Slashdot Mirror

New Scientist

New York Times

CS Monitor

Nope.

Nice try, but you'll have to do better next time.

Remove 2 billion people from the planet.

There is really no need for that. We have basically got population growth under control, with the fertility rate being around static (2.2) in most places. Yes, even third world countries.

The population is still growing because people are living longer. But it's levelling off, and at a level which is sustainable with modern farming methods and renewable energy.

In the longer term, past 2100, the population will probably fall as the fertility rate continues to decline

Modern farming techniques aren't sustainable. Modern farming relies on tapping fossil water (aquifers), mining phosphorus, and petro chemicals. All of these are exhaustible resources. And beyond that fertilizer runoff in waterways, excessive antibiotics used to raise livestock, and pesticides are all ecological disasters in their own right.

I'm not saying that we should just stop all those things now and let a bunch of people starve, but we need to realize we are drawing down resources in decades that were built up over millions of years. We should do our best to improve these practices, figure out how many people actually sustainable agriculture and industry can support, and work on getting our birthrate down below replacement until we hit that number.

And of course, we'd have to come up with an economic system that isn't predicated on constant growth. Right now several countries that have flat or negative growth rates are running PR campaigns and social programs to incentivize people to have more children to stave off economic repercussions of a shrinking population.

Came here to say this. By 2012, U.S. farmers were using no-till on over half of all acres planted to corn, soybean, and wheat.

Farming has moved so far beyond this article that I am not sure why it was even published.

Consider the source: a freshly-minted staff writer and an economics writer for the Christian Science Monitor. If they didn't know about it before, it must be news.

Came here to say this. By 2012, U.S. farmers were using no-till on over half of all acres planted to corn, soybean, and wheat.

Farming has moved so far beyond this article that I am not sure why it was even published.

Consider the source: a freshly-minted staff writer and an economics writer for the Christian Science Monitor. If they didn't know about it before, it must be news.

What lies?

Oh please! You really have to ask? It's marketing 101. They have a product to sell.

Oklahoma is hurtling off of a fiscal cliff, and it's entirely self-inflicted. They must be getting desperate.

https://www.csmonitor.com/Busi...
https://www.economist.com/unit...

Unsurprisingly this is written by Farhad Manjoo, known for being a liar in the pocket of industry:

https://www.csmonitor.com/Book...
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/f...

638 million people in India do not have access to a toilet. I'm not trying to go on some racist rant here. Having access to basic facilities isn't a matter of race, it's a matter of infrastructure. A government that can't solve this problem has no real business trying to regulate businesses and the Internet.

I'd argue that the US should ignore any laws India tries to create. On the evidence that the Indian government isn't organized enough to enforce its own laws.

I dare D.C. to call India's bluff!

Who said I want to destroy them? There's a difference between tearing statues down and denying them a place of honor. Germany got it right after WW2 - they didn't bulldoze the concentration camps. They turned them into museums that were clearly designed to avoid a repeat of past atrocities. They get a lot of credit in my book for facing their demons directly. The confederate statue-defenders want no such thing. They don't want to face the truth - they want to blindly honor their view of history. Sorry. No. That place and time simply doesn't deserve the honor.

You don't speak for the people who DO want them destroyed, and you also don't speak for the people who feel strongly about preserving their history.

What's your position on this one? Lots of people find it offensive.
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/...

How about the protests to remove Thomas Jefferson statues?

Trust me, this will just continue. Eventually they will get to something you care about.

It wasn't undiscovered. It was an open secret [duckduckgo.com].

It's not an open secret if only his own company and some Hollywood insiders know about it. If it's not widely known, it's just a regular secret.

Why do you strawman instead of tackling the issue? You ignored the initial pushback. You ignored the context in which he was finally pushed out. It wasn't about morals, it was about what was politically expedient.

Consider their record, compared to the record of the Republicans on Roy Moore and Trump himself. This is the beginning of a trend where you've begun to move the goalposts from the core issue of a vast difference in moral/principled behavior and tribalism among the left and right in the US, to making the false equivalence argument that the left isn't perfect on these issues and is therefore just as terrible as the party where Donald Trump and Roy Moore operate freely.

But they are liberals.

Biased sample fallacy. Most liberals would not support Polanski.

No, I'm talking about this [twitter.com].

A ridiculous description of well-documented events?

