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Agree on polluting the ecosystem. But nearly all of the world's population growth is happening in developing countries. Some developed nations like Japan are even experiencing a population decrease (which can have interesting effects on things like the housing market). Even in the U.S. with its minuscule 0.6% population growth last year (among the highest in developed countries), roughly half of that is due to immigration, only half due to natural population growth.

Economic development and progress in science and technology are the solution to overpopulation - it makes people stop having as many kids.

Shoot, here is an article from 2017
https://www.brookings.edu/blog...

In the early 20th century, global population grew more rapidly than ever before. Then came a dramatic reversal as population growth began to slow. It appears very likely that the human population will soon stabilize and may even start to decline. Fertility rates are dropping as women become more educated and gain better access to birth control. As fewer babies are born, the average age of the population increases; thus, our planetâ(TM)s human population is getting older. Today some populations are already declining while others are rising. But soon, populations in most countries will begin to decline.

Besides the point about where the population increase is happening, the rate of increase has also stopped increasing and is now or will soon be going down. Meaning the population is still increasing but at a slower and slower rate, and the population is not expected to double from where it is now.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog...

My understanding is that North Sea gas is fine for decades, which is about as much as anyone searches for today. Considering the need for alternative sources, Norway and Scotland will have plenty of resources for new wells even if they are uneconomical in the immediate pricing situation. EU grants will come very quickly should they be needed.

Norway is not in the EU and Scotland will soon not be in the EU either. The UK currently is dismantling most of its oil rigs. Also, one reason why Russia has been pulling ahead in the segment is because they have been willing to fund most of their projects on their own dime.

Also, with regards to the Netherlands.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog...

Natural gas production from the Groningen field has now roughly halved over the last three years, and will not return to previous levels. This latest decision, therefore, truly marks the end of an era for the Dutch and for Europe more broadly. (2016)

Netherlands natural gas production in Bcm.
https://ycharts.com/indicators...

Finally.
https://www.reuters.com/articl...

Production is set for 21.6 billion cubic meters (bcm) this year, already down from a peak of 53.8 bcm in 2013, following a series of cuts as decades of extraction have led to dozens of earthquakes each year, damaging thousands of homes and buildings.

“Our intention is (to cut production) to get towards 12 bcm in the coming four or five years, and to zero at the end of the coming decade,” Prime Minister Mark Rutte told a press conference. (2018)

Nord Stream 2 isn't needed in any meaningful way right now on merits of "today", as Nord Stream 1 is underutilized.

https://www.nord-stream.com/pr...

"In 2017, the Nord Stream Pipeline delivered 51 billion cubic metres (bcm) of natural gas to consumers in the European Union. This means the pipeline system operated at 93 per cent of its annual design capacity of 55 bcm."

That's 93 per cent capacity last year. Plus given the ramp up trends it should have reached full capacity this year.

As for US supplying gas, most of the shale producers have wells for "30 years of production". Why not more? Because they would have to disclose this if it was so, which automatically makes them target for hostile takeover. Natgas is the by-product of shale, that is getting increasingly captured instead of flared. So US has supplies for at least 30 years, and realistically for far longer period of time. The problem here is costs, because energy expenditures to compress the gas into liquid and transport it are just too high compared to piped gas. You're looking at about 50% price increase for someone like Germany.

Exactly. It would be a lot more expensive. It would also require large liquefaction and regasification facilities to be build. There are plenty of port facilities in Europe but there is a severe shortage of liquefaction facilities in the USA and regasification facilities in Europe. In fact Europe has been investing in ports, storage, and regasification facilities for natural gas over the past decade. However the USA can neither supply that demand nor do it cheaply. In fact the USA has been bickering already that Russia is starting to carve a chunk of the LNG sector themselves via their Yamal LNG liquefaction facilities.
https://www.reuters.com/articl...

China hit peak coal years ago and has been in decline ever since:

http://ieefa.org/ieefa-update-...
https://www.brookings.edu/2018...

The "new" capacity is replacing old plants with more efficient, cleaner ones. Same thing happened in Germany.

The current big players in the car battery are in East Asia, with China rapidly becoming the dominant manufacturer. Some projections have China with 70% of the worldwide market within two years. With government subsidies and other cost advantages, batteries and especially EV batteries will be sourced largely from China. That other locales with cleaner energy exist won't matter that much. The question is how quickly China will ramp up their renewable energy availability. Estimates of renewable/nuclear energy production range from 20% to 50% by 2030.

In the United States, we have had a rapidly growing money supply, based entirely on the Fed printing money, and it has not led to inflation.

This is misleading. The whole point of QE was to prevent a deflationary spiral in the aftermath of the financial crisis. So while it didn't lead to high inflation, it did lead to much higher inflation than we would have otherwise had.

The money was pumped into the financial sector and government. The Fed bought mortgages and government debt. I seem to recall the Fed buying some unusual loans, auto and the like, for a while.

The financial sector trades in financial and physical assets. It's the "house" for making bets on real life. There has been quite a bit of inflation in financial assets and real estate. The government, via the GSEs (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) is heavily involved in real estate, financing (purchasing) nearly all new mortgages since the 2008 Financial Crisis.

