Slashdot Mirror

JPM, like all other big banks, are engaged in outright fraud. Like rigging municipal bonds, where the penalty was a just fine (ie - cost of doing business). Maybe even rigging LIBOR, where I bet the end result will just be another fine. The problem is, no one goes to jail since it is now official policy not to prosecute bank fraud.

Federal prosecutors officially adopted new guidelines about charging corporations with crimes — a softer approach that, longtime white-collar lawyers and former federal prosecutors say, helps explain the dearth of criminal cases despite a raft of inquiries into the financial crisis.

Though little noticed outside legal circles, the guidelines were welcomed by firms representing banks. The Justice Department’s directive, involving a process known as deferred prosecutions, signaled “an important step away from the more aggressive prosecutorial practices seen in some cases under their predecessors,” Sullivan & Cromwell, a prominent Wall Street law firm, told clients in a memo that September.

The guidelines left open a possibility other than guilty or not guilty, giving leniency often if companies investigated and reported their own wrongdoing. In return, the government could enter into agreements to delay or cancel the prosecution if the companies promised to change their behavior.

Murdoch's News Corp (he owns 12% of shares but controls 40% of voting), Google (the founds control more than 50% of voting thanks to owning shares that give them 10 votes each), LinkedIn, Zynga and Groupon.

http://www.economist.com/node/18988938

You may want to watch the news in Argentina carefully. Between stirring up jingoistic talk about the Falkland/Malvinas Islands as a distraction from domestic problems, strange restrictions on foreign currency use, and forcibly nationalizing several major businesses, it's pretty debatable whether the economy there is going to get better or if the government is going to start heading in the direction of Venezuela's more authoritarian style. I hope not. For now, it's still a legitimate (albeit poorly-managed) democracy. I could easily see things turning sour before 2014.

As someone else has suggested, if you're heading that way Chile might be a better choice.

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm

Intellectual property: Patents against prosperity | The Economist

Why abolish software patents - software patents wiki (en.swpat.org)

When Patents Attack! | This American Life

Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture | Video on TED.com

Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing? Times Labs Blog

The Coming War on General Purpose Computation - Boing Boing

US patent trolling costs $29b: study - Strategy - Business - News - iTnews.com.au

Patents | Electronic Frontier Foundation

http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/

Zynga might be too close, but the vast majority of games actually copy each other so much that they create a GENDRE for god's sake. And that has been alwways a good thing for gaming in particular. The truth is that yes, there are indeed assholes, there will always be, but they seem to be on both sides and the question remains to where do they cause the less damage.

As far as being non-creative, I'm not sure who you mean. Personally, I develop new software for a living and I was curiously enough working on my novel when I got your reply.

When I went to university, I thought I might find people mostly with similar opinions (politics etc) to myself, being of the same IQ group. Up until then I had always thought most people around me had plainly idiotic opinions and I had put it down to their being a bit low on brainpower. In fact I found the others at uni (who we can assume were all of significantly higher IQ than average) had the same range of idiotic opinions (IMHO) as people generally. Surveys have shown that the distribution of political, ethical and religious opinions tends to be the same whatever the IQ group. I find this strange. Take the infamous Mrs Thatcher. I can recognise that she was a very intelligent woman but at the same time stupid in many things. Like she thought that by privatising industries and selling the shares to the public (cheap), the British people would become shareholders in large numbers - a "shareholding democracy" - and we would all then clamour for more efficiency in those industries as shareholders. What happened is that we bought those shares and then promptly sold them again (mostly to foreign enterprises as it turned out - a large part of UK rail freight is now owned by the *nationalised* German Railways!). The point is that most people with any sense could have told her that would happen - why could someone so intelligent not see it herself? Just one example of my point.

There is an argument to be made that foreign ownership of local firms is not necessarily a bad thing. I find your 'this happened and because I think it's bad therefore the people who caused it must never have considered the possibility it would happen' argument to be problematic.