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/...

You know Good Ole' Bubba has been accused of rape, as well as being a serial sexual harasser of women, right?

Fair point. So is he still in good standing? Hard to tell. He's no more involved in politics than any celebrity with political opinions these days. If the allegations from the '90s happened today and he was in office, it would likely be a different story.

As for Sarah Jeong, like it or not parodying racism isn't racist, and there is a difference between punching up and punching down in comedy. Pretending otherwise harms your credibility.

And, breaking news, soon we'll get to see how this turns out. I predict plenty of mulligans and conspiracy theories on the right:

https://www.wired.com/story/co...

You mean how London briefly has had a higher homicide rate than New York, a US city that has been experiencing record lows in that category https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/... [csmonitor.com] ? London, in a country that has had strict gun laws for over a half century.

Record lows despite a 50 year trend of liberalizing gun laws in the us from their most restrictive points in the 60s and 70s

Keep going.

You mean how London briefly has had a higher homicide rate than New York, a US city that has been experiencing record lows in that category https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/... ? London, in a country that has had strict gun laws for over a half century.

You're referring to the spike in London that clearly has nothing to do with their gun laws?

Maybe get your information from sources other than right wing news and you might look less stupid.

I thought that no voting machines were hacked, and no vote tallys were changed. Is that no longer true?

That has never been true.

All that has ever been said is that they have not found proof, not that they have disproved anything. Much of that is because the states responsible have not even been looking for proof.

Furthermore, there is tons of circumstantial evidence to indicate that there was vote tampering. For example in 2015, russians secretly bought the company handling Maryland's voting machines. We also know, because they were caught at the last minute, that the russians tried to change votes on Ukranian voting machines in 2014.

So, even if the russians have not yet successfully altered votes, it is not for a lack of trying.

Also, fuck off you shitstain antipatriot. I've read your post history, its clear you would be happier living in russia so just fucking move already and leave our country to real americans.

Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago
A new investigation shows the oil company understood the science before it became a public issue and spent millions to promote misinformation

Did ExxonMobil commit securities fraud by denying climate change?
New York's state attorney general and a US congressman are looking into whether the energy giant illegally misled shareholders about climate change.

They weren't ignored. And indeed, a lot of jobs were recovered after the GFC losses. But they've been declining steadily since 1980, so that's unlikely to change much soon.

As for "having nothing to lose", we've already seen how e.g. Trump's steel tariffs can actually damage local manufacturing by dramatically raising their costs, so I very much doubt that's true. The decline in those jobs might be slowed a little, but at the cost of making other sectors less competitive - and workers in construction and auto manufacturing are major parts of Trump's base too. And that's before we get into the impact of retaliatory tariffs on completely different sectors like farming.

Is it? Can you quote a single Democrat saying this? Ever?

Actions speak louder than words. They oppose all attempts to secure the border, enforce immigration law, or deport those here illegally.

Not even close. In fact the Obama administration deported 2.5 million illegal aliens, not only more than any other presidential administration, but more than all the other 20th century presidential administrations put together. They called him the "deporter in chief".

"Actions speak louder than words."

https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/verify-did-obama-deport-more-people-than-any-other-president/408785995

https://www.npr.org/2017/01/20/510799842/obama-leaves-office-as-deporter-in-chief

https://splinternews.com/sorry-obamas-still-deporter-in-chief-1821625282

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-deportation-policy-numbers/story?id=41715661

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/obama-record-deportations-deporter-chief-or-not

Any economist worth his salt knows how to create a shortage

Empirical data already suggests that surge pricing does not alleviate shortages, it just moves them around. That's probably because getting new drivers on the road isn't "free" - drivers aren't just sitting around idling and waiting for prices to go up, they've got other stuff going on. So most can't get geared up and out there before the surge event is over.

Instead surge pricing mostly just reroutes current drivers away from their normal areas, which increases wait time in those areas because they are now under-served.

Related to this, Elon Musk has repeatedly claimed that Autopilot is safer than human drivers.

This claim is extremely exaggerated for a few reasons.

First of all, Musk is comparing autopilot to a human driver crash rates for ALL existing vehicles and ALL types of drivers.

But Tesla drivers are very much a self-selected subset of all drivers. Drivers of other similar expensive luxury type cars are quite a lot safer drivers than average.