There are two kinds of inflation: 1) Cost push and 2) Demand Pull (they mean what they say: cost push means costs are pushing the prices higher; demand pull means demand is pulling the prices higher). The definition of inflation is "the rate at which the general level of prices for goods and services is rising."

It does smell ridiculous that the government and central bank bailed out Wall Street for the benefit of the rest of society; that implies that Wall Street is operating for the benefit of the rest of society. I don't think that's true. The bailouts rescued the old system. The problem with the old system is that it was extractive, not productive.

Basically so long as you're making more stuff with less or even the same people you can raise wages without price inflation, because that's real wage growth. e.g. there's more stuff for everybody. Well, not since 2008 though. Since 2008 the more stuff part of the equation has gone to the top 1%....

The "more stuff" part maybe hasn't gone to you, but globally, the gains aren't restricted to the top 1%. Billions of people have entered the middle class (and millions have joined the 1%).

So, this is well within an order of magnitude of the cost estimate for Trump's wall between Mexico and the United States: https://www.brookings.edu/essa...

Global cost / benefit, anyone?

Kid, you have spent too much time reading Ayn Rand. As you get older, if you're smart and open to ideas, you'll learn that it ain't as simple as you describe.

There are a LOT of other factors that go into whether or not a person is successful in the US other than the few you describe.

I won't call you a "fucking LIAR", but I will call you ignorant. Luckily, that IS something you can remedy on your own. Best of luck, snowflake.

How about these this study from the Brookings institute
https://www.brookings.edu/opin...

Or this one, from Britain
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne...

It's not a guarantee of success, any more than using condoms guarantees no pregnancies or STD's.
But you wouldn't argue against condom use just because sometimes people who use them still create babies.

Is there really anything in the advice given that you would argue against? I've given my kids more or less the same advice. Their future is an open book filled with promise, as long as they don't do anything fatally stupid like creating a baby, getting a record, dropping out of high school, getting drug addicted, etc. Do you advise your kids otherwise?

Obama bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital and sent gunners in to kill the fleeing nurses and patients. Check their own website here.

"The attacks took place despite the fact that MSF had provided the GPS coordinates of the trauma hospital to the US Department of Defense, Afghan Ministry of Interior and Defense and US Army in Kabul as recently as Tuesday, 29 September. The attack continued for more than 30 minutes after we first informed Resolute Support and US military officials in Kabul and Washington that it was a hospital being hit."

This was one of the most shocking moments of the 21st Century. You will notice during Obama's last term he would often not be greeted by a senior delegation when visiting foreign countries, this was due to the hospital bombing. Oh, did your news not tell you that? Huh, I wonder why.

As for the deep state, although there's no precise or scientific definition, generally refers to the agencies in Washington that are permanent power factions. They stay and exercise power even as presidents who are elected come and go. They typically exercise their power in secret, in the dark, and so they're barely subject to democratic accountability, if they're subject to it at all. It's agencies like the CIA, the NSA and the other intelligence agencies, that are essentially designed to disseminate disinformation and deceit and propaganda, and have a long history of doing not only that, but also have a long history of the world's worst war crimes, atrocities and death squads. Remember Salvador Allende being overthrown and replace with a dictator? That was the deep state. Don't believe me? View this article in the house organ of the deep state, the Washington Post, in which the deep state is praised as a savior.

Before this harebrained and reckless administration is history, the nation will have cause to celebrate the public servants derided by Trumpists as the supposed âoedeep state.â

The term itself is propaganda, intended to cast a sinister light upon men and women whom Trump and his minions find annoyingly knowledgeable and experienced. They are not participants in any kind of dark conspiracy. Rather, they are feared and loathed by the president and his wrecking crew of know-nothings because they have spent years - often decades - mastering the details of foreign and domestic policy.

God bless them. With a supine Congress unwilling to play the role it is assigned by the Constitution, the deep state stands between us and the abyss.

A foreign policy establishment that serves its own goals instead of obeying the elected government. That's the definition of "deep state".

You are completely missing what I am trying to say. Let us pretend we are attending a conference on qualfonic energy, which is completely made up. Let us suppose that someone has just given an address with a serious criticism of this form of energy. Would you be more likely to trust this criticism if it came from someone who has had nothing good to say about it or from someone who was a major proponent of it? Hopefully you can understand why people might take the comments from the latter person more seriously given no other information.

Neither. They both have motivations to lie. I'd want to fact check the claims of either person because the first one might be inventing a criticism and the second one may be omitting other major problems. You're a fool if you think either of them is more trustworthy than the other. Furthermore, a proponent admitting a minor flaw, is a classic hustle technique to get you to buy into the product that they're pitching.

If this were not the case you would understand why a source pointing out all of the things that Trump has lied about or misrepresented is not sufficient proof of your claim. You need to compare it to other politicians and I am not convinced that Trump is significantly worse. He certainly is not a truthful politician, but few are and we tend to forget the myriad lies and cover-ups of controversies that surround past politicians. I suspect that if we were discussing some subject where you were not in agreement with the conclusion, you would be quick to employ the same arguments I have used here, but you dislike Trump so much that your emotions blind you to reason.

