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Cash for Clunkers is a typical government program. Take perfectly good cars, ones that people actually own outright, and demolish them. At the same time "encourage" consumers to purchase "better" (read: more expensive) ones on credit. Of course any of this stuff is at best zero sum, so all those people who don't fall for this scam are obligated to finance those who do. There is no free lunch. If Paul gets a government subsidy, then Peter is going to have to finance it.
Living in Ontario, you're doubly blessed on the auto industry, Tom. Not only do you own a part of the federal share of the auto bailout but you also own a part of the provincial share. Probably the only real evidence will be the debt you'll have to help pay down.
Low trade in value is a real deterrent to people buying a new car. About a year, or probably a bit more now, I was at the dealership getting something done to my car. I saw one I liked and was talking to the salesman. I asked him how much I could get for mine in a trade in. He asked the year and model I was driving. It was about 3 years old and sight unseen offered me $3,000. for it. I told him it had less than 30,000 km on it. He then said he would give me $5,000. It wouldn't have paid the sales taxes on the car he was trying to sell me.
Cash for Clunkers is an American program. I think Canada gives a few hundred dollars for a car under certain conditions. Not really enough for me to even look into it. Is there really any point in bailing out the foreign auto makers when there is no incentive for people to buy the product? They give their citizens the cash and I would imagine they build the majority of the autos they sell under that program in the U.S.
Do you think the economy is picking up or that it's simply entered a slightly different phase? I'm hearing a lot of "Happy Talk" but what I'm seeing is slightly different.
How do you like the American health care debate? It reminds me of the old joke. When a Canadian dies after an illness, he leaves a will. When an American dies after an illness, he leaves a bill.
Good. We are bringing the thread back to the economy. Now the idea is to try to make a dollar or two from it all.
This thread was always about the economy. The draconian measures demanded by the chicken little man made global warming crowd require us to cut our own economic throats for no net benefit.
Even if you accept their premises, their solutions require us to send massive taxpayer and industry dollars to third parties and the net effect will be exactly zero on carbon emissions. In fact, world wide carbon emissions will continue to go up. The plans of the industry, governmental and quasi-governmental entities developing around this whole wrong-headed idea do not indicate that they even believe that carbon emissions are the problem that they publicly make them out to be. If they were then they would not have exempted the biggest and fastest growing so called polluters.
This whole man-made global warming hysteria has only served to take our eye off the ball of all the real pollutants that are being emitted in order to focus on a naturally occurring element of our atmosphere, carbon dioxide.
Low trade in value is a real deterrent to people buying a new car. About a year, or probably a bit more now, I was at the dealership getting something done to my car. I saw one I liked and was talking to the salesman. I asked him how much I could get for mine in a trade in. He asked the year and model I was driving. It was about 3 years old and sight unseen offered me $3,000. for it. I told him it had less than 30,000 km on it. He then said he would give me $5,000. It wouldn't have paid the sales taxes on the car he was trying to sell me.
Cash for Clunkers is an American program. I think Canada gives a few hundred dollars for a car under certain conditions. Not really enough for me to even look into it. Is there really any point in bailing out the foreign auto makers when there is no incentive for people to buy the product? They give their citizens the cash and I would imagine they build the majority of the autos they sell under that program in the U.S.
Do you think the economy is picking up or that it's simply entered a slightly different phase? I'm hearing a lot of "Happy Talk" but what I'm seeing is slightly different.
I think the US economy is going to be in even worse trouble two years down the road. I expect the value of their dollar to continue to be hammered, their government to continue to bailout industries at the expense of productive companies and taxpayers, and their enormous debt will be monetized (i.e. they will print money to pay off its nominal value, which screws its creditors). About a year ago I converted much of my US cash to Canadian, and about six months ago I converted 90% of the rest. A country cannot run on consumption. Consumption doesn't equal growth. Both Canada and the US needs more saving, more investing and most importantly less consumption.
I have never owned a car, and don't understand how trade-ins are valued. Seems to me that if I buy a car for $X, then the market is going to determine if after three years it is worth $.7X or $.5X or $.2X. If I think that $.2X is too low then I can do at least one of two things: drive my car into the ground, and/or buy the cars of other people who are selling their used cars for too little, in my estimation.
