Will the left of the party finally pull a Manchin? The bill probably gets enough republicans for it to not work
Y tho? They have a follow-up bill that jams their goodies through budget reconciliation. This might seem like the cherry on top of the cake but it's really the icing to cover up the joyless and bland vegan (not vegan) gluten free (with a smidge of rationed gluten) batter. If these ****in dummies want to stunt, bring in the votes and people to Washington in order to back it up.
Great move by the Senate and good job by members of both parties. Really hope the House can also act bipartisanly and get this passed. This will be a huge win for the country.
https://theconversation.com/us-hist...-infrastructure-doesnt-always-end-well-165653 US history shows spending on infrastructure doesn't always end well by Richard White, Professor of American History, Stanford University Constructing barge canals took a massive investment that didn't pay off. New York State Archives Over the past two centuries, federal, state and municipal governments across the U.S. have launched wave after wave of infrastructure projects. They built canals to move freight in the 1830s and 1840s. Governments subsidized railroads in the mid- and late 19th century. They created local sewage and water systems in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and then dams and irrigation systems through much of the 20th century. During World War II, massive amounts of public money were spent building and expanding ports, factories, airfields and shipyards. And after the war, highway construction – long a state and local project – became a federal endeavor. Many of these projects did not end well. The problem wasn’t that the country didn’t need infrastructure – it did. And the troubles weren’t the result of technical failures: By and large, Americans successfully built what they intended, and much of what they built still stands. The real problems arose before anyone lifted a shovel of earth or raised a hammer. These problems stem from how hard it is to think ahead, and they are easy to ignore in the face of excitement about new spending, new construction and increased employment. Politicians, business executives and labor leaders like to talk about the benefits of infrastructure work – but they often don’t think about the potential detriments. AP Photo/Andrew Harnik The questions about which massive structures to build, and where, are actually very hard to answer. Infrastructure is always about the future: It takes years to construct, and lasts for years beyond that. The money invested in roads, railroads, airports and dams cannot be repurposed, and what is built requires large future expenditures for upkeep. If the infrastructure isn’t needed, then we throw good money after bad. Railroads, like this one built in Georgia in the 1890s, rapidly overtook canals as a means of getting goods and people around the country. Library of Congress Overbuilding Obsolescence isn’t the worst of the potential problems that can come from infrastructure spending. Railroads dominated the 19th century, but the U.S. built too many of them, particularly into the lightly populated West. I spent a whole book discussing the many ways in which that work, lauded now as a great success of government funding for private infrastructure, was in fact a costly and wasteful failure. The costs began with the bankruptcies and repeated regional and national economic crises that 19th-century Americans referred to as “railroad depressions.” Infrastructure is intended to promote development, and it will. But that can be a problem. There is such a thing as dumb growth, like the development that swamped 19th-century markets with wheat, timber and minerals that they could not absorb. The result was numerous business failures and the abandonment of whole geographic areas when the economy went bust, as during the Dust Bowl. The economic damage the overbuilding of railroads yielded paled before the environmental damage wrought by the mining, clear-cutting and large-scale agriculture they encouraged. And this points to another problem. An 1892 map of railroads across the U.S. shows an interlinked web of routes all over the continent. Library of Congress more
conclusion Delayed costs People tend to disregard the long-term costs of the plans they make, particularly if they reap the benefits and others pay the costs. In the early 20th century, municipal water and sewage projects were great successes. They probably had more to do with reducing disease than medical advances did. They made modern cities livable. But they inflicted costs on others. Los Angeles became Los Angeles by draining water away from the Owens Valley, draining a lake and reducing farmland to desert. San Francisco became San Francisco by flooding the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which naturalist John Muir once called “a wonderfully exact counterpart of the great Yosemite.” The results may have been worth the price, but it is useful to recognize that there was a price – one that continues to be paid. When launched, new infrastructure seems to be a list of benefits. In the mid-20th century, enthusiasts for hydroelectricity and irrigation saw all sorts of advantages as the government dammed Western rivers and irrigated Western lands. But many of these lands needed unreasonable amounts of irrigation to yield the desired crops. Dams utterly changed the nature of rivers and hurt the iconic species of the Pacific West, particularly salmon. It might have been helpful for builders to have had a little less faith that future technologies would correct the problems they foresaw. Building dams, such as the Grand Coulee on the Columbia River in Washington, provided hydroelectric power and irrigation water but damaged the environment.Library of Congress Perhaps the greatest federal infrastructure system of the late 20th century is the interstate highway system. It changed the spatial arrangement of the nation and how Americans moved. It capitalized on the American car culture, until the interstates became crowded around cities they maimed and people confronted climate change, to which the cars on those interstates contribute so significantly. In promoting infrastructure, politicians will tout jobs, economic growth and a whole array of conveniences and benefits. Citizens should be more sophisticated. They should ask who – particularly which corporations and developers – are going to benefit from these projects. They should look beyond the price tag to the social and environmental costs. Building canals for a railroad age proved a great mistake. But climate change makes building an infrastructure for a carbon economy a far more dangerous endeavor. Richard White does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Again, I ask you your conclusion or opinion on this. Are you now an environmentalist? Do you believe in man made climate change and think we should do something about it like the author does?
