Bill USA
Bill USA's JournalMyth: 15% Ethanol Fuel Will Destroy My Engine
http://www.fuelfreedom.org/myth-15-ethanol-fuel-will-destroy-my-engine/(emphases my own)
The testing conducted by the Coordinating Research Council (CRC) neither captures nor represents the reality of the U.S. car market. More than 80% of the miles driven in the United States are on cars that are less than 10 years old, yet 7 of the 15 cars tested were past their “product useful life” of 10 years. Only one car was a late model year – a 2009 Honda Accord. It should not be surprising that a 1996 Toyota Camry, 5 years past its useful life, with a Kelley Blue Book value of $3,750, did not perform well under stringent testing conditions.
The test did not use the 15% ethanol blend (E15) that new standards call for. Instead, they used Aggressive E20. The word “aggressive” means the addition of sulfuric acid and hydrochloric acid to the fuel mix (ph of 2.8). Needless to say, standard car parts were never built to withstand acid in the fuel. Moreover, ethanol in water is a slight base; hence any resulting corrosion does not resemble corrosion due to acid exposure. (Note: Off-the shelf E10 that was NOT “aggressive” was used for the control test.)
Water in the fuel is a strong abrasive. The water content of their Aggressive E20 blend was raised to the top of the legal limit. Commercially sold ethanol has about half of that water content.
The study specifies that: “The project oversight panel specified the aromatic level of the base gasoline (prior to ethanol blending) to approximately 40% volume.” In other words, per the request of non-scientist auto and oil representatives, CRC increased the percentage of octane-enhancing aromatics in the fuel to 40% – 10% more than the normal fuel aromatics content of 30%. This change, in turn, enabled CRC to use 80-octane fuel, which has less tolerance for water, despite the fact that the minimum sold in the U.S. is 84-octane. Running the test on 80-octane fuel caused the water they added to the fuel to become an even stronger abrasive.
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the climate researchers, I guess - out of a scientist's desire to be very circumspect, are avoiding
pointing out to the rest of the population something the scientists know.
It has been stated that the Greenland ice-sheets' movement off the Greenland land mass is accelerating but what I have not seen mentioned is that this acceleration is very likely NOT going to remain stable. The ice sheets will at some point will reach a boundary, as the amount of melt water flowing down to the ground underneath them increases and reaches a certain point where the ice sheets movement will suddenly start to increase. They will probably reach another rate of movement that will remain accelerating in a more modest linear way - until the next boundary is reached.
The scientists all know this is not going to continue in a linear fashion, but as of right now, I guess nobody has enough data to make even a guess as to when that point of inflection will be. That's probably why nobody in the scientific community is bringing this up.
The Myth Of The $634 Million Obamacare Website - MediaMatters
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/10/24/the-myth-of-the-634-million-obamacare-website/196585~~
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The life of the $600 million figure appears to be the latest example of how misinformation is fermented within the right-wing media and then adopted as quasi-policy by the Republican Party. After all, Rep. Camp is holding a hearing specifically to determine why the government's $600 million health care website doesn't work, even though the site didn't cost $600 million.
The eye-popping $634 million figure was first trumpeted in a piece by Andrew Couts at Digital Trends on October 8. It pointed out that the Montreal-based company awarded the contract to build healthcare.gov, CGI Federal, had received $634 million in government contracts related to health care. (Digital Trends later amended the article and lowered the figure to "more than $500 million" that was allegedly spent "to build the digital equivalent of a rock."
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Independently, the Sunlight Foundation estimated it cost $70 million to build the much-maligned website, not $634 million. (Officially, CGI was awarded a $93 million contract for the healthcare.gov job.)
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Despite those red flags, the bloated figure has been widely embraced as factual within the conservative press.
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Profitable US corporations Effectve tax rte ~13% of pretax Wrlwide income vs top stat rte of 35%-GAO
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-520view full report
What GAO Found
Effective tax rates (ETR) differ from statutory tax rates in that they attempt to measure taxes paid as a proportion of economic income, while statutory rates indicate the amount of tax liability (before any credits) relative to taxable income, which is defined by tax law and reflects tax benefits and subsidies built into the law. Lacking access to detailed data from tax returns, most researchers have estimated ETRs based on data from financial statements. A common measure of tax liability used in past estimates has been the current tax expense--either federal only or worldwide (which comprises federal, foreign, and U.S. state and local income taxes). The most common measure of income for these estimates has been some variant of pretax net book income. GAO was able to compare book tax expenses to tax liabilities actually reported on corporate income tax returns.