Furthermore, vehicles in the similar price range to Teslas have many advanced safety features, ranging from crash-resistant construction to automated collision avoidance systems. So this type of vehicle is a few times safer than the average vehicle--which include older vehicles, pickup trucks, etc etc etc.

Finally, "Autopilot" is most typically used on the type of roads that are quite a lot safer than the average road. These roads are roughly 2X safer than average.

Putting this all together, Tesla "Autopilot" is approximately 10X more likely to be involved in a fatal crash than similar vehicles with similar drivers operating on similar roads. More detailed analysis here and here.

This type of analysis might go over the heads of the average citizen, but it's the type of thing Slashdot readers should be able to get their minds around.

And Musk really needs to get some pushback from the technical community when he makes this type of unsupportable claim.

Honestly it is a pretty amazing accomplishment that Tesla's Autopilot is even in the same ballpark as human drivers. It does give some reasonable hope that technical advances will be able to advance automated driving until it is actually safer than humans (though Tesla systems are unlikely to ever get there, as their sensors simply are not up to the task).

But still the "Autopilot" system is a whole order of magnitude more dangerous than similar vehicles with similar drivers on similar roads.

Both Tesla drivers and the general public need to understand that. When you switch on "Autopilot" you are literally trading convenience for safety.

Basically, the complaint is that the new NASA Administrator disagrees with the left on some issues. Did they miss that time back in 2016 when we had an election and the candidates promoting their issues lost? What do they expect? Do they really think continuing the over-the-top whining is going go convince anyone to vote for them instead next time?

Meanwhile, let's remember Charlie Boldon's interview on Al-Jazeera, Obama's pick for the same job and what he "misspoke" about his instructions from the top:

"One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering,"

DAPA was shot down by a circuit court and the Supreme Court split 4-4 on it with no opinion.

Interesting... I can't find prior rulings on deferred action programs at this time. There have been a great many. Someone did sue the Clinton administration and lose, and on pretty good grounds.

The fun part is people complain about these rules and assert that they're at odds with the law, and we often just pass laws making these rules the law. I've encountered people on the campaign trail that tell me that's stupid and I need to focus on enforcing the law; I point out that enforcing the law is the Judicial's problem, executing it is the Executives, and that the job I'm going for is making the law--which means when I say it's fine and several hundred others in the room nod in agreement, that is the law.

Good catch, though. I'm working off fourth-hand information in this case, and should seek better sources.

The last hand-cranked telephone was disconnected in the 1980s., decades after they were common. IIRC, The last telegram was sent in India less than 10 years ago. There's always a long tail of old tech that had a large installed base.

Roman Mir?

Some citations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/africa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...


Not only were beating, lynching, and rape common and likely in Jim Crowe areas, they were likely in the North as well. Racism is not only a southern problem. Have you ever heard of a "sunset" town? They existed in many states.
Do you honestly think none of this was backed up by violence or threats of violence? We live an a remarkably peaceful time and it's difficult for many people to reconcile that with past attitudes and practices.
In a perfect world, you could research this all yourself, but once again I'm wasting my time trying to educate an ignoramus. Yes, I know this is an unlikely way to change your mind, but I'm pretty sure your not fixable.

Also if you call a biker a woman and get beaten up the biker is breaking the law. Misgendering laws like this mean you'd be breaking the law

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/...

New York City issued guidelines in December 2015 for employers and landlords on the correct pronoun usage for transgender men and transgender women. Violating the guidelines intentionally or repeatedly could result in a fine as large as $250,000, especially if doing so appears to be malicious. The guidelines say that to avoid the fine, transgender people must be asked what their preferred pronoun is.

The guidelines require anyone who provides jobs or housing to use the transgender person's preferred pronoun, such as "ze," "hir," "they," them," "he," "she," "him," or "her." "Ze" is the third person singular, used in place of either "he" or "she," while "hir" is third person possessive, used to replace "his" or "her." Pronouns like "ze" or "hir" represent a break from traditional male- or female-only roles.

"Gender expression may not be distinctively male or female and may not conform to traditional gender-based stereotypes to specific gender identities," said a city official.

While some say that the conversation over transgender pronouns represents progress toward equality, others note how easy it might be - even for the parents of transgender people - to also sometimes forget or mix up the pronouns.

The guidelines are the country's first of their kind, coming from the New York City Commission on Human Rights. About 75,000 transgender people live in New York City.