Trump's lies corrode democracy.
There's a long history of presidential untruths. Here's why Donald Trump is 'in a class by himself.
How Does Trump Stack Up Against the Best — and Worst — Presidents?
Trump’s Lies vs. Obama’s
Donald Trump running the most dishonest White House ever, says historian
Comparing Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump on the Truth-O-Meter
Are Clinton and Trump the Biggest Liars Ever to Run for President?

That is not to say you are a bad person, because everyone is that way about something that they take personally. My point is that in this particular area, you are not a good source absent significant and quality evidence.

How much evidence do you need? If you're really interested, there's a lot more stuff on Trump's lack of honesty and his place in the world of American politics in respect to that, but I think it's telling that presidential historians (who ought to know quite a bit about past presidents) have (spoilers) ranked him last place out of all of America's presidents. That's pretty unusual, most politicians get ranked in the middle somewhere during their terms, neither best nor worst.

You should learn to use Google.

In Europe you top out at a level of material prosperity that Americans would find unacceptable. You have ZERO possibility for building wealth in Europe. There is no "economic mobility" in Europe.

I'm sorry, pal, but you're just wrong.

https://www.epi.org/publicatio...

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-c...

[Note: the raw data is available there if you would like to do your own analysis, uninformed though it may be.]

What part of 'updated figures' do you think means 'none of the figures have been updated'?
A simple look here shows that isn't the case at all.

Sigh, I don't know if you are deliberately being obtuse or simply fail to understand simple economics and prefer to ignore facts that don't fit your narrative.

Let me state it again clearly: at $60000/year, a high school teacher makes an hourly salary of $40, while a regular industry worker makes an hourly salary of $32, for the simple reason that the high school teacher is contracted to work far fewer hours. On top of that are massive benefits that workers in private industry don't get.

FYI: Brookings Institute https://www.brookings.edu/blog... [brookings.edu]

The Brookings study goes out of its way to push a political agenda, and it is a testament to lying with statistics. Their main argument is based on a comparison between teachers and "similarly educated workers". But if you have an education degree, you are not "similarly educated" to people with other degrees; an education degree is the bottom of the barrel degree that people with the lowest test scores and lowest IQs go into. And like you, we have to assume that Brookings erroneously uses annual salary data instead of hourly or monthly data in their comparisons and neglects benefits.

Fortunately, Americans are getting tired to pay for people like you and are starting to see you for what you are: underperforming, greedy, and mendacious. That is why we need to privatize large portions of our education system and move to vouchers and charter schools. And it is going to happen, whether you want to or not.

Oh, and that cushy retirement plan you think you have? Don't count on getting it.

You seem to be unable to understand the simple economic concept that teachers are only paid for the actual time worked (typically 10 months) and do not get paid summer vacations

Teachers also don't get unpaid summer vacations; what teachers get is several months where they can sell their labor to anybody who wants to hire them, often taking advantage of the status, security, and education that their government job confers upon them. That's a sweet deal that almost nobody else gets. At a minimum, you need to add another 25% of salary on top of the teacher's salary to make it comparable to other salaries just to account for the smaller amount of time they work (185 contracted work days vs about 230 for private sector employees). And that's not even taking into account benefits like health insurance and retirement, which keep accruing.

If you look at the OECD, US teachers are paid below the OECD average

That's simply not true even if you look at nominal salaries (the analysis in HuffPo is bogus, just look at their numbers). But HuffPo doesn't tell you the whole picture: you need to add another 25% because of the shorter work year, and then another 25% on top of that for the nice benefits teachers receive. And on top of that, taxes in the US are much lower than elsewhere, and teachers also receive benefits like 403(b) plans that are not available to teachers in other countries. Just the fact that teachers don't have to pay into social security is a huge benefit by itself.

Take it from someone who has known teachers in both the US and several other countries: US teacher are being rewarded lavishly.

Sigh, I don't know if you are deliberately being obtuse or simply fail to understand simple economics and prefer to ignore facts that don't fit your narrative. At least you admit to being a former teacher and thus no longer miseducating anyone. HAND.

FYI: Brookings Institute https://www.brookings.edu/blog...

It's a myth that you can solve problems in education by just giving schools more money. It's not the amount of money that schools have, it's how they spend the money they have.

Spending more money doesn't improve quality.
https://www.americanexperiment...

Schools actually spend more on minority students than white students
https://www.brookings.edu/blog...

The GAO has something to say:
https://www.gao.gov/products/G...

Even NPR came to the conclusion that simply adding more money doesn't neccasarily help:
https://www.npr.org/sections/e...

"Money alone does not guarantee success any more than a lack of it guarantees failure. Paul Reville, the former Massachusetts education secretary, says not all districts there were able to translate funding increases into academic gains. Often, the difference was how they spent the extra money."

US transportation CO2 has risen every year for the last 5 years. So much that it is now a higher emitter than electricity generation. And it is predicted to keep rising, even with electric vehicles.

