The case you bring up is interesting, because as far as I can tell, it's one of the cases that JREF shouldn't have been at all concerned about losing. Putting myself in their position:

Would I bet $1M that a dowser would fail? I'd have to think about it. It's extremely unlikely that he'd succeed, but I suppose it's vaguely possible that there's something in physics that we don't understand that could cause me to lose the bet.

In this case, would I bet $1M that the guy needs food and water to survive? In a heartbeat. I can't imagine JREF feeling threatened by the possibility of success and having to weasel out of it. That's especially true given the fact that they do run all sorts of tests on other far more likely phenomena (like dowsing and psychics). The notion that they're not afraid of a dowser but they're terrified that this nutbar is a perpetual motion machine who just might beat them seems ludicrous to me.

It's also pretty easy to see that Randi (and probably lots of the JREF staff) are abrasive people who may heap scorn on you before the test is done. I don't think that's how I would run things, but it's hardly evidence that they're rigging the game. So, given the choice between the notion that they're just arrogant and sometimes rude and the possibility that they're genuinely afraid that one particular nutcase has an ace in the hole, I know which one seems more likely.

I suppose the third possibility is that they were afraid that the guy would go into testing and die on their watch. That would make me a little bit nervous in their position. If the guy is sufficiently crazy, they have a choice between getting flak for ending the test "early" or getting flack for letting a crazy person die.

I think the main point is that there are other places in the world that have genocide, torture, slavery, and all sorts of terrible things going on. The place we invaded happened to be the one that was strategically important, and I didn't see any evidence that they were just the first in line before we solved all of those other problems.

Of course, I don't buy into the notion that we wanted to go in and "steal" the oil. It's perfectly reasonable to have a strong interest in the stability of the unstable region that produces your energy supply. In fact, if our leadership wasn't interested in the Middle East for the oil, they'd be ignoring their duties. When people from certain countries bitch that we're only interested in their oil, I often can't help but think, "Yeah, it's a real shame that we don't hang out with repressive backward thugocracies more often... just for the company."

Depending on how you look at it, stopping a monstrous regime is either icing on the cake or a good excuse for doing what you wanted to do anyway. Still, I don't think that we should make any mistake about whether or not energy security was the major reason we went in. Without oil, it's pretty easy just to add Iraq to the list of countries we don't bother with because they're murderous dictatorships, unstable hellholes with constant tribal warfare and genocide, or whatever else.

Of course, it also doesn't hurt that dowsing using rods for drugs in schools amounts to essentially a random search, increasing the probability that you'll get caught with contraband even though there is zero correlation between the rod's response and actual contraband. Administrators could say, "We roll the dice, and if they come up snake eyes, you get searched," and end up with a pretty good drop in drug activity. Then again, people would be up in arms about that.

If you complain they call you "unreasonable" and close the claim.

Do you have some actual examples of unreasonable changes they've demanded? Every time somebody points me toward historical examples, it usually ends up with the claimant demanding that JREF front a bunch of money to pay for something. I'm interested in which case you're thinking of.

In the last few years they have made it really hard to apply for the challenge requiring that you have media exposure before they even consider your application.

There's a simpler explanation for that, and it doesn't require malice: When you offer a million dollars to any kook who thinks he has magic powers, you're going to have to invest a LOT of resources in figuring out which ones are legitimate and which ones are people who just need medical help.

I think that Doug Stanhope made kind of the same observation when he said something like, "You can't keep weapons off of planes. You can't even keep weapons out of prison, and in prison they're allowed to check for weapons in your ass."

The government's reaction, in 1999 was to change the federal regulations — instead of making it easier for the banks to fight off the undue pressures.

Imagine you're a lender. The government tells you that you have to make a certain number of loans that you know will be unprofitable. Do you:

a) Make the bare minimum number of those loans.
b) Lever up and make as many of those loans as you possibly can, looking under every rock and behind every tree to find somebody who will borrow?

When it became possible to off-load the bad securities to Fannie Mae, the banks did make tons of money.

You do realize that during the exact time frame you're talking about, the GSEs lost market share to "non-bank lenders," right? The hallmark of the better part of the last decade was traditional institutions losing market share with the rise of nontraditional issuers (who, of course, were also not subject to the CRA).

And a little stimulus money for a bank gives the government the ability to set payment levels. Why does NPR get a pass?

Yes, I'm sure that the leadership at NPR are living in opulent splendor.

I don't think you understand logic. The only purely rational stance to take in the total absence of proof or disproof of God is agnosticism. Taking a stance in any direction is a leap of faith which requires an assumption not grounded in logic.

