite the same.

I read an interesting article on the BBC's web site on exactly this question - http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160404-why-some-animals-have-venoms-so-lethal-they-cannot-use-them

It makes some of the same points as this video, but also has an additional one in regards to why some animals are so toxic to humans: Bad luck! We aren't their targetted prey, so it's pretty much irrelevent to them whether their sting can kill one or 1,000 humans.

Bad luck comes into it as well. A bite from a Sydney funnel-web spider is extremely dangerous for humans, whereas rodents are relatively unaffected by their venom. Since these spiders evolved to eat neither rodents nor humans, this can be seen as nothing more than an unfortunate alignment of the spider's neurotoxin with a receptor on some of our cells.

I think a lot like you do -- big government is a problem. But, while the GOP loudly and constantly *declares* that it is the party opposed to big government, to me it seems pretty clear that that is no longer even remotely true (if it ever was).

Is Clinton even more in bed with all of that than Trump? Probably, yeah. But this isn't an issue that revolves around Republican vs Democrat lines. It absolutely does revolve around corporations.

Yay for Capitalism and everything, but if Capitalism is the ultimate motivator, it stands to reason that these giant corporations *must* be getting a return on their investment when they funnel huge sums of money into politics. Otherwise, as Capitalist enterprises, they wouldn't be doing it.

So while I tend to agree that big government tends to be worse than small government for quite a few reasons (harder to monitor for corruption, less efficient, etc.), I think that big corporations and big government represent a feedback loop that feed off of each other. Thinking that the problem lies in one but not the other is doing yourself a disservice.

I'm pretty sure everyone on the planet knows when you add "Australian" to something, it will usually involve pain, death, and/or extreme fear.

Australian Rules Football.
Australian (Sydney) Funnel Web Spider
Margot Robbie
Australian Eastern Brown Snake

This was off the coast of Kaliningrad. If a Russian or a Chinese guided missile destroyer conducted excercises with the Cuban military (say two years ago) off the coast of Florida, the US military would not sit by idly.

It is a provocation, I agree. But so are military excercises on another nation's doorstep.

As far as I am concerned, I'd very much appreciate if every nation would stop taking their toys out for a spin in Eastern Europe. I'd prefer the Russians not to set up a brand sparkling new tank corps on their western border, and I'd prefer fucking NATO not to deploy hundreds of MBTs all over former Soviet territory.

That said, the sailors aboard the Cook seem to have the proper reaction: a laugh. For politicians (looking at you, Kerry!) to use this incident as an excuse to funnel more money towards the MIC was as predictable as it is despicable.

Edit: if they absolutely need to play war, Paradox is going to release HoI4 on D-Day -- you get to fight Russians for a mere 40€.

@bobknight33
you know bob,i owe you an apology.
i shouldnt have told you "fuck you" when my problem was with the video,and i wrongly conflated you with this video.

that being said,i still stand by my feelings of "fuck this video".

i struggle with people who have this binary view of politics.
just because i criticized the lies and deception of the republican party does not automatically translate me to promoting or defending democratic practices,because BOTH parties manipulate the body politic while at the very same fuck them over.

the two party duopoly are just different faces of the same coin.both have been purchased to serve the interests of:wall street,big business,bankers and the military.

i have never subscribed to either party.i judge on individual merit and a case by case basis.so when you call me a liberal i dont know what the fuck you are talking about.

do i hold some liberal views? yes.
do i hold some conservative? yep.

but so dont you bob,we ALL do.
of course that is not the dynamic that is shoved down our throat every goddamn day.that somehow our politics can be reduced down to this over-simplified,and overly basic dichotomy.

but nobody has such a simpleton,and almost childish politics.as humans we are pretty complex is our understandings,feelings and desires.it is those complexities that influences our politics and how we feel things should be as a society.

i am a libertarian socialist (anrcho-syndacalist).
which is why you may see me post videos that address the corruption in politics,in our economy,in our foreign policy.the hypocrisy of politicians espousing that "feel your pain" language,while they funnel public funds to their criminal friends on wall street...and point to the food stamp recipient,or immigrant and state..with zero sense of irony..THERE,that is your problem.

my politics is the reason why i may post video criticizing and ridiculing ultra-right wing politicians attempting to legislate "proper" and "moral" behavior,because they pretend they have some relationship with god,and god spoke to them.

but also why i will post videos criticizing and ridiculing the extreme left.who seek to legislate "harmful" or "offensive" speech,because they seek to control language.as if THEY are the true moral arbiters of human interaction.

so i do not necessarily disagree with you when you point to the democrats hypocrisy in regards to poor folk.that they use the language of empathy and compassion,and then enact legislation that is entirely bereft of compassion and empathy,but BOTH parties do this!

