Slashdot Mirror

It's called "insurance" for a reason. Again you display a very strange view on reality. The German unemployment rate just hit a record low of 6.6% (and our rate is real - we don't have people drop from the list like the US when the benefits run out).

Also productivity increase in Germany was the best of all G7 countries in the last decade.

On the other hand our welfare state goes back half a century. Obviously its parameters have to be tweaked constantly but it in the long run it has not hurt us a bit (despite us having to absorb East Germany in between). Nor has it hurt the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, etc.

It always amuses me how "Socialist" Europe is talked down in the US. Frankly it delivered quite nicely.

The current Euro woes are inherently uncorrelated, and very much predicted, as a currency without a common budget can not really work. In a sense this was by design, to create economic facts that'll force tighter integration.

If you wait to have history prove you right you are in for a very long wait. But at least you can die without ever having to reconsider your preconceived notions.

Regardless of whether or not we obfuscate their attempts at monitoring social sites these attacks are coming anyway,

Yes, that is the point. So why do you try to throw noise in the system to make them harder to detect and prevent?

anyway, you sir are the tool for actually thinking anyone serious about attacking would use Facebook to announce it.

Or simply better informed....

3 Men in NC Terror Ring Get 15-45 Years in Prison

Hassan used his Facebook account and Internet forums to post his own comments and videos by others encouraging Muslims to fight nonbelievers and Muslims who did not agree with their desire to establish mandatory religious law, prosecutors said.

Extremists use the same social media as anyone else. I take it that you've never heard of the Internet Jihad?

This "monitoring" social sites is an attempt at disrupting things like OWS and other legit protest before they gain traction

"Monitoring" is a fancy way of saying "looking". You don't disrupt things bigger than the atomic scale by looking at them. "OWS" and other protests are a city problem, not a federal problem. The same backers for OWS are also largely behind the Obama presidency. If the "Occupy" movement turns violent, then all bets are off. That would seem unlikely as the "Occupy" movement is more hype than substance. You do know that at least some of the protestors were being paid to be there, don't you?

Christ there's one like you born every minute much to my dismay.

Face, meet mirror.

There are other devices that use ceramics, metals, or plastics. There are about 30 companies that make some form of additive manufacturing device using different processes like Selective Laser Sintering, Fused Deposition Modeling, and 3D Printing. This is a new industrial revolution that's just getting started. With these devices you can make small production runs cost effective and efficient. Also, these processes produce far less waste, so they use less material and energy.

As for consumer goods, I haven't seen clothing, but there are a lot of interesting items being designed for everyday use on Shapeways.

I've been following Additive Manufacturing since I read the article "Print me a Stradivarius" in the Economist. I expect this to be as significant as the Internet.

Also, see http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2011/12/daily-chart-2 for time offs for each country.

While the 98% number is clearly something he pulled off the top of his head, it's true that economists tend to strongly support a carbon tax (basically the same as a gas tax, but across the whole economy, not just for cars). Here are a couple of the top hits for a google search on "economists favor carbon tax":

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/09/climate-policy

http://www.carbontax.org/who-supports/scientists-and-economists/

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/02/libyan_oil

Hmm apparently Italy did even more. Never heard about that. I wonder what their participation was if any.

The Economist covered the reasons some weeks ago, starting at the sixth paragraph.

Basically, music sales ( real and online ) in Spain are at an all-time low. 10 million albums sold in 2010 in a country of 50 million people.

If there is any country in which the big media conglomerates feel they have lost, it is Spain. Little wonder they're pressuring to have Spain "punished".

Over 20% unemployment, 40%+ youth unemployment. Prices completely out of whack with young people's budgets. An they are surprised sales are low?

Spaniards do not believe in IP and their disposable income is already spent. Making piracy harder will not fix the fact that the business model does not work with that population.

The Economist covered the reasons some weeks ago, starting at the sixth paragraph.

Basically, music sales ( real and online ) in Spain are at an all-time low. 10 million albums sold in 2010 in a country of 50 million people.

If there is any country in which the big media conglomerates feel they have lost, it is Spain. Little wonder they're pressuring to have Spain "punished".

