The journey from there to here

Link

I like compact flourescent light bulbs. I really do.

In fact, you will not find traditional incandescent bulbs in our house for that reason. And our nominal electric bill (average bill between 30-50 bucks a month) reflects that and other energy saving options that we implement around our house.

But I'm going to readily acknowledge that good flourescent light bulbs do not come cheap. The cheapest ones aren't worth buying, frankly, and you have to go somewhere in the $2-3 a bulb range to find a bulb that will actually last. Honestly, it's worth it in the long run.

But given the average 3 bedroom home, and the almost inevitable minimum of 10 lightbulbs throughout the home, and you can see where converting to all flourescent might not be an affordable option for some, in light of the fact that incandescent bulbs are about 1/10 the price. In other words, for the cost of one flourescent bulb, you can light the entire house with incandescents (of course, you pay more in the long run, but honestly, that's not something the poorer members of the community see, especially since utilities are covered by welfare programs, light bulbs are not).

And so, armed with this knowledge, it seems ludicrous that California would be seriously considering implementing a ban on incandescent light bulbs. And yet they are. If the loonies in the legislature have their way, Californians will no longer be allowed to purchase incandescent bulbs. And as usual, the poorest will be the hardest hit by their insane laws, because the cost of outfitting the aforementioned 3 bedroom home with compact flourescent bulbs would be half a day's wages for a minimum wage employee, not the kind of outlay one expects to put into light bulbs.

The proposal to ban incandescent bulbs is yet another symptom of a government run amuck, a government that has lost touch with the people it was elected to represent. If you want to cut electric usage, increase rates. Make electricity pricey, and families will do more to conserve, and consumption will drop. But to even consider banning consumer choices, especially in ways that could very well hurt the poor financially, is contemptible and disgusting.


Comments (Page 4)
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on Feb 06, 2007
please show me where I am wrong


already have done that. sorry, this lil reindeer game is over.
on Feb 06, 2007
please show me where I am wrong


already have done that. sorry, this lil reindeer game is over.


No, you have just stated opinions contrary to published facts. You really are a lame debater.

So for the slow learners - prove to me that NO ONE CLOSE TO CARTER HAS RESIGNED OVER HIS BOOK BECAUSE THEY DISAGREE WITH IT.

Sorry Sean, Nyah Nyahs are not good debating techniques. So until you have something substantive to say (as kingbee never does), go stand in his cesspool of ignorance.
on Feb 06, 2007
Sorry Sean, Nyah Nyahs are not good debating techniques. So until you have something substantive to say (as kingbee never does), go stand in his cesspool of ignorance.


sorry guy, just making me repeat everything over and over in hopes that i'll word something differently and you'll have an opportunity to try out your cocktail party lawyering is what is obvious to the rest of us.

keep diggin boy...if you must...but trying to hijack everyone else's posts just to try n "get me" on something is getting quite tired...and transparent. you and everyone else know that i'll stand up to all the attacks i am forced into, but it just isn't right or polite to keep hijacking all these posts and just zero in on me on all of them.

i get tired of repeating myself, so that's when ya get a little taunting (that you bring on yourself by trying to be a poor man's johnny cochran)..and you know it. when ya wanna grow up and stop having the delusions that you are the greta van sustren of joeuser, let me know.
on Feb 06, 2007
tell ya what miler,,,go watch the oscar nominated "inconvenient truth" that features nobel prize nominee al gore and get back to me. this is gettin boring goin round and round with ya


I wouldn't watch anything that loony puts out! Besides his movie has already been shown to be "full" of erroneous statements. And this coming from a man who claims to have invented the internet.
on Feb 07, 2007
wouldn't watch anything that loony puts out! Besides his movie has already been shown to be "full" of erroneous statements. And this coming from a man who claims to have invented the internet.


Careful Doc. He wil try to beat you into submission by repeating his lies and opinions over and over and over and over and over. Next he will be telling us that Farenheit 911 is factual.
on Feb 07, 2007
I wouldn't watch anything that loony puts out! Besides his movie has already been shown to be "full" of erroneous statements. And this coming from a man who claims to have invented the internet.


wanna talk erroneous statements? al never claimed "he invented the internet"

Did Gore invent the Internet?
Actually, the vice president never claimed to have done so -- but he did help the Net along. Some people would rather forget that.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Scott Rosenberg

Oct. 5, 2000 | That Al Gore once claimed to have "invented the Internet" is now part of electoral folklore -- one item in a litany of Gore "exaggerations" or "lies" that his opponents trot out to discredit him. At Tuesday's debate the line became the basis for a flatfooted one-liner George W. Bush lobbed to deflect Gore's onslaught of statistics: "This is a man who has great numbers -- I'm beginning to think not only did he invent the Internet, he invented the calculator."