bill clinton was incredibly detrimental to the poor and working poor and made the job of digging out of poverty damn near impossible.

you may identify with republican ideology,and that is not a bad thing.republican base ideology may be a tad more pro-business,but it also recognizes that the governments job is to protect the people from fraud and over-reach from those businesses.original republican ideology was for limited government,and fiscal responsibility.which USED to translate to anti-war and dismissing the military when it was no longer needed.

i could go on.

i could also point out that democrats USED to be more hawkish and far more involved in addressing the concerns of the working man.

but look at the political landscape of today.
both of these parties are nothing even close to representing their original ideals.they are solely and totally beholden to big monied interests.

our republic has become a plutocracy,run by the plutocrats and oligarchs.

so when you delineate the argument by republican/democrat i simply do not see this play out in reality.

we might as well be arguing who is the better fottball team,because thats what american politics has become.bread and circuses and cheerleading for our "team".

it is the height of absurdity.american politics has become absurd.

as for you not seeing this for being racist.
i dont know what i can say to remove your blinders.
this video is textbook racist.
we have "black face"
we have over-generalizations.
we have ridicule and assumption based solely on skin color.

calling this video racist is a non-controversial assertion.

and you cant promote it out of discard.
the sift has spoken.you can disagree,but that wont change the fact that this video is in the discard bin.

anyways,sorry for telling you to fuck off.
i just found this video offensive,but i dont find YOU offensive.confusing at times,but not offensive.

It's a discussion we've been having in this country for as long as I can remember and was one of the prime arguments made for a vast set of reforms a decade ago. And I still don't buy it.

At the very basic level, the argument is that a declining percentage of working age people have to pay for an increasing number of pensions. But that's only half the story. The working age population has to generate enough output to sustain not just themselves and retirees, but also children, the unemployed, the sick, anyone not working. A shrinking population means less children, and most importantly less unemployed. Increases in productivity are more than enough to compensate for that, no need to increase birth rates or immigration.

Germany is regularly paraded around as a country in dire need of immigration, given our low birth rate. Even if we ignore for a minute that any 50 year population forecast of the past has been invalidated after maybe 5 years, the "worst" they could conjure up was a decline in working age population of 34% by the year 2060. So what? That's 0.8% a year. And since it's based on a population decline of 20% over the same time, it's an annual drop of 0.2%. That's their worst case scenario, and it's statistical noise.

We've had a massive increase in average age over the last century as well as two world wars and our system managed just fine. And an annual drop of 0.2% is supposed to bring it to its knees? Pah.

Now, I'm all in favour of immigration, primarily to spice things up and prevent our society from becoming too homogeneous. But our pension system needs neither mass immigration nor an increased birth rate. What it needs is for politicians to stop funneling funds from our "PAYGO" system towards their buddies in the private sector. Current income = current payments, public system. Everything else is too volatile and susceptible to the Vampire Squids on Wall Street.

Pure quality by John, as usual.

There are a few points I'd like to add, in order of appearance.

5:10 – Greek default or Grexit could be manageable by the rest of the EZ, economically. Italy looks a bit shaky and Spain still looks like shit, so things could spiral out of control, but chances would be better now than they were in, say, 2010.

However, Grexit would be a political nightmare. EZ membership is supposed to be irreversible, so Grexit would reduce the Euro from a common currency to a peg when viewed from the outside. That's open season on the rest of the PIIGS. If Greek then rebounds, other people might very well decide to give Germany the finger and leave as well. If Greece fails, you have a NATO member turn into a failed state, which not only gives NATO the shivers, but also buries any notion of solidarity within the EU. This union survives because of the promises it makes, which include increasing standards of living and solidarity among different peoples. Without it, we're left with... what exactly?

And nevermind the humanitarian catastrophe taking part in Greece. We've conditioned ourselves to block out the pain and suffering of people in Africa. We even manage to shrug at the cesspool of corruption that is Kosovo. But if we do that to Greece as well, what little moral authority Europe might still have left would be gone then.

5:32 – The last payment Greece received was in August, long before Syriza took over. The previous government was in disagreement with the Troika and therefore transfers were frozen.

5:57 – Troika payments are required to service previous debt obligations. They are separate from what the Greek banks require to maintain their liquidity. That would be Emergency Liquidiy Assistance (ELA) from the ECB, which is a different thing entirely, even though it comes from a member of the Troika.

The ECB is bound by law to maintain and ensure the stability of the banking system(s) within the EZ. If a bank runs into liquidity problems, support is provided by the national bank of the respective country, which funnels funds from the ECB to the troubled bank. That's ELA, and a limit on ELA is a limit on the amount of funds that banks can draw from through this process. If an illiquid bank is cut off from ELA, it goes belly up. Bad idea.