As an overall percentage, it's down. In the 1970s, 36% of US families stayed in the same income quintile. In the 1980s, 37%, and in the 1990s, 40%. That's reduced class mobility. How significant this is debatable, but it's not "unsubstantiated opinion and bordering on pure fiction".

http://www.economist.com/node/3518560?story_id=3518560

That's silly. Everyone who has actually thought seriously about it knows the US is bankrupt.

http://www.economist.com/economics/by-invitation/guest-contributions/america_bankrupt

Khan academy is used by teachers in the class room to help students. When used like that, Khan academy competes with lesson plan providers like Mathalicious.

Apparently you have not heard of China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, Equador and Bolivia.

China embraced capitalism.
Viet Nam is mixing Capitalism with Marxism.
Cuba is embracing capitalism.
Venezuela is failing at constructing a Communist economy.
Brazil has prospered by not governing from hard left principals.

That leaves you with Ecuador(a mix of capitalism and communism) and North Korea(a completely failed state). That doesn't seem to match up with your paranoid narrative, though, does it?

And you have not heard of the latest developments in Marxism, created by Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno.

The latest deveopments? From a series of authors who have been dead for decades? Care to elucidate what makes these particular dead men so dangerous to your worldview?

Cultural Marxism is alive and kicking in the West. Just go to an average university and see what books the philosophy/geography students read.

That's funny. I had enough philosophy for a minor, and I never once had a philosophy professor mention Marxism more than in passing. And geography? Care to list out the horrible things students are learning?

Check out what "moderate socialism" did to the economy of Europe.

Oh, you mean the debt based economic problems? How is that different from the US? How is it the fault of socialism?

The Bible says "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's" What happened in the Middle Ages was a perversion of Christianity. AND IT HAPPENED 400 YEARS AGO.

WTF are you talking about? I never said anything about the Dark Ages.

Saying that "bin Laden is religious" is as relevant as saying "bin Laden has a long beard".

If you think that bin Laden's actions were due to something other than his religion, then you are so wildly misinformed that I'm not sure where to start.

The probability of a Christian commiting terrorism is the same as a long-bearded man commiting terrorism. Being "similar" to bin Laden in one aspect does mean one is a terrorist.

Holding an irrational belief as your core philosophy is always dangerous.

Pat Robertson is more a politician then a pastor; and he is a televangelist.

No True Scotsman fallacy.

You don't find this kind of rhetoric in Catholic churches.

You are wrong. Moreover, the Catholic church is quite comfortable in claiming that homosexual marriage will result in the destruction of the fabric of society.

The crimes primarily happened 30 YEARS AGO, during the ecclesial chaos that followed the revolution of 1968.

The crimes were horrific. The cover up by the entire Vatican heirarchy was arguably worse. And that cover up and and denial persists to this day. The Catholic church still wants to brush this under the rug.

On average, a Catholic priest less likely to comit such a crime then a publich school teacher, and a Catholic bishop is less likely to cover it up than a public school principal. But you conveniently focus on priests.

And those priests and bishops claim to speak with t

Wrong. Classroom PLUS Khan

Yes, and there are examples that the Classroom + Khan is an effective model. The Economist has an article describing how the Los Altos school district is using Khan's videos to provide the "dry lecture" which is assigned for homework while classroom time is used for supervised problem solving with the teacher roving about helping any struggling students. That model makes complete sense to me especially since we keep hearing stories about how parent's can't do their kids homework (I've been called in to help my little cousin with her math homework at times when her parents were thoroughly confused).

As farming declined, new jobs were created in war (World War 2) and manufacturing (first for the war, then for civilian use). Why do you assume history will repeat?

It's fundamental economics. It repeats over and over again, across place and time. Look up 'creative destruction'.

It has repeated in the U.S. many times since then; look at jobs people had in the 1950s, or 1980s -- many or most are now gone, replaced by new jobs. Where do all those software developers and web designers come from? I suspect that most of the jobs of Slashdot readers didn't exist in 1980.

There are plenty of places in the world where farming jobs have not been replaced by something else. Brazil is a good example.

Brazil is an interesting choice. The unemployment rate is under 6% and it's one of the great economic success stories in the world, maybe in the history of the world. Tens of millions of people have been lifted out of abject poverty.

