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27% of microsoft users don't know how to install a program.

Yes, it is true that people that use their system's default browser tend to be dumb. These people are statistically poorly performing employees, and some companies avoid hiring them. So even if you use MSIE or Edge as your browser, you should use something else when submitting your resume.

Same goes when a guy's email address is @hotmail.com :)

Yes, it is true that people that use their system's default browser tend to be dumb. These people are statistically poorly performing employees, and some companies avoid hiring them. So even if you use MSIE or Edge as your browser, you should use something else when submitting your resume.

Fascinating. Sounds exactly like the kind of positive reinforcement I would love to believe.

"A study of 20,000 workers showed that more honest people tend to perform better and stay at the job longer. For some reason, however, they make less effective salespeople."

So where is the study? Who did it? Was it the author with ants?

"Take a look at the board game industry or card game industry and see how well it's been doing since the advent of video games. "
Just to take one of your many examples, the boardgame and especially card game industry has EXPLODED particularly in the last 10 years.

http://www.economist.com/news/...

Seriously, you think card games were doing better before pokemon, mtg, etc.?

27% of microsoft users don't know how to install a program.

Yes, it is true that people that use their system's default browser tend to be dumb. These people are statistically poorly performing employees, and some companies avoid hiring them. So even if you use MSIE or Edge as your browser, you should use something else when submitting your resume.

Like when accounting for "20 million active users" monthly to "between 300000 and 400000 jobs" every month.

Population of China: 1.357 Billion.
Out of which 359.14 million were employed in urban and 405 million in rural China, in 2011.

Meaning that those "monthly gigs" represent 0.039 - 0.052% of jobs in China.
While "20 million active users", would represent 2.61% of workers - if there actually were 20 million gigs too.
Instead of there only being enough "gigs" for about 1.5 - 2% of "workers".

Some of whom are significant enough percent of the whole to be singled out in the article as ""beautiful women"...between the ages of 18 and 28...working as live-streaming models to keep mostly-male viewers entertained" - for 70$ per day + tips.

I.e. The company offers either "sorting crates of milk at a supermarket or hand out pamphlets on frozen sidewalks" kind of "gigs" - or "gigs" which are not so cleverly disguised online prostitution.
Considering that regular prostitution can employ some 300000 in a single city those 80$ million look more and more like they are being made on the backs of prostitutes.

That is absolutely correct, and there was a very good article in The Economist relating to the removal of $55 million from 'The Dao' which made the same legal argument that exploiting poor programming in a Smart Contract was not theft but simply following the rules of a system, even if those rules did not do what the creators intended.

In addition The Economist argued that that whereas the heist was not a crime, altering digital ledgers to retrieve the lost ether was affront to the whole project.

Guess you've never heard of the phenomenon of bullshit jobs.

The issue is not that jobs used to have meaning and now they don't; most jobs in most periods have undoubtedly been staffed by people who would prefer to be doing something else. The issue is that too little of the recent gains from technological advance and economic growth have gone toward giving people the time and resources to enjoy their lives outside work.

http://www.economist.com/blogs...

The Economist found that between 2012 and 2015 the three biggest Indian outsourcing firmsâ"TCS, Wipro and Infosysâ"submitted over 150,000 visa applications for positions that paid a median salary of $69,500. In contrast, Americaâ(TM)s five biggest tech firmsâ"Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoftâ"submitted just 31,000 applications, and proposed to pay their workers a median salary of $117,000 http://www.economist.com/news/... https://qz.com/889524/the-us-s...

The Economist found that between 2012 and 2015 the three biggest Indian outsourcing firmsâ"TCS, Wipro and Infosysâ"submitted over 150,000 visa applications for positions that paid a median salary of $69,500. In contrast, Americaâ(TM)s five biggest tech firmsâ"Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoftâ"submitted just 31,000 applications, and proposed to pay their workers a median salary of $117,000 http://www.economist.com/news/...

They house price to income ratio is almost double what it was in the 80s.

Duh, if people are making the same amount but houses cost almost twice as much, they won't buy one. If they find one they can afford, they probably won't move.

If you think of the house price to income ratio as metric to determine the "value" you are getting for buying a home at market prices that year, value has dropped substantially. Unless, of course you think the price to income ratio can go up indefinitely.

The Economist has some great interactive charts. http://www.economist.com/blogs...

In other words, you take money from the rich and give it to the poor.

That is exactly what UBI is. It is redistribution of wealth. In a world where the rich are getting richer, and goods and services will (supposedly) get cheaper and cheaper to produce because of robots and AI, yet require less and less labor, them some sort of redistribution will likely be needed to maintain social harmony.

India is probably most serious about UBI. They already have a huge welfare system that is badly corrupted, so they would benefit from just wiping it out and replacing it with something simpler.