The sheer cheek of Gore's purported claim invites mockery. Everybody knows the Internet is an extraordinarily complex piece of engineering that only incredibly smart scientists could have "invented." Politicians need not apply.


But things that "everybody knows" are always worth examining for defects. And the "Gore claims he invented the Net" trope is so full of holes that it makes you wish there were product recalls for bad information.

Gore never claimed to have "invented" the Internet. What he said was:

During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet.

As my colleague Jake Tapper carefully reported here last year, at worst that statement is a minor exaggeration of Gore's legislative record -- and miles away from the "I built it from scratch!" lie into which it has been twisted.

The life trajectory of the "I invented the Internet" Gore meme has been well traced by Phil Agre back to the original coverage of Gore's comment by Wired News' Declan McCullagh. McCullagh's first report, while never using the word "invent," interpreted Gore's statement as an outrageously false boast, and supported that view with one quotation from a conservative foundation spokesman. (That quote -- "Gore played no positive role in the decisions that led to the creation of the Internet as it now exists -- that is, in the opening of the Internet to commercial traffic" -- offers its own wildly distorted view of Internet history, narrowing its focus to "the opening of the Internet to commercial traffic" as the only significant milestone to shape today's Net.)

From McCullagh, the tidbit got picked up by the TV pundits and became the butt of late-night political jokes. The word "invent" practically leaped into Gore's mouth. News outlets across the board -- including Salon -- have now burned the distortion of the vice president's words into the public mind.

If that were the end of the tale, we could just dismiss it as one more round of election-year spin and counter-spin in which the lies won out over the truth. But this particular snow job springs from a deeper ideological well, and that makes it more interesting.


WWW Link



Careful Doc. He wil try to beat you into submission by repeating his lies and opinions over and over and over and over and over.


just facts guy,,,and pay attention, cause i don't wanna repeat myself...despite your claims...

on Feb 07, 2007
oh, but wait,,,there's more!

read on!



Several of the people who could claim to have "invented" the Internet, or key pieces of its protocols -- in particular, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn -- are out there on the Net today defending Gore, asserting that he was the politician in Washington who took the "initiative" to support the Net in its early days.

Implicit in their argument is a broader awareness of what it took to create the Internet. Anything as successful as the Net is not and cannot be successful as technology alone; technology does not exist in a vacuum. And just as the Internet required the services of brains like Kahn and Cerf and all the others who contributed code to its foundations, it also needed bureaucratic and legislative patrons.


It took social engineers as well as software engineers to build the Net. And that may be why the response to Gore's original statement was so savage: Not because his claim was a lie, but because it was a truth that a lot of people today are trying to forget or bury.

The Internet didn't spring full-blown out of some scientists' heads, nor did it just grow, like some techno-Topsy powered by the mysterious magic of the marketplace. It emerged from the world of government-subsidized university research, and every step of the way along its passage from academic network to global information infrastructure was shepherded by the state. As the Net's parent, the government didn't do everything right; but it managed to nurture the network through its youth -- then get out of the way once it was mature enough to move out of its parents' digs and shack up with private industry.

Libertarians and conservatives are uncomfortable admitting this. Their vision of Net history is a stirring saga of markets overwhelming states, technological imperatives vanquishing stifling bureaucracies and free information "routing around" government blockages. There's some truth in this vision -- but it's only part of the story.

The other part of the Net's history is a complex, and sometimes dull, chronicle of federal research grants, bureaucratic infighting and legislative initiatives that stitched together a messy but functional patchwork quilt of linked computers -- the famous "network of networks" that arose primarily in the 1980s, when the term "Internet" first came into play, and that remained a dark horse in the race to connect the public until around 1994.

Government alone couldn't have built today's Internet, but private industry, left to its own devices, wouldn't have, either. Without the critical spark of government-funded research lighting a fire of networked inventiveness, we'd probably have been stuck with the morass of competing proprietary online spaces that vied for the consumer's dollars in the early 1990s -- when AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, the prototypical MSN and other long-forgotten entrants like AT&T's Interchange and Apple's E-world all stared at each other across unbridgeable technological and business divides.

In those days the Internet was, we were told, too complex and geeky to ever reach the masses. That piece of conventional wisdom died a fast death as, one by one, the proprietary spaces folded or took down their walls and accepted that Internet connections were what people wanted.

