Orton's Arm

It's not a belief so much as it is a realization.

Of course I give the retarded a bad name. It's sort of like Joe Montana giving an incompetent backup high school QB a bad name. Nearly every point you've attempted to raise in our debates has been stupid, ignorant, and absurd. My use of the word "assumption" was an act of kindness; implying you hadn't put much thought or effort into those posts. Because if those posts represent your best--or anything close--that would make you far more pathetic than I already believe you to be.

Your original post claimed there was no reason to believe the free market has failed to adequately address the problem of pollution. That claim is absurd to anyone who understands the concept of a negative externality; and how our own economy typically responds to them. You made another claim too--that free market economies have generally done a better job of pollution control than centrally planned economies. This second claim is correct. While both systems have failed to properly address the environment, the failure of centrally planned economies has been far graver and more catastrophic.

You've been making unfair and inaccurate assumptions about my posts for months. Why stop now?

I understand your ambiguous feelings. On the one hand, it's clear human industrial activity has caused a large increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. How much has this impacted the Earth's climate? That's a tough question to answer. Personally, I feel we should try very hard to reduce pollution; until we're absolutely sure that massive increases in greenhouse gases won't create a major climate impact. To respond to a point GG raised earlier, the free market system has failed to adequately control pollution. The free market's response to pollution is a classic example of a negative externality. With a negative externality, you don't internalize the costs of your own actions. Say for example you're thinking of building a factory somewhere. Advanced pollution control equipment would cost you $250,000. Not installing the equipment would impose $750,000 in costs on the people living nearby, due to worsened health and quality of life. But as the factory owner, you're not stuck paying for that $750,000 in costs--they're a negative externality. The economically optimal outcome is where the pollution control equipment gets installed, but the outcome a free market will actually produce is one where it won't. But, some might say, people could choose to buy things only from factories which have good pollution track records. That sentiment is ridiculous. Do you honestly know the environmental record of the company which produced the pizza box for the local pizza place? What about that milk you just bought--how good is the environmental track record for the company which produced it? Or you go to the local diner--what's the environmental track record like for the company which produced their napkins and straws? It is absolutely preposterous to expect normal people to do the level of research required to answer these questions--or at least enough normal people to make an economic difference.

A good read. Thanks for posting it.

I agree with that: if there's an elite difference maker at LB, you take him. But I doubt the best player available at #12 will be a LB, and this way the Bills won't be forced to take a LB based on need.

Coy Wire the linebacker is a better football player than Coy Wire the SS. Keeping Wire relieves some of the pressure at the LB position. If Spikes doesn't recover from his injury, the Bills could start Crowell in the middle with Wire and Ellison on the outside. If you keep Takeo in the lineup, Wire provides a good backup. With Wire on board, the Bills will be better able to focus on positions other than LB in the upcoming draft.

Zachary Miller, welcome to the Buffalo Bills.

What makes it even sweeter is that Reich has the biggest comeback in the history of college football too.

Jeff Saturday was my first choice for the award, but I can easily see why others would pick Manning.

If you're solid at QB, OL, and DL, you have the chance to win every week. The Patriots are very strong and relatively young in all three areas. With their cap room and their reputation for winning, they are an attractive destination for free agents. Add to that their high quality of coaching and all those draft picks, and the Patriots have as good a chance as anyone of winning next year's Super Bowl. We don't have to like it. But we can't blind ourselves to reality either. The fact of the matter is, there's an 800 pound gorilla living next door to the Bills. I hear people talk about how the gorilla may stop exercising well, or eating well, or whatever. But it's still an 800 pound gorilla.

Frank Reich's play in the comeback win over Houston was ranked the #1 postseason performance ever by ESPN, and the second best postseason performance ever by the fans who voted. That made me feel good.

Touche

You bring up good points: 1. The West isn't in control of whether global warming gets addressed, because China and India can produce more than enough pollution for everyone. 2. Additional pollution controls on American manufacturers could very easily result in yet more industrial jobs going overseas. But we still need to address the environment. We could do that by 1. Impose higher fuel efficiency standards on cars and SUVs. In addition, there'd be tax incentives to do more than just meet the minimum standard. 2. Buy up or otherwise decrease the number of emissions certificates available for coal power plants. Steps like these would make a real difference for the environment, but without going after American manufacturers. I'd like it if we could impose a "pollution tax" on imports, thereby punishing overseas companies that pollute too much. But such a tax would violate a trade agreement we signed.

In that soundnibble, Hillary made it sound like she'd take away all the profits that companies like Exxon are earning, and would put those profits into a giant research fund. You can't just confiscate corporate profits wholesale like that; without undermining the basis of a free market economy. Comments like those make her seem very scary for business, which will make it harder for her to be elected.

True, but what general manager in his right mind would agree to trade away Tom Brady?