Destroying goods that are still useful is foolish, both economically and environmentally. However, governments would not like it if everyone did reduce, reuse and recycle as much as they can. What would happen to their tax revenues if people did?
"Tom is a well known racist, and like most of them he won't admit it, possibly even to himself." - Ed Seedhouse, October 4, 2020.
Even if you accept their premises, their solutions require us to send massive taxpayer and industry dollars to third parties and the net effect will be exactly zero on carbon emissions. In fact, world wide carbon emissions will continue to go up. The plans of the industry, governmental and quasi-governmental entities developing around this whole wrong-headed idea do not indicate that they even believe that carbon emissions are the problem that they publicly make them out to be. If they were then they would not have exempted the biggest and fastest growing so called polluters.
This whole man-made global warming hysteria has only served to take our eye off the ball of all the real pollutants that are being emitted in order to focus on a naturally occurring element of our atmosphere, carbon dioxide.
I do not know if mankind is responsible for global warming or not, though it wouldn't surprise me if we were. However, I do absolutely agree that governments give no indication of taking global warming seriously in the same way that they give no indication of taking overpopulation or peak oil seriously (the last two of which I do believe). Of course that may be because governments are concerned only over short-term stuff; just enough to get them re-elected.
Citizens are no better. How many people bike or walk to work instead of driving? How many carpool? How many compost? How many curb their consumption of goods? How many are willing to make the irrational decision to make their lifestyle more inconvenient in order to decrease pollutants by 0.00000001%?
"Tom is a well known racist, and like most of them he won't admit it, possibly even to himself." - Ed Seedhouse, October 4, 2020.
This thread was always about the economy. The draconian measures demanded by the chicken little man made global warming crowd require us to cut our own economic throats for no net benefit.
You probably realize B.C. and Quebec already have a Carbon tax. As far as I know they are the only 2 provinces to get in on that tax grab. Companies which produce goods and use a lot of energy to do it could find their products are not competitive with the tax.
Some fuels do burn cleaner than others. Natural gas burns cleaner than fuel oil in a boiler. One time I was at a prison working on the natural gas equipment. When I finished I went into the boiler room to talk to the man in charge. There were several men working on the tubes in the large boiler cleaning them. All which was visible was a light grey film. I commented the boilers didn't really need cleaning. His reply was that around there labour was cheap.
Back in the 1960's and even later on I worked changing oil burning industry and large high rise apartment buildings over to natural gas. Some days I worked on 2 or even 3. Most had the ability to change back and forth from oil to natural gas. The major benefit for the industries was the natural gas cost less. Right now the price difference after the conversion of BTU's for oil and natural gas is up to around 20 times. This is historically high and indicates either natural gas is under priced or oil is extremely over priced. I don't see how it's economical for the exploration companies to sell natural gas at the current prices.
If a low mileage auto has depreciated around 90% in only 3 years, without the salesman even looking at it, there seems to me to be a big problem. With such a small value, I decided to drive it until it was no longer feasible to do the repairs.
I read somewhere that autos are on the road an average of 11 years. There are people who like to change cars when they are 3 years old. Some people buy cars at 3 years and sell them at 6 or 7 years and other buy cars that age and drive them into the ground. My last car I kept for 12 years until it needed some expensive motor repairs. Cars seem to last longer these days because rust doesn't seem to effect them as early as it used to do. Used to be a time when 6 or 7 years was about all without expensive body work.
I don't know how the U.S. economy will be in a couple of years. I thought things were bad after the Savings and Loan debacle some years back but it got over that. There are a lot of people who feel like you do on the U.S. economy and the gold advocates are anticipating high gold prices. The prices they give like 2 and 3 thousand a troy oz. are so high they make me dizzy. Personally, I don't see the demand for it at that price. I mean, would you buy gold or gold jewelry with a gold price of $2,000. an oz? If people would pay that, the price would probably already be there. I seem to recall reading somewhere the IMF will be selling a lot of gold.
If the Canuck Buck goes to par with the Greenback I'm going to look into an ETF which goes up when the Canuck Buck drops. If the Canuck Buck gets high it will probably mean the price of oil has gotten too high. I expect the Buck to roughly move with the price of oil.