After all, you don't need to hide if you haven't done anything wrong.

Right; because Justice is blind, and no one get jailed over bullshit.

now, do us all a favor and take a flyin' fuck at a rollin' doughnut, you hideous troll you.

Learning requires effort. It requires concentration and forcing glucose through the brain. If using a gadget can make that easier (e.g. word processing), use it. But don't expect the gadget to reduce the core effort. But that is what some wish these gadgets to be - a method to effortlessly upload knowledge.

Trying to learn without effort is like trying to build muscle without working out. For the freakishly genetically endowed, like Herschel Walker or Bo Jackson, they are freakishly strong and powerful and have massive endurance without having to do much work at all. In the intellectual arena, there are kids who are able to upload vast quantities of knowledge with little effort.

I applaud people for trying to reduce the effort required to uptake knowledge. Just like I'd applaud someone who came up with a system which could increase our strength and endurance with less effort. Computers are powerful devices. But I don't see their use reducing the effort of learning, especially in the earlier grades.

An Encyclopedia Britannica subscription will make it much easier for an interested child to access that knowledge, than requiring a parent to take him to the library. A math game could speed up a child's uptake of multiplication tables. Perhaps electronic games could be used to motivate children. The Economist had a fascinating special report a couple of weeks ago on the "game-ification" of the world.

I think we should continue to look for solutions to make education easier and more accessible. We should think outside of the box to look for optimizations. But, on some level, learning will always require some effort and discipline. Just like strength or endurance training.

This is an important point. One of the biggest economic phenomena in history, the US housing bubble, was not even acknowledged by prominent economists, government or private. They solemnly intoned such a thing didn't exist and all was well. Economics remains firmly a social science. A worthwhile field of study, but not subject to scientific rigor and generally not yielding testable hypotheses.

Many say the massive stimulus (deficit spending) saved the world economy. It's an unfalsifiable assertion.

The Economist magazine had a most interesting discussion on the similarities between the 1930s and today, with a discussion of the responses.

Brooksley Borne was just one [pbs.org] of many people who predicted the financial meltdown. She was shut down by people who really believed that regulations are bad.

There are thousands of people who predicted the financial meltdown. Many of them predict financial meltdowns every year. People who can predict ups and downs seem more worth listening to... it's just that there aren't any of them. Henry Paulson was famed for "predicting" the housing downturn and making a lot of money off it. Now he lost a lot of money with his next prediction. Doesn't that failure make you think maybe his first prediction was just luck?

You know what this entire financial crisis, US and European, is caused by? Loans going bad. Loans being defaulted on.

You have to ask yourself one question - "Why would a lender make a loan that he doesn't care about having repaid?"

Answer: Because finally, since the late 70s, lenders figured out how to separate themselves from repayment risk. They got better and better at it. Nowadays, a bank has a loan on its books for 60 days, then it's sold off. So they don't give a rip whether it gets paid off or not. It's a great system for loan originators. Write a number on a piece of paper, fill out some pro forma paperwork, sell it, and get a commission that's a percentage of the number you wrote down. It's the Dutch Tulip Bulb mania on steroids. The debt markets are completely flawed.

THAT'S the root of the problem - lenders not having repayment risk. It used to be that lenders cared about being paid back. So, very, very few bad loans.

However, there are a lot of big companies who pay a lot of money to politicians who want to keep this system going. And a lot of politicians who get that money who want to keep this system going. Because bribery is de facto legal in the US government ("The US government is the best money can buy"), the current system keeps going. This system involves loan originators making loans and then the US government, either through Fannie and Freddie, or through the Federal Reserve, taking the bad loans off the lenders/originator's hand, and giving them either face value for the loan, or just flat out buying it and generating the commission.

The Economist magazine was talking about all of this in 2003. I remember reading a cover story on the global real estate bubble in the early mid 2000s in The Economist. So much of this was foreseen by disinterested observers. But, as I've noted previously, when things are going great, no one wants to change anything because no one wants to stop the party. Especially those who are making money off of it. And it especially doesn't change when those benefiting from it are big companies and the politicians they own.

Actually global exports are over $300 billion more than global imports. So we are running a trade surplus with *someone*.