The FA signings he mentioned are these: Spikes, Milloy, Sam Adams, Villarial, FLetcher, Bledsoe. Look at what they're bringing to the table today: Spikes: injury makes him a question mark Milloy: gone Adams: gone Villarrial: would make a decent backup Fletcher: probably on his way out Bledsoe: gone So yes, the Bills used free agency to have one of the better defenses in 2004. But it wasn't a stepping stone to a successful 2005. It was a stepping stone off a cliff. Build through free agency, and you give yourself a very small window. Build through the draft, and your window gets bigger. Players work with each other over longer periods of time, and have the chance to develop chemistry. One advantage to the bigger window is that it gives you more time to get the whole team built. Take the Colts. For many years, they had a good offense but lousy defense. But because that offense had been built through the draft, they were able to keep it intact for many years. That gave them the chance to get the defense fixed. Compare that to the Bills--good (if overrated) defenses in 2003 and 2004, but a mediocre to bad offense. So the Bills focused on offense in the draft with picks like McGahee, Losman, Lee Evans, and every slot receiver that declared himself eligible. But even as we started getting production from some of those picks on offense, the free agent-based defense collapsed.

Universal health care: the current U.S. health care system is a mess. Universal health care could, in theory be an improvement; if our government didn't mess things up. Given our government's track record, I'm not too optimistic. Affirmative action: this tends to make the hiring and firing process more political; and is just another restriction on American companies' ability to compete. The way to fight discrimination in the workplace is to create economic conditions in which people can choose from very many good employers; as is already the case in Silicon Valley. Death penalty: some criminals deserve to die. Net neutrality: a necessary measure. Ethics reforms: clearly ethics reforms are badly needed. Can they be achieved in a way which diminishes the voices large corporations and government unions have on Capitol Hill, while at the same time not being an attack against the Democratic or Republican parties? I hope so. Gay marriage: is problematic because of adoption issues. Border fence: absolutely necessary to prevent the U.S. from being assimilated by illegal aliens. Extend health care and Medicare to illegal aliens: no. We should send illegal aliens back to their countries of origin. Patriot Act: yes, it's gone too far. The government ought not to be allowed to engage in privacy violations unless there's accountability of some sort. Secret warrants are a good tool for that.

Come 2007, only eight of TD's draft picks are expected to be starters for the Bills, and that's if we re-sign Clements. To find eight starters over five years of drafting isn't exactly the mark of a world-class assembler of talent. Nor can you really say that there are a bunch of TD draft picks who got released from the team and are finding success elsewhere. But maybe when you described "TD led signings" you had his free agent acquisitions in mind. Other than Jason Peters (signed as a UDFA), I can't think of any TD signings we can fully rely upon going into 2007. Not Spikes due to injury concerns. Not Fletcher because of age and contract status. Not Gandy due to contract status and questions about his play. Certainly not Villarrial. Did TD completely waste his five years here? No. He gave us players like Aaron Schobel, Angelo Crowell, Lee Evans, and Jason Peters. Not terrible, but an average NFL GM could have done the same or better over that span of time.

Okay, you win. Systematic differences in cellular microenvironments--assuming they exist--must be caused by macroenvironmental differences, because they both involve the word "environment." The idea such hypothetical differences could even possibly be caused by genetics is too stupid for words. Is the above an accurate summary of your latest fact-free argument, or have you managed to produce additional stupidity I'm unaware of?

Right. It's my fault you took a multiple month break from saying anything intelligent, logical, factually-oriented, or humorous. While you're at it, why don't you blame me for global warming too? As for the regression toward the mean jokes . . . the test/retest phenomenon (a.k.a. the regression effect or regression toward the mean) has been described by Stanford, Duke, the University of Chicago, and even the Bills' secondary's very own Ohio State. In that regression toward the mean thread, you yourself finally admitted that in a test/retest situation, where the correlation between test and retest is less than 1, those who obtain extreme scores on the first test will generally score closer to the population's mean upon being retested. But you mock that exact same phenomenon here. Hey, why not throw in a few jokes mocking Copernicus's theories too? If you're willing to mislead people about regression toward the mean, why not go whole hog and mislead them about other statistical phenomena, genetics, the scientific method, political questions, etc.? Oh wait . . . never mind. You're a few steps ahead of me on that one.

Yes, this thread clearly needed a regression toward the mean joke, because a) it's not like a regression toward the mean joke has ever been told on these boards, and b) it's not like there are plenty of articles from Stanford, Duke, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the EPA, and other authorities which describe the test/retest situation. You know, the situation which all those places describe, and which you still insist on ridiculing. Over in the Iran thread, you were saying stuff that was intelligent, that made sense, and that added to the discussion. It was the first time in months that your conversation has had any of those attributes. Why, if you're capable of that Iran thread stuff, do you so often insist on making a fool of yourself with jokes about regression toward the mean or East German scientists?

It's you who has been making unproven assumptions about how differences in people's cellular microenvironments are driven by nutrition or by other macroenvironmental factors. I've merely responded that a) you have presented no evidence that such is the case, and b) evidence indicates that shared environmental factors such as nutrition don't help determine differences in adult-level intelligence.