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November 05, 2018 06:58 AM UTC

Monday Open Thread

  • 72 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.”

–Desmond Tutu

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72 thoughts on “Monday Open Thread”

  1. To "Mansplain", defined:

    mansplain

    verb

    [with object]informal

    • (of a man) explain (something) to someone, typically a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing.

      ‘I'm listening to a guy mansplain economics to his wife’

    •  

      ‘Apparently you can't sell a second-hand car for as much as a new one. So glad he mansplained that to me’

    • ‘Don't mansplain female sexuality.’
    • ‘Where are we going to find someone to mansplain heterosexual lit?’

    I'm perfectly capable of asking for explanation on things I don't understand well, and I often do. "Explaining" something I just commented about at length, and adding that I must be stupid or dishonest because I don't agree with the mansplainer, is sexist and it should be identified as such.

    Most people on here are "gender-neutral". I do have a sockpuppet on here that is male-identified. "He" doesn't post much, but when he does, he is typically not condescended to.

    2. In the case in question, you claimed that claims that Stalinist 112 would cost 46,000 jobs were impos sible because you only found 31,000 listed under that category .

      that was a foolish claim because it ignores the well documented "multiplier effect" where a primary job that brings new money into an economy generates other jobs as that money circulates through the economy.  That can range from 3 to 6 times th e original number.  Because oil and gas jobs are high paying, they have fairly high multiplier effects.

      I have a master's degree in labor economics.  You have a ba in Men are no damn good.   This is a question of economics, especially labor economics.  My academic background clearly gave me a better understanding of the issue than yours did.

      I have every right to correct your ignorant mistake.  Which you made in several posts.

      You have every right to bellow that men are no damn good and their opinions are worthless, which you just did, again.

      But I can make fun of you every time you do.

      Which I just did.

      Tee hee.

      1. Interesting to learn about VG's academic background. However, multipliers can be used to support just about any outcome desired by a particular viewpoint. As an example, Garfield County is a heavy oil & gas producing county. It is also a county with a heavy presence of outdoor recreation, including a downhill ski area (Ski Sunlight). How does one equate these various multipliers? How does one link Garfield to the heavy outdoor recreation effect in neighboring Pitkin & Eagle Counties?

        I'm reminded of a discussion back in the 1990s when advocates of public lands grazing tried to build a case that grazing was the main economic support for small towns on the Western Slope, via use of multipliers. Turned out that the opposite was the truth. The small towns supported the grazing industry because of being sources for ranchers to take second jobs.

        1. Indeed, if prop 112 creates more clean land, air, and water, which it will because oil and gas are enormously destructive to the environment, it could create more jobs in public recreation! It could also likely spur investment in renewables, which could also create new jobs.

          1. deadpigeon, if you're in Longmont and want to volunteer to help GOTV today for prop 112, here's a link to sign up:

            Edit: I took the sign up link down as it had specific names of activists on it, and many of them have already received hate mail and death threats.

            So here’s a different link for colorado rising.https://corising.org/rides/. You can still link up with a local group through that link.

            If anyone wants to email me at noshes93193@mypacks.net, I’ll write back with the specific sign up info.

            The sign up link works for anyone anywhere in Colorado where there’s a colorado rising group.

            I’m taking the day off to GOTV in Morgan County, myself. We might not make the County blue, but it will definitely be a deeper shade of purple!

            Colorado Rising activists are really good people – you probably already know some of them. Have fun!

        2. You have to be careful about multipliers but they do exist.  They are very high for oil and and gas, which have very high paying jobs .  Very low for MJ's beloved tourism industry.  All those minimum wage maid's jobs are just a ?drain on the taxpayers.

          1. I mean, I suppose that the oil and gas industry has great multipliers in the healthcare industry, what with all the people who's health they wreck. Plus, with all the climate refugees it creates, it'll surely create lots of excellent multipliers in the housing industry!

              1. I don't own a car. Even if I wanted one, I can't afford it b/c, unlike you, I'm a poor renter who works minimum wage jobs where my limp and my anxiety allows. And I don't want to die from the global ecocidal crisis that's currently underway, which both drilling for oil through the direct impact it has on poisoning the environment around the drill site and burning oil through the pollution it emits, contribute to.

