Thank you for the clarification. Would that not make the stock more volatile even though the company is a stable company.

Explain what the 1.75x means?

So, you are saying the rate pitbulls that do attack end up killing, whereas other breeds can be frequently more violent but fail to kill as manh due to how they bite.

Is that it?

Weatherall, you know that the breed responsible for the most dog attacks on children is the Labrador, right?

There /are/, in fact, endless stories, but regime media filters for novelty as much as for politics.

(Labradors are #1 for attacks mostly because there are so many of them in households with children under 10. They ARE less excitable on average than pitbulls, but the difference isn't huge. Labs were bred for hunting, after all.)

Sure but normal warming during interglacial periods happens slow, slow enough for life to adapt. Unlike the current rate of warming which is far exceeding historical warming periods (outside cataclysmic events like volcanism/asteroid impacts). That is the concern.

The first article you shared says this:

"The model calculated the monthly change in Earth’s energy balance caused by the eruption and showed that water vapor could increase the average global temperature by up to 0.035°C over the next 5 years. That’s a large anomaly for a single event, but it’s not outside the usual level of noise in the climate system, Jenkins said."

The second article says this:

"The study says that, before the eruption, there was a 50-50 chance that global temperatures would exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial levels at least once by 2026. In its aftermath, the likelihood of exceeding this threshold has increased by seven percentage points – making “imminent 1.5C exceedance” more likely than not."

So although it has temporarily warmed the planet further, the major underlying cause is still because of the major excess of GHGs. So sure, maybe once all the water vapour cycles out of the stratosphere, global temperatures will cool slightly, but then again the amount of warming the water vapour may have caused is within the usual level of noise in the climate system. So even if we assume the last two winters are exceptionally mild because of the volcano, more winters like it are likely to come as the planet continues to warm.

Sorry contradicts your claim that the last 2 years are warm because of the volcano*

CO2 levels should be a concern though since it's causing global average temperatures to rise too quickly.

The boreal forest in north america has evolved to expect significant snowfall over the winter which melts in the spring and feeds rivers, lakes and the soil keeping the forest moist. The last two winters have been absolutely mild with little snowfall. It's actually insane. I grew up in Northern Ontario where snow begins to fall/accumulate in early November and stays until late May. At the peak of winter we have 8ft snow banks. Snow mobile season usually lasts from early December to April. The last two years, its been a few weeks. There was so little in winter 2022 and so little rain in spring 2023 that we had major forest fires throughout northern Ontario and Quebec with smoke affecting daily life all the way to New York City! I know forest fires are normal but those very mild winters (that I have never seen in my life, nor has my father or his father) are causing forests to dry up which impacts so many things. And then warmer air means warmer oceans and that greatly affects ocean currents and marine life... You see where I'm going with this?

Well water is good too, but if you drink a bunch of gallons at once you can die from it.

So context matters.

This is why things like pesticides, microplastics, and those kinds of things keep me up at night more than CO2 emissions from hydrocarbons. Extinction-level stuff starting from the base. There’s way more CO2 in the soil, plants and animals, and oceans than the atmosphere. Maximizing those things can be way more powerful than minimizing CO2 emissions.

So all I can really do is draw from existing scientific literature, and my conclusion is that I’m a preservationist in many ways (protect forests, waters, etc) rather than someone who is particularly concerned about hydrocarbons.

Greek temples only have three columns right?

Gonna experiment with posting this here because the interface for inserting screenshots is better than on X, and I think this might be a more receptive audience anyway.

Now that Krugman has invoked the name of F.A. Hayek to defend Kamala Harris' policies, I must effortpost.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that this is once again a case of a progressive quote-mining Hayek to make a point he almost certainly wouldn't have agreed with.

First, let's look at the paragraph that follows. Krugman says Harris is not a full-on communist (true). She just wants to expand welfare, not fundamentally change the role of govt. Harris did support single-payer health care but now doesn't. But even if she did, says Krugman, it's not that radical or dangerous ("un-American")!

Hayek would disagree.

Hayek on "social insurance" from The Constitution of Liberty, more detailed than the The Road to Serfdom quote Krugman links: Progressives rarely mention the part in red, where he says that while the aim of govt providing a safety net is philosophically defensible, the actual methods are the problem, and as we'll see, a likely inescapable one in Hayek's telling.

He continues on to say that opposition to govt welfare is entirely defensible, just not purely on human freedom grounds. To understand this, you have to grok that Hayek defined freedom as the absence of coercion and placed a high value on prohibiting government monopolies.

He does not accept the "taxation is theft" maxim, which is why many libertarians dislike him. What he opposes is government action that prevents people from trying new experiments and competing with the state or state-connected actors to provide "essential" services.

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What Hayek is saying about "social insurance" is that in theoretical terms a state-supported welfare program could achieve its ends without threatening freedom.

The more sound reason to oppose it, he argues, is that the state apparatus that administers welfare in the modern world inevitably becomes a coercive and monopolistic one. There are strings attached to that money, always: Strings that serve the plans of the bureaucrats, not the individuals receiving the money.

It's fantasy ("illusion") to imagine a government machine powerful enough to administer welfare at nation-state scale while being kept in check against liberty violations. "Democratic control" ain't gonna cut it.

History shows the administrative state certainly never checks itself. This is why the recent Chevron reversal was so crucial. It allows courts, rather than "democracy," to exert more direct constitutional restraint on these agencies, likely to be more effective than Congress "doing something" (LOL).

THE GREATEST DANGER TO LIBERTY TODAY, writes Hayek, comes from the expert class running the bureaucracy for the "public good."

It is INEVITABLE, he says, that such an apparatus will become self-willed, uncontrollable and hegemonic.

Agree or disagree with Hayek's analysis, but does this sound like a guy who endorses anything close to resembling our modern welfare state? Or does it sound like a nuanced thinker conceding that the state could theoretically subsidize welfare in some non liberty-threatening way that he never quite specifies?

Hayek would almost certainly recognize massive problems with the way our current top-down welfare system distorts the market, coercively suppresses competition, and immiserates people. And to invoke him anywhere proximal to single-payer health care is a joke.

I get the criticism from libertarians that Hayek could've been more clear to avoid mischaracterization, or should've been more "hardcore" about opposing all taxation. I'm not arguing that he's that kind of libertarian. And that's OK.

But it's hard for me to see the way Krugman is quoting him here as anything other than a disingenuous way to normalize Harris' proposed expansion of social engineering and an intrusive welfare state.

True. However, Calories In Calories Out is how you lose weight.