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“Bill McKibben, whose 1989 book, “The End of Nature,” helped coalesce and spread worry about climate change, views the national environmental groups’ strategy of winning support for energy and climate legislation by compromising with industry as a complete failure. “The result: total defeat, no moral victories,” he wrote at the environmental news site Grist, speaking of the Senate’s inaction on climate legislation.
“Making nice doesn’t work,” he added.
Whatever the merits of his position, it has less traction when it comes to local environmental issues. In this arena, there has been a string of successful compromises between environmentalists and industry in the last two weeks.”
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“[W]hy has there never been a serious attempt at a real libertarian utopia? Most other utopian ideologies have inspired at least someone to attempt a practical implementation. On the face of it, libertarianism seems ideally suited to the belief in a fresh start, with no messy pre-existing claims. All sorts of ideas have been floated – island buyouts, sea-steading, co-ordinated moves to New Hampshire and so on, but none has gone anywhere. The only explanation I’ve seen, that libertarians are too independent and ornery to organise a utopia doesn’t convince me.
Thinking about the discussion we had though, it strikes me that there is a simple explanation: Actually Existing Libertarianism (see below) offers a better economic deal for nearly all libertarians than any feasible version of Galt’s Gulch. Once you do the math on going Galt, it’s not hard to see why no self-respecting libertarian would actually do it.”
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“This is work that needs doing at a time when work is needed so —
DEFICITS! ZOMG!1! DEFICITS!!1!!
Yes, OK, calm down please. We’re accounting for that.
See the biggest current cause of federal and state deficits is unemployment.
Let me repeat that to double the odds of this finally sinking in:
The biggest current cause of federal and state deficits is unemployment.
First there’s the massive reduction in tax revenue from the 14.6 million Americans unable to find work. Then there’s the expense of paying their unemployment benefits. For every one of those 14.6 million who finds a new job revenue goes up and spending goes down and the deficit shrinks.
If you’re worried about deficits right now, you need to be worrying about unemployment.”
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“Although overloads are actually quite common, I rarely see them discussed when people talk about adjunct ratios. Full-timers teaching overloads fall between categories. When determining something as basic as “the percentage of classes taught by adjuncts,” how should the overload sections be counted? I have departments in which the overload sections are as plentiful as adjunct sections; depending on how you choose to count them, you could wind up with very different pictures of what’s going on. If the argument is based on perceived quality or health insurance, I’d argue that the full-timers are full-timers. If the argument is based on salary, it’s more context-dependent. “