Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Eli Explains It All

ATTP is talking a pause, from blogging that is.  He is depressed by the futility of it all, trying to have a discussion with people, who are blathering from bad faith or ignorance
Here’s maybe the crucial point : if you think what the other person says is absurd, just stop. There’s no way you can have a good faith discussion with someone who you think is talking nonsense.
No one said it better than Barney Frank

 

Still Eli will miss the conversations over there with the likes of Steve Bloom, Pekka and some (not all) of the regulars to be dissed later.

25 comments:

Anonymous said...

It appears Tamino is also taking a break. No posts from him since mid-July.

Anonymous said...

ATTP and Tamino?! Oh noes, the Alarmist Blog Empire is falling apart! This surely must be the final nail...blah blah. You know the rest.

Luckily WUWT is still cranking out posts by the gigatons each day containing a measly 0.04% substance as usual, so who cares anyway?

--cynicus

Anonymous said...

Barney Frank, the criminal. Barney Frank the one who played a major role in causing the housing crash in 2008.

Referencing Barney Frank makes sense for Rubbish Run.

1

Anonymous said...

"Barney Frank the one who played a major role in causing the housing crash in 2008."

I have never heard a dinning room table say anything that stupid, so I have to say that Barney Frank is wrong, you are worse than a dinning room table.

elspi

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

"Luckily WUWT is still cranking out posts by the gigatons each day containing a measly 0.04% substance as usual, so who cares anyway?"

With diligence and application, you too may one day achieve a 2500 to 1 noise-to-signal ratio while depositing 800,000 tons of bullshit daily.

Kevin O'Neill said...

Anon - neither Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac nor the CRA had anything to do with *causing* the economic crash of 2007-8. That can be laid squarely on unregulated financial derivatives along with a rating system that gave trash unsupportably high ratings.

If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had acted like the private entities their losses would have been much worse.

Fernando Leanme said...

" if you think what the other person says is absurd, just stop. There’s no way you can have a good faith discussion with someone who you think is talking nonsense."

I never think the other person is talking nonsense. The key is to understand people don't share the same "realities".

Iraq WMD anyone? What about the Space Shuttle, was it a sensible engineering design? Does offshore wind power work?

Susan Anderson said...

Barney Frank did not cause any financial troubles, he did his best to work against the criminals who did. He is also the perpetrator of my favorite political ad. Have a look:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C72I1Ydf2fc

Kevin O'Neill said...

Anonymous - please learn to read and then perhaps responding to what is written. I realize this takes you off script, you'll just have to learn to think on your feet a little quicker.

What I wrote was, "...neither Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac nor the CRA had anything to do with *causing* the economic crash of 2007-8.

Note: I even emphasized the word 'causing' - emphasis is often a hint to the writer's intent.

Of course the GSE's were part of the fiasco - they backstop a large percentage of the loans. But how many subprime loans did they originate or encourage be originated? None that I know of.

Bryson said...

OK, I'll have a go at this. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were very late to the party. They had lost a lot of market share to the privates, who were handing out mortgages to anyone with a pulse, while loan officers collected big bonuses. A recent fraud case in CA makes things very clear: the bankers didn't care whether people could pay, since their bonuses didn't depend on it, and their models told them the market couldn't collapse since they assumed independence of regional markets. Pinning it on poor people and two lenders who came in late trying to defend market share is just a cute little deception, like some others one encounters from anonymi around here.

Anonymous said...

Frank on his vote resisting regulation of Fannie and Freddie:

"These two entities—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—are not facing any kind of financial crisis," said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. "The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing."

And interestingly:
“even if there were problems, the federal government doesn’t bail them out.’

The CRA did have an influence, if nothing more than the CRA was sweetener for the the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and other acts by Republicans and coincided with the deregulation of Fannie and Freddie lending standards by Democrats.

To really screw things up takes collusion of incompetence by both parties.

There really are 360 degrees of blame on this one.

Anonymous said...

Russel, just to get an idea about the amount of dilligence and application I need to increase, what's the current ratio? BTW, to what amount is is your dilligence working out?

--cynicus

cRR Kampen said...

Bully the bullies, use foul language. Use the morons for your own amusement. Hunt & pester.
This truly gets a life I can assure you.


From Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently (author of ‘The Black Swan’) -

Someone wrote: “Dear Mr Taleb, I like your work but I feel compelled to give you a piece of advice. An intellectual like you would greatly gain in influence if he avoided using foul language.”
Answer: “Fuck off.”