Speaking of manufacturing the numbers and Enron accounting, this would not be the first time that M$ has reported a loss. M$ went $18 billlion into the red before, if normal (non-Enron) accounting is used. That was back when times were good. Since then, sales of desktops has been slumped and, thus, the OEM sales of Windows upon which the whole beast lives.

There was a good article about this in The Economist: http://www.economist.com/node/21558263

Few of Afghanistan's 30m people have a birth certificate, a second name or can read. Yet America's army and the Afghan government have collected digital records of more than 2.5m of them. Elsewhere such intrusions would have caused an outcry. But few Afghans, so far, have protested. American officers praise the technology as a helpful counter-insurgency tool: if opponents can be identified, they can be separated from the wider, law-abiding populace.

The data are passed on beyond Afghanistan, to America's army, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Agreements to share data exist with dozens of allied countries. American soldiers in Ghazni once described scanning a dead insurgent, then two days later getting a call from the CIA to say that his record matched someone first scanned in Iraq. Yet as the system grows, so do worries about it. It is involuntary and shrouded in secrecy. It is easy to come across Afghans who claim that they were wrongly denied foreign visas or jobs after a biometric scan flagged up their presence on some watchlist. Evidence held against them is rarely divulged, nor is it clear how they can challenge it.

“There is a vetting process to be put on a watchlist,” says Sergeant-Major Robert Haemmerle, of the American army's Afghanistan biometrics programme. “It's not just a matter of ‘I don't like this guy'. There is a deliberate policy and process to ensure that people's rights are respected, that it's not abused.”

Yet those policies and processes are kept classified by NATO and America's Defence Department. Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group based in San Francisco that keeps a watch on how digital technology encroaches on civil freedoms, also questions the quality of the data. She fears that scans done quickly in the field, or by inexperienced technicians, could lead to cases of mistaken identity.

But the more people who are scanned, the more powerful the database becomes.

But it's not like the US is scanning everyone who enters the country, and adding them to this database . . .

. . . yet.

I've never stayed in a shady hostel in Paris. I've stayed with friends in the shady-but-not-bad neighborhoods, like the 11th.

Afaik, American cities usually have murder rates around or over 20 per 100,0000, but Paris has only 2-2.5 per 100,000 overall and around 5 in the bad St Denis neighborhood.

Yes, you should avoid the neighborhood with double the murder rate of the rest of the city anywhere, but it's probably no worse than the neighborhood where you go clubbing in your home town, assuming you're American.

They should look at integrating with blue tooth shoes too. Funny to see more than one story about smart phone technology for the visually impaired in the same day.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/07/footwear-blind?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/bluetoothshoes
The shoes have an actuator in the heel which can vibrate to signal when to turn or alert the presence of an obstacle, a sensor in the toe for detecting obstacles, and blue tooth for phone app integration.

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/02/14/apple-to-become-samsungs-biggest-customer/

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/08/apple-and-samsungs-symbiotic-relationship

http://www.razorianfly.com/2011/04/20/apple-refutes-previous-reports-claims-it-is-samsungs-largest-customer/

The figures suggest $7.8 billion, which is a seriously large amount of cash to simply give up on a whim.

We need an agreement between our citizens to work hard to stop this crap.

I've got bad news from the Canadian side, though. We currently have a majority government that likes ramming through any legislation it pleases, en masse, regardless of public outcry or long-established conventions regarding parliamentary procedure.

being in a shit-hole place with shit education where everyone has been miserably poor for centuries has much more to do with you being a violent scumbag than the particular batshit superstitions you subscribe to.

actually, terrorists tend on average to be relatively wealthy and well-educated, from relatively well-to-do countries

No they're not. VW are crushing everybody at the moment, in terms of units sold:
http://www.economist.com/node/21558269

Actually, NOAA has been having a "war on lightning" for some time now. And they can filter money into their buddies' pockets - do you think that S.A.M.E radios are free? Does it cost nothing to build a storm shelter?