"I think it comes down to respect. People identify how they want to identify and it's not up to anyone else to determine that," a pedestrian told Fox 5. "There are a lot of social norms that are changing and people need to understand that this is someone's life, it's not just a flippant choice."

Others however think the fine is too high. "I understand the intent," another pedestrian told Fox, "but $250,000 is excessive." Writer Paul Joseph Watson at InfoWar said the notion of businesses asking every customer what pronoun they want to use is "absurd," given that even Facebook delineates 71 gender options.

"So people can basically force us - on pain of massive legal liability - to say what they want us to say, whether or not we want to endorse the political message associated with that term, and whether or not we think it's a lie," writes Eugene Volokh, law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

It's also pretty obvious that laws like this violate the First Amendment as Volokh points out. Be able to threaten people with $250,000 fines unless they call you "ze" is fucking mental.

Real science doesn't label critics as “deniers”. Politics in the name of science does that.

Real scientists label things as what they are. In this case there are two theories a) the critics of global warming are "denialists" and b) the critics of global warming are "skeptics". There's an experimental test we can do. We take those that are critical and we provide them with experimental evidence and data. We allow them to make predictions and then we test those predictions. What happens in most cases is that they go through a series of different denials and change their theories: there is no warming oh.. there is warming however it will go away soon oh .. it didn't go awayhowever it isn't caused by CO2oh .. it is caused by CO2 but it isn't caused by humans and it's natural oh.. and this goes on and on.

In a few cases there are actual skeptics and when you do this they end up admitting that they were wrong which is how science works. These people were skeptics and were valid critics and do end up changing their mind when they see and understand the overwhelming evidence.

In your case, I make the prediction that even when I point you to sufficient evidence to be clear you will not take it into account and change your views. That would make you a "denialist" because that is what scientific testing shows you are, not because I'm labelling you.

What are you talking about? They have lockers. Use them. For schools that don't have lockers either forbid them to bring the phones or come up with a secure box to store them during the day.

You should learn how many schools are removing lockers these days.

I think it is simply a huge black hole for time that could be productively used for employment, study, personal enrichment, and trolling slashdot. With the additional benefit of avoiding more ads. Don't get me started about TV.

True this. But let's not start sounding like our grandparents, blaming the fall of Western Civilization on that blasted idiot box. We survived. So will the kids who grew up with the Internet.

Big Picture, Mr. Idiot Pai is simply performing a pivot; attempting to duck the controversy about Net-Neutrality with a head-fake toward the boogeyman of mean, mean social media (and the rich, nasty, West-Coast libs who own it). Let your mind go soft and go "Gosh, maybe the Internet would be nicer if ISP's could charge more against nasty social-media sites and newspapers that pick on helpless political hacks like Pai and his sweet dear leader." Think nice thoughts while Pai's FCC junks Net-Neutrality and Title II with a party-line vote to open the floodgates to vast new opportunities for ISP profits. I wonder which of his relatives is flush flush flush with Verizon and Comcast stock, ready to take off once they finally have the right to get a piece of every successful internet business' action.

Put simple, you wanna stream that Disney movie? Not on Comcast's wires you won't, not unless Disney pays Comcast a little extra for that bandwidth. Money money money that will eventually trickle out of you. Oh, sure, you can just pirate from a torrent... but wait! without Net-Neutrality, your ISP can shut that off, completely. VPN? Now they're calling it a business application, costs extra to carry those packets. The possibilities for new fees are as boundless as the Internet itself, with that silly Net-Neutrality out of the way.

Christian
  Catholic
  Islam

Maybe i'm just paranoid (most likely) but...does this look like preparing the public for a planned nuclear war?

More likely Sec Energy Perry's attempt to get subsidies for nuke and coal plants. But I also wonder about the WIPP The WIPP is a DOE project. Maybe Perry wants to change the standards to make underground storage less dangerous.

China is NOT worried about CAGW dolt. CAGW is simply another foreign money maker for them and strategically exploits the US.

Urban particulates for black lungs, NOx, SOx are their immediate problems.

Somebody with MOD points please MOD the parent comment up!

Aside: In addition to the toxic cloud they call air enveloping them, China's cities are sinking.