                1. Well, good for you on the car front, anyway.

                  but don't worry about dying from eco collapse.  Those Honduran death squads marching on our border will kill you long before climate change does.

                  Yeesh, haven't you learned ANYTHING watching Fox?

                    1. In this case, it's a joke.  I'd like to watch Fox.  But I'm retired and medicare won't pay for the frontal lobotomy required to appreciate their programming.

                    2. VG: you may want to do a little research before mouthing off about MJ's "low paying maid jobs in the tourism industry." There is big money in outdoor recreation, which actually is a bit different from general tourism.

                      Start with the web site of the Outdoor Industry Association. You can look up Colorado's details.

                      http://www.outdoorindustry.org

                    3. Any industry that depends on illegal aliens as employees because they can be cheated out of even the minimum wage kind of does its research for me, chb.  But, yeah, I don't mean the river rafters.  

                      As to backpackers in wilderness areas, locals have a saying:

                       "They arrive with a $20 bill and two pairs of underpants.  And they haven't changed either when they leave two weeks later."

                    4. Ok, but the jobs impact of tourism is kinda irrelevant. The jobs impact of oil drilling is, in the long term, incredibly negative as climate change leads to mass death. We can't have a healthy economy where people have jobs if we're dead because of climate change. However many jobs you get from tourism or whatever is more than that.

                2. WARNING! This is not a safe space for anyone with a compromised mental state, especially anxiety. Everyone here is unstable and nothing you read is reality or to be believed. You have been warned. I don’t want to hear some lame bus rider murdered people b/c people were mean to him on Colorado Pols.

    2. Magellan Strategies is up with their analysis as of "Colorado 2018 Returned Ballot Voter Demographic Report as of November 4, 2018 Comparison to Equivalent Date in 2014".  The summary:

      As of this morning we are now over 1.5 million ballots returned, with a total of 1,508,764. Here are the key observations:

      • 43,600 fewer Republicans have returned their ballot than at this same point in 2014. This low turnout holds in most of the top twelve counties in Colorado, the only exception being Weld County.
      • Democrats now have a nearly 5,000 vote lead over Republicans heading into the last two days of the cycle, with a total of 517,441 ballots returned. Clearly, Democrats are voting earlier than they did in 2014, and this trend holds for most of the top twelve counties in Colorado, with the exception of Pueblo.
      • Perhaps most significant, Unaffiliated voters remain well ahead of their 2014 pace. Their 478,616 ballots returned is 107,109 higher than at this same point in 2014. Of those, 197,417 voted in this year’s primary elections, with 62% voting in the Democratic Primary and 38% voting in the Republican Primary.

        1. Likely most of them were unaffiliated four years ago. Midterms normally have notoriously low turnout with Republicans having relatively high turnout during midterms. But this year looks to be much more than normal and with abnormal voter composition for midterms. So this is more likely people who were always unaffiliated turning out in greater numbers than they normally do for midterms.

          1. You still haven't explained why you hate pigeons!

            Actually, I'm fine with your support of Stalinist112.  You waited so late to voice it that everyone on this blog had returned their ballot long before read ing your strange theory that confiscating my mineral rights wasn't confiscation because you don't know what the word "confiscation" means.

            But, seriously, why do you hate pigeons?

                  1. Out of curiosity, Deathpigeon, are you vegan?  Eating meat, especially beef, is very destructive to the environment.  My wife and I are mostly vegan, plants and a few fish.  Admittedly, in our case, we're vegan for health reasons, not ethical ones.

                    If you are, let's get together at city o'city some day.  Great food.  I'll pay — that minimum wage thing is hard.  I have a modest pension in my old age, thsnks to my union.

                    1. I'm currently vegetarian, but I would be vegan already if milk alternatives were cheaper.

                      I'm not sure the next time I'll be able to make it down to Denver, it's, like, a two and a half hour bus ride, but I'll keep this in mind.