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Cynicus, dust off your abacus and multiply your first quantity , gigatons, ( the plural begins at 2) by your first factor , 0.04%

QED

turboblocke said...

Does offshore wind power work?
In which reality is that even a relevant question? Are you doubting thé laws of physics or just trolling?

Anonymous said...

Does offshore wind power work?

Not if it is in the view of the Kennedy compound.

1

Sloop said...

Annoy. 1:
On September 8 the Dept. of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management issued final approval of Cape Wind’s Construction and Operations Plan.

Cape Wind has already signed a major power purchase agreement with the region’s utility.

There is additional litigation pending initiated yet again by astro turf orgs trying to stop the project but despite their continued funding from wealthy coastal property 1%ers (I’ll grant that Teddie Kennedy may have made some grumblings about visual impacts early on, but the Kennedy family has never been a player in the astro turf opposition.) these groups have exhausted their legal remedies. They will not prevail. All conceivable issues regarding the environmental, viewshed, and human ocean use impacts of the windfarm have already been litigated and reviewed ad nauseum by the courts and federal, state, county (Barnstable; the only country that counts for anything in Mass.), and local authorities.

Sloop said...

Offshore wind power works. Proof:

Have a look at the North Sea off of Germany, UK, Denmark, Netherlands.

European researchers, industry reps, and executive authorities are rapidly identifying how construction and operating costs will start to decline substantially as the technology and its applications mature and scale up.

In addition to Cape Wind, the Block Island Windfarm off of RI will begin construction next year. It did not have to seek federal permits because it will be built in state waters. The BI windfarm is a precursor to a utility scale windfarm that will be built in federal waters off RI that may feed power to both southern New England and Long Island. The BI wind turbine generators will be 5-6 MW units, nearly twice the size of those proposed for Cape Wind

It's taken too long in this country, but it's happening folks and we're likely crossing a threshold beyond which expansion along eastern seaboard could be quite rapid

Sloop said...

I miss Barney Frank. He was honest, brillant, funny, dedicated, eccentric, and ready to compromise with folks across the aisle who weren't just cardboard cutouts inserted into the Capital by Americans for (their own) Prosperity.

Fernando Leanme said...

Here's an incomplete story about offshore wind in Germany. I'm not showing it to you because it lays out the full picture, rather to show you how media stories can feed you information to bias the way you think.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-offshore-wind-industry-goes-from-boom-to-bust-a-914158.html

EliRabett said...

Spiegel has been playing the Pielke-Lomborg bit for a number of years now.

Fernando Leanme said...

Yes Eli, I know Spiegel has a biased editorial line. Most media does. However, there is something in that story they failed to cover because they didn't understand the full system dynamics.

One reason why those wind turbines aren't getting connected is the system's inability to handle the wind power without serious instabilities. The German grid just can't take it, so they try to shed power to nearby countries. Those countries in turn are starting to see their systems go unstable.

Here in Spain our wind system sheds to France, but the French system has a limit.

I think the solution is to stop installing so much wind power until they have set up a super grid. That should take about 10 years (getting permits for high voltage lines takes time).

However, as we know the EU is in a panic so they keep rushing ad hoc solutions and running into brick walls. And meanwhile leftist media has a party advocating more and more wind power we know can't be connected.

EliRabett said...

Ah yes, until everything is perfect the bunnies can't do anything, another excuse for doin nothin.

The fact is that the transmission network IS being built out, and that the nature of solar and wind is that it is well suited to local application.

Excess local capacity can be used for industrial processes as with the US western dams that feed the aluminum industry, one driver for establishing the aircraft industry in Washington state.

If there really is a lot of power available locally, some company will take advantage.

BBD said...

Eli sez:

If there really is a lot of power available locally, some company will take advantage.

Or build pumped hydro for overcapacity storage that can be used to compensate for intermittency and slew.

Why so relentlessly negative about decarbonisation of the electricity supply, Fernando?

It's got to be done, so as Eli points out, the best thing is to get on with it. Doing nothing isn't an option unless you don't believe in physics.

Sloop said...

Of course there are struggles in rebuilding the energy system of an economy as large as Germany's. The need for new updated smart grid to be paired with renewable energy sources has always been understood to be the long-term goal. The challenges and business struggles described in the Speigel article do not add up to "a failed german offshore wind policy." See recent article in NYT on the growth of wind and solar. Talks about the same difficulties that have arisen with grid management and utility balance sheets; but comes to a very different conclusion. Likely that similar grid development issues will arise in US too. Germany is showing the world how it can be done. Grid 'stability' entails fundamentally engineering and finance issues. They are solvable and will be.