Deaths due to lightning, annually: 24,000.

(As NOAA will tell you - if you can hear thunder, you could get zapped - get your ass inside and stay in until 30 minutes past the last thunderclap. Thank you.)

Deaths due to terrorism: varies wildly. Pick an arbitrary year, like 2010, and your "more" is a factor of 3, approximately. Some years, it's only a factor of 2. Given all the deaths this year in Iraq, I suspect that the figures will be large.

The problem is not bank failure. The FDIC regularly seizes banks on Bank Failure Friday. Banks fail all the time:

http://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/failed/banklist.html

The problem is the complete lack of any serious reform. Too Big To Fail, a major issue, is even worse today than it was in 2008. The failed banks are merged with larger banks with the government absorbing significant losses.

Basically, the current system uses tax money to fund Wall Street profits. Bad loans which the government insures or buys means tax money goes to make the loan good, making the lender whole, and leaves the taxpayer on the hook. With government debt at 100% GDP, the government should not be funneling money to Wall Street for pure profit, and getting nothing in return.

Tax money should be used for public goods, not Wall Street profits. That system has not changed in any significant way. The Too Big To Fail banks are completely and totally backstopped by the government. And that means these entities have a direct line to the public treasury.

Creative destruction is desperately necessary at the top. The people who orchestrated this debacle are still in power, both in finance and politics. They rose to the top because of their ability to create and prosper in this terribly flawed system. To think they'll voluntarily change it when it rewards them so handsomely is completely unrealistic.

That was Commodore.

How do you figure?

Commodore's only GUI PC was the Amiga, and the Macintosh came first, and always outsold the Amiga.

From reading the article, it sounds like the Pauls are more afraid of the government than corporations, which is a mistake IMHO. Eisenhower talked of the Military-Industrial complex. It's all slowly merging into one giant GovCorp, where the politicians and top corporate executives entrench themselves further and further, scratching each other's backs.

There's the concept of "Creative Destruction." The working classes are well acquainted with it. The problem is that where it's needed most, at the top of the political system and in financial sectors, it's almost completely prevented from occurring.

The Economist had an interesting article entitled "The question of extractive elites."

From that article: "In an extractive economy, such as the Belgian Congo and its successor state, Zaire, a narrow elite seizes power and uses its control of resources to prevent social change... Much of current economic policy seems to be driven by the need to prop up banks, whether it is record-low interest rates across the developed world or the recent provision of virtually unlimited liquidity by the once-staid European Central Bank. The long-term effects of these policies, which may be hard to reverse, are difficult to assess."

Oh yes, and meat: http://www.economist.com/node/21548147

Anyone else remember the story of the Iranian concrete from a while back? Read about how much it blew away the competition at a concrete strength contest and brought the issue to light. 50-60k PSI concrete failure strength is just insane.

Finally, someone makes a reasonably intelligent post about the platform wars.

I don't know how old you are, but I was just old enough to learn about computers about the time that the Mac SE/30 and the 386 processor came out. So I got to live through them from almost-start to finish, and I think they've always been fairly silly. There have always been blind defenders of both Apple and Microsoft, and there have always been reasonable people who make a considered choice to support one side, but it's always hard to figure out where the line is.

I want to respond to you in three ways.

First, I think you hit the nail on the head when you say "Microsoft is the incompetent demon I know; Apple is the devil I don't." There's a lot to be said for going with what you know. Computers are tools, after all, and there's nothing wrong with picking a tool that fits you as long as it gets the job done. Generally I think most people will be perfectly fine using either Windows or a Mac – which is to say, if a user doesn't have a clue in the first place, it doesn't matter what OS they're running. (Or: If I'm too young to get my driver's license, it doesn't matter if I get behind the wheel of a Ford or a Toyota.) By the time someone really learns computers and becomes either a power user, a programmer, or an engineer, they've developed their own preference for How Shit Works on their machine, and as long as they can make that machine do what they want, more power to them. I'm never going to begrudge someone who knows what they're doing their own choice of desktop OS.