From the Economist, Female Labor Markets, http://www.economist.com/node/21539932
"In Sweden, Finland and Denmark, where women make up roughly half the labour force, their share in public-sector employment is a remarkable 70%."
&
"Women are concentrated in teaching, health care, clerical work, social care and sales; they are underrepresented in manual and production jobs, maths, physics, science and engineering and in managerial jobs, particularly at the senior end. They are also much more concentrated than men in just a few job categories. Half the employed women in rich countries work in just 12 of the 110 main occupations listed by the International Labour Office (ILO). The jobs in which men work are spread far more widely, from construction workers to top managers."

and

"Rich World" = ODBC
Cite: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/7/5/48111145.pdf
      See page 47 for more details.
Correction: 12 of the 110, not 120

This is getting blown way out of proportion.

See this article for another view: http://www.economist.com/node/21541395

Specifically the last paragraph:
"What is left unsaid in all this is the fact that conventional cars with a tank full of petrol are far greater fire hazards than electric cars will ever be. Some 185,000 vehicles catch fire in America each year, with no fewer than 285 people dying as a consequence. But, then, people have been living with the hazard of petrol for over a century. Irrationally, electric-vehicle fires are perceived as somehow more worrisome simply because they are new."

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-04y.html

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/06/the_economics_o.html

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_9_115/ai_n27050480/?tag=content;col1

http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/space-power/

http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/episode/2011/01/08/january-8-2011/#Voyager+Launches+the+Third+Age+of+Discovery

http://www.economist.com/node/18897425

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the-high-frontier-redux.html

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/

Space Nutters generally also have an overabundance of blind, naive enthusiasm for almost anything vaguely sci-fi sounding, the limitless growth of the human species, that there will even BE a human species 100000 years from now, etc... But mention life extension research and all of a sudden they turn into the most rabid anti-technological, skeptical "don't mess with Nature" types.

We'll never understand biological processes that occur all over the planet and require little energy, but we'll have Martian colonies (entire COLONIES) and all the other space garbage that require stupendous resource-inputs for zero return, no problem.

Oh, and the absolute Bible for Space Nutters:

http://www.amazon.com/Millennial-Project-Colonizing-Galaxy-Eight/dp/0316771635/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323225862&sr=8-1

The amount of delusion and flat-out denial needed to believe in the claptrap that Space Nutters do makes it a religion to me.

News flash: The U.S. is the only country pushing anti-Iran propaganda down their citizen's throat. The rest of the world does not see Iran as a threat, and actually perceives Israel and America a much bigger threat to the stability of that region. There will be no "multi-national" invasion.

First of all, I said nothing like that in my post, other than when I used the word "Iran" talking about something completely different. But anyway, you are wrong.

Iran is heavily involved in trafficking of ballistic missile technology and nuclear technology with North Korea, Syria, and Pakistan, which ALL other nations see as an extreme proliferation risk. If you read skimmed through any of the diplomatic cables, you would see that an ENORMOUS number of them deal with proliferation issues around the world that affect international interests. Iran is also an enormous supporter of Hezbollah and Hamas and their shah-lead dictatorship is openly hostile to the Western world (rightly so since liberalization weakens their grip on power.) If you think the majority of the countries of the world have friendly relations with Iran, you are very, very mistaken. Iran is recognized as a concrete threat to the greater international community, but the cost to do anything about them is very high. The problem is, our entire global civilization revolves around oil, and nobody wants to fuck with the oil supply unless they really have to. This is the case whether you are talking about sanctions or whether you are talking about an invasion disrupting the oil flow for some years. Here's a recent article from The Economist:

France has led the way in offering European Union support, recalling its ambassador for consultations in Paris (in common with several other EU countries), and calling for a new sanction barring EU countries from buying Iranian oil. At a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Thursday there was much talk of solidarity, but no agreement on boycotting Iranian oil. Spain and Italy had grumbled at the level of diplomats in working groups that they would need more time to find alternative sources of energy. Greece, which is heavily reliant on Iranian oil because few other suppliers are willing to supply a country on the brink of bankruptcy, blocked a boycott. A report on the EUObserver news website quotes unnamed diplomats saying that some other countries were also hiding behind Greece, saying "People don't say it out loud. But there is an understanding oil sanctions would hurt the EU rather than hitting Iran where it hurts and would make oil cheaper for China."