                    2. Where do you live? 

                      . Maybe I can come up there. I don’t drive much but still have my faithful 1987 Ford F-250 that I brought in from the farm when my dad died.

                    4. I have in laws in longmont.  It's an easy run for my truck, but, yeah, a pain by bus.  If you're game, let's try for a meet up after the election.  Boulder County has some fine vegetarian restaurants.  

          2. In fairness to V, he's an equal-opportunity condescender. He'll insult you , whatever gender you claim, should you have the temerity to disagree with his lofty pronouncements.  – checking in at lunch – carry on.

            1. Now, why would I condesend to somebody who, when I catch her in a huge mistake like assuming that an industry with 31,000 direct jobs would not genera te thousands more through the well documented multiplier effect, becomes enraged and says "You're a man and your views are therefore worthless."

              yeah, that is what " mansplaining" means.

              it is a sexist, bigoted term.  Used by sexist, bigoted, people.

              who are gluttons for punishment.

              Mj has actually been on fairly good behaviour for months.  Her hatred of the thousands of good men and women in the oil and gas industry that cooks her food, heats her home and runs her car just got the better of her.

              on the positive side, she spent so much time bellowing for Stalinist 112  that she was virtually mute on tax increase 73.

              Did you even vote for it, MJ?  Or did Sudafed convince you it was regressive?

              1. You'd be shocked at how tiny a blip your opinion of me and my "good behavior" makes on my radar.

                That includes your absurd predictions about what I think, feel and want. Hell, your reading comprehension can't even take in what I write – so nobody should be surprised that your mind reading powers (about what I don't write) suck.

                Anyhoo, I'm freaking busy. With school and election /GOTV and family stuff, not to mention the odd social engagement, I'm way too busy to do more than occasionally snort and snicker at your posturing and bad mind reading. 

                Sunday was an exception – I was texting bajillions of sporadically voting millenials, so got on here for a change of pace. But hopefully, all of that will pay off TOMORROW!!!!

                 

                Blue Wave GIF from Blue GIFs

                 

                2. The Center for Contradictory Eructations says that is the 143rd time MJ has posted a long, bitter, fusilade noting that she does not care one whit about Voyageur's opinion, so there.

                  They say that with seven more posts claiming to ignore me, she will win some sort of prize.

                  Well, everybody needs  a dream.

                  Tee hee.

                   

                   

              1. I wonder if VG would be as condescending if he didn't have relatives working in the oil & gas industry?

                Ran out of Reply buttons above. Too bad that you think the outdoor recreation industry in Colorado hires illegal aliens so they can be cheated out of their minimum wages; and also is composed in part of cheap and smelly backpackers. Guess you don't care that outdoor recreation is a multi-billion industry in the state that generates thousands of well-paying jobs. Your ignorance and unwillingness to remedy same becomes your problem. To quote the orange haired Russian tool in the White House: sad.

                1. So, all those roundups of illegal aliens never happened?  I must have imagined them.  And I'm sure the lady I called La Criada was just a dark skinned Norwegian who learned Spanish for the fun of it!

    1. In this way, the 2016 election was both cause and consequence of the moment in which it happened. Obama’s presidency, the shrinking political power of white America, the further sorting of the political parties by racial attitudes, the rise in the percentage of foreign-born residents, the changes in the culture — all of it created a sense of threat for those who liked America the way it was and a sense of possibility for those who were excited by the more diverse country it was becoming. 

      But for those to become central identities at play in the 2016 election required candidates who wanted those to be the central identities at play in the 2016 election. If the primary had ended with Bernie Sanders facing down Jeb Bush, the key identities would have been economic — Bush would’ve run against Sanders’s socialism; Sanders would’ve run against Bush’s plutocracy. 

      But the matchup we got wasn’t random. Trump won the Republican primary because Republican voters resonated to his anti-immigration message rather than Bush’s promise of lower taxes. There was a market for a candidate like him, and he took advantage of it. History would be different if he’d never descended that escalator, but, eventually, someone would’ve come in and given the Republican Party the nativist candidate the base wanted rather than the anti-tax Republicans the party kept offering up. 