Now, with that out of the way, I want to put your other comments in a little more context. Let me say at the outset that I agree that Apple is creating a walled garden and that walled gardens raise serious questions about privacy and control. Let me also say that I agree with you that Apple is now manipulating the market at a remarkable level in ways that also raise serious questions. Okay? As an Apple customer, I'm saying I agree with you on those points.

Do you recall the phrase "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?" It was how a Microsoft VP described Microsoft's own plans to maintain control over technologies like Java and HTML – to prevent other groups from weakening their control over what technologies were on people's computers or weren't. This article, which is twelve years old, deals with the antitrust trial that ocurred due to that fight for control, but it also mentions how Bill Gates described his desire to "turn Windows into an operating system for the Internet, creating a 'walled garden' in which devices running on Windows work best with servers powered by Windows—and thereby to keep all the firm’s competitors out." This didn't really surprise anyone who lived through the early 90's, because Microsoft's tight market control is one of the main reasons that Windows became as popular as it did in the first place. I didn't make this stuff up, I lived through it. And they're still doing it, working as hard as they can to make sure that they keep control.

Am I saying this to trumpet some kind of righteous assertion that Apple would never do such a thing? Please; we're all adults here. Where does everyone think Apple learned these strategies from? So when Microsoft supporters get up-in-arms about the walled garden and vendor lock-in of the iOS / OS X ecosystem, people like myself have a really, really hard time taking them seriously. When you say Apple is "able to manipulate the market to absurd levels ... in ways that harm ALL computer users," I don't disagree. But Microsoft's business strategies manipulated the market to absurd levels in ways that harmed all computer users for pretty much my entire childhood and teenage years, so if you have a problem with it, how can you still support Micro

From that section on pg 22:

In collaboration with the inspection team, Ms.Simone identified a trend in customer complaints that the firm had not been aware of. This trend involved incorrect or missing patient results in a laboratory information system, and incorrect or missing notifications to clinicians that test results were out of range.

Basically, problems with LIMS or other systems. It's not that the device released the incorrect dose, it's that the record keeping system had an incorrect dose history or test result, causing a doctor or nurse to administer an incorrect dose.

Similar to the issue discussed here:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/05/medical-devices

I don't know what you find reputable, but here are a couple. The USA Today story cites the New York Times as the original source.

As much as I recall, the quote itself was never disputed, just denial of any sinister intent. The fact that the guy gave $100k to the Bush campaign and sent out fund raising letters for them would seem in line with that.

Here's a good start...

http://www.economist.com/node/21556575

I see no evidence that that is true.

I see no evidence that it isn't true. Browsers are more capable and faster today than they were even two years. Every browser maker wants their browser to be the fastest and the benchmark is the speed of other browsers. Competition breeds improvement.

And indeed there are plenty of other browsers on the platform.

There are no other browsers on iOS. There are only shadows of other browsers. If you can't have your full browser stack on iOS, there are no competiting browsers.

It's only the rendering engine that's mandated to be one defacto-standard. And that's for user experience reasons.

*Only* the rendering engine? You mean the most fundamental part of any browser? In any case, it's both the JavaScript engine and the rendering engine that are banned. My user experience would be improved by being able to run full Firefox on iOS. I like Firefox. I can run Firefox on Windows. I can run Firefox on OS X. I can run Firefox on Linux. I can run Firefox on Android. There is no justification for not being able to run Firefox on iOS. The quality of the user's experience is for the user to decide, not Apple.

People are not all the same. Neither are corporations.

If you want to draw an analogy between people and corporations, corporations are psychopaths. This may help you: http://www.economist.com/node/2647328

From TFA (p.2):

All Udacity courses are free and will remain free, it is the certification, or level of certification which will eventually cost money.