China's coal consumption has already peaked, even if it rose a tiny bit in 2017.

According to the NEA, in the first three quarters of 2017, coal consumption in China reached 2.81 billion metric tons, an increase of less than 1 percent from 2016. A similar estimation of 2.82 billion to 2.83 billion tons is corroborated by the Energy Research Institute of the NDRC. We support the conclusion that coal consumption is likely to have experienced a rebound of around 1 percent in 2017. Total consumption would be 3.82 billion metric tons – 150 million tons less than that of 2015, or 420 million tons less than the 2013 level. Even if coal consumption increased by 3 percent to 3.90 billion tons in 2017 as the Global Carbon Project report said, it is still far less than the 4 billion tons in 2015, let alone challenging the 4.24 billion tons peak in 2013.

The Tea Party, or people happy to affiliate with them, currently control the Presidency, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court (with more nominations likely), and many state Governorships and legislatures. They are running the country.

You speak as if you'd love for the Occupy Wall Street folks to have taken over the government.
Even though we all know that there's only one major party which has no scruples or morals and is willing to take any fringe loon into their ranks just to stay in power.
We're not gonna name them but it's The Party Formerly Known As The Republican Party.
You know... before they took side with fucking Nazis! Now they should probably be called Nazi Party Lite.
Or Diet Nazis. The New Nazi Taste?

All of which has led to so much "winning" that they are breaking all records with the number of people who are leaving the current government - even given as much leeway as possible in order to make the lists more comparable to earlier administrations. Like not counting various people who've served for "insignificant time".
And we can all agree - insignificant service is the key attribute of this administration.
So even in such an unfair comparison - they are beating all other administrations in recent history.

Meanwhile there are still literally hundreds of unfilled key positions.
And that's while they control EVERYTHING in the government.

So much winning...

Sorry, i'm not as wealthy as you think i am. In terms of world population i'm in the 42%.

Source: "The Unprecedented Expansion Of The Global Middle Class"

Really. Really? You think that America went out of its way to avoid ISIS in Syria? You taint the rest of your post by starting off with that, makes it hard to take you at all seriously.

Your ignorance of the subject is not my problem. Yes, the United States has been arming, training and funding both ISIS and Al Queda to overthrow Assad. From the beginning.

America was reluctant to get involved in Syria in general

America was plotting to overthrow Syria before the Arab Spring was a thing. Again, remedial knowledge of the subject.

if for no other reason than he's allied with Russia and Iran and has been a thorn in Israel's side due to the illegal occupation of the Golan Heights after the 1967 war which was started by Israel

FTFY.

It is sort of curious how hard you are arguing for the Assad side

Why are you arguing for the Al Qaeda head choppers and the ISIS organ eating side? Because you want to see another Arab country turned into a third world hell hole like Iraq and Libya so American neocons can jizz themselves?

its hard to argue that the Syrian government hasn't engaged in plenty of other war crimes

How hard would you fight if if was your country being overrun by foreign-funded terrorists who wanted to chop off your head or cut out your heart and eat it?

The thing about chemical weapons in general is that they are not particularly effective as weapons of war

Then WTF would Assad use them in areas packed with his own people and military, when he was winning the war, on the day inspectors arrived. If your bullshit detector is completely and utterly non-functional....I have some oceanfront property in Idaho I would love to sell you at a great discount.

Your statement is in direct contradiction to what I just did above which was to post the misleading news and then post the actual data.

I also recommend watching and listening to a wide range of media. However, Fox has basically descended to a propaganda arm.. Frequently, when the entire world is presenting a news story, they completely ignore it (suppress it really) so people who rely on Fox only are not even aware the event occured.

Wapo, The Economist, and the NY times are better sources than CNN and MSNBC. MSNBC actually has a fairly pro-wealthy bias. They'll talk about how you can't raise taxes on the "job creators" (in the face of evidence that the "job creators" mostly invest in China- and any investment in the west is mostly in government bonds).

Two of the major creators of fake news said liberals don't bite and conservative/mr. trump fans do. One made thousands of dollars a month based on that observation. You can't ignore that fact.

I used to be a conservative. Their hypocrisy and lying drove me from the republican party halfway thru my voting life.

The so-called "fiscal conservatives" are already on target to add 7.8 trillion dollars to the debt. If this goes on, we are on track for them to add 32 trillion dollars to the debt.

(and fact checking that- it looks like it's exploded since I read the prior article. Now it's 8.7 to 10 trillion dollars in new debt (just over 1 year into the Trump presidency).

https://www.cnsnews.com/news/a...

https://www.brookings.edu/opin...

You still fail to explain why China should be cutting faster and more than America when America is over twice as polluting? Facts are facts, China has over a billion more people than the US.
China has 4 times the population, but only twice the CO2. Even if China went further than your prediction and doubled it's coal use, it would still be less polluting per person than America.
But the fact is China's coal use has already peaked.
It peaked a few years ago, and the coal that is being used now is also being used much more efficiently.

powerful group of well-financed backers willing to prop up a particularly ugly core of militants

Really! 110 billion ain't chump change, is it?. Shit goes way back, man...

https://www.brookings.edu/rese...

there is actual data on that page. Asians score highest, whites, then latinos then blacks. We have to make perfect ethnic rainbows.