Some argue that the ECB should not provide ELA to those Greek banks anymore, since they are insolvent, and ECB rules forbid ELA to insolvent banks. But as Varoufakis said, even the ECB's own Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) department, which is the new banking oversight, declares the four large Greek banks to be solvent. So there is no reason for the ECB to cut ELA to Greek banks. It's all political, and the ECB is designed to be outside of politics. That's also a reason why its membership in the Troika is so controversial.

The political argument for cutting off ELA is that Germany et al. are on the hook for the total amount should Greece itself go belly up. Somewhere along the line, someone made the glorious decision to install the ECB as a currency issuer without providing it with the attributes of a regular currency issuer. If the Bank of Japan or the Bank of England racks up losses, noone cares. They issue their own currency, they cannot go bankrupt, whatever debt they have in their books is irrelevant, for this discussion anyways. But the ECB has to balance its books, it has to receive funds from its members to balance losses, and in proportion to their economic size.

They made sure that politicians can scare the demos by pointing out how they have to foot the bill for this shit, even though it's the one entity where debt truly doesn't matter at all.

By the way, the funds that Greece is hoping to acquire are meant, primarily, for two purposes: making debt payments and to provide financial room to convert ECB(?) debt into EFSF debt (4% interest down to 1%). That's all. No spending.

6:54 – "Printing" money is generating demand out of thin air. There is a shortage of demand throughout the entire continent. So yeah, if the folks at the ECB could type in a few numbers, that would be swell.

Even Germany has a shortage of demand. We are merely hiding it behind the €200b+ of demand that we steal from other countries, i.e. our current account surplus. But the infrastructure and investment spending over here is at all time lows. We'd need an additional €200b+ just to get the infrastructure back to the state it was in a decade ago.

There is no productivity growth in Europe. The UK actually lost a lot of productivity by its introduction of zero hour jobs and other forms of slavery. Without sufficient demand, there is no need to improve production capacities – they can't even sell what they could produce right now.

@RedSky

The need to be kept afloat by European funds is pretty high on the list of things Syriza is keen to do away with. Varoufakis was clear on this pretty early on, at least 2009 as far as I know. They treated it as a problem of liquidity instead of a problem of insolvency, and therefore any funds funnelled into Greece were basically disappearing down a black hole. They are bleeding cash left, right and center, and the continuous flow of credit from Europe doesn't help a bit in its current form.

As of now, they can't pay shit. Any additional credit has to be used to pay back interest on previous credit. Their meagre primary surplus is less than their interest payments. With that in mind, some of the ideas floating around sound rather intriguing, especially given the horrendous failure all the previous agreements have produced. These ideas include: cap interest payment (1.5% of primary surplus), use the rest for investment or humanitarian relief; no payments on debt below 3% growth, 50% of agreed upon payments at 3-6% growth, full payments at 6+% growth.

Yet even those ideas are purely theoretical, because there is no growth in Greece. The celebrated growth in Q3 2014 of 0.7% might very well be a fluke, as Bill Mitchell described here (prices falling faster than incomes). For Greece to be able to have any meaningful growth, they'd require not just a complete reconstruction of its institutions (structural reforms), but also massive investment.

And there's where it breaks down again, since you rightfully pointed out that the Germans in particular won't spend a dime on Greece, especially not with investment in Germany in equally dire shape (shortfall of about a trillion € since 2000).


Which brings me to another point: Germany vs France.

Productivity in both countries was en par in 1999, and productivity in France in 2014 was only slightly below German numbers. "Living within your means" is a very popular phrase in the current discussion, which basically means living in accordance with your productivity.

Subsequently, there should be a similar development of unit labour costs within a monetary union, with growth targets set by the central bank. In our case, that would be just below 2%. Like I've previously said, Greece lived beyond its means in this regard, and significantly so.

But what about France and Germany? The black line marks the target, blue is France, red is Germany. That's beggar-thy-neighbour. That's gaining competetiveness at the cost of your fellow Euro pals. That's suppressing domestic demand in order to push exports.

German reforms killed its domestic market (retail sales stagnant since early '90s) and created an aggregate trade surplus to the tune of 2 trillion Euros. That's 2 trillion Euros of deficit in other countries. And we're looking at an additional 200-210 billion Euros this year. If running trade deficits is bad, so is running trade surpluses.

Ironically, there's even been legislation in Germany since 1967, instructing the government to balance its books in matters of trade (and other areas). They've been in violation of it for 15 years.

With this in mind, everytime a German politician calls for the other countries to run trade surpluses just like Germany, I get furious. Some of them, on the European level, even have the audacity to say that everyone should run trade surpluses, and all it takes to get there is massive wage cuts. That's open lunacy and a failure of basic math. No surplus without deficits, no savings without debt.