(this excerpt was from 2nd page, about half way down in the question: The recent Forbes Magazine’s article title on Udacity read “$100 for a masters degree” is that a reasonable estimate ? )

This is cool because the material will be available even to very cash poor people, and I will likely look into classes here I'd never think about paying for at a conventional school.

jellomizer wrote:

The only way you can get $100 for a degree in education is to mass produce it. Pre-Recorded Lectures, Online articles, Mutable choice tests, all done online. Now granted some colleges nearly teach like that, a professor with a well practiced rehearsed lectures, then you do you multiple choice tests, then you got your class credit...

btw, JM: I agree with your points about delivery & cost cutting. When the Khan Academy has come up past discussions, people often talk about the idea of "flipping classes" so lectures are on the students time and class sessions are collaborative help sessions roughly like you describe (e.g. hybrid).
All very cool, I'm excited by the potential this offers.

jellomizer wrote:

While you may learn, and can get accreditation. It creates a culture of mediocre education. This takes out some of the human elements that are both good and bad. If you are able being able to be noticed by a professor and working with them on his research, having your work properly critiqued. When I went to college for Computer Science, I came in already knowing how to program, and I was working programming, but I wanted to learn more then just the core requirements, I wanted to learn the nuances. While some students in my class who passed they got the basics, I was able to use education and the work directly with my professors to hone my skills and make me better. I know I used up more then $100 expense on my education.

However I think a hybrid approach would be a good match. There are some classes, that I didn't like spending thousands of dollars on, just because I had to take them, I would much rather pay a lower rate, and take the mediocre online class to get the credit, and save some money. But save the classes I am actually interested in with live people and professors.

From The Economist, "Leaving the euro: My big fat Greek divorce" http://www.economist.com/node/21556583

Some economists think that Greece could nonetheless avoid a sudden departure from the euro. The government could pay some of its bills by issuing its own IOUs direct to its domestic creditors. These notes (“scrip”) would start to circulate at a steep discount to euros. In effect, argues Thomas Mayer, an adviser to Deutsche Bank, Greece could create its own parallel and depreciated currency while still remaining in the monetary union.

Something similar happened in Argentina as it struggled to retain its rigid link between the peso and the dollar before the link eventually snapped in early 2002. Bankrupt regional governments started to pay their workers in scrip, such as the patacones issued by Buenos Aires Province. But these desperate measures were desperately unpopular because the patacones immediately fell in value. Within just a few months, the Argentine government restricted withdrawals of bank deposits, defaulted on its debts and broke the link with the dollar, allowing the peso to devalue.

Mario Blejer, who was Argentina’s central-bank governor in the middle of the crisis, says that resorting to scrip would be even worse than creating a new currency outright (which he thinks would be disastrous). It would create monetary chaos and generate inflationary pressure before the exit that would inevitably ensue.

So if you are in Greece, you seem to have a bad option for storing your cash, and an even worse one.

Take your pick.

Just read it. Fair points, I wouldn't contend that the people of Japan are all running around in poverty. It's not an across the board awful country or something.

That said, your article basically says, yeah, GDP isn't great but look at all these other good things! My point is that their GDP isn't growing. They are in ludicrous amounts of debt. Their companies are losing their competitiveness (have you seen how much money Sony has been losing lately?). They are facing serious long term demographic challenges related to their population aging. Hell, they can barely keep the lights on! (http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/25/japan-power-minister-idUST9E8EM02G20120425). Heck, we can trade articles, I think this makes my point quite clearly: http://www.economist.com/node/21556596.

It has been bad for them lately, and things are only going to get worse if (when) interest rates on their debt rise.

As for the ad hominem, I double majored in Mathematics and Economics at a top 10 school in the US; I graduated with high honors. I wrote my thesis on sovereign bonds. I do, in fact, know what I'm talking about. Do you?

I think he messed up by comparing NASA's budget to social safety net and education budgets in the video though, the implication that one should grow at a cost to the others is not going to sit well with many. He carefully stepped around mentioning the bloated military budget for some reason.

In fact, I thought about including a comment about this in my post —

He realizes that our military infrastructure is one of the things that also drives and protects our society, and while war isn't preferable to other motivations for technical progress and scientific research, it is one of the chief motivations throughout our history. He also realizes that exploration can reinvigorate the human spirit, even stoking industry and the economy, which actually would help the people served by the "government safety net" more in the long term by creating a robust economic environment instead of having an environment where half of US households are on the government dole.