related: https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2021/08/would-extinction-be-so-bad 10 AUGUST 2021 Would extinction be so bad? Given the amount of suffering on Earth, the value of the continued existence of the planet is an open question. BY ROGER CRISP In recent decades it has often been said that we are living at the “hinge of history”, an unprecedented period during which a catastrophic event such as rapid climate change, nuclear war or the release of a synthesised pathogen may bring an end to human and perhaps all sentient life on the planet. Most people think that such extinction would be bad, in fact one of the worst things that could happen. It’s plausible that the process leading to various forms of extinction, and extinction itself, would be bad for many of us, given that our lives are, overall, good for us and that, all else being equal, the longer they are the better. But it’s also plausible that extinction would be good for some individuals – those in the final stages of an agonising terminal illness, for example, whose pain can no longer be controlled by drugs. This means one key factor in judging the overall value of non-extinction will involve weighing these disparate interests against each other. How might we do that? Let’s focus on sudden extinction. Imagine that some huge asteroid is heading to earth, which if it hits will remove any possibility of life on Earth. If you have the power to deflect it, should you do so, from a moral point of view? If extinction would be bad for all sentient beings, both now and in the future, the answer “yes” seems hard to argue with. But, as we just saw, that’s not the case. Consider the huge amount of suffering that continuing existence will bring with it, not only for humans, and perhaps even for “post-humans”, but also for sentient non-humans, who vastly outnumber us and almost certainly would continue to do so. As far as humans alone are concerned, Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill at the University of Oxford’s Global Priorities Institute estimate that there could be one quadrillion (1015) people to come – an estimate they describe as conservative. These numbers, and the scale of suffering to be put into the balance alongside the good elements in individuals’ lives, are difficult to fathom and so large that it’s not obvious that you should deflect the asteroid. In fact, there seem to be some reasons to think you shouldn’t. How can we make comparisons like these? CI Lewis, a leading Harvard philosopher in the mid-20th century, offered an intriguing thought-experiment. To judge the value of some outcome, you have to imagine yourself going through the relevant experiences. Usually when we think about extinction, because we are not in great pain, we focus on the good things we’ll miss. But if God were to offer you the choice of living through all the painful and pleasurable experiences that will ever occur without extinction, would you jump at the opportunity? I have to say I wouldn’t. There are, of course, many other ways of measuring value, more technical and precise than Lewis’s thought experiment. Most of them assume that values can be compared against one another on a continuous scale. Imagine that you want the pleasure of being admired on the beach for your impressive tattoo. But getting it will hurt. So you balance the pleasure against the pain, and decide to go ahead only if the first outweighs the second. But perhaps there are discontinuities in value. John Stuart Mill, for example, used to claim that some pleasures – such as enjoying some great work of art – are “higher” than others, in the sense that no amount of “lower” pleasure – such as that of eating peanuts – could equal the higher pleasure in overall value. Likewise, some pains might seem discontinuous in value with others. Imagine that the Devil offers you a choice between a year of the most appalling agony imaginable, and some period with a barely perceptible headache. Some would take the second option, however long the headache lasted, perhaps even if it were to last for eternity. Since we are considering whether extinction might be better than continuing to exist, the question arises whether some pains could be so great that they outweigh any number of pleasures and other goods. To avoid the worries that arise from imagining large numbers, consider just one kind of pain, undoubtedly among the worst that any sentient being could experience: that of torture by electric shock. One recent victim of such torture described it as “like they are breaking every bone of every joint in your body at the same time”. Along with the sheer physical agony of such torture go many emotional horrors: dread, terror, panic, humiliation, degradation, despair. Now consider some relatively short period of such torture – an hour, say – and return to CI Lewis’s thought-experiment. Imagine a choice between, on the one hand, the non-existence of immediate extinction and, on the other, an hour of electric shock torture followed by some period of pleasure and other goods. What would you choose? Not (I hope) having been tortured, you might want to ask one of its victims just how bad it is. Unfortunately, it is common for such victims to say that it is impossible to convey this badness. Jacobo Timerman, for example, who was tortured in Argentina, said: “In the long months of confinement, I often thought of how to transmit the pain that a tortured person undergoes. And always I concluded that it was impossible. It is a pain without points of reference, revelatory symbols, or clues to serve as indicators.” Another problem is that it appears to be hard to remember the true nature of agony. Harriet Martineau, who suffered terribly throughout her life from a uterine tumour, once said during a period of remission: “Where are these pains now? – Not only gone, but annihilated. They are destroyed so utterly, that even memory can lay no hold upon them.” Perhaps one reason we think extinction would be so bad is that we have failed to recognise just how awful extreme agony is. Nevertheless, we have enough evidence, and imaginative capacity, to say that it is not unreasonable to see the pain of an hour of torture as something that can never be counterbalanced by any amount of positive value. And if this view is correct, then it suggests that the best outcome would be the immediate extinction that follows from allowing an asteroid to hit our planet. more
conclusion Of course, allowing an asteroid to hit the Earth would probably be bad for you and those close to you. But given what’s at stake, it may well be that you should pay these costs to prevent all the suffering. As the philosopher Bernard Williams once said: “If for a moment we got anything like an adequate idea of [the suffering in the world] … and we really guided our actions by it, then surely we would annihilate the planet if we could.” The question of whether extinction would be good or bad overall is obviously very important, especially in the face of potential catastrophic events at the hinge of history. But this question is also very difficult to answer. Ultimately, I am not claiming that extinction would be good; only that, since it might be, we should devote a lot more attention to thinking about the value of extinction than we have to date. Roger Crisp is Uehiro Fellow in philosophy at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and professor of moral philosophy at the University of Oxford. He is the author of "Mill on Utilitarianism", "Reasons and the Good", "The Cosmos of Duty: Henry Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics", and "Sacrifice Regained: Morality and Self-interest in British Moral Philosophy from Hobbes to Bentham”.
You still haven't answered my question. Do you believe we have an impact to the climate and do you give enough of a **** about the environment as it pertains to human existence, present and future, to think we should change our current course?
I wish an infrastructure bill could just be about infrastructure, and not a grab-bag of several things. Not that I'm opposed to free community college (especially living so close to a Lone Star campus - congrats, kids of mine, this is what you'll be doing for the first 2 years of college!) but I just wish things didn't operate the way they do.
It's unfortunate, but it is what it is. I wish they could throw in $10k of student loan forgiveness. I have $2k remaining. Since I don't qualify for any of the stimulus or child credits, etc that they are handing out, I would like to at least see my student loan forgiven .
what laws do you have in mind? you realize this is an incredibly complex area of policy, with an enormous amount of uncertainty about virtually all aspects of the topic?
I'm going to turn this around. Which laws and regulations do you agree with and which laws and regulations do you you not agree with. You literally post everyday, and I have no idea where you stand on any issue other than being anti-liberal and anti-democrat.
you seem to feel entitled to make demands of me to respond. where does that entitlement come from? and since you infer from my posting history that I am "anti-liberal and anti-democrat" I can only conclude that even if I were to write anything in response to you, you would simply misread what I wrote and continue making faulty inferences about me. So why should I waste my time? serious question
Because you waste our time everyday with articles and links to other peoples opinions without stating your own. The only stance I've seen you make in the last few months is that you need a big truck to go camping and to pull your tiny boat.