Libertarians typically believe that the government can't do anything right, and they prefer to forget or ignore the part government has played in the Net's triumph. Giving Gore credit means admitting the government's role; distorting and mocking his claims helps deny it.

McCullagh, who is outspoken in his libertarian views, argues that, though he didn't use the word "invent," it is "a not entirely unreasonable paraphrase of the vice president's remarks," and suggests that the pro-Gore comments from Cerf may have a partisan basis: "I'm a big fan of Vint Cerf, and I think he's an able defender of the vice president, but let's put his defense of the vice president in context. Cerf is an executive at a large telecommunications company, and I suspect he acts more like a Washingtonian than a technologist nowadays. For instance, Cerf was a guest of honor at the White House's New Year's Eve gala, appeared with the president and first lady at an October 1999 White House 'Millennium Evening' lecture, and joined the president and vice president at a July 1997 event to introduce administration policy proposals."

Well, technologists do have a right to their political leanings, don't they? But the defense of Gore currently underway feels to me less like a party-line effort than like the repayment of a debt of gratitude by Internet pioneers who feel that Gore is being unfairly smeared.

That's what you'll hear from Phillip Hallam-Baker, a former member of the CERN Web development team that created the basic structure of the World Wide Web. Hallam-Baker calls the campaign to tar Gore as a delusional Internet inventor "a calculated piece of political propaganda to deny Gore credit for what is probably his biggest achievement."

"In the early days of the Web," says Hallam-Baker, who was there, "he was a believer, not after the fact when our success was already established -- he gave us help when it counted. He got us the funding to set up at MIT after we got kicked out of CERN for being too successful. He also personally saw to it that the entire federal government set up Web sites. Before the White House site went online, he would show the prototype to each agency director who came into his office. At the end he would click on the link to their agency site. If it returned 'Not Found' the said director got a powerful message that he better have a Web site before he next saw the veep."

That sounds like a pretty good description of the kind of "initiative" Gore claimed credit for in the first place. So the next time you hear an "Al Gore, Internet inventor" joke, think about the strange twisted path a politician's words can take in other people's hands -- and be glad we can use the Internet to try to straighten it out.


salon.com | Oct. 5, 2000
on Feb 07, 2007
During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet


"Still" bs!

1962
RAND Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation (a government agency), was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to do a study on how it could maintain its command and control over its missiles and bombers, after a nuclear attack. This was to be a military research network that could survive a nuclear strike, decentralized so that if any locations (cities) in the U.S. were attacked, the military could still have control of nuclear arms for a counter-attack.


NONE of these dates even comes close to what the lying sack says! Maybe you should go read this: Link


Previously, he had served in the United States House of Representatives (1977-85) and the United States Senate (1985-93)
on Feb 07, 2007
tell ya what miler,,,go watch the oscar nominated "inconvenient truth" that features nobel prize nominee al gore and get back to me. this is gettin boring goin round and round with ya



And as far as this goes , read this:


Warming Hype: 'Will Billions Die?' and
'Could Destroy Earth?'

The networks on Wednesday, without any sense of any questions about the media-fueled scientific "consensus," continued their hyperbolic panic over the supposed dire threat of global warming. ABC's Good Morning America displayed this on-screen throughout a report from weather reader Sam Champion: "Will Billions Die from Global Warming?" Champion eagerly relayed how the upcoming report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) "will estimate that between 1.1 and 3.2 billion people will suffer from water shortage problems by 2080. That's not your grandchildren, that's your children. And between 200 million and 600 million more people will be going hungry." The IPCC's site: www.ipcc.ch

Over on NBC's Today, co-host Matt Lauer warned of "a controversy in Washington over what literally could be the end of the world as we know it. Did the Bush administration freeze out scientists trying to sound the alarm on global warming?"

CNN's Larry King Live on Wednesday night featured a panel under the on-screen heading: "Could Global Warming Destroy Earth?" Though the panel was dominated by left-wingers who endorse Al Gore's calls for drastic government action to curb human-caused warming, CNN, unlike the other networks, included one scientist, Robert Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences at MIT, who doesn't buy into the "consensus." Last July, he penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, "Don't Believe the Hype: Al Gore is wrong. There's no 'consensus' on global warming." An excerpt:

....Mr. Gore's preferred global-warming template -- namely, shrill alarmism. To believe it requires that one ignore the truly inconvenient facts. To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that country, which is depicted so ominously in Mr. Gore's movie. In the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or alarming.

They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why....