UBI would be much harder to implement in America. There is little political support for redistribution, and there would be enormous resistance from people currently receiving entitlements that would be drastically reduced under any plausible UBI system.

This was embarrassing.

Yes, an embarrassing set of hysteria from the right wing, who forgot the truth on their way to their latest outrage.

Tell us about the curtains, the birth certificate and the training exercise.

The Mexican president canceling a meeting in a huff? Not so much.

Oh oh, oh, ooloorie, you forgot, Trump said it was "mutual" so you are passing the wrong story.

Of course, now he has to meet with another populist radical, who wants to advance her own agenda over the wishes of the actual elected government which only now is she spinning as what she intended to do all along.

I guess we can start calling it AirStrip One.

It's done more for explanation but not for actual comparison.

FTA: "Gaël Varoquaux, a machine-learning specialist at the Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, in France, says that the 6502 in particular is about as different from a brain as it could be. Such primitive chips process information sequentially. Brains (and modern microprocessors) juggle many computations at once. And he points out that, for all its limitations, neuroscience has made real progress. The ins-and-outs of parts of the visual system, for instance, such as how it categorises features like lines and shapes, are reasonably well understood." http://www.economist.com/news/...

It's also widely understood that large data sets and analytics will not necessary reveal great insights simply because of the size of the data set. Which is why I thought the article was a fluff piece that provided no insights.

They already have that.

Reading your conclusion that solar is more subsidized than NG I feel it's partly because of market distortions in the USA. (This bias may, or may not be, related to the pre-existence of gas plants i.e. the absence of capital cost).

Once one looks outside the USA solar appears to be a clear leader in at least certain areas. Take Dubai, where solar beats out both coal and gas plants by a substantial margin:

http://www.apricum-group.com/d...

Another illuminating post is from the Economist:

http://www.economist.com/news/...

In any case, some thoughts below.

> What is your definition of "highly subsidized"?

The ordinary definition is something like "a benefit made by the government or a public body to assist an industry or business so that the price of a commodity or service may remain low or competitive."

In the case of natural gas, it's a combination of:

1. ultra-low interest rates; and
2. so-called "dumb money" (including, perhaps especially, public pension funds) debt-financing of shale companies.

(I'm aware that one could argue that these are not strictly subsidies, but that doesn't deflate the point that NG is surviving on cheap credit and not competitive advantage).

Once these factors dissipate, natural gas might be substantially more expensive â" and quite a bit more expensive than solar.

Of course one could argue that solar similarly benefits from low interest rates. The key difference is that NG is a resource industry (usage decreases supply, thereby increasing cost), and solar is a manufacturing industry (benefitting from economy of scale, etc, where costs go down as more is manufactured).

One of the things I don't like about them is that their aggressive price-cutting monopsony forces manufacturers to cut corners, leading to unique SKU's that are only available at walmart

What's to dislike about that?

a nice large big screen TV (I think it was a Samsung?) that was the Wal-Mart-only model, that was mostly identical to the regular model except with fewer inputs and no smart features

What's to dislike about that?

It is almost like someone has told you to hate Walmart, but you just can't help yourself saying good things about them and recommending the store to others...

I am really appalled at how many people don't take the Russian interference seriously and blame it on some kind of Democrat/Obama conspiracy. This has been happening in eastern European countries for decades and Russia has now been targeting also western Europe since the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine. Russia is funding right-wing populist parties and helping them out with propaganda all across the western hemisphere in an attempt to discredit our democracies and our free press.

Don't believe it? Google "russia populist funding". Here are the top three links:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
http://www.economist.com/news/...

It's really scary how much success they are having in sowing distrust in our institutions and our free press. Every time I read someone here decrying some mayor western news outlet as "Fake News" I am reminded of the effectiveness of Putins troll army.

Apparently this isn't true; LGBT people have been charged: http://www.economist.com/blogs....

Never mind the repressive effects of such laws even if they aren't strictly enforced. A law is a law.

First thing you do is fire all the hedge fund managers. Their fees make them consistently the worst way to invest in stocks.

Then you get rid of market index funds. The market index funds (DJIA, S&P500, etc) are weighted based on market capitalization. "Popular" stocks have a higher market cap, so tend to be over-represented in these funds. But a stock being popular means it has already experienced a value gain. It's less likely to appreciate more than the "unpopular" stocks.

So now you've got an algorithm which randomly picks stocks with an equal chance to pick any given stock (i.e. the proverbial monkey throwing darts at the financial page of a newspaper). That is your baseline. Until you come up with an AI which can beat that, this is just more marketers spending large quantities of money on ways to generate a slick prospectus which fools naive investors into investing in their fund so they can leech fees (which admittedly may be what they're trying to do).