      Similarly, Clinton lost the Democratic primary in 2008 and won it in 2016 because the Democratic electorate was substantially less white than had been true a generation ago. She’s often criticized for overemphasizing so-called “identity issues” (again, using that narrower, weaker definition), but that reflected the issue priorities and political incentives of the Democratic electorate as it exists, not just a strategic choice on her part.

      1. Nor are these dynamics limited to 2016. We’re now on the cusp of a midterm in which the central issue of the final weeks is a slow-moving caravan of mostly Honduran refugees who intend to legally ask for asylum when they make it to our border, whenever that is. In any traditional model of politics, this is a bizarre issue to have dominating a midterm. But it makes sense under the Identity Crisis model. 

        The emphasis on the caravan reflects Trump’s political choices, of course, but it also reflects the fact that the Republican Party is increasingly organized around a defensive version of white identity politics: anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim (hence Trump’s repeated, evidence-free assertion that there may be Middle Easterners in the caravan), and a whole lot more interested in protecting its numbers and borders than celebrating tax cuts.

        1. The progress we've made on climate change is mostly because gas, with less than half the C02 output per btu than coal, has mostly replaced coal.  The granola technologies, solar andvwind, are far too intermittent to totally take over the day.  Sadly, the best answer, nuclear, is shut out by hysteria. 

          Eventually, storage improvements m ay put wind over the top.  Solar is still environmentally very dirty to manufacture.  

          natural gas is the vital bridge technology to the future at least in electrical generation.  

          Sorry about sloppy typing.  My amazon fire is very buggy.

          Above is to deathpigeon. It popped up here when I filed.

          1. Is Solar more or less dirty to manufacture than coal, oil & gas?

            V-boy, You need to update your knowledge base regarding the expense and availability of solar, wind and storage. I suggest reviewing the renewable energy reporting at vox.com . 

            We could start by getting rid of the subsidies on C, O & G. Of course that includes military operations in the Middle East. Speaking of expensive subsidies, What are the latest costs of the unending wars in Iraq & Afghanistan?

            Level the playing field, and the high-tech technologies of Wind, Solar and Storage are as cheap than the "legacy" dirty technologies. 

            1. According to recent Xcel filings, it's now cheaper to buy wind/solar than to operate existing coal plants. 

              Sorry, no links, but it's easy enough to find. Or ask Bowman.

              1. Intermittency is no where near the issue it was a decade ago.  As we've increased the penetration of wind and solar into the grid the reliability factor has gone up.  Even in CO we've seen something over 60% of the Xcel grid supplied by wind in the morning hours when when is at a peak and demand is low.  

                Storage has gotten cheap, and it's getting cheaper. Since 2010, the cost of lithium-ion batteries has fallen by 80%. It's estimated that costs will continue to drop by an additional 66% by 2030, against a 2017 baseline.   

                Natural gas has been a bridge (the bridge may be shorter than we first thought), and often touted as 'clean'.  That's only true if, in the life-cycle of the gas, we've captured the methane leaks at the well-head.  It doesn't do any good to move to natural gas and then have Front Range ozone levels in the stratosphere (that's a common occurrence).  Coal has gotten away for decades claiming 'cheap', but that's only because the utilities don't have to recognize the negative externalities from combustion (which is something north of 16 cents/kwH). 

                With the last decade as our guide, we can easily achieve 100% in the next decade-plus.  

                Funny how the folks who think we can safely store nuclear waste for tens, even hundreds-of-thousands, of years think we can't solve overnight electric storage issues.   I'm not necessarily anti-nuke but there are way too many good options that are cheaper and don't require John Q. Public to be liable for an unforeseen disaster.  The upside? Rural Colorado/America can become energy producers. 

                 

            2. Solar is quite dirty but the damage is mostly limited to china.  Would it be as dirty if manufactured in a more environ!entally conscious country?  Probably not.  But it would cost mor e.

              wind now, that's clean and cheap.