I scored a composite 29 on ACT(taken in 10th grade), still didn't do great in college at 18, went back at 22 and got straight A's, BS and Master's. I don't think standardized tests matter much. Schools teach for the test and deliver college freshman without the ability to overcome challenges. Not everything will be cookie cutter rote memorization in life.

Also I got a 99% overall percentile on the PCAT (pre pharmacy school test) and didn't get accepted. Had an interview, but I'm a white male. Plenty of ethnic rainbows got in with lower scores.

No, the news being suppressed is about the agenda of "regime change" agents from Europe and the US. What were protests against austerity measures have been hijacked by others screaming for "democracy now!" The regularly scheduled pro government rally was much larger. I'm sure the Brookings Institute can tell you all about it(pdf).

"Democracy" evangelists (rich bankers really) are no better than any of the religious ones. Indeed they are false prophets. They don't want to allow anything, they want to impose it. This whole story is a propaganda piece to generate outrage and say 'yes' to war. It is the proverbial *Fake News* that you read about every day now. In the street we call it "bullshit". This story is that, it's bullshit. You shouldn't believe any of it.

if the elections have really been hacked, why not void them and have a do over?

Because "elections have been hacked" can mean anything including:

1. Polling machines programmatically hacked (which nobody, so far as I can tell, is alleging.)
2. Infrastructure around polling, such as voter registrations, and tools to make available voter IDs, being hacked to suppress turnout (there were rumors the Russians might have at one point been considering doing this, but nobody has alleged they actually have done this.)
3. The pollution of information sources to ensure voters are given believable false information

Thus far, the allegations concerning the Russians have focused on (3). There's pretty much no constitutional basis for overturning an election on the basis that voters were mislead. Voters are mislead all the time, it's just usually the lies come from fellow Americans, and to some extent there's some balance. On top of that, if the election were reheld today, how many people would go to the polls saying "Well, I've since learned that Clinton was actually the victim of a 25 year long smear campaign and it's highly improbable that 90% of the bad things I've heard about her actually have any basis in reality. I was duped, and will change my vote"?

Any? Nobody willingly admits they were duped over something that basic.

At this point, the only mechanism we have for "correcting" the mistake is to elect an opposition party to power in Congress in 2018. If we consider Trump continuing to be President dangerous (and I do), we also have to hope that party also recognizes that Trump has already broken the law and should be impeached. But that's the extent of it. You can't request a do-over because voters were lied to and manipulated, that'd invalidate almost every Presidential election we've ever had. The fact it's a foreign government that did so means we need to address our relations with that government, not invalidate our own elections.

https://www.brookings.edu/rese...

That part of the article (the researched bits) eluded you, because it was labeled "opinion". Your response is also an opinion, and has no research to back it up. Guess what, you should dismiss your own opinion similarly.

I can't think of any examples of "gangs" shooting hundreds of people at random like in Vegas. And by "gangs" we can only assume you mean black people, you racist fuck.

It's very convenient of you to exclude "non-sucide gun deaths", so I'll go for the unintentional deaths which account for 80% of the deaths caused by white owned guns. These are primary accidental handgun deaths, but if your baby was shot intentionally or accidental through the apartment wall it hardly matters to you.

citation1 citation2

San Francisco loves its left wingers, but somehow the economic side of that is left in the dust.

California in general, and SF in particular, have very pro-union laws snd policies, so I don't think there is any hypocrisy there.

If you want to see hypocrisy, look at how prosperous urban California uses exclusionary zoning to keep the poor out of their cities.

Just read Margaret Macmillan's essay The Rhyme of History wherein she mentions Kennedy's actions in the Cuban Missile Crisis:

"The young and relatively untried U.S. president was urged by virtually his entire top military leadership as well as many of the civilians in his administration to confront the Soviet Union vigorously, up to the point of invading Cuba and so risking an all-out nuclear war. Standing up to them, he opted instead for negotiations with Moscow and, in the end, preserved the peace. It was perhaps fortunate that he had just read Barbara Tuchman’s great The Guns of August and was very mindful of the ways nations can blunder into war. "

I'm all for letting people do whatever kind of private education they want if they're willing to pay for it. I don't think it will matter much. There was a report done by the Brookings Institution that found that school district, school choice within district, and teacher quality within schools collectively only explain a little under 10% of the variance in student achievement.

Realistically, even if some private company has it all figured out, there isn't a lot of room for improvement. I think the only area where they have a good chance at making a compelling argument is driving down costs. There's been enough administrative creep in education that could be done away with while having negligible impact on educational outcomes.

People seem to be making an incorrect assumption that schools will have a significant impact on their children's education, when there are other factors that contribute far more heavily to this. As the old saying goes, don't let your schooling get in the way of your education.

If I moved to where my job is I'd need a 500% raise to afford a mortgage or the rent.