[font size="3"]For tax year 2010 (the most recent information available), profitable U.S. corporations that filed a Schedule M-3 paid U.S. federal income taxes amounting to about 13 percent of the pretax worldwide income that they reported in their financial statements (for those entities included in their tax returns). When foreign and state and local income taxes are included, the ETR for profitable filers increases to around 17 percent. The inclusion of unprofitable firms, which pay little if any tax, also raises the ETRs because the losses of unprofitable corporations greatly reduce the denominator of the measures. Even with the inclusion of unprofitable filers, which increased the average worldwide ETR to 22.7 percent, all of the ETRs were well below the top statutory tax rate of 35 percent.[/font] GAO could only estimate average ETRs with the data available and could not determine the variation in rates across corporations. The limited available data from Schedules M-3, along with prior GAO work relating to corporate taxpayers, suggest that ETRs are likely to vary considerably across corporations.
Why GAO Did This Study
Proponents of lowering the U.S. corporate income tax rate commonly point to evidence that the U.S. statutory corporate tax rate of 35 percent, as well as its average effective tax rate, which equals the amount of income tax corporations pay divided by their pretax income, are high relative to other countries. However, GAO's 2008 report on corporate tax liabilities (GAO-08-957) found that nearly 55 percent of all large U.S.-controlled corporations reported no federal tax liability in at least one year between 1998 and 2005.
Given the difficult budget choices Congress faces and its need to know corporations' share of the overall tax burden, GAO was asked to assess the extent to which corporations are paying U.S. corporate income tax. In this report, among other things, GAO (1) defines average corporate ETR and describes the common methods and data used to estimate this rate and (2) estimates average ETRs based on financial statement reporting and tax reporting. To conduct this work, GAO reviewed economic and accounting literature, analyzed income and expense data that large corporations report on the Schedules M-3 that they file with Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and interviewed IRS officials.
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CBO: Low & Moderate Income Taxpayers Who Have Earnings Face Total Marginal Tax Rates of 40% or More
http://goldrushcam.com/sierrasuntimes/index.php/news/mariposa-daily-news-2013/161-october/10576-congressional-budget-office-reports-low-and-moderate-income-taxpayers-who-have-earnings-face-total-marginal-tax-rates-of-40-percent-or-moreOctober 23, 2013 - Marginal tax rates are the percentage of an additional dollar of income that is paid in taxes or given up in government benefits; those rates affect taxpayers’ choices about many things, including how much to work and save.
In 2013, 37 percent of low- and moderate-income taxpayers who have earnings face total marginal tax rates—including federal and state individual income taxes, federal payroll taxes, and the phasing out of benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—between 30 percent and 39 percent, and over 20 percent of that group face marginal rates of 40 percent or more.
CBO estimates that 56 percent of such taxpayers face marginal rates of 10 percent to 19 percent from the federal individual income tax system alone.
For more information on marginal tax rates, see Effective Marginal Tax Rates for Low- and Moderate-Income Workers (November 2012). The chart above incorporates the effects of the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, which had not been enacted when that report was published, and the expiration of a temporary reduction in payroll tax rates. The analysis is based on a 2006 sample of nondisabled, working-age people who filed tax returns and whose income was less than 450 percent of the federal poverty guidelines.
Budget battles cost 1 million jobs - economists
http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/03/news/economy/budget-jobs/Washington's heated budget battles have already cost the economy at least 1 million jobs over the last few years, estimates Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Analytics.
How? Debates about stimulus in 2009, and the federal budget and debt ceiling since then, have created so much political uncertainty for businesses, entrepreneurs, banks and consumers, they're all holding back.
"Businesses are more reluctant to invest and hire, and entrepreneurs are less likely to attempt startups," Zandi said in written testimony before the Senate Budget Committee last week. "Financial institutions are more circumspect about lending and households are more cautious about spending."
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Zandi estimates the unemployment rate would be around 6.6% now if political uncertainty had not increased since 2007. Unemployment currently stands at 7.3%.
His estimate coincides with separate research conducted by San Francisco Fed economists Sylvain Leduc and Zheng Liu, who say the unemployment rate would have been around 6.5% at the end of 2012, if it weren't for an increase in political uncertainty.
