Only place I could find it:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/02/10/kim-jong-un-assassination-rumours-flood-twitter-weibo/

Still, this is unconfirmed... so don't jump to conclusions.

The giant blue screen of death on my regular laptop wanted you to know that I may be slow in replying. 

What does that have to do with anything in this thread?  I'm confuzzled.

lol... shhh! 

First, I want to give a short analysis of the topic.

A follow-on treaty is not simply a repetition of a prior treaty.  Rather, it attempts to continue the general goals of the original treaty as closely as possible, while recognizing and correcting problems which existed in the prior treaty.  Empirically, the START follow-on treaty restructured the verification regime of nuclear weapons.

In addition, this interpretation of "follow-on treaty" is most realistic because treaties are written with expiration dates for the sake of testing.  Both the START and Kyoto treaties were constructed as initial measures toward their goals, with the recognition not that their goals would be abandoned upon expiration, but that the original treaty could be examined and perfected to achieve the goals of the prior treaty.

That means I have the right to recognize core flaws in the original Kyoto Protocol and attempt to correct them in an advocated follow-on treaty, as long as I do not modify the fundamental goal established in the Kyoto Protocol.

Thus, my advocacy:
A follow-on treaty to the Kyoto Protocol should be ratified, creating a series of universally applied benchmarks on emission caps.  In addition, the treaty should state that trade barriers against imports which violate the agreed upon benchmarks are considered a proper environmental justification for establishing trade barriers in accordance with World Trade Organization standards, as long as greenhouse gas emission standards are applied universally.

The advocacy attempts to correct two flaws of the original Kyoto protocol: lack of enforceability and lack of universal emission cap standards.

Let me begin by explaining how it works.

The World Trade Organization is the organization tasked with enforcing the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, the standard agreement governing the vast majority of interntional trade barriers throughout the world.  The World Trade Organization acts as a court to hear legal charges that a nation is establishing protectionist measures illegal under GATT, such as establishing regulations on foreign goods which do not apply to domestic goods.

If a nation establishes a regulation which another nation considers a violation of the GATT, they can file a claim before the WTO.  The WTO would act as a court to hear the case, and render a ruling just like a domestic court.  Generally, the countries in question settle out of court somehow.  If, however, such a settlement cannot be reached, the WTO can issue an order for a nation to pay damages.  Obviously, the WTO can't collect a fine from the US directly.  So the WTO will allow the nation which incurred damages to impose a tariff on goods imported from the nation at fault in order to collect an amount equal to damages.

The World Trade Organization does allow nations to establish environmental regulations, as long as those regulations are equally applied, i.e., the US may establish a fuel standard regulation on imports as long as the fuel standard is the same among all imports, and is the same as the domestic fuel standard.  However, the question has not been answered regarding what constitutes an environmental standard.  There are definitely specific cases, but it is not known whether global warming is considered an environmental issue by World Trade Organization standards.

Under my advocacy, if a nation violated the new Kyoto Protocol, the World Trade Organization would be empowered to determine whether a violation has occurred, and provide an order allowing a damaged nation to impose tariffs to offset losses.  Specifically, damages could be estimated as the difference between the cost of applying Kyoto standards to a good's production and the cost of the good in violation of Kyoto, plus a penalty to consider possible economic effects of environmental damage.  In this way, the agent which violated the Kyoto Protocol would lose the marginal benefit of violation.

I claim two advantages.

First is global warming (duh)

We know that carbon dioxide results in increases in temperatures.  At an extreme example, the CO2-heavy atmosphere of Venus is higher temperature than Mercury, despite being further from the sun than Mercury.  Additionally, the scientific community generally agrees that humanity is contributing to increasing global temperatures (Source: http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/materials-based-on-reports/booklets/climate_change_2008_final.pdf).

Even if current emissions are not enough to influence global warming, expanding economic growth in India and China will increase total consumer demand for industrial-scale goods, multiplying the total amount of carbon emissions even more than today.

Left unchecked, global warming presents the possibility for multiple scenarios of global human extinction.  Formerly arable land will become inhospitable relatively quickly due to shifting patterns of climate and the seasons, forcing perpetual adjustments in the food production necessary to sustain humanity.  With nations such as the United States and Europe seeing destabilized food production, both would be forced to take imperialist measures, even against one another, to secure food supplies, where the price of failure is starvation.  In such a world, the risk of not winning the war would be as great as the risk of losing a war, to the point where even nuclear deterrence would be insufficient to prevent armageddon.

Second, species loss would become a critical threat.  Global ecosystems are relatively fragile, requiring the coordination of multiple species to sustain the biological functions which keep the ecosystem functioning.  Remove one or two species and the ecosystem will be hurt.  However, remove a keystone species which provides a function that cannot be duplicated by other species, and the ecosystem collapses.  Global warming creates a fundamental shift in every ecosystem globally.  In the face of such a shift, and with biological evolution only existing on a scale of millions of years, ecosystems will not have the opportunity to check against the instability of global warming.