Climate scientists can't even get tomorrow's weather right. How can they be expected to predict the next century?
This is the climax of an amazingly dumb set of statements! Of course climate scientists can't predict tomorrow's weather, they don't study weather, they study climate!
If climate scientists could predict tomorrow's weather they'd be very bad climate scientists indeed because they'd be wasting their time studying the wrong subject. Studying weather what weather scientists do, often quite successfully.
The fact that you apparantly don't know the difference between weather and climate says all I need to know about your understanding of Science, Vlad. The rest of your rant doesn't really need any refutation since it basicly refutes itself.
The fact that you apparantly don't know the difference between weather and climate says all I need to know about your understanding of Science, Vlad. The rest of your rant doesn't really need any refutation since it basicly refutes itself.
Apparently you are one of the low level trolls, not even capable of forming an argument. Its also typical of the troll game for you to seize upon a statement out of context and run with that since you are incapable of advancing coherent arguments supporting your position. Weather and climate prediction are intricately intertwined. Climate prediction deals with longer time frames and averages of weather. Climate is to weather as decades are to days. HTH.
Climate predictions are even more difficult than weather predictions given the oversimplified models that the alarmists tend to use to support their arguments.
Vlad, would you kindly attack the position and not the person in this thread?
Okay. His position is that we are experiencing global warming and that it is anthropocentric in origin and that the measures proposed will somehow be able to reverse this. Further his claim is that there is a scientific consensus on all of these points.
My position is that we may or may not be experiencing global warming and if we are, most of the effect is naturally generated. I do not believe that we can reverse this natural phenomena. Further I dispute the claim that there is a scientific consensus on global warming as a man made phenomenon.
"Water vapor overwhelms all other natural and man-made greenhouse contributions."
"Water vapor, the most significant greenhouse gas, comes from natural sources and is responsible for roughly 95% of the greenhouse effect (4). Among climatologists this is common knowledge but among special interests, certain governmental groups, and news reporters this fact is under-emphasized or just ignored altogether."
"The carbon dioxide levels on Earth have risen from approximately 0.028% to 0.036% in the last few decades. It is a major stretch to compare this with Venus at a 96.500% carbon dioxide level and promote an uncontrollable runaway condition. Earth in its early history, 385 million years ago, had an atmosphere with 10 times the present carbon dioxide levels. Those elevated levels did not produce runaway global warming then, so why should we theorize that it would today?” http://personals.galaxyinternet.net/...balWarming.pdf
"The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.
That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago. " http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle1363818.ece
29 April, 2005
"Given that the atmosphere inarguably shows no appreciable warming in the 25-year history of satellite and radiosonde measurements (initiated in response to the cooling panic), to assert that runaway global warming is as real as President Bush's re-election is an absurd proposition. This, instead, illustrates how responsibility for the greens' problems lies with unsupportable claims in pursuit of laughably premature and inconsistent scare campaigns." http://cei.org/gencon/019,04520.cfm
"It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming. Given Dr. Trenberth’s role as the IPCC’s Lead Author responsible for preparing the text on hurricanes, his public statements so far outside of current scientific understanding led me to concern that it would be very difficult for the IPCC process to proceed objectively with regards to the assessment on hurricane activity. My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy. " Chris Landsea Leaves IPCC http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/pr...ea_leaves.html
“But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.”
– MIT Professor Richard Lindzen http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220
"The film brings together the arguments of leading scientists who disagree with the prevailing consensus that a ‘greenhouse effect’ of carbon dioxide released by human activity is the cause of rising global temperatures.
Instead the documentary highlights recent research that the effect of the sun’s radiation on the atmosphere may be a better explanation for the regular swings of climate from ice ages to warm interglacial periods and back again.
The film argues that the earth’s climate is always changing, and that rapid warmings and coolings took place long before the burning of fossil fuels. It argues that the present single-minded focus on reducing carbon emissions not only may have little impact on climate change, it may also have the unintended consequence of stifling development in the third world, prolonging endemic poverty and disease."