The longer you allow a market economy to continue, the more optimized it becomes. The low-hanging fruit of economic efficiency has already long been picked. The remaining efficiency improvements are mostly so small that variances due to random chance usually swamp out their effect. That makes the market extremely difficult to predict because the better it has optimized the economy, the more it acts like gambling as its critics like to claim. (The key difference being this is one gambling game which is fixed in your favor, rather than in the house's favor. You just have to pick a strategy which minimizes your risk, which usually means some sort of broad unweighted index fund.)

and now you reject evidence simply because the numbers are too big based on....what?

First, that many researchers is equivalent to the US's entire PhD production annually.

in a world of 7 billion people you think there cant be that many climate scientists?

Yes.

Let us also note that the paper doesn't actually do what it claims. Just look at the methodology. There's no way the author is finding climate researchers or climate research with the search they're doing.

More serious studies are definitely needed.

No more studies are necessary. The answer is perfectly clear: Bacon. Those Danes produce lots of it! Even the venerable "The Economist" takes note of that:

"Denmark is a tiny country, with 5.6m people and wallet-draining labour costs. But it is an agricultural giant, home to 30m pigs and a quiverful of global brands. In 2011 farm products made up 20% of its goods exports. The value of food exports grew from €4 billion ($5.5 billion) in 2001 to €16.1 billion in 2011. The government expects it to rise by a further €6.7 billion by 2020." http://www.economist.com/news/...

All that happiness-bringing bacon cancels out all those depressing, but brilliant, Lars Von Trier films.

Not saying Denmark is some shining beacon of mental health

Not saying Denmark is some shining bacon of mental health

FTFY

No, you look after them for the rest of their lives, just like any responsible society does for those not able to look after themselves.

Many of them can look after themselves, especially if they get some help to get started. In America, 80% of autistic people are not employed. But with coaching, and targeted help, most autistic people are employable. Some countries do a far better job of this than others. The Economist recently had an article about the effectiveness of education and employment policies for autistic people.

The Middle East is unfortunately still "developing" and doesn't really have a lot of stable nation states. They have a very difficult transition. And they are actively weaponising religion. But that doesn't mean that the the millions of people who are part of those groups culturally, are intent on any of that crap themselves.

They've been "developing" for over 100 years. Part of the big problem in the Middle East is you have several religions (Christianity, Judaism, Sunni and Shiite Islam, etc...) and all consider Jerusalem to be theirs. If you only consider Jerusalem, you've got a much longer history of conflict.

The strange part is all religions teach that they are the one true religion. Christianity is known to be in-your-face and even some sects believe they are the one true Christianity - talk to any devout Catholic about whether a Baptist should take communion. Many years ago we had the Crusades, where Catholicism was spread to the masses through fear and violence... but nowhere in the Bible (that I'm aware of) does it say "though shalt convert as many as possible". Even the most hard-core Catholics I've met will stop at "I've accepted you're going to hell, you can be saved and I can help you", but no threat of violence.

Today we have what the press sometimes calls the "Islamic Threat", which is a great way to spread fear and animosity toward Islam. The scary part is the extremists, that take the "every non-believer is a heathen" and "die for your religion and be welcomed to heaven with 100 virgins" to mean "Kill everyone, yell Allah, and you'll be forgiven and martyred".

Still when it comes to luring employees, countries are competing. So not whether it is reasonable in China but how well it competes against other employment centres. So for China, logically relocating tech companies seeking to bring in foreign employees to Hainan https://www.lonelyplanet.com/c... makes sense. Employment conditions and wages will not drive recruitment, lifestyle when not at work will. At the end of the day, sticking to this list makes the most sense for employers and employees http://www.economist.com/blogs..., word of mouth and reasonable work conditions and wages will drive successfully long lasting recruitment, although admittedly if you attempt to transfer staff from those locations once they have settled, chances are really high they will quit and seek local employment along with permanent immigration. I know quite a few foreign staff who left companies rather than leave Adelaide Australia, especially cold climate foreigners, one year and it often becomes permanent.

Unless you can get in that top 10 to 20 you will always struggle against other locations, that are in the top 10. Keep in mind it has an economic advantage because you can pay less and still more readily retain staff, especially if employment conditions beyond your own company for their skill sets are pretty slim.

I think it has more to do with people being too tired for sex and being unable to raise children due to being extremely poor and working multiple jobs for even the barest subsistence living.

http://www.economist.com/blogs... http://livingwage.mit.edu/page... What we try to do is to calculate what amount of money allow somebody to cover the basic necessities. Maybe there is an argument for $30 but it's not "more is better." The argument for a living wage is that if somebody works a 40-60 hour week, they should be able to afford food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. I don't know of any places where $30/hr would be needed for this. But the "more is better" argument is a ridiculous strawman which is why nobody will debate you.