And while we're at it, it's not the savings rate in Germany that bothers me. It's the moral superiority that is being ascribed to running surpluses in every way imaginable. Every part of society is expected to have a positive savings rate, because debt is bad. Well, if everyone's saving and nobody's accruing the corresponding debt, you get the current situation where there is no investment whatsoever, a gargantuan shortfall in demand given the national productivity, and a cool 200 billion Euros of debt a year that foreign actors have to rake up so that Germany can have its massive growth of 0.5-1.5% annually.

Finding borrowers for all that cash is getting more difficult by the day. The ECB's QE is basically one big search for new borrowers, since everyone either doesn't want to borrow or cannot borrow anymore.

If Germany wanted to help the Eurozone, they'd start by increasing their ULC vis-á-vis the rest of the countries. Competitiveness should be regulated through the foreign exchange rate, not this parasitic race to the bottom within the zone. Ten years of 4% increase in wages, annually. That ought to be a start.

Additionally, allow the ECB to fund the European Investment Bank directly, instead of this black hole of QE.

Or go one step further and seriously consider Varoufakis' ideas, including the old Keynesian concept of a global surplus recycling mechanism.

But all that is pure fantasy. I don't think a majority of Germans would support either of these measures, not with the overwhelming fear of inflation this society has. Add the continuous demonisation of debt and you get a guarantee that very few countries might be compatible to be in a longtime monetary union with Germany.

Yeah, this trick is never going to end in medical bills.

Next trick, how to core an apple with only a shotgun and a funnel.

One question in Citizens United v. FEC was "what constitutes a campaign contribution?" Michael Moore had just made an anti Bush film, and decided to personally pay to run ads for his film just before an election. The ruling was basically that Michael Moore had just made a campaign contribution. That is, if David Koch's PAC had made a documentary about Obama's birth certificate and ran a bunch of ads for just before the election, that's effectively giving a campaign contribution as well.

Whether the campaign spent the money, or someone spent the money on behalf of the campaign, it didn't matter. An ad is an ad, and ads cost money. However, if you extend this logic, nobody can produce any positive or negative media about a candidate during the election run-up. That is, the NYT couldn't run a photo of Barry O smiling on the front page. That sort of exposure has value, and would thus constitute a contribution. Otherwise, what would stop me from producing a huge pile of fliers with smiling candidates on them and dropping them from my helicopters?

This is how we end up running up against free speech. Personally, I don't think we should put those kinds of restrictions on media. People will always play games, and find ways of couching themselves as other forms of protected media in order to keep funneling huge sums of money into biased political messages. That's just how it works. But I'm not comfortable limiting political speech, least of all around an election run up. The risk for unintended consequences is too high.

Do you honestly have no clue as to what you do ?

The only thing I personaly respect about what you do with the ban thing is that you adhere the Terms of service ( which everyone reads of course right ??? ).

The rest of the time you deny possible gems in the rough without any warning.

I mean I do not want to be so in your face, but to see you write that made me mad. You have denied so many possible peole here without any incling of the genuine purpose of the site, you just outright ban people and we are not stupid, it is so you can garner some form of level up, you got called on a lot of things in the past in that regard. SERIOUSLY ? ? you ask her why she explained that ??

TELL YOU WHAT , I honestly told people exactly what she did in a pm, while you asked your silly little funnel of a question. What makes people pissed is that you give no quarter, you give no choice ( to most - obviously some are blatent www. whores ) but you have a black and white for the most part.

So do not be impressed or decompressed when someone actually explains something to someone, I have been doing it for years on the opposite behalf of you. Lately I just got tired of it for the past year and couldn't give a shit.

But I am in a talking mood, I love ya enough to write this because it astounded me as to your obliviousness to actually giving someone a chance, not just this video in general, this video was the scratch test and the lattice grew.


WHEWWWWW free therapy !

Just because YOU aren't "in it for the money" doesn't mean that the majority of people who govern and influence those that govern aren't in it for the money.

Therein lies the problem.

Facebook isn't just social media, it represents capital and influence. It's the same problem in politics where you have all these people with their personal agenda based loosely on some sort of idealism; meanwhile, these assholes (apparently beyond your comprehension) are feeding off the majority of people that buy into such a system because they believe it works. Yet in reality it's feeding off of these masses, funneling into a corporation that now funnels that money into politics.

But I'm sure you don't find that relevant either. Or maybe you do. Doesn't matter, I was bred, born and raised by lazy assholes, so I've learned to accept and tolerate.

I figured out how skewed the tax laws are when I found out companies like Google and Haliburton start up paper companies in various places in the world to funnel funds so that they can avoid US taxation. There's more than a few 1 person, single room offices out there pulling down BILLIONS every year.

What gets me is if I did it exactly the same way, but not as a corporation, I'd go to jail.