The high property values are a result of government imposed artificial scarcity. Relatively rich landowners are using the government to enforce high rents and property prices on people that are much less wealthy. Instead of taxing the rich more, maybe we should just reduce their unfair subsidies.

How Zoning Laws Exacerbate Inequality
Zoning as opportunity hoarding
How Anti-Growth Sentiment Thwarts Equality

This means that winning one electoral vote in California takes on hell of more votes than winning the same electoral vote in Wyoming or Kansas or Montana

That would be true if every state ran their system like ME and NE. However, the majority is first past the pole. Here's the states that you mentioned if they worked on a distributed EV system.

California: Clinton 34, Trump 18, Johnson 2, Stein 1
Wyoming: Trump 2, Clinton 1
Kansas: Trump 3, Clinton 2, Johnson 1
Montana: Trump 2, Clinton 1

There's nothing wrong with your statement in that it takes more heads to earn a single EV (total population divide by EVs in state), but first past the pole makes that a mute point. WY, KS, and MT are a total of 12 EV which is only 2.2% of the EC. CA is 55 EV which is only 10.2%. Three rural states aren't even a fifth the total power of CA. So while Clinton only commanded ~62% of the state, she gets 10.2% (55/538 EV) of the EC from only 2% (1/50 states) of the total number of states. Trump commanded 70%, 57%, and 57% in WY, KS, MT respectively and received 2.2% (12/538 EV) of the EC out of 6% (3/50 states) of the total number of states.

What I do think is interesting is that Johnson commanded 3.4%, 5.3%, 4.7%, and 5.6% in CA, WY, KS, and MT respectively and received 0 EV, even though that is 3.6% (496,603/13,835,311 votes) of all votes that were cast in those states. I mean not even an unfaithful elector. My two cents, and it is just that, is that we're all so hell bent on trying to fix something for a two party system, that we forget we could be more than a two party system.

I will agree that the limit of 435 members to the house is pretty brain dead. Additionally, while the 1911 Act set the new membership size, The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 set it in stone. Census data in 1920 showed that populations were growing faster in cities than in rural areas and this Act was a stop-gap (oops turned into forever) measure to come up with a new method for determining size of Congress and distribution of seats, the formula has change since then, just not the number of seats. Additionally, I won't go into the formulas but they are posted here for public review. Without boring you to tears, the formulas favor smaller over bigger. You can read this about other methods that have been used and a bit of history on how membership size has ran through the decades.

As far as number of seats go. There's pros and cons to both sides. A smaller Congress would be more apt to get things done and cost less (maybe, unless they gave themselves a raise pursuant to the 27th Amendment), but members would be less personable to their constituents. A larger Congress would most likely cost more and less (I know, hard to think about Congress doing even less) might get done. However, they would be able to get more personable with their constituents. I think larger would be better, but I also think Congress should rethink the way that they operate and going into my opinion on that end would just inflate this comment already bigger than it already is.

Hope any of that drivel was helpful.

Besides that, many countries have higher gun ownership rates than the US, and still less violent crime. In the US, it's not a gun problem, it's a culture problem. This is especially obvious if you look at the difference in behavior between men and women, black people and white people, and especially among men who feel they need to prove their masculinity to other men.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog...

We are NOT trying protectionism, that is what the rest of the world has been doing for literally forever... We are moving to fair trade around the world. Let me educate you my fellow slashdot citizens: The US during the cold war set up trade deals to foster freedom and democracy around the world. We essentially used our economy to subsidize other free countries to help them grow and stabilize many regions. The cold war ended over 25 years ago, but the lopsided trade deals remained and many of our trading partners have further pushed their unfair trade advantages with the US to further extremes. The American people have been hurting ever since the dot com bubble burst and the 9-11 terrorist attacks drained ~$3 trillion from the US economy, with the war on terror draining another ~$3 trillion, with the rest of the world offering only token support while they grow fat on their socialistic benefits, made possible in large part by the US subsidizing their national defense with our military and subsidizing their economy with lopsided trade deals. The US citizens have looked around the world and collectively said WTF, no more of this bullshit and elected Trump to do what every other leader of every other country around the world does and is expected to do: put his own country's interests first...

Fact: The labor participation rates under Obama were the lowest they have been in 40 years (since Jimmy Carter).

Inflation has been created by the Fed lending the federal government trillions of dollars (more than half to most of the $12T of debt that Obama racked up in his 8 years, we don't have accurate numbers because the Fed or treasury won't release them). My guess is Trump won't release them either for fear of panicking the markets and destroying the economy even further thanks to Obama.

Median income growth was -2.3% in the US (that is just a hard fact) over the 8 years since Obama took office. That might not seem like much, but under Bill Clinton and Ronald Regan's presidencies that number was around 4% PER YEAR, that means than in either 8 year term you could expect to see your income rise by 37% on average if you were between the ages of 25-39 (where most of the middle class' bump up in income). Beyond that, if you use a real CPI, based on the things that real people buy, real income is down much more than 2.3%.

