President Trump - 1st State of the Union

[Speaker to Animals]

He's not even going to try to understand the problem. What a waste of time.

[StCapps]

He's not even going to try to understand the problem. What a waste of time.

I understand the problem you mention, it has nothing to do with what I said proving I don't understand the problem, you are trying to conflate two things that have nothing to do with one another and then claiming I don't understand, but it's you who doesn't understand. Stop arguing past people while moving the goalposts and assuming someone else doesn't understand because they made a simple statement that has little to do with what you are talking about.

[clubgop]

Wait, so that cop busted a drug addict, and ten took her baby??

More nukes - jesusfuckingchrist

My god you are a fake news whore hack bitch. Dishonest up and down. A homeless drug addict was pregnant and about to shoot up, he got her help and adopted the child, no good deed goes unpunished with this hack bitch around.

It was a joke. Try not being autistic for 10 minutes, see how it goes.

Oh a joke, like your knowledge of Chinese history, the second amendment, and entrapment? Yeah, right. You were being a jumping to conclusions bitch. You don't have any problem when a limp wristed bureaucrat takes a kid away from parents when they won't let little Billy chop off his penis, but god forbid a man wearing a pig's uniform gets a pregnant help and take care of the baby. Your party's handbook says let that bitch shoot up then take her to PP so they can abort and sell the baby parts. You gotta fundraise, amirite?

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

Sort of a Love/Hate thing at best, coal mining.

Well, for people who immigrated to this country from shitholes, these were the best jobs they could get and they were the only people willing to do the work. They were taken advantage of by their employers and used as near slave labor to power every major city in this nation for damn near 100 years.

So you have these communities see, that played by the rules. They worked hard and sacrificed for their country on the battlefield and in the coal mines and they were ardent Democrats, being Union and all. So as just as their industry hits extremely hard times the party they supported for decades brags about how many families in the Appalachia they put on food stamps. Turns their back on them because "white rural America is dying" and spreads open their arms for the newest cheap labor in town.

That may all be true, but there are better solutions than pretending coal is more economically viable, safe, or environmentally friendly than it actually is.

[StCapps]

there are better solutions than pretending coal is more economically viable, safe, or environmentally friendly than it actually is.

Also there are better solutions than pretending green energy is more economically viable, safe, or environmentally friendly than it actually is.

[Speaker to Animals]

He's not even going to try to understand the problem. What a waste of time.

I understand the problem you mention, it has nothing to do with what I said proving I don't understand the problem, you are trying to conflate two things that have nothing to do with one another and then claiming I don't understand, but it's you who doesn't understand. Stop arguing past people while moving the goalposts and assuming someone else doesn't understand because they made a simple statement that has little to do with what you are talking about.

You didn't read it.

You didn't respond to it.

You just repeated your religious dogma: "let the market solve it".

Fucking ridiculous. What happened to you?

[clubgop]

How much are we subsidizing "clean energy" compared to corn?

We subsidize coal more than clean energy. Maybe we should let EVERY industry compete on its own merits. I'm in favor of that.

Corn? We subsidize corn so fucking much we turn that shit into fuel even though that uses more fossil fuels to produce than whatever energy we get out. Congratulations, you picked the one thing that makes coal look like Rearden metal.

[StCapps]

You didn't read it.

You didn't respond to it.

You just repeated your religious dogma: "let the market solve it".

Fucking ridiculous. What happened to you?

I read it, I understand it, and I didn't respond to it, because you are arguing past me and assuming I made some argument that I never made, because you are triggered by that phrase for some strange reason. You always think you make these great posts that if people don't directly refute them in high detail than you somehow win, when really the post is just one big non-sequitur and it's no wonder it's being largely ignored. Your posts aren't that brilliant most of the time dude, you just think they are, what you think is some kind of mic drop, couldn't further from a mic drop.

[K@th]

How much are we subsidizing "clean energy" compared to corn?

We subsidize coal more than clean energy. Maybe we should let EVERY industry compete on its own merits. I'm in favor of that.

Corn? We subsidize corn so fucking much we turn that shit into fuel even though that uses more fossil fuels to produce than whatever energy we get out. Congratulations, you picked the one thing that makes coal look like Rearden metal.

You bitch at me even when we agree. LMAO - you are such a small, petty person.

[Speaker to Animals]

You didn't read it.

You didn't respond to it.

You just repeated your religious dogma: "let the market solve it".

Fucking ridiculous. What happened to you?

I read it, I understand it, and I didn't respond to it, because you are arguing past me and assuming I made some argument that I never made, because you are triggered by that phrase for some strange reason. You always think you make these great posts that if people don't directly refute them in high detail than you somehow win, when really the post is just one big non-sequitur and it's no wonder it's being largely ignored. Your posts aren't that brilliant most of the time dude, you just think they are, what you think is some kind of mic drop, couldn't further from a mic drop.

Then respond to the argument:

Capps, please actually try to understand what I am writing here (this is an important concept and one that a few people here don't want to accept for ideological reasons, but is very real).

The notion that "the market" will converge on the optimal solution is a dogmatic expression of faith that is refuted by the coal industry itself. This libertarian Mammon-worshiping ideology (it's more like a religion) believes in the market like another man might believe in any dogma of Christianity. But this one is readily refuted simply by looking at the coal industry and the very proliferation of coalfire plants.

Coal is one of the least optimal solutions the market could possibly converge upon. When you break it down, coal is far more costly than other forms of energy. This is especially true when you consider the environmental damage inflicted by coal mining, the health damage to the miners, and the tens of thousands of annual deaths of Americans due to lung cancer caused by coalfire plants. But for the utilities and the mining companies, it's most profitable. It's very profitable because they don't have to pay the costs of all the negative externalities they inflict on Americans.

It's like how Walmart indirectly receives subsidies for their labor force by paying them so low that tax payers have to pick up the slack with welfare and food assistance. That's also a negative externality whereby Walmart sloughs off the costs of their business onto innocent people (usually society at large since the costs are almost always spread out to all tax payers).

Utility companies don't pay for the lung cancers they inflict on thousands of Americans every year. They don't pay for the pollution they dump into our atmosphere and water. Mining companies don't really pay for the runoff into the local water supply, or the fact that they destroy the landscape itself by removing mountaintops and creating toxic holes in the ground.

"Clean coal" is a euphemism for "mitigating all the massive externalities of burning coal for energy". The only way to do that and make it profitable for the utility companies is to subsidize all the technology used to trap, collect, and dispose of the pollutants. Otherwise, if you force the utility companies to pay for that, and especially if you force them to pay for the negative externalities they impose upon the surrounding communities, then they would switch to another form of energy. This would bankrupt the coal mining companies. It would put half of Appalachia out of work too. So the government tries to subsidize the costs of mitigating the negative externalities in order to artificially make coal more profitable that mining companies stay in business and the coal workers don't sink further into economic ruin. It's literally a subsidized jobs program and gibs handout to industries no different than Obama's green energy initiative.

The market does not always arrive at the most cost-efficient solution to an economic problem because of negative externalities. This is a pretty good example of that in practice and it's an example of the government trying to artificially prop up a bad industry instead of just letting it die on its own by forcing them to simply pay for their own negative externalities instead of making tax payers do that.