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[font size="3"] The Republicans have done so much damage to the U.S. you have to wonder who has hurt us more, al Kaida or the GOP?[/font]
The Real Reasons Why Obamacare Exchanges Aren't Working Yet - Wendell Potter
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wendell-potter/the-real-reasons-why-obam_b_4136549.htmlHere are four possible reasons for the current mess:
• HHS wasted valuable time trying to persuade more states to operate their own exchanges. Officials apparently deluded themselves into thinking that even some of the red states could be persuaded that it would be in their best interests to have a state-run exchange than one run by the federal government. In hindsight, those officials wasted months in which time and resources could have been devoted to making sure the federal exchange would work on Oct. 1. HHS officials should have realized from the beginning that Republican governors and state legislators had no incentive for Obamacare to work. There wasn't a chance that they would operate their own exchanges if doing so might enhance the chances that Obamacare would be perceived as a success.
• The administration waited too long to issue important regulations pertaining to the law. HHS clearly didn't want to announce some of the more controversial regulations until after the 2012 midterm election. Those postponements decreased the chances that insurers and the companies hired to build and operate the federal exchange could have everything in place and working perfectly by Oct. 1.
• It made a mistake by requiring that visitors to the website first set up an account before beginning to shop for coverage. Some states operating their own exchanges didn't do this, which, again in hindsight, was a wise decision. Setting up the accounts at the front end has proven to be a system-crashing undertaking. Apparently only a lucky few have been able to get through the account set-up phase and actually begin the real process of choosing a health plan.
• There are simply too many moving parts -- and too many health plan options. Not only are there several insurers offering an array of policies in most states, there are four levels of coverage -- bronze, silver, gold and platinum -- all with varying premiums and coinsurance obligations. Members of Congress who wrote the law fell for the insurance industry's propaganda that "choice and competition" are what the American people need and want. No, it is what the insurance industry wants. When people do get past the account set-up phase, they have to spend considerable time trying to make sense of the various choices -- far more than most employers offer their workers.
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UCLA engineers develop new process for making biofuels, offers possible 50% increase in yield
here's the complete title:
UCLA engineers develop new metabolic pathway for more efficient conversion of glucose into biofuels; possible 50% increase in biorefinery yield
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2013/10/20131001-liao.html#more
Researchers at UCLA led by Dr. James Liao have created a new synthetic metabolic pathway for breaking down glucose that could lead to a 50% increase in the production of biofuels. The new pathway is intended to replace the natural metabolic pathway known as glycolysis, a series of chemical reactions that nearly all organisms use to convert sugars into the molecular precursors that cells need. The research is published in the journal Nature.
Native glycolytic pathways—a number of which have been discovered—oxidize the six-carbon sugar glucose into pyruvate and thence into two-carbon molecules known acetyl-CoA for either further oxidation or biosynthesis of cell constituents and products, including fatty acids, amino acids, isoprenoids and alcohols. However, the two remaining glucose carbons are lost as carbon dioxide.
Glycolysis is currently used in biorefineries to convert sugars derived from plant biomass into biofuels, but the loss of two carbon atoms for every six that are input is seen as a major gap in the efficiency of the process. The wasted CO2 leads to a significant decrease in carbon yield, the researchers observed, which results in a major impact on the overall economy of biorefinery and the carbon efficiency of cell growth. However, re-fixing the lost CO2 would incur energetic and kinetic costs.
While it is theoretically possible to split sugars or sugar phosphates into stoichiometric amounts of acetyl-CoA in a carbon- and redox-neutral manner, resulting in maximal yields, no such pathways are known to exist in nature.
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Wonkbook: The shutdown is a total disaster for the GOP
..is the public finally rousing itself from its apathetic torpor? ...Are people realizing that the shutdown, the threat of default, and the GOP's relentless internecine war on Governmnent is just the GOP's refinement of the old 'Burn Down the Reichstag building' maneuver of past enemies of democratic government?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/11/wonkbook-the-shutdown-is-a-total-disaster-for-the-gop/?wp_login_redirect=0
Thursday's Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll hit the Republican Party like a bomb.
It found, as Gallup had, the Republican Party (and, separately, the Tea Party) at "all-time lows in the history of the poll." It found Republicans taking more blame for the shutdown than they had in 1995. It found more Americans believing the shutdown is a serious problem than in 1995.
Even worse for the GOP is what the pollsters called "the Boomerang Effect": Both President Obama and Obamacare are more popular than they were a month ago. Obamacare in particular gained seven points. (More poll highlights here, full results here.)
It's hard to overstate the magnitude of the GOP's strategic failure here: Obamacare's launch has been awful. More than a week after the federal insurance marketplaces opened, most people can't purchase insurance on the first try. But Republicans have chosen such a wildly unpopular strategy to oppose it that they've helped both Obamacare and its author in the polls.
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