Yeah, he won the clown car race with 16 (or was it 17) candidates by a healthy margin by differentiating himself. But polling throughout the race had him at unprecedented unfavorability ratings, with only Clinton able to even remotely complete. He polled worse than lice and Nickelback.

Also, among the groups of independents, Democrats, and Republicans, Republicans are the smallest group, and only a small subset of them voted in the primaries.

Which is why there are many questions yet unanswered. Without any mention of any other nations, American voting machines are notoriously easy to hack https://fossbytes.com/defcon-2... http://thehill.com/policy/cybe... 2012 - https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/... 2011 - https://www.salon.com/2011/09/...

2005 - https://arstechnica.com/uncate...

This is not fake news, this is not remotely deniable. I knew that the voting manchines were Internet of things easy to hack almost 15 years ago. http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/peopl...

There have been some strange happenings like in the 2012 election where Carl Rove had a public meltdown when he refused to concede the Ohio vote, expecting some districts to come through and push the Republican candidate over the edge and win Ohio. It was interesting in the aspect that Ohio had a strange even in a previous election where the exit polls gave the state to a Democrat, but the vote tally did not. The Republican response was the typical Good Republican Voters screwing with the Media. But that's just a side story, and I digress.

The big question is - with the machines having terrible security, why the hell would a tech-savvy nation not hack and alter the results to mess with an adversary nation or to put in a person they had sway with?

11 counties have more voters registered than people.

11? Man, that's terrible. Out of over 3000, there are 11, with registration greater than the number of people.

Heavens no. In our highly mobile society, people like Jared Kushner, Tiffany Trump, and Steve Bannon, can't keep their voter registration up to date! The horrors! And it's not even a crime!

LA alone is at 144% of people register vs actual population but they haven't cleaned the lists.

What are you talking about? The county says they have 4.3 million registered voters, and the Census says the County's population is over 10 million.

That's not tracking with your claims. Where do you get your numbers from?

This alone doesn't mean there was voter fraud but increases the chances there actually is significant amount of voter fraud in CA, but CA doesn't want anyone to check.

And Trump's voter commission chair has a history of lying and evasion.

Not only that, states have a history of failing in voter purges. And yes, that is evidence of illegality. Criminal behavior to suppress the vote.

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/...

Anyone with substantial amounts of wealth has rapid access to cash via extremely low interest rate loans.
Sources:
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2012/0717/Zuckerberg-s-1-percent-mortgage-Why-does-a-billionaire-need-a-loan
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-rich-people-can-borrow-money-at-very-low-rates-of-interest-nearly-free-Regular-savers-must-borrow-at-much-higher-rates-of-interest

On the civilian side, offhand, thousands of engineers, computer programmers, project managers, administrators, machinists, assembly-line. Pretty much all the workers employed on or supporting military contracts at companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrup Grumman, L-3, BAE, ITT, ... and all their subcontractors working on those programs. And any of those that require security clearances are 100% not going to be ousted for H1B workers or have their jobs shipped to China.

And on the military side, more than a million people are employed, physically conditioned, trained in their jobs, receive additional education and healthcare. In FY 2016, total Army end strength was 483K, the Navy had 329K, Marines 183K, Air Force 313K, and Coast Guard 39K. Currently about 9800 troops are deployed in Afghanistan and about 6000 in Iraq, about 700 in Syria. A large percentage are in the US, training etc., most of the rest are deployed at sea or in places like South Korea, Germany, Poland, Japan.

Some years old, but makes the point: https://www.csmonitor.com/Busi...

America’s biggest — and only major — jobs program is the U.S. military.

Over 1,400,000 Americans are now on active duty; another 833,000 are in the reserves, many full time. Another 1,600,000 Americans work in companies that supply the military with everything from weapons to utensils. (I’m not even including all the foreign contractors employing non-US citizens.)

If we didn’t have this giant military jobs program, the U.S. unemployment rate would be over 11.5 percent today instead of 9.5 percent.

And without our military jobs program personal incomes would be dropping faster. The Commerce Department reported Monday the only major metro areas where both net earnings and personal incomes rose last year were San Antonio, Texas, Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. — because all three have high concentrations of military and federal jobs.

This isn’t an argument for more military spending. Just the opposite. Having a giant undercover military jobs program is an insane way to keep Americans employed.