The IAEA recently released a report concluding that Iran was actively involved in nuclear weapons research and development. Don't let the calm wording of the report fool you, this is a big deal for the IAEA to come out and say. The IAEA has often stymied US efforts in the past to get viable sanctions against Iran, because the IAEA is extremely impartial, and they never make assumptions or report findings without extremely strong evidence. They have a very long history of not kowtowing to the greater powers, such as the US.

This isn't propaganda against Iran just because these reasons may justify a later war. When you get down to it, this is a country that gives enormous support to real, actual terrorists and openly subverts attempts by the international community to contain its nuclear weapons research and conventional weapons proliferation. If you truly believe only the US cares about this, then you should asking your government WHY they aren't doing more. Thankfully, however, your world view is incorrect and the international community actually is interested in containing Iran and the huge proliferation risk they pose to the world at large.

The new [Italian] government sworn in on November 16th has the chairman of NATO’s military committee...as defence minister; the boss of Italy’s biggest retail bank...as minister for economic development and infrastructure; and no fewer than seven professors...out of a cabinet of 17...The new government’s only defect may be that it contains no young people...It is rare for the intellectual firepower of so many technocrats to be trained on a country’s problems.

In the OP's story, the author implicitly suggests that government would better serve the people by getting the hell out of their lives. In second story, the author implicitly suggests that a country's problems are best solved by intellectual firepower getting more involved in people's lives.

Bullshit. You do know that Canada loses more days to strikes than France? In 2009, Canada lost 2.2 million working days to strikes, compared to just over 0.1 million in the US, a country 10x the size. It seems to me that Canada is paying more for unions than the US.

> will soon be filtered out and go out out of business.

The main environments in which such filtering would occur are libraries, schools and workplaces. Somehow I doubt there is much demand for porn originating from those environments anyway, at least not much money-raising porn.

According to a recent article in the Economist, porn browsing is growing fastest on smartphones. The .xxx domain wouldn't be blocked on those devices unless attached to a corporate network.

So who exactly will be blocking this?

To have the KDE 3.5 forked into an actively-developed fork will not downplay KDE 4's significance nor its own active development. This just gives us users a choice between two considerably different desktop environments.

When you fork, you gain a choice and lose synergies. If Trinity gains steam, how much development effort will it pull away from KDE 4? How much energy will it take from application developers trying to target both platforms? Will Debian divert other packaging efforts to support this new desktop? And how much extra confusion or frustration will this add for Linux users? Choices you don't care about are, in fact, drawbacks.

I'm not arguing for or against the Trinity effort. Forks can bring value to the community, especially when solving a legal dispute, circumventing a stagnant core team, trying out something really innovative, or targeting a specialized set of interests. But fragmentation has a cost, and it's not as simple as saying more choices are always better.

According to this article from The Economist the most common background for politicians word wide is Law (surprise!) and then comes (in order) Business, Diplomacy, Military, Journalism, Economics, Medicine, Academia, and Engineering.

Almost 20% of the politicians had a Law background while about 7% had an Engineering background.

How come my posts are supported by actual facts and your posts are only supported by your vivid fantasies?

http://www.thenation.com/article/159997/nuclear-dead-end-its-economics-stupid

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/radioactive-corporate-welfare/

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/nuclear-renaissance-is-short-on-largess/

http://www.economist.com/node/14859289

http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv15n1/reg15n1-rothwell.html

Terrestrial nuclear fission plants cannot compete in the marketplace. They are a handout of government money to favored corporations.

In any case, the fact that the poor are especially vulnerable to the ravages of climate change has been well documented:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090820082101.htm

http://www.economist.com/node/14447171

Also see the IPCC report.

That does not mean that first world countries will be unaffected - this is a strawman on your part, and simultaneously an unspoken assumption on the part of the denialist groupthink.