A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse. Regardless, these items are clearly not issues over which debate is ended -- at least not in terms of the actual science.

A clearer claim as to what debate has ended is provided by the environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook. He concludes that the scientific community now agrees that significant warming is occurring, and that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system. This is still a most peculiar claim. At some level, it has never been widely contested. Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.

There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas -- albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause for alarm rests on this issue, there has been an intense effort to claim that the theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide has actually been detected.

Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the infamous "summary for policy makers" reported ambiguously that "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto....

Even more recently, the Climate Change Science Program, the Bush administration's coordinating agency for global-warming research, declared it had found "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system." This, for Mr. Easterbrook, meant: "Case closed." What exactly was this evidence? The models imply that greenhouse warming should impact atmospheric temperatures more than surface temperatures, and yet satellite data showed no warming in the atmosphere since 1979. The report showed that selective corrections to the atmospheric data could lead to some warming, thus reducing the conflict between observations and models descriptions of what greenhouse warming should look like. That, to me, means the case is still very much open.

So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest at least three points.

First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists -- especially those outside the area of climate dynamics. Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade.

Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may have farce -- if we're lucky.
on Feb 07, 2007
During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet


"Still" bs!


I think that is what you said he said. And it is still BS. But I guess newbies dont know how the Internet came about anyway. But then they think "An Inconvient Truth" is factual as well.
on Feb 07, 2007
I think that is what you said he said. And it is still BS. But I guess newbies dont know how the Internet came about anyway. But then they think "An Inconvient Truth" is factual as well.


keep jawin with no facts...it's transparent son.
on Feb 07, 2007
think that is what you said he said. And it is still BS. But I guess newbies dont know how the Internet came about anyway. But then they think "An Inconvient Truth" is factual as well.


keep jawin with no facts...it's transparent son.


The "facts" are high-lighted above I suggest you read them. And "you" are the one that said he had a hand in it. I refer you to reply #53 . And it's still bs.

During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet.


YOUR post not ours.
on Feb 08, 2007
YOUR post not ours.


yes, and that is exactly what the facts show...and he never said "i invented the internet" as you bogusly claim. your point?
on Feb 08, 2007
Gore never claimed to have "invented" the Internet. What he said was:

During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet.


These are "your" words not mine. Al Gore had absolutely NOTHING to do with the thought processes that went into the internet. Actually he has had nopthing to do with the internet at all, except use it. And I repeat once again go read your own reply #53.
on Feb 08, 2007
Actually he has had nopthing to do with the internet at all, except use it. And I repeat once again go read your own reply #53.


i did, and you are dead wrong...keep diggin miler!

McCullagh, who is outspoken in his libertarian views, argues that, though he didn't use the word "invent," it is "a not entirely unreasonable paraphrase of the vice president's remarks," and suggests that the pro-Gore comments from Cerf may have a partisan basis: "I'm a big fan of Vint Cerf, and I think he's an able defender of the vice president, but let's put his defense of the vice president in context. Cerf is an executive at a large telecommunications company, and I suspect he acts more like a Washingtonian than a technologist nowadays. For instance, Cerf was a guest of honor at the White House's New Year's Eve gala, appeared with the president and first lady at an October 1999 White House 'Millennium Evening' lecture, and joined the president and vice president at a July 1997 event to introduce administration policy proposals."

Well, technologists do have a right to their political leanings, don't they? But the defense of Gore currently underway feels to me less like a party-line effort than like the repayment of a debt of gratitude by Internet pioneers who feel that Gore is being unfairly smeared.

That's what you'll hear from Phillip Hallam-Baker, a former member of the CERN Web development team that created the basic structure of the World Wide Web. Hallam-Baker calls the campaign to tar Gore as a delusional Internet inventor "a calculated piece of political propaganda to deny Gore credit for what is probably his biggest achievement."

"In the early days of the Web," says Hallam-Baker, who was there, "he was a believer, not after the fact when our success was already established -- he gave us help when it counted. He got us the funding to set up at MIT after we got kicked out of CERN for being too successful. He also personally saw to it that the entire federal government set up Web sites. Before the White House site went online, he would show the prototype to each agency director who came into his office. At the end he would click on the link to their agency site. If it returned 'Not Found' the said director got a powerful message that he better have a Web site before he next saw the veep."

That sounds like a pretty good description of the kind of "initiative" Gore claimed credit for in the first place. So the next time you hear an "Al Gore, Internet inventor" joke, think about the strange twisted path a politician's words can take in other people's hands -- and be glad we can use the Internet to try to straighten it out.

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