Historically some of America’s biggest jobs programs that were critical to the nation’s future have been justified by national defense, although they’ve borne almost no relation to it. The National Defense Education Act of the late 1950s trained a generation of math and science teachers. The National Defense Highway Act created millions of construction jobs turning the nation’s two-lane highways into four- and six-lane Interstates.

Numerous states have lost in court over their abusive voter actions: Florida, Texas, Kansas, North Carolina. What do these states have in common? Is it also that they've been subjected to Republican misrule, often due to gerrymandering? It would seem, therefore, if Republicans were really interested in fair and honest elections, they would remedy the faults in their actions that lead to unlawful purges, and discriminatory ID claims, so their actions would be fair and above reproach. Yet the opposite happens...Why is that?

Oh, and it turns out that Virginia had problems with its attempted purge. And that report you cherish is questionable.

Sorry, LynnwoodRooster, but your command of statistics remains faulty, same as when you're being a racist bigot about homicides.

You're a fucking idiot.

You want to see what nuclear power does? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

That's what "can" happen with nuclear. THEN, on top of that... we have https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/...

AND THEN there's the fact that nuclear power, as a percentage of energy production has been level for some time (in the US), while solar and wind (you know, the ones that don't cause radioactive wastelands, or materials that have to be sequestered for centuries) are climbing rapidly.

The problem is not that democrats oppose nuclear, it's that republicans are stuck in the 70's and can't pull their heads out of their ass to see the future... and it's not nuclear.

As for genetic crops... i don't give a crap one way or the other, nor animals... although some on the republican-fake-christian side seem to think messing with animals is somehow going against God. And for medicine? Oh yeh, if we could only cure cancer..... or if we could cure 70% of a cancar with a simple vaccine... then the republican-fake-christains will be against it because they have shit for brains.

Space travel? Now you are truly just being a fucking idiot. You're a conservative asswipe who's trying to disassociate from all the stupidity of the people you agree with because deep down you know they're fucking idiots, and by extension, so are you.

CSM has recently switched to be completely behind a paywall, as well.

Just now I went to csmonitor.com, with JavaScript enabled in my browser. On that web page, there are some links to Monitor articles. Near the bottom of the page, there is a grey "Show More" button. If you click it, more links to articles appear at the bottom of the web page. I clicked that button 3 times, then clicked on a link to an article. This article appeared. I was able to see the entire article. So I don't think you have to subscribe to the Monitor to read its articles.

I just wish that in their articles (like the one that I referenced), they'd use responsive web design, and put in more than one column if the screen's width is large enough to be a laptop.

You get U.S. history, warts and all as a freshman in college.

Sure you do.

Did anyone get a check back from Obama after the Solyndra bail-out fiasco? Nope.

There was no bail-out, no fiasco, just a loan guarantee that came due because it turned out Solar panel prices dropped due to even more extensive Chinese government subsidies of their own factories.

For which yes, there was a check. I believe it went to the George Kaiser Family Foundation, to claim that there was no check is foolishness.

Actually, the Energy Department was very successful and produced a net gain in money alone.

Or did you think Solyndra was the only participant? More foolishness on your part then.

But no, you are not entitled to a check for the government running a surplus on that program, if you want money from the government, buy a bond yourself.

Besides, you might as well complain that the government gave away land to the railroads and the Sooners. Not that you are, which would at least give you some credibility for history. I bet you don't even know that it was the Bush Era Energy Policy Act of 2005 that started the program.

As to TFA's claim, if cheap energy is here why have my rates gone considerably higher, triple in December/Jan/Feb as most Californian's saw? Come tell me what will and won't work when you get back to planet Earth.

The last time California had an energy problem, it was a private company in Houston. I suggest you start there.

Also since you complained later in the thread, Congress does Oversee regulation, making yet another case of ignorance on your part.

On the plus side, illegal immigration is at the lowest it's been in 2 decades

Not just illegal immigration, people are avoiding traveling to the US in general (Interest in travel to the US has "fallen off a cliff" since Donald Trump’s election - https://www.theguardian.com/tr...) Good! There are enough people here, we don’t need anymore, we’ll make that tourist money up in other ways. Silicon valley tech companies are avoiding letting employees travel to outside the US for fear they won’t be able to get back in. Good! show them with actions it’s better to only hire US workers. I mean what have immigrants ever done for silicon valley and the US anyway?! https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...

the economy is up by 20%

%20? sure, I follow you brother no citation needed. Either way, great, nothing wrong there. ("Any improvement for the consumer will be balanced out by the higher value of the dollar," Mr. Payne forecasts. http://www.csmonitor.com/Busin...)

and we made a strong-but-measured move in Syria which has garnered praise from many world leaders.