I know personally that 10 years ago I could buy more with my dollar than today, and the things I bought weren't cheap Chicom knockoffs from once proud companies that have been bankrupted by the flood of cheap junk competition from China. Probably 50% of our landfills today are filled with junk from China that was a "better deal" but only lasted 6 months before falling apart.

http://www.nationalreview.com/...
https://www.brookings.edu/blog...

To elaborate on the "never-conducted-an-attack-against-the-west" aspect: The closest thing one can come up with is the kidnapping of 45 UN peacekeepers by the former Jabhat al-Nusra (now Jaish Fatah al-Sham, after the announcement of severance of ties with al-Qaeda); they were all eventually released, under mediation from Qatar. But that was in response to a previous firefight between al-Nusra and the UN forces, and was conducted in an active conflict zone. There've also been a number of other foreigners kidnapped (they would say arrested), but always in Syria, on various grounds. They do not go overseas to conduct attacks, have repeatedly stated that they have no war with the west and do not seek one (although some US bombings of them in recent months seem to be ticking them off, based on their statements). JFS makes up about 30% of the defenders in Aleppo, and like the other members of Jaish al-Fatah and the FSA groups that make up the rest of the defenders, is in fierce opposition to Daesh. Jaish al-Fatah is a salafist rebel coalition; non-salafists generally go by the general moniker FSA (Free Syrian Army). But there's so much variation between different brigades in each group. For example, the FSA groups in the northwest, like the 1st Coastal which operates in Latakia, are for example very different from the FSA groups that are working alongside the Turkish army in Euphrates Shield near al-Bab.

I think because of the former connection with al-Qaeda (which is now ostensibly severed; no evidence has been presented to the contrary, but it's right to be suspicious of them until proven otherwise), there's been a lot of foreign attention focused on JFS. But it's a lot more complicated than that (here's a nice profile of the group, written pre-split), and more to the point, I think it takes away a lot of attention from some of the complexity in the conflict in general. JFS's stark opposition to Daesh, domestic focus, and much greater nuance in handling of local populations (versus previous al-Qaeda-linked groups, such as in Iraq) led to the mainstreaming of them into the opposition. But some groups (apart from the obvious case of Daesh) are more concerning - for example, al-Zinki. During the previous (quite successful) JaF assault on Hama petered out when al-Zinki allowed/assisted a Daesh suicide bomber to move through Idlib and attack against Ahrar ash-Sham (a prominent JaF group). JaF in turn directed its guns on al-Zinki instead. JFS tried to act as the "Can't We All Just Get Along?" peacemaker in the conflict. Another incident with al-Zinki occurred when they captured a child soldier from a Palestinian paramilitary that was fighting for Assad, and beheaded him. That nearly got JaF attacking them as well, until al-Zinki arrested the soldiers and promised to punish them.

Ah, complexity...

"Shovel ready" is a bit of a joke

What was not? "Cash for clunkers", perhaps?..

According to this breakdown Trump won the popular vote in 2,584 counties and Clinton won the popular vote in 472 counties.

that's why California totally isn't the 6th largest economy in the world.
Chicago's economy totally isn't the size of Switzerland.
and NYC totally isn't larger than all of Canada .
such yuuuge failures, the lot of them, amirite? /s

I'm sure you also marveled at how huge the Soviet economy was and what a huge city Moscow was. See, it's easy to build a huge economy if you bleed others dry to pay for it.

And California, Chicago, and NYC also have huge fiscal problems, huge inequality, and huge social problems.

https://www.brookings.edu/rese...

These cities and states are doing well for a powerful political and social elite, who use government interference in the market to enrich themselves. In fact, you left out the biggest example of them all: Washington DC, whose wealth has gone through the roof under recent, increasingly corrupt administrations.

Please read: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-c...

https://www.brookings.edu/rese...

The most recent academic research suggests that, on average, immigrants raise the overall standard of living of American workers by boosting wages and lowering prices. One reason is that immigrants and U.S.-born workers generally do not compete for the same jobs; instead many immigrants complement the work of U.S. employees and increase their productivity. For example, low-skill immigrant laborers allow U.S.-born farmers, contractors, or craftsmen to expand agricultural production or to build more homes—thereby expanding employment possibilities and incomes for U.S. workers. Another reason is that businesses adjust to new immigrants by opening stores, restaurants, or production facilities to take advantage of the added supply of workers; more workers translate into more business.

Source: http://www.brookings.edu/~/med...

>> Do you think poor people are poor simply because they don't feel like getting a job?

Following these 3 rules correlates to a 2% of becoming poor:

1) at least finish high school
2) get a full-time job
3) wait until age 21 to get married and have children


Please don't tell me people are forced into violating these 3 things.

http://www.brookings.edu/resea...

I know Americans can never contemplate the idea that anybody may have freedom who isn't American let alone have MORE freedom

A few places are comparably free, but the vast majority of the world's population, regretfully, continues to live under regimes considerably more oppressive than the US. And I'm not talking just the usual suspects — like China or Russia — generally respectable places like India can be quite intolerant of unpopular opinions and authoritarian in controlling the information networks. It may seem crazy to Americans, but Germans and Brits, for another example, routinely get arrested simply for saying the wrong things on social media — in the US attempts to criminalize "hate speech" are still duly resisted.