The Great Global Warming Swindle http://littlegreenfootballs.com/webl...try=24691&only
By the way the above is an excellent film. I watched it on YouTube a couple of years ago.
I do not know if mankind is responsible for global warming or not, though it wouldn't surprise me if we were. However, I do absolutely agree that governments give no indication of taking global warming seriously in the same way that they give no indication of taking overpopulation or peak oil seriously (the last two of which I do believe). Of course that may be because governments are concerned only over short-term stuff; just enough to get them re-elected.
Citizens are no better. How many people bike or walk to work instead of driving? How many carpool? How many compost? How many curb their consumption of goods? How many are willing to make the irrational decision to make their lifestyle more inconvenient in order to decrease pollutants by 0.00000001%?
One thing that bothers me is that back in about 1988 Fortune Magazine reported that solar power generation made sense as long as oil prices were about 28 dollars a barrel. Maybe the number was $30 or maybe the number was $20 or the expectations were that it would soon be $20. If solar power was not so tied up with governments and government programs you would expect that the effects of Moore's law would have kicked in by now and that magic number would be down to about $1 to $5. Instead solar is just about the most expensive option. What gives?
On bikes, I am sure that I would be dead by now if I rode my bike to work. We must have the worst drivers in the world in this area.
If the Canuck Buck goes to par with the Greenback I'm going to look into an ETF which goes up when the Canuck Buck drops. If the Canuck Buck gets high it will probably mean the price of oil has gotten too high. I expect the Buck to roughly move with the price of oil.
Oil and gas extraction were roughly 4% of the economy in 2007.
I don't understand why the price of oil would have such a huge impact on the Canadian dollar. It seems to me, given the relative size of our deficits and the problems in the two economies, the Canadian dollar should appreciate against the U.S. dollar over the short and medium term whether oil goes up or down in price.
I don't understand why the price of oil would have such a huge impact on the Canadian dollar. It seems to me, given the relative size of our deficits and the problems in the two economies, the Canadian dollar should appreciate against the U.S. dollar over the short and medium term whether oil goes up or down in price.
I would imagine the percentage of the economy would depend on the price of oil and gas. Last year the price of oil topped out at around $147. a barrel, U.S., and natural gas at around $12. or more per MCF and that in U.S. dollars. Our dollar rose to around $1.07 against the American dollar. When the price of oil dropped, our dollar dropped back to 80 cents or less. Recently it has been following the price of oil upward. I guess when the American dollars come into Canada it raises the value of our dollar. Also, the volume and income from the Tar Sands might not be in those 2007 figures.
I think when the Bank of Canada intervenes in the market to support the Canadian dollar and keep speculators from driving it up against the American dollar they sell American dollars and buy Canadian dollars.
For an idea of the revenue government get from oil and gas google:
Alberta royalty rates oil and gas
Do the same for B.C. If you want you can also substitute the name of a country for the province. Canada also takes a royalty rate above the provincial one.
Before I invest in a company I like to figure out if I think that company is viable after they pay the royalty rate from their gross revenue. After the executives pay themselves their salaries, royalties, exploration, etc., what's left over for me?
Okay. His position is that we are experiencing global warming and that it is anthropocentric in origin
No, my position is that the evidence available to us at present, gathered by highly qualified scientists, shows beyond doubt that global warming is a fact and that it is highly likely that it is anthropocentric in origin.
and that the measures proposed will somehow be able to reverse this.
Vlad invented this out of whole cloth since I have never made that claim here at all.
Further his claim is that there is a scientific consensus on all of these points.
Again a falsehood. There is scientific consensus on the first two points. I said nothing about the third.
Further I dispute the claim that there is a scientific consensus on global warming as a man made phenomenon.
I am not going to bother further refuting the many erroneous and irrelevant claims he makes in the rest of the article, simply because I have no confidence that he will not merely repeat his performance of telling falsehoods about what I say and believe. To argue with someone you need someone who is willing to argue honestly, and I have no confidence that Vlad is such a person given the above performance.
If you find Vlad convincing then that is your problem. It's a free world and if you want to be irrational it's your life.
Last edited by Ed Seedhouse; Sunday, 16th August, 2009, 10:42 PM.
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