Comments Posted By Bill Arnold
Displaying 11 To 20 Of 118 Comments
A PREVIEW OF OBAMA'S TRIP TO THE MIDDLE EAST AND EUROPE
Something stripped out the embedded BBC link, sorry about that:
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 2.06.2009 @ 14:48
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2009/06/090602_obama_transcript.shtml
Transcript of the Obama BBC interview, for those interested in more than a FoxNews summary.
The Dresden visit is interesting. Odds are good that Obama and team will navigate it fine but there is always the possibility of some genuine gaffe or miscalculation. My amateur reading is that Dresden would have been in violation of the 1949 Geneva conventions, but the applicable 1907 Hague conventions were considerably vaguer about targeting of civilian areas.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 2.06.2009 @ 11:45
OBAMA OUTFLANKS GOP WITH SOTOMAYOR PICK
What about Cardozo? Wasnt he Portugese? I would have thought that qualified as Hispanic.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 26.05.2009 @ 16:08
Interesting question - according to a Wikipedia article the answer appears to be ... ambiguous.
For instance, Portuguese Americans are not considered "Hispanic" by the United States Census Bureau.
and
The U.S. Office of Management and Budget currently defines "Hispanic or Latino" as "a person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race".[14] This definition excludes people of Portuguese origins, such as Portuguese Americans and Brazilian Americans. However, they are included in some government agencies' definitions. For example, the U.S. Department of Transportation defines Hispanic to include, "persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Central or South American, or others Spanish or Portuguese culture or origin, regardless of race."[15] This definition has been adopted by the Small Business Administration as well as many federal, state, and municipal agencies for the purposes of awarding government contracts to minority owned businesses. Still other government agencies adopt definitions that exclude people from Spain. Some others include people from Brazil, but not Spain or Portugal.
Rick, did you really mean 2000 economists? The full page CATO advertisement had 200 names. An impressive lineup regardless. (I spot checked 10 or so names to verify that it wasn't overtly padded.)
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 6.05.2009 @ 16:32
I was unable to find (in a quick lazy search) an estimate of the total number of economists in the U.S. 200 seems like a small number relative to the number of colleges and universities.
faithfully execute vs execute xxx faithfully. It's hard for me to see any significant difference. Obama had already said the word "execute" when he realized that Roberts had flubbed the literal wording, so the only way to retain meaning without a do-over was the "execute xxx faithfully" construct.
Agreed that he should do it again over lunch with Roberts and a few other witnesses. And make Roberts pay for lunch.
My copy of the constitution says
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 21.01.2009 @ 16:26
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." I don't think any president has ever said "swear left paren or affirm right paren". (According to "the internet" F Pierce and H Hoover affirmed).
There is an excellent monograph on this subject written by Dr. James Paden at Middlebury College in VT.
Can you provide a link please? (Couldn't find it in a brief search.)I also suggest these two teaching pieces at realclimate.org, one a little mathy, one more mathy.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 26.12.2008 @ 16:44
First link:
Learning From a Simple Model
Second link:
The CO2 Problem In 6 Easy Steps
The takeaway - a doubling of CO2 levels would have an approximately 3 degree centigrade forcing effect. (Positive and negative feedback effects in response to forcing effects not included, effect of aerosols not included, etc. And professional climate modelers work with models orders of magnitude more complex. Note: changes in solar output would also be a forcing effect.)
Overall Bill Quick's assessment is very rational. Since we're quibbling:
(1) It is unclear where Pakistan is going politically, and according to recent reports they've chosen a different route on permissive action links than the U.S. did, physically separating the fissionables and the devices, at different sites if I recall correctly. (Looking for a citation). Perhaps they are positioning themselves for arsenal destruction if the political situation gets dicey. Wouldn't want to bet on it though.(2) It is unclear how close Iran is to deliverable devices. There seems to be an element of national pride in the uranium enrichment program, and missile-deliverable (non-gun-design) weapons are a non-trivial engineering challenge involving testing, unless they take a shortcut, swallow pride, and use somebody else's design. (FWIW, by this point the level of uncertainty in the amount of LEU produced by their current public centrifuges is or will soon be high enough that they could divert some to a covert program to enrich to HEU without being discovered, but an implosion design using HEU would involve testing.)
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 14.12.2008 @ 20:34
Plus, it is possible that the Iranian program's progress will suffer from "induced Murphy's Law" incidents, or be more directly set back through bombardment.
DO YOU WANT BARACK OBAMA TO SUCCEED?
RSGG:
Bottom line: Lets not exaggerate the current troubles, whatya say? Were in a recession. They occur every 8-10 years and have so for half a century now. Everyone grow up.
Respectfully, we have no idea how bad the current recession will become. The numbers already look as bad as the beginning of the early 80's recession, but that one was inflicted by Volcker, and uninflicted by Volcker, and Reagan tax cuts. (At least that's how I recall it.). The monetary tools are mostly tapped out now.
FWIW, this cycle took about 6 years from recession start to recession start, not 8-10. (March 2001 to January 2007. The March 2001 date has never been officially revised.)Why do you believe that 2009 will bring a conservative backlash? As a Democrat who believes in balance-of-powers government, I want a strong opposition with actual ideas, not just predictable anti-Democrats. I'm not seeing the current conservative movement deliver at the moment.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 9.12.2008 @ 17:49
ajacksonian's detailed comment is pretty good.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 17.11.2008 @ 18:16
I'll add that you should see if you can find a manual online for that model, and look up the beep code. It's possible something connector or connection (e.g. memory) was dislodged during the power supply replacement.
When tinkering with a PC, one early thing to try is reseating all connections. That's usually worth a try.
WHAT MIDDLE AMERICA THINKS OF THE ELECTION
It sounds like your middle America doesn’t care to get themselves educated about the candidates. They don’t care about Rev. Wright, T. Rezko, Fannie & Freddie, and a host of other things that go against the character of Obama.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 2.11.2008 @ 15:27
Robert, the dirt is out there on McCain. Some of it is even true. For whatever reason, the Obama campaign didn't go for mud slinging, the media hasn't ridden with these stories, and the left is simply lousy at the whole forwarding of unsourced negative chain-email approach.
(Just recently my wife got a copy of the almost-entirely-made-up "Obama's tax policy" email that has been circulating since at least June 2008, the one that starts with "INTERESTING DATA JUST RECEIVED ON TAXES". It bears only a passing resemblance to McCain's own stated tax policies, and very little resemblance at all, particularly in the made-up details, with Obama's stated policies. Anyone who felt moved could do debunking in 30 minutes using the candidates' web sites as primary source material.)