The Economist magazine had been calling the global property bubble a "house of cards" since 2003

They had a cover story dedicated to chronicling the runaway housing boom/runaway debt markets in either 2004 or 2005.

It's not been a secret except to people who fit this description: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair.

The Economist magazine had been calling the global property bubble a "house of cards" since 2003

They had a cover story dedicated to chronicling the runaway housing boom/runaway debt markets in either 2004 or 2005.

It's not been a secret except to people who fit this description: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair.

In USA, big business controls the government.

In China, the government controls big business.

Neither country has free market (if you look at the big picture), but USA is definitely way closer to it than China.

To get this in perspective, in China, economic crimes such as tax evasion or fraud, and even things that we would consider far less notable than that, can (and sometimes do) result in a death sentence. One recent case.

Since I jumped into this thread with both feet, I might as well continue my self-dialog under the burning bush.

I suppose I've listened attentively to at least 50 Econtalk episodes, including Cowen on the Great Stagnation. It didn't make a particularly strong impression. Russ gives a good interview and he invites smart subjects. Often he goosesteps over the pearls of wisdom he elicits on his Route 66 to Hayekville. That's his loss at the end of the day. I get a lot out of it applying a broader filter.

I think the majority of the explanation lies in the transition to doing more with less. Our productivity figures are pretty insane when it comes to this kind of thing. Counterproductive cycles are double counted, while real progress self negates. If you go back and dampen those old productivity figures with the careless waste streams and hidden liabilities, we're not doing so badly in the present after all.

It's a bit like hitting the 4GHz barrier in CPU design. Innovation hardly ceased, but it's bounty has become a lot less direct. In the kinds of systems that will soon replace the laggard tail of the human bell curve, those multiple cores will find their use.

Then you want to read The Economist. Look around for a few minutes and be impressed that such a high-level newspaper exists. Despite its name, it does not deal with mostly economics. It's more for international politics and major world events.

But universities have discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour.

I find the subject of higher education in the US perplexing. We can all agree that more and more people are being encouraged into higher education, but as more students have entered college the costs, rather than coming down as you would expect, have risen dramatically, far out-pacing inflation or increases in income(remember when that was a thing?). In these sort of anomalous situations I usually figure the explanation can be found by following the money, so can anybody point me at an article that does this? My theory would be that corporations must ultimately benefit from the research being done by the professors who would otherwise have to teach - that job having been taken over for the most part by their PhD students.

Agreed on the bigger ... but I want even larger than that. I absolutely *loathe* the LED message signs that it seems every church / school / bank / shopping center has these days.

But I want to put something in front of our Town Hall that we can change the messages on easily, and looks a little classier than the old school swap out the letters ones ... An indoor large sign was actually one of their first products (mentioned in a Economist article from 2000)

I keep forgetting who to credit for this quote, but it's not mine:

The stone age did not end for a sudden lack of stones. Likewise, the oil age will not end because we have run out of oil.

The person to credit is Sheikh Zaki Yamani, a former Saudi oil minister. That's fairly significant, don't you think?

Actually Japan is noted for some industries having a corporate culture where "not invented here" takes hold.

http://www.economist.com/node/10169932
http://www.business-strategy-innovation.com/2010/01/pay-attention-when-sony-and-japan.html

"Akira Takeishi of the Institute of Innovation Research at Hitotsubashi University has investigated why Japanese firms are highly competitive in some industries (carmaking, electronics, imaging products, video games) and less so in others (personal computers, software). He concluded that Japanese firms did best in manufacturing industries with closed product designs that do not require collaboration with the rest of the industry, and worst in fields based on open standards and modular architectures. So if the nature of innovation has changed, and it now depends on collaboration with other firms around the world, Japan could be in trouble. Japanese patents with foreign co-inventors accounted for less than 3% of the total, compared with 12% in America."

Obviously I meant the national debt and that in comparison to the population. Have a look at: http://www.economist.com/content/global_debt_clock

So you're wrong again.

US National debt per capita: $29,053.53
France: $31,882.18
Canada: $36,898.23
Italy: $38,025.60
Japan: $83,444.57

Obviously I meant the national debt and that in comparison to the population. Have a look at: http://www.economist.com/content/global_debt_clock

And don't forget, that the US and the UK have a higher rate of GDP generated from the finance sector than other western states, which in the end do not produce direct wealth for the majority.