              Ps by dirty solar, I mean the panels produced with toxic chemicals for electrical generation. The passive stuff, hot water, etc. Is clean, simple and great. It does usuallyvrequire backup for blizzards, etc.

          2. Nuclear isn't the obvious answer, V. There's the waste problem, still unsolved after all these years. Then there's water. Nuke plants need lots of it so that rules out a goodly large part of the country. Siting them where hurricanes and tornadoes regularly blow through won't work, either.

            So where?

            1. I've long been opposed to Nuclear for all the obvious reasons, of which cost is certainly a big one.

              For the sake of climate change, I would be willing to compromise on that. But frankly, I don't trust any of the big energy industries – if you give them an inch they take a mile.

            2. Very little of that water is consumed, gertie, it just flows on about 5 degrees warmer than it entered.  As to the waste  problem, the uber left does its best to destroy safe effective sites like Yucca mountain and then says you can't use nukes because there are no safe, effective, sites.  In short, kill your parents, then ask for mercy from the court because you are an orphan.  Sigh.

              1. You have to have abundant water available in the first place, V. That's a problem in the West. As for Yucca Mountain, Nevadans of all persuasions think it's a bad idea. Apparently being the nation's dump doesn't appeal to them. You didn't address the siting problems in other parts of the country about hurricanes and tornadoes. Flooding, too, can be a problem in some locales. I'm not a nuclear opponent per se, but it doesn't seem practical.

                 

                1. Nuclear power is sort of a litmus test to sort out people really concerned about climate change and those just hoping to use the crisis to take society back to a sort of pre industrial age.  France has proven how effective and safe it can be.

                  Here, there are too many who say Jane Fonda made a movie about it and that settles it.  It doesn't.

                  But facts is facts.  Nuclear energy is the environmentally most benign source of  24/7 baseline energy.  Intermittents like solar and wind are best suited for peaking power at least until storage technology matures.  While hemp actually shows real promise on storage, that problem is far from being solved.

                   

                    1. Right? And skewer any community members that object as "Those who want to over-regulate to take away your freedom and jobs!"

                    2. Oh, if it’s gridlock you want, you're on the right track.

                      the left blocks nuclear because, you know, Jane Fonda made a movie.

                      The right blocks wind and solar because, you know, Obama was from Kenya and Clean Coal is a Trump thing.

                      clean coal doesn't actually exist.

                      natural gas is all that's left.  So, get out your water wings, the ocean is rising.

                       

                  2. Nuclear energy is a litmus test — of confidence in humans to design, build and operate complex machinery for the lifetime of the power plants and for the next 10,000 years or so in storage.

                    It isn't inspiring when the New Mexico storage site WIPP, after only 15 years of operation, had an accident with contamination on site and release of americium-241, plutonium-239 and plutonium-240.  And what defeated the planning?  The base problem:  "The source of contamination was later found to be a barrel that exploded on February 14 because contractors at Los Alamos National Laboratory packed it with organic cat litter instead of clay cat litter."

                    Our Federal Government hasn't yet figured out what would be a large enough incentive to get sufficient support for a permanent depository. We don't know what it would cost to remediate all the sites of mining, to disassemble plants when they reach the end of their productive life, and to store the waste. Without knowing those externalities, saying it is a cost-effective process is a fervent wish. Without even knowing the full risks of existing disasters (Chernobyl, Fukashima), saying it is "benign" is using language beyond what I consider prudent.

                    1. Well, letting the planet melt down from CO2 isn't a great idea either, John.  The Frenc h have shown how effective and safe nuclear power can be when you standardize the designs.  And France is the only major industrial nation now meeting the carbon standards necessary to avert disaster.

                       

            3. I'm guessing that many Coloradans simply don't know about the nuclear waste problems we have (and have had) in our state. One example: There's a contaminated site just south of Cañon City that's been on the Superfund list since the early 1980's (yep, still not cleaned up). The entirely inappropriate site (in a floodplain upstream from a major river, and built on top of old coal mine tunnels) was used for a uranium mill since the 1950's until it was finally shut down about 7 years ago. It polluted the air, soils, and water, and the pollution likely reached the Arkansas River. 

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