Yes, strength! (Trump's Syria Strike Was Unconstitutional and Unwise - https://www.theatlantic.com/po...)

Hey don't forget it's not just Syria, we are showing our strength all over the world! (civilian deaths - more than 1,000 in March alone - that have come directly as the result of the Trump administration’s other reckless military campaigns across the Middle East over the past few weeks. - https://www.theguardian.com/co...) Yes, this is great! The heavy handed tactics accusations thrown at Hillary which would lead us into war, well now Trump has done them so it’s ok, yeah! We’re #1 we’re #1!

positive effect on relations and negotiations with Iran, N. Korea, and China.

Yes, for sure because they respect a useless reckless show of force over keeping their trade deals in tact.

Limiting illegal immigration should eventually bubble up into more jobs

Yup, I’m pretty psyched, I’m preparing for my new job! It’s at a nice outdoor location in sunny fields actually. Purportedly it reaches about 100F so I should get a good tan out of it to boot! The hours will be refreshing, I will be working from 5AM to 6PM and I’m working with nature, picking fruit, I think I can have a radio with me and I’m making $15 per hour! Great, looking forward to it! The other benefit is I'll be able to take some fruit home in my bag since I won't be able to afford it anymore at the supermarket.

Or is it just another example of government waste?

Yeah, i think it was one of those stupid "Obama liberal biased" attempts to help brown people not get railroaded by local law enforcement practices, good riddance I say!

There's a difference between preventing peaceful protest and preventing people from blocking highways that are used for emergency vehicles.

I was hoping someone would try to make this argument. These bills have nothing at all to do with "blocking highways", and everything to do with blocking speech.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/J...

This just infuriates me. It is part of the reason why people don't have any faith in the two major US political parties. It is sort of like how people will eagerly issue wedding invites to relatives they have no desire to see when they are confident that the invite will be refused. The Republicans now obviously have the same lack of spine as during the last 6 years of the Obama administration. During the Obama administration they quickly rolled over on every debt ceiling increase and budget increase requested. They sent unworkable legislation that they knew Obama would veto (not just Obamacare repeal bills). They were clearly posturing/grandstanding.

This is something you didn't know from the start? Trump's own blandishments were a joke. And his excuse that nobody realized how complicated it was? That's what we call revealing insight into his character.

I can't help but feel that the way they are behaving now is an effort by the establishment types to subvert Trump because they don't like him. Funny enough, I think that they are likely to more damage than the Democrats that also don't like Trump.

Yes, your average Republican is more likely to do more damage than any Democrat, the party has turned crazy enough to elect Trump is full of nutbars.

Yeah, I got whiplash from last 16 years. Rewind to the Bush administration and dissent was patriotic, at least according to the media. It was hysterically funny to see the diehard Democrats who tried to pass themselves off as being all about civil liberties oppose renewal of the PATRIOT Act under Bush, but not really a peep out of those same people when Obama pushed for the same exact renewal of powers as Bush had.

In reality, you were only called racist because you were paying attention only to the deluded ravings of Orly Taitz, meanwhile, unbeknownst to you, the ACLU, EPIC, and FreedomWatch continued their opposition to the Patriot Act, both in the courts and the legislatures.

In fact, most Democrats opposed an extension in 2010,2011 2013, and 2015. Rand Paul might be the only name you know, but Dennis Kucinich and Ron Wyden stood against it numerous times as well.

This is why you have no credibility, you go along with the empty-headed Mi when he plays the "race card" card, while anybody with a modicum of information can point out the flaws to your story. The deep factual ones.

That child is going to grow up with his communications logged, messages recorded, phone conversations intercepted, and what's more all his porn interests, mistakes in teenage years, drug taking, cheating, law breaking, foolish racist or bigoted or cruel utterances, web searches, fucking everything.

Then when they're making something of themselves they get a knock at the door and someone comes in with a big file.

And this is why, in 1939 when Robert Heinlein wrote Revolt in 2100, he predicted that when the US government falls, it will fall into a religious dictatorship, the most oppressive theocracy the world has ever seen. There was no such thing as an integrated circuit at the time, no such thing as a world wide web, but the Puritanism latent in American society has been a dangerous undercurrent since before the founding of the nation.