Does this remind you of something?

http://www.economist.com/node/21528593

Because there is no GAAP way to express the value of customer loyalty,

Dude, I wish you the best of luck. Loyalty is the hot ass you crave after wedding the invisible hand.

Corporations bent on cultivating the next quarterly earnings report don't hold much enduring appeal to informed consumers wishing to build relationship equity with non-human entities. Where does the loyalty come to rest in this system? With suckers, if you can find them?

The body beautiful

A reputation for morality and high ethical standards is normally built up over the course of a lifetime. But some big companies have found a quicker route--just buy it.

Are you planning to GAAP codify loyalty the commodity, or loyalty the sentiment? Watch your step, Groupon, there's a small crevice near you.

Don't worry; the 3D printing folks will just print more! I've been assured by the droolers that 3D printing will change everything. Or maybe we can mine some from the Moon? Nah, we'll just use the exhaust from our fusion power plants! Gee whiz, our future is shiny!

But if we take you up on your offer and abandon our project for 3D printing of replacement organs, you're going to die of old age sooner than you otherwise will, QA.

Interesting atricle from The Economist, from 2004, about social/financial mobility in America. http://www.economist.com/node/3518560

Blaming Wallstreet for an "information blackout" (and ultimately for the current economic situation, while simultaneously giving the government a free pass

The housing crisis, caused by lending institutions granting mortgages to unqualified applicants, wasn't the fault of large banking corporations? They knew they could shove their losses off on Fannie and Freddie, so they had no risk, took the money and ran. Not that the govt wasn't complicit as well, dishing out TARP funds did nothing but encourage this anti-social behavior.

If the economy falters, companies are bringing in less revenue

Seriously? What planet are you on?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/business/economy/24econ.html"Corporate Profits Were the Highest on Record Last Quarter"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/23/corporate-profits-q3-2010-_n_787573.html"Corporate Profits Hit New Record, U.S. Workers Still Struggling "

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2011/performers/companies/profits/"Top companies: Most profitable" # Note, you have to go to #27 before you find one reporting a loss, and out of the top 50, only 5 report a loss

http://www.economist.com/node/18073369"How much longer can corporate America keep on delivering bumper increases in profits?"

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph"It's the Inequality, Stupid" Sorry, their title, not mine. Anyway, this gives an idea where that profit is going. If you are NOT in the top 1% of income earners, your after tax income has likely gone down since 1979. If you are in the top 1%, it has gone up more than 120%.

http://www.businessinsider.com/15-charts-about-wealth-and-inequality-in-america-2010-4#the-last-two-decades-were-greatif-you-were-a-ceo-or-owner-not-if-you-were-anyone-else-5"15 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wealth And Inequality In America" # CEO pay up 298% from 1990 to 2005, while the average workers pay is up 4.3%.

I would go on, but I have to get back to my wage-slave existence so I can have a roof over my head and something to eat tonight. Crying and/or going postal in the office would probably get me marked down on my performance review.

Thanks for the link and other suggestion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Shark_Hunt

I knew Carter was a farmer and a bit of a nuclear engineer, but I did not know he was a Bob Dylan fan. :-) Although it is an interesting song Carter mentions, a protest song about protest songs, or maybe something more? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggie's_Farm

That is a great video on Carter. He really was, morally, the best we could have hoped for as a president. If Carter had gotten four more years, I wonder what our world would be like, as he made mistakes, but might have learned from them?

Don't know if this is true?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise_conspiracy_theory

But in any case, it is sad that such a morel person, Jimmy Carter, lost his bid for re-election in part for blowback for immoral things done by earlier administrations (the original destruction of a democratic government in Iran).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat

I had renewable energy newspapers from around 1980-1984 and you could see the change from optimism to despair as Reagan came in and made changes. Otherwise, we might have had this sort of 24 hours a day solar-thermal power plant twenty years ago in the USA:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-gemasolar-solar-thermal-power-hours.html

I fear you may be right about gridlock etc., but I can hope you will be wrong. Maybe we will at least see action at a local level?
http://www.amazon.com/Neighborhood-Power-Localism-David-Morris/dp/0807008753

See, for optimism:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."

