For the 2009-2010 season, the San Jose Sharks have a quirky series of ads. They’ve been releasing them at an irregular schedule, apparently in an attempt to keep the comedy fresh. Here are the ones I’m aware of, in no particular order:
Jody Shelley
Joe Pavelski
Joe Thornton
Rob Blake
Todd McClellan
Dan Boyle
Ryan Clowe
Clearly the Sharks are lousy actors, but happily they’re a great hockey team.
Global Warning, Climate Change, the AlGorePocalypse, whatever you want to call it, there sure are a lot of data floating around about it, and a lot of tempers flaring. I’ll not address the merits of the conclusions people have been drawing from these findings not only because I don’t consider myself to be a qualified expert on the topic, but because I don’t give a rat’s ass. Instead I’m just going to take a look at a graph published by NASA regarding the mass of ice in Antarctic (reproduced above).
Clearly this graph shows a downward trend. The scale on the left shows the rate of change in the mass of ice, and the scale at the scale at the bottoms shows a left-to-right chronology, so downward from left to right is clearly a loss of ice. The caption accompanying this image is “The continent of Antarctica has been losing more than 100 cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice per year since 2002.” That’s all pretty clear-cut, right?
No, not really. Actually the caption and the graph are at odds with each other. The values shown are not the sum total of ice in Antarctica, but the rate of change of the mass of ice, the first derivative of it. In 2002 we see seven points, all of them above zero. Each represents an increase in the amount of ice in Antarctica. in 2003 there are another ten points, all still above zero. The graph is showing two years of ice growth here. The rate doesn’t dip below zero until the second point in 2004, and doesn’t stay under zero for a majority of samples until 2007. The trendline generated here crosses zero in early 2006, not 2002 as described in the caption.
The following is the result of estimating the values shown to produce the integral. I was unsuccessful at finding the actual mass values on NASA’s site, so I just measured (my estimates):
Clearly I didn’t put any effort into sexing up the graph. I also started with a zero value. That is ludicrous, but we’re being somewhat arbitrary about scales here anyway; the NASA graph also gives no indication of whether 1 billion tons is a lot or a little in relation to the total ice mass of Antarctica, so I’ll just assume it’s a heck of a lot and let the graph look big.
There were 78 points on the original graph, but only 36 of them are negative values. In under half of the samples shown, there was a reduction in ice mass. There were four samples shown that I estimated at zero, leaving 38 increases, with a total change over the sample period of -678 billion tons. Bear in mind that the total change from the first sample shown through the 49th is +9587 billion tons. I seriously doubt that anybody in mid-2005 was arguing that global warming was causing a massive ramp-up of ice deposits at the South Pole, at an alarming-sounding rate of 3,200Gt per year. Because that’s what these numbers would have shown.
I don’t think the folks at NASA were malicious in their presentation of this information, but it sure as hell is sloppy. Misleading and contradictory material like this undermines the general case for anthropogenic climate change and poisons the conversation. Don’t piss on my back and tell me it’s El Niño.
California’s budget is a mess, and has been since the big dot-com bubble burst. This is nothing new, and has been a political campaign topic at the state level for about ten years now. I don’t post about it much, but somehow every time KC Meesha gretches about his taxes, I end up steamed and monopolizing his comment section. I totally understand where he’s coming from on paying taxes in a town where he works but doesn’t live, and delight in pointing out the fact that he’s unable to do anything about it. I think he takes it quite well.
What got my goat, however, was a flyover-dweller bitching about California looking to get a little money from the federal government to cover our budget shortfall. Specifically “I Travel for JOOLS” brought this up:
And I just ran across this little article. The money quote, California’s unionized public employees can retire at 50 and receive 90 percent of their last year’s pay FOR LIFE !
AND THEY WANT US TO BAIL THEM OUT ????
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/08/AR2010010803593.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns
First, pensions are paid by the pension fund, not by the state directly. Second, she’s citing an article by George Will, who doesn’t know his ass from his elbows regarding how California spends its money. Third, she’s using all-caps, which I find obnoxious. Fourth, she’s using excessive punctuation (one question-mark is sufficient, folks). All of this just serves to raise my hackles regardless of the actual merit of her point, which is rather seductive: California is spending its way into this mess, why should the rest of the country be burdened by this?