There are people who have never looked at porn, never groped a girl in high school, never drink alcohol, let alone try other drugs, never cheated on a test or a boyfriend or a spouse, never so much as speed in their car or download a song without paying for it. With very few exceptions, they're the most self-righteous little prigs you could ever hope never to meet. But in a culture like the US, with that streak of lip service to Puritanism, they're unassailable. If we ever accumulate a critical mass of them, the US as we knew it would be doomed, lost even to memory because it would all get dumped down the memory hole, since freedom is obviously too dangerous to even remember, let alone possess.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel though. Americans are voting Republicans in everywhere, while simultaneously voting down nearly every Republican social initiative. Everything from anti-abortion measures being voted down, even in deeply red states, to minimum wage hikes being approved, again in deeply red states, to drug legalization and gay rights. Somehow or other, voters relate better to Republican candidates, while disliking everything they allegedly stand for. The massive gap in approval ratings for Obamacare vs the A.C.A. is further evidence of this bizarre disconnect. So maybe we'll avoid the theocracy. Maybe.

This is just in: Obama hacked the UK Trident nuke missiles!!

The Trump administration is very different. At least, the security and intelligence communities think so.

In a Christian Science Monitor poll of "influencers" in this space (November 2016), 27% thought the Trump admin. would improve cybersecurity, and 73% thought it wouldn't. If you read the comments, many of the 27% said essentially they thought cybersecurity is such a serious topic that the administration would be forced to improve things.

More to the point of this article, here is a quote, in which Peter Singer states exactly the problem. He is a big thinker in the cyberwar / nation-state cybersecurity space:

“Set aside the lack of understanding (10-year-old sons excluded) and turning a blind eye to Russian role in an attack on American institutions, the real damage may be on the people side,” says Peter Singer, strategist and senior fellow at New America think tank. “It is hard enough for government to recruit and retain talent, especially in a field like cybersecurity. It just got bigly harder.”

Personally, I'm in a graduate-level infosec program that included a class in advanced exploitation. We participated in the NSA Codebreakers Challenge, and I did very well. I was seriously considering working for the NSA until Trump won. I suspected then (and now) that he is an incompetent manager who will damage all federal agencies. I was also concerned that I would build weapons he would then hand over to Russia.

As a final note, the metadata monitoring reported by Snowden appears to be a very small piece of what the NSA does. In the 2016 Codebreaker Challenge, we were given software that used cryptography to remotely detonate improvised explosives, and we were tasked with reverse engineering and cracking it. This is the kind of signals intelligence that is within the NSA purview.

Kind of like investing in Solyndra.

Well, that's why the Department of Energy provided loan guarantees for a diversity of enterprises.

And it's in the black so, yay?

but having someone who is against vaccines study it is more likely to be convincing if he is.

Nice theory.
The reality is that most people don't have brains that work like that.
The cognitive load required to abandon years of passionately held conspiracy theory is really high. It is so much easier to decide that the person was compromised by bribes, threats or even stupidity - that sort of rationalization is ideally suited to the logic of conspiracy that fuels the belief in the first place.

Its what happened when physics professor, MacArthur genius-grant fellow and high-profile climate change denier Richard Muller spent a year trying to disprove the existence of global warming and instead ended up proving its existence. As a result nobody changed their minds about climate change, they changed their minds about Dr Muller.

The bigger story is that they are investing $360 billion on renewable energy over the next 4 years.

That's a plan that will not only pay dividends in pollution reduction, it will keep them on the cutting edge of energy technology. An industry that is obviously a growth market because India and Africa both have tons of unmet demand for energy and Chinese companies are going to own that market.

Meanwhile, the US has just voted for more coal. Maybe, if we are lucky, some more fracking too.

The future is bright! (for china)

Does historic data getting colder in newer datasets count or is your mind already made up?

Historic data is not "getting colder". Don't believe everything you read in the Breitbart comments section.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Scien...

http://arstechnica.com/science...

I challenge you to name any US mainstream news outlet that compares favourably to the BBC in terms of objectivity and bias.

The BBC may be a dung pile, as the saying goes, but Aunty Beeb grows very good roses.

The Christian Science Monitor