Second is free trade

Domestic global warming standards fundamentally fail because they result in an increased marginal cost of production only in domestic markets.  As a producer, with the additional marginal cost of abiding by an environmental standard, a producer has an incentive to move to unregulated nations.

This has two implications.  First, it means no net reduction in greenhouse gases would be reached from domestic regulations because, unlike most other types of pollution, greenhouse gases are not local events... an increase in greenhouse gases in one region of the world creates a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions, and thus climate change, globally.

Second, however, it encourages further unfettered emissions.  In the face of work outsourcing due to asymmetrical regulations, domestic politics in any region would experience the shift recognizing that environmental regulations have real regional economic costs.  As a result, the incentive to support emissions regulations will diminish, and established policies will inevitably fail.

Unfettered emission undermines the general credibility of free trade.  For individuals concerned primarily with enironmental issues, a race to the bottom trade network establish a precedent of free trade being the enemy of environmental regulation.  As a result, over time, environmentalists will be forced to fight free trade in order to pass their agenda.

Opposition to free trade devastates the global economy.  Beginning with David Ricardo, economists have generally agreed with the principle that the net consumer and prodcer surplus will always be greater under a free trade world than a protectionist world.  First, it ensures that people are more able to specialize, maximizing production.  Second, it allows businesses to take advantage of economies of scale, further increasing total output of goods.  As a result of both conditions, the competitive markets created allow businesses to reduce prices in order to gain market share, increasing total consumer surplus.

I'm empirically correct on this argument.  The past 50 years have been defined by the two correlating patterns of continually reduced international trade barriers and economic growth nearly unprecedented in human history.  Consequently, the greatest period of global economic decline, the Great Depression, was marked with a sharp increase in protectionism with the Glass-Steagal Act in the US, a large general increase in tariffs following the initial stock market crash, and the resulting retaliatory tariffs by foreing nations, reducing overall productivity and perpetuating the Great Depression.  Thus, a reduction in international trade will be detrimental to the global economy.

Remember, this is not an issue of whether individuals should be allowed to have abortions.

If there are 40 insurance companies, only 5 of which refuse to provide funding for abortions, and you want an insurance program which covers abortions... you can simply go to one of the 35 other insurance companies to find an insurance program that meets your needs.

Someone explain for me exactly why we need to force Catholic Charities to provide a service which they do not want to provide when alternative insurance companies exist which would provide funding for abortions.  Unless you can answer that question, this is not an abortion rights debate.

> ~Wornstrum~ wrote:

> If someone doesn't want to use birth control, they do not have to, right? This move sounds more about "pro-choice" than anything else. It will open up options to many women to do what they want (how is this bad?).

At what point does "pro-choice" become a proper argument for personal activity, but not economic activity?

This law could have been worded to give religious organizations a broader exception.  Under that exception, individual buyers would be able to choose whether they want the option to have an abortion covered under their insurance program, or whether they want to avoid any involvement in abortions.

In short, for some people, the "choice" in the "pro-choice" slogan involves the individual actually saying no to an abortion, and not wanting any part of the abortion process.  This bill eliminates that choice... effectively only creating one choice for people which the people find immoral.  In short, no, Wornstrum... this is not pro-choice.  It's pro-abortion.

Yeah, I'm similarly in the "crazy part of the week, terrible time to participate" situation like You_Fool.  If I'm way too slow, I'm willing to concede due to slowness.

Should you really be considering military hardware as IP-protected?  I mean... it's not like the Soviets said "wait a second... the atomic bomb is still under a US patent... we can't build it until 1965!"

EDIT: Well, at least in Europe, people had no problem with reverse engineering things.  I'm pretty sure gunpowder wasn't really reverse engineered in East Asia, so it actually could be argued that, as far as military technology goes, China is the  IP-protected example while Europe is the no-protection example.  But then again, Europe was a much more competitive market simply due to geopolitical circumstances, so this is really probably a terrible comparison regardless.

So... is the assertion that everything you say is sarcastic... sarcastic?

> East wrote:

> it's not the government's job to hand out food!

If the government establishes an agency to hand out food... it's that agency's job to hand out food.  Yes, from a policymaker perspective, you may be correct... but if you were working in an agency with the task of handing out food, and you spent all day sleeping at work, responding to any requests to do your job by saying "hey, I'm a libertarian..." you'd be out of the job pretty quickly, and rightly so. 

ARFeh... here's the quandry:

Marginal benefit of keeping the organization open to accept the donation: $2,600
Charity's cost to accept the donation: approximately $0 (the organization used volunteer work, though some relatively low costs may have existed)

For the charity, it's a no-brainer.  Take the damn donation.

For the government organization, however, marginal benefit is $2,600, but we also have marginal cost $X to keep the building open.
If X > $2,600, the government agency is inefficient because the cost of operation exceeds the benefit for the organization, whereas private equivalents receive a higher return on investment, as proven by the above scenario.
If, however, X < $2,600, the government agency rejected an economically efficient transaction, so either the organization is poorly managed, or regulations prevent the organization from being flexible enough to accept economically beneficial exchanges such as this.

Either way, it reflects poorly on the government organization.