Not to mention certain sunny locales, where one's had can be removed for apostasy.

Reducing America's control over the Internet will — inevitably and by definition — increase the share of control by these governments.

We've seen this before — UN's "Human Rights Council" is a good example of it. All of the things about it, that the so called "Liberals", dismiss as "myths", are actually quite true. It will happen to the Internet's governance — inasmuch as it needs any — as well.

I wouldn't because it's safer not to. The stats are really clear. If you try to use your own weapon for self defence your likelihood of being shot dramatically increases.

That's not true at all.

There are two main ways of looking at the statistics. Both have their error rates. The first is to look at people who died by a gun who own a gun. This tends to lead to false positives, as it includes (for example) people who buy a gun but don't use it, as well as people who buy a gun because someone threatened them - they were going to end up shot anyway.

The second approach is to look at people who die by their own gun. This leads to false negatives, as there are indeed cases where drawing a firearm escalates a situation where there would not have been a homicide.

In addition to going with data gathering that includes false positives, the anti-gun crowd tends to lump in suicides in the "firearm deaths" statistics, which leads to more false positives (cases where people were going to kill themselves anyway). They also like to compare only "odds of dying from a firearm" between owners and non-owners, which is of course higher, for exactly the same reason that "odds of dying from a car" is higher when you own a car. The problem with this approach, is that it does not include the chance of self-defence, so it's impossible to have any other outcome. Even though the odds of dying may be lower, the odds of dying from a gun go up.

Recognizing that, even using the pessimistic numbers, you're still almost certainly safer with a firearm than without. Here's why:

http://www.brookings.edu/~/med...

In the US, if you are not a 18-25 year old black male, you are actually safer with a firearm than without. That single segment is responsible for a huge portion of both homicide victims and perpetrators.

In addition, there's also the matter of training. Parents who own pools are more likely to have their kids drown (unsurprisingly). Parents who teach their kids to swim are less likely than those who don't, even if they own a pool (also unsurprisingly). Likewise, the firearm statistics include people who carry that are stupid and untrained. Don't be one of those people, and your odds get even better still.

Likewise, if you have children who don't know how to use firearms, keeping loaded guns around the house makes negligent deaths far more likely. If you don't have kids, you're much safer.

On top of that, whether or not you are safer depends on whether you are likely to be a victim, and how strong you are. My 85 year old grandmother (for example) is not in a position to defend herself from a violent attacker. She has no children in the house whatsoever. For her, a bedside firearm is far, far, far more likely to defend her than to be used against her, as she's already in a position of weakness to any likely attacker.

I prefer to defend myself with gun control and a more equal, fair society

So, you prefer rule of the strong and the many. Good for you. Some of us have been assaulted (and have family members that have been, too). What would you say to rape victims - "just sit back and let it happen"? Scream, and hope he gives up? Guess what, he didn't.

On balance, that seems to work better than the American model.

If you subtract the black population, the firearms homicide rate is on the higher end of Europe. If you subtract the Hispanic population, the rate is closer to the low end of Europe.

The US doesn't have a gun problem. It has a minorities with guns problem.

The List would, as you say, be abused. Nor would it help much.

The majority of firearm homicides in the US are not the result of crazies. Gangbangers are real. It's politically incorrect to say so, but black men are far more likely to commit homicide by firearms than white men, and vastly more likely to shoot other black men. They also do not make the national news, just the local bleeds-and-leads where the violence gets ignored. The root of that violence is not psychological trauma but a lack of economic hope. To be blunt and very politically incorrect, the black men who are shooting other black men would probably not be doing so if they were more gainfully employed and had hope that, by building the same kinds of lives as white men, they could make progress in the world. I'll say it again so that I can get modded into oblivion: the problem is economic, not psychological. The crazies are a small fraction of the problem, but the desperate and hopeless sane ones who have turned to crime are the real problem. If you treat poverty, if you find ways of bringing hope for a better future to the ghettos and slums of the inner city, you will reduce firearm violence far more than by any "smart gun" or technological solution.

Nathanial Hawthorne, for those who didn't fail English class, was right when he wrote Earth's Holocaust: eliminating the instruments of undesirable behavior without treating the causes of that behavior does nothing to eliminate the behavior. You could melt down all the guns in America if you wanted, only to find that more were cast and made the next day. Safety and social progress do not arise from changing objects but from changing people. Ignoring the statistics only ignores the problem, and the problem is human, not metal.

The NHTSA site is woefully incomplete on that point.

That said, another ref:

Level 1: ADAPTIVE speed control
(not the bog standard cruise control I've been using 20+ years)

Level 2: ADAPTIVE speed control + lane centering

Given that, regular, non-adaptive (non speed-adjusting as opposed to speed-MAINTAING) cruise control is likely level 0.

Ref:
http://www.brookings.edu/resea...

Absorbing immigrants takes resources. But I dispute that it's a net loss for a country; immigrants to a country tend to over-contribute to the economy once they get established. The actual cost/benefit analysis is much more complex (PDF) than you seem to be stating.