There was an interesting part of his UW-Madison speech where he reflected on how many Americans assume that NASA's budget is a lot larger than it actually is. He then went on to (jokingly) propose a new model for government budgets, wherein each agency would get the amount of money that the public thinks they get.

I was amused because if that were true, even among this informed and educated audience, that would mean that DOD would get something like "50%" or "over half" of the federal budget — as many people erroneously assume — when in reality, all of "national defense, veterans, and foreign affairs" is closer to 20%, while "Social programs" and "Social Security, Medicare, and other retirement" are what accounts for "over half" (55%) of our spending.

And some people will still say it's too much; to that I say that China exceeded US space launches for the first time in 2011, has increased their military spending 12% every year for the last decade, and is on track to exceed US military spending by 2025. Hint: that's not all for "peaceful regional defense". In sum, Neil deGrasse Tyson isn't anti-military, and recognizes its necessity and the significant scientific and research contributions it has brought to our society. He also talks about the broader historical context for war. You should really listen to his speech.

Speak with experience here.

I do employ people, and I've been doing so for the past 2 decades.

I find that the quality of newer crops of university graduates are much lower than their counterparts that I had hired 10 or 20 years ago.

With the panflation syndrome ( http://www.economist.com/node/21552214 ) already permeated many of the traditional brick and mortar universities, it wouldn't do me too much harm for me to try hiring some who graduated from the $100-per-degree online universities
 

I don't particularly want my insurance rates going up to have to pay for obesity-related health problems.

And 46 O.Z. of corn-syrup goo is a bit EXTREEEEEEEEME! . Drink water, lardass.

California’s democracy is not at all like America’s, as conceived by founders such as James Madison. The federal constitution is based on checks and balances within and among three and only three branches of government—executive, legislative and judicial. That is because Madison feared that popular “passions” would undo the republic, that majorities might “tyrannise” minorities, and that “minority factions” (ie, special interests) would take over the system. America’s was therefore to be a representative, not a direct, democracy. “Pure democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention,” Madison wrote, “and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

I think the hope is that pollution standards will (continue to?) rise along with living standards in Asia, and at that point the West will already have developed certain practices and technologies that the newly developed countries can adopt. E.g. the price of PV panels has dropped significantly in the past years (along with the energy required to build them), fueled by an increase in demand in the Western countries. If it drops a bit more, it'll be cost effective enough to at least be a part of the strategy dealing with the rapidly increasing energy needs of the Asian countries. That's just the general argument and you don't need to "believe" in PV power generation to buy the argument itself.

Of course that's just one part of it, there's also the fact that despite much better environmental regulations, our per-capita emissions are still much worse (even you don't consider "exported" emissions via product manufacturing) and of course the fact that we've been emitting for a much longer time than the newly developed countries[0]. Those are moral arguments, the first one is more utilitarian -- e.g. even if you don't think per-capita emissions should be the important figure, the argument holds water.

[0] We have been emitting since the industrial revolution, that is. I wonder, though, considering the growth of both population and world economy -- 28% of the human hours lived were lived in the 20th century and, incredibly, "over 23% of all the goods and services made since 1AD were produced from 2001 to 2010" --, if the (CO2) emissions of the past 10 or 20 years don't exceed all emissions made prior to that.

Presumably he bought his 4% stake and it cost him some amount of money, so that might be part of it. But for 67 million to be a 30% tax rate he would have had to pay 3.7 billion for that 4% stake. Even at 10% it's still over 3 billion of original investment.

There has to be something I'm missing.

You're missing the fact that he is paying taxes, nearly half a billion, by renouncing his citizenship. The $67 billion figure appears to be an estimate of how much more he might have eventually paid if he had stayed a citizen. On the other hand, he may have paid less or nothing if the stocks drop in value before he sells them.

I thought this was a good summary of the situation:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/05/renouncing-citizenship

To measure political speech, I would use a list like this, which is much less subjective than your opinion. It looks to me like the dividing line is somewhere in the middle of that list, but that is obviously IMHO. The bottom of that list is straight out.