I'm not so sure about that. Is the only rational stance in the absence of proof or disproof of unicorns to withold judgment? Is, "Invisible aliens that shave my beard every 10 seconds but grow it back so quickly that it's undetectible don't exist," such an irrational thing to say? At what point to you step over the boundary between wisely reserving judgement due to lack of evidence and believing that it's not possible to know anything at all?

Bertrand Russell had it nailed: When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.

But doesn't this imply that a _religion_ should not be given tax exempt status? I could understand a charitable branch of a religion being given a tax exemption, but not the whole organisation. So, how does that work?

The theory is that even if the state can't support a particular church, it could cleverly structure tax policies to strangle churches it didn't like. The only foolproof way of closing the loophole would be to disallow taxing churches.

Of course, that opens the door to the question, what the heck is a legitimate church?

"Common sense" would dictate that if your goal is to lower the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, "CO2 in the atmosphere" is the variable to optimize for, no? If the total CO2 emissions drop by 50%, it really doesn't matter if one guy pays everybody else to stop emitting and he emits the entire worldwide quota himself. It's still a more efficient system.

You seem to be optimizing for some sort of emotional "feel good" variable that doesn't actually change the reality of emissions. You're welcome to it, but I don't see the benefit in going along with it.

Allow me to explain (b). The government made those loans interesting for tax reasons for large banks. (read the CRA)

Oh, so you've read the CRA. Good. So you can explain the tax credits to banks (or better yet, cite the CRA!)? What they were? What was requird to get them? Tax incentives for borrowers is one thing, but for banks? That's darned interesting.

So there we have it. Lots of loans, who are, in the long term, extremely unprofitable BUT having them in your possession on Jan. 1 of any year is unbelievably profitable.

You didn't come anywhere near reconciling your claim with the four pieces of evidence I pointed out. Like how that affects the majority of the subprime lenders--who were not covered by the CRA. At all. Or again, why CRA covered loans did not underperform mortgages in general.

It seems you've dropped the GSEs from you complaint. What happened there? Where is the devastating explanation of how they drove the housing crisis from behind?

So you've created a game of "hot potato". You have a package that blows up & you pass it around.

Ding! That's definitely the source of the problem. But the incentive to do it is there in the absence of the CRA or any other bogey man piece of legislation. How do we know this? Because the majority of the hot potato loans were being originated by "nonbank entities" rather than by regulated institutions. I would think somebody as data driven as yourself would have checked that out.
You seem... err... out of your depth on this one.

Sulphur dioxide emissions have reduced by a little under 50% in the US. World-wide, however, they have risen. The net result was, obviously, a large rise in these emissions...However, the policy only bought some time, it did not solve the problem.

Sooo... "buying time" is not a useful activity at all, right? Because to me, that's a very useful activity. The longer you have to sort out your emissions problems, the better off you are for reasons explained below.

More to the point, was our economy crippled in the process? Why am I not busy stacking millions of skulls of dead American children in a gulag somewhere?

I can't find any CFC numbers. However, CFC's cause the expansion of the gap in the ozone layer. I wonder if it has shrunk ? Since if your claims are right, then we'd see a massive shrinking of the hole in the ozone layer ... I'm sure you've checked that beforehand ... heh ... I forgot ... democrat ...

Did you use your mad data-finding skills to note that CFCs take an average of 15 years to get to the upper atmophere and stay there for an average of 100 years? Considering the date of the Montreal Protocol and that total atmospheric concentrations of the chemicals didn't start decreasing until the early / mid 90s, no I wouldn't expect that at all.

The data from the Montreal Protocol agreements are an excellent example of what can happen when a handful of the top powers get together and tax an emission. It lowers their emissions and spurs innovation, creating products that then make lowering emissions a low-cost, enabling countries that originally didn't sign on (*cough* China) to be more easily goaded into lowering their emissions. But perhaps I should defer to a more rational person who has spent 3 minutes on Wikipedia.

Without the introduction of either CRA and Fannie/Freddie you can be absolutely sure that this would not have happened, and there would have been marginally less houses developed on American soil (not much less though, and they're all seriously undervalued now as a result).

Oh, good. Maybe you can be the first person who can answer these simple questions about the situation. Let's say you're a bank. Let's say the evil leftist government comes to you and says you have to loan a certain amount of money to filthy poor people. You know that each loan is, on average, unprofitable. Do you:

a) Grumble about it, do the bare minimum, and then use your enormous lobbying clout with Congress to make the problem go away?
b) Make as many of those unprofitable loans as you possibly can, searching under every rock and log for loan candidates, leveraging yourself out the wazoo to do it in order to maximize your losses.

Your theory should explain:

1) Why profit maximizing firms generally chose (b).
2) Why a law that simply says, "You must loan money where you take deposits" and applies only to regulated banks would cause non-bank entities to take over the loan market by making exactly those loans even though they were not regulated under the CRA.
3) Why the GSEs, who were presumably "driving" the whole thing, managed to spend most of the sub-prime run-up *losing market share* to these non-bank entities.
4) Why the CRA loans that presumably are the cause of all of this managed to do so without actually underperforming the mortgage market in general.