In any case, we will see solutions in other countries (including China which is led by a lot of engineers).
http://www.economist.com/node/13496638
"The presence of so many engineer-politicians in China goes hand in hand with a certain way of thinking. An engineerâ(TM)s job, at least in theory, is to ensure things work, that the bridge stays up or the dam holds. The process by which projects get built is usually secondary. That also seems true of Chinese politics, in which government often rides roughshod over critics. Engineers are supposed to focus on the long term; buildings have no merit if they will col

Commander Taco is being replaced by Chicken Little in slashdot.

Expect numerous announcements on how we "just" grew by a billion in twelve years, while the previous billion took ten years and the billion before took even less, starting from smaller bases. For a more balanced explanation of the situation see:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/multimedia/2010/11/world_population

I asked you below, and I'm going to ask you again. Do you have some proof of this? I honestly want to know. I'm an independent voter and a musician. Can You Prove what you've asserted twice in this thread?

While I don't have the specifics on the case parent mentioned, The Economist ran a couple of stories about somewhat similar cases a year ago. Here a relevant quote:

In 2000 four Americans were charged with importing lobster tails in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes, in violation of a Honduran regulation that Honduras no longer enforces. They had fallen foul of the Lacey Act, which bars Americans from breaking foreign rules when hunting or fishing. [...] The lobstermen had no idea they were breaking the law. Yet three of them got eight years apiece. Two are still in jail.

I asked you below, and I'm going to ask you again. Do you have some proof of this? I honestly want to know. I'm an independent voter and a musician. Can You Prove what you've asserted twice in this thread?

While I don't have the specifics on the case parent mentioned, The Economist ran a couple of stories about somewhat similar cases a year ago. Here a relevant quote:

In 2000 four Americans were charged with importing lobster tails in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes, in violation of a Honduran regulation that Honduras no longer enforces. They had fallen foul of the Lacey Act, which bars Americans from breaking foreign rules when hunting or fishing. [...] The lobstermen had no idea they were breaking the law. Yet three of them got eight years apiece. Two are still in jail.

best schools in the country where their combined bills could come to $500,000.

You know we're in an education bubble, right?

I can assure you that no matter how clean the findings are for Mann, this will not be let go. This whole "debate" has nothing to do with facts about the climate -- it is merely another extension of the American conservative anti-government-anything ideology.

Facts are not what drive our politics. Uncompromising, stick-to-your-principles, recalcitrant thinking defines American conservatism: https://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20110730_USC300.gif

The Yuan is not floated like many countries currencies are. This gives China a significant competitive advantage over all countries to produce goods and services in their country.

Do you have any evidence that the Yuan is currently significantly undervalued relative to the dollar? A few years ago it was, sure, but the last estimate I saw was that it was now only ~5% under valued, on a purchasing power basis. That gives Chinese manufacturers a bit of an advantage, but it's probably less important now than differing regulatory environments.

(The Economist agrees with me, for what it's worth)

We believe that many of the prominent new Internet companies are building real, high-growth, high-margin, highly defensible businesses.

'Believe' is the key word there.

Mr Andreessen really needs to read this article at the Economist.

I think he'll change his attitude.

Yes, you will have a much chance of getting a job interview with a "white-sounding" name. Study cited towards bottom of article. http://www.economist.com/node/21526320

Fair enough, it's a multi-step problem:

1. CDL required for farm tractors
2. Disqualification for CDL if convicted of a felony
3. Sexual offender felony charges for 'indecent exposure' if caught urinating in public. Here's a man in Arizona charged with a felony for public urination. Only two of the 13 states with such laws restrict it to requiring a child to be present

There are enough absurd laws on the books that any new regulation has far-reaching consequences. At least part of the reason that administrative rulemaking is a public evil.

This one is a gift to agribusiness as it will surely cause many family farms to fail, through one consequnce or another. Hopefully this rule will ultimately fail, but it's unproductive folly to pretend that Democrats don't pander to the corporatocracy.