To measure democracy, I'd try something like this (sorry about the PDF). They have a category called "Authoritarian regimes", and I think those countries should definitely be excluded.

I'm not trying to rig the game in favor of the US, I'm trying to rig the game in favor of human rights.

* Data loss: I would combine an always running network backup (CrashPlan is my favorite) with a periodic backup to an external hard drive (Time Machine, or also CrashPlan). Dropbox is not really good enough for this, although it mitigates some of the problem.

I don't like Dropbox because the data is unencrypted and they have a poor security history. However, they keep the data and even version it for you, and they're nearly ubiquitously available. I'm curious--why do you think that it's not good enough?

Chinese scientists continue to make shit up, as always: http://www.economist.com/blogs/asiaview/2010/07/academic_fraud_china

Crime in the US:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
http://www.economist.com/node/18775436

etc

...Oh, I know, China isn't a "threat". The fact that it's on track to exceed US military spending by 2025 must be for "peaceful regional defense".

So basically what you are saying is that given the US as an example, it is not possible to spend so much money on "defense" only. And that once a country spends as much as the US, it can only be for aggression. Since that is what your military does?

Er... you do know the Soviet Union was dissolved twenty years ago, right?

Yep. That's why I added:

Forgot to add: The only reason Russia is not still invading other countries and fucking with their political systems (Georgia excluded) is that the country and its currency utterly fucking collapsed a couple of decades back and most of its surface and sub-surface navy is rusting its ass off, and its army isn't much better.

Not to mention the fact that being an opposition journalist doesn't just get you screwed with, but murdered in today's Russia- last count there were around 200 killed in one way or another since the Soviet Union fell. Don't forget corruption that would make the Corleone family proud. The company whose project I was managing a few years ago had to finally pull out of the Russian market because it was spending more on bribing layer after layer of Russian mobsters and officials (is there a difference?) than it was on infrastructure and product development, by a factor of 3. The bribes they have to pay to Chinese officials to do business there are a fraction of those demanded by Russians. It's like a huge, grey, vodka-soaked banana republic. You think American institutions are corrupt? You have no idea.

Again, the only reason Russia is not doing the exact same thing as the US is that they can't afford to.

...but for those who say the threat "isn't there", I guess this is just a figment of the imagination then? And they certainly didn't have any "help"...

Oh, I know, China isn't a "threat". The fact that it's on track to exceed US military spending by 2025 must be for "peaceful regional defense". This isn't really happening.

What about the F-35? Oh, yeah — that, too.

...but for those who say the threat "isn't there", I guess this is just a figment of the imagination then? And they certainly didn't have any "help"...

Oh, I know, China isn't a "threat". The fact that it's on track to exceed US military spending by 2025 must be for "peaceful regional defense". This isn't really happening.

What about the F-35? Oh, yeah — that, too.

...but for those who say the threat "isn't there", I guess this is just a figment of the imagination then? And they certainly didn't have any "help"...

Oh, I know, China isn't a "threat". The fact that it's on track to exceed US military spending by 2025 must be for "peaceful regional defense". This isn't really happening.

What about the F-35? Oh, yeah — that, too.

Are you actually serious?

DOD and the military services (particularly the Navy) has been saying that climate change is a major national security threat for YEARS. This is NOT NEW, and it's not about the "war on terror", or anything else, "running out of steam".

"Climate change", as a measurable phenomenon with very real national security implications, is real. The political debacle which claims it is caused mostly or exclusively by humans, and therefore we need to decimate/tax/etc. industrial capability even as developing nations whose greenhouse gas emissions are skyrocketing do absolutely nothing, is the travesty here.

You do realize the US has adversaries, and that there are actual threats in the world that hope to displace the US as a global power and are even on track to exceed US military spending by 2025?

Apparently, satellite stands are covered by ITAR. Basically, we are talking about an aluminum table to hold up the satellite when people are working on it..

Here is an old, but good article,

http://www.economist.com/node/11965352