Basically, the argument makes no sense from an economic perspective. At least, not if you believe that supply curves slope up and demand curves slope down, or that rational firms maximize profits given a set of constraints. That's why on one side of this argument, you have crackpots like Kevin "Dow 36000" Hasset, and on the other side, you have people like Janet Yellen.

You've been had. This was your run of the mill speculative bubble that was exacerbated by what amounted to unregulated insurance markets and artificially low interest rates pushed by the Fed. If you can put together a coherent theory that hangs properly on economic principles and matches up with the data, I'd love to see it.

You didn't answer my question : cap&trade will not lower emissions, and neither will cap&trade + tariffs. There is NO way to fix the bill that does not violate basic concepts of economy. Why do you think you can "fix it anyway" ?

That's because I disagree with your premises. If you they were correct, we would not have seen government policy working with other emissions as it has. You didn't answer my questions about CFCs and sulfur dioxide, probably because you can't square it with your assumption that emissions taxes simply cripple the economy and don't reduce emissions. You might as well say, "Ice is not cold. Why the hell would you put it in your drink to cool it off? It is because you're a STATIST COMMUNIST??"

An example for this type of business model would be the gaming industry, where the standard practice is to sell hardware at a loss in order to get your system as widely distributed as possible in the hopes that software liscenses will cover your expenditures.

So what would be a good example of a (long-term profitable) instance of a business model in which you buy carbon credits for a higher price than its marginal product, then? Companies are free to buy any number of assets at unprofitable prices. They rarely do, because there usually aren't perverse incentives to do so.

And as for companies that deal in international markets, forget about that poor US company being able to compete with anyone when they automaticallty have a additional expense on their books that no one else has simply because of this carbon fee.

The question is, which markets are we looking at? If the US, Australia, and Europe are generally cutting back CO2 output and imposing import tariffs on countries that are not, your losses are mainly going to be in the export market that consists of countries other than the US, Australia, and Europe. What percentage of US GDP is net exports to those countries?

A recent study in Spain found that for every green job created through these type of government programs 2.2 jobs were lost. Not to mention that their energy costs have gone up 31% under that system.

I don't think that we should labor under the assumption that a tax like this one is supposed to result in a net increase in jobs, especially in the short run. It's essentially recognizing that something that we treat as "free" is not free in reality. That's not going to be good news no matter how you slice it.

Let me ask you : are you SURE that you could have fixed those laws (not, mind you, with the benefit of hindsight) ?

Actually, I still would still have supported TARP in its original form as it was better than nothing, unfortunate losses notwithstanding. I would have liked to have seen something that addressed the solvency issue more agressively early on to wring some of the uncertainty out of the system, but putting a floor under systemic bank collapses was a good call. Many economists were calling for proper capital injections in the form of equity purchases rather than the no-questions-asked purchases of questionable assets that happened early on. I was among those who thought that the way things went later, with the government trading capital for a dilution of ownership was the right way to stabilize broken banks while not piling on massive moral hazard.

My objection to this particular cap and trade bill is this: Given its length, it's likely not a cap and trade bill. It's more than likely a "some parts of the industry sort of cap and trade with thousands of complicated exceptions to the point where it's just a random wealth transfer to constituent industries" bill. That's a separate issue from whether the general principle is correct. A proper set of cap and trade regulations should be describable (if not politically passable) in a hell of a lot less than 1200 pages.

How does single 'family' factory compete with a large multinational for these rights?

That depends on which one is able to make better use of the CO2. If the large multinational needs the CO2 to produce something that's immensely profitable, then it's worth it to bid the price up beyond what the smaller company would pay. If it's the other way around, then the small company wins.

It's not a matter of how big you are. It's a matter of how much you *really* need that CO2. You'll certainly pay no more for it than its usefulness in making you a profit. If, for example, you could make a $10 profit by emitting a ton of CO2, there's no reason in the world for you to pay $11 for that credit.

If all their wealth is being generated by local production facilities that will now all have an added expense to operate how can they hope to compete with a company that has offshore facilities that they can easily use to offset the expenses.

Ah. I may be misreading your question. The problem you're asking about is whether an international corporation could just remix its balance of local and international production to reduce its burden. I would say that the correct way to handle that is to slap an ofsetting import tariff on energy-intensive goods that don't come from places that are similarly capped. In fact, if you don't do that in the first place, a cap-and-trade system is DOA as the first thing that would happen is all of your carbon-intensive work will be immediately outsourced to unregulated countries. You might as well skip the whole thing.