Let’s take a look, shall we?
Where does California get its money? Specifically the general fund money that our congress-critters get to fiddle with every year? ebudget.ca.gov provides a nice little summary:
Mostly from income taxes and sales taxes. I see money come out of my paycheck every week on one, and see the other nearly every time I buy anything. I’d just as soon leave these alone or lower them.
Where does the money go? Again, ebudget provides a summary:
Education takes up almost 58% of the state budget. Ouch. That looks like a great place to look for fat to trim. It’s also a political landmine to go anywhere near that portion of the budget without alarming reactionary parents and grandparents. Grandparents vote, you see.
Health and Human Services makes up the next biggest slice of general fund, at about $21,000,000,000. This is the nebulous government waste that I think most libertarians and tea-party types are talking about most of the time that they whinge about government waste. If the federal congress were actually trying to fix health care, this could have been reduced significantly (partly through increase systemic efficiency but largely through federal spending). But they aren’t.
Which brings us to: where the hell is all my tax money going?
I pay my taxes like a good citizen. I look for whatever deductions and credits I may be legally eligible, of course, but I understand that taxes are the price I pay for having a variety of safeguards and comforts that many others in the world don’t enjoy (into religion? love guns? hate paying taxes? you’d love it in Somalia!). But the bulk of the money coming out of my paycheck doesn’t go to Sacramento. It goes to Ogden, Utah. Where the IRS collects my annual 1040 form. So what happens to Californians’ federal tax money?
On the California income tax table, if you earn $70,000 a year (median income for a family of four in the state), and you somehow haven’t managed to deduct your way down to a lower bracket, you pay $2,304 in state income tax. Conversely, the US income tax for that bracket is $9881. That’s a very sloppy calculation, based on $70,000 taxable income without all the typical deductions and such, but really it’s just to demonstrate the proportions involved. I can expect to pay a quarter as much to the state as I do to the federal government in income taxes. It’s a good thing that comes back through federal spending, right? Right?
California produced $313,998,874,000 in gross tax revenue for the United States federal government in 2007. With a population of 36,553,215, that works out to $8,590 for every man, woman, and child. Meanwhile Missouri produced only $48,568,138,000 with their 5,878,415 people ($8,262 per capita). That’s OK, though; we have a progressive income tax, so states with higher typical wages will pay more taxes, and the difference isn’t really that high.
That said, we’re having to pull more of our weight internally than a lot of other states. For every dollar we pay into the federal government, we get $0.78 back. That’s $69,079,752,280 coming out of California taxpayers’ pockets that is landing in places like Missouri that gets back $1.29 in spending for every dollar of federal taxes they pay. Heck, it’s more than the entire tax contribution of that state by a significant margin. It’s also about 75% of our proposed state budget for next year.
I suggest that the Republicans in Sacramento have got it right: we don’t need to raise fees or taxes on Californians. I also suggest that Democrats in Sacramento have it right: we have much-needed health services, correctional institutions, and schools that really need to properly-funded. We need our representatives in Washington DC to start representing us better.
When the revised health care bill kicks its way back to the House of Representatives, Lynn Woolsey and other “progressive” Democrats should demand a better deal. If Woolsey isn’t going to get the public option she wants (much less single-payer), then she should get additional funding for the Palm Drive hospital in Sebastopol and the Sutter Medical Center in Santa Rosa. California should get the same kind of treatment Nebraska gets for Medicaid costs. If her party wants her to swallow her liberal principles to vote for an imperfect bill, she should bring home some bacon for her constituents.
The same goes for our other representatives of both major parties: put your constituents ahead of your party and secure funding for local projects. Your voters are paying for roads and bridges and schools and hospitals and army bases elsewhere, let that money flow back home.
*Mea culpa: I seem to have put a totally ludicrous figure on KC Meesha’s comments page about how much folks in Missouri pay per capita to the feds. I don’t know where that figure came from, but I noticed it while I was writing this up.
*edit: out of ignorance I had some gender pronouns wrong there.
I’m sure the new Doctor Who episode already aired and this theory is already rubbish, but here we go:
Therefore, perhaps Wilfred and Donna are actually The Doctor and Susan, disguised in a manner previously used used by other time lords in the series.
I just needed to get that off my chest before I actually see the new episode and am certainly proved wrong.