China has 1,448 naturalised Chinese in total. Almost no foreigners are able to become citizens (source).

Even Japan, better known for hostility to immigration, naturalises around 10,000 new citizens each year; in America the figure is some 700,000.

If you aren't Han, you are in trouble in China.

The Russian economy contracts 0.6% and somehow Russia is insolvent? LJL. Sorry to break it to you but the Kremlin is still sitting on $390 billion in hard currency and a mere 3% budget deficit. Russia is in a mild recession but insolvent it is not.

I don't know where this 0.6% number is coming from, but it's not an annual figure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://www.nytimes.com/interac...

http://www.economist.com/news/...

For the life of me, I can't figure out why people are in denial about Russia's involvement in attacking our electoral process.

Sure, you can find Macedonian teenagers, and idiots in California who claim that "only conservatives fall for fake news" and that it "doesn't work with liberals" (...) but that's a side show.

Start here, and read it until you grasp what is going on:

Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say

The flood of "fake news" this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.

Russia's increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human "trolls," and networks of websites and social-media accounts echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.

Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on "fake news," as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Then continue here:

A collection of articles on Russia influence operations in the United States:

The threat from Russia
22 Oct 2016

How to contain Vladimir Putins deadly, dysfunctional empire

FOUR years ago Mitt Romney, then a Republican candidate, said that Russia was Americas number-one geopolitical foe. Barack Obama, among others, mocked this hilarious gaffe: The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the cold wars been over for 20 years, scoffed the president. How times change. With Russia hacking the American election, presiding over mass slaughter in Syria, annexing Crimea and talking casually about using nuclear weapons, Mr Romneys view has become conventional wisdom. Almost the only American to dissent from it is todays Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

http://www.economist.com/news/...

---

Belching smoke through the Channel, Russian aircraft carrier so unreliable it sails with its own breakdown tug
22 Oct 2016

The ageing Russian aircraft carrier that sailed through the English Channel escorted by the Royal Navy has been plagued by years of technical problems and is accompanied everywhere by a tug in case it breaks down.

The plumbing is so bad on the 55,000 ton Admiral Kuznetsov that many of its toilets cannot be used, while it has had repeated problems with its power and a string of accidents, naval experts said.

The Soviet-era warship is leading a flotilla of eight naval vessels to the eastern Mediterranean, where its aircraft are expected to join a renewed assault on the rebel-held city of Aleppo.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

---

Yes, 17 intelligence agencies really did say Russia was behind hacking
21 Oct 2016

Donald Trump

Libertarian philosophy is *explicitly* to "keep government out of the way", limiting government's role basically to defense and police work. Over the last 40 years, while demand for quality education has become strongly inelastic (it's necessary for individual economic survival, we'll pay through the nose to get it), the libertarians in our society have successfully reduced education funding at all levels, with college and grad school seeing the largest shift from public funding to students and families.

I think it would be educational for you to look at how much we actually spend on education in the US. Sure, there was a modest drop after the 2008 recession, but one would have to go back to the late 70s to find an era where less public funds were spent on college than now.

College funding hasn't significantly changed at all over the last 40 years. The problem is that costs have grown immensely. And they grew so because students could borrow arbitrary amounts of money and have the loan guaranteed by Uncle Sam.

Sorry, libertarians aren't to blame for this mess.

Your stereotypes are way out of date.

"The average factory worker in China earns $27.50 per day, compared with $8.60 in Indonesia and $6.70 in Vietnam. "
http://www.economist.com/news/...

Have you seen the California budget lately? No, CA does not give more than it receives. The state is in massive debt, has massive regulations, and businesses can't seem to leave the state fast enough.

Oddly enough, Liberal Jerry Brown changed things a bit http://www.economist.com/news/...

So anyhow, now that your ideology is in complete control, it's going to sound pretty funny when you still try to blame them damn libtards for every problem. Let em go or kick them out.

I fully supported Texas seceding, as I do California.

Don't forget the $50 Billion in job losses to offset the $25 B in gains. We tried this crap with NAFTA etc and it only benefits the rich.

People who actually have studied this and know something about it disagree with you.

I don't blame you, it is an easy mistake to make because benefits are diffuse while costs are concentrated and easy to identify, especially due to the inadequacy (in the USA) of the trade-adjustment assistance program.

A good article in The Economist magazine about how the porn business model has evolved on the internet, particularly focused on the recent rise of the porn tube industry:

http://www.economist.com/news/...

From the article, perhaps this is the anecdote you where thinking of:

"IT WAS 2012, and Fabian Thylmann's goal was world domination. The man who had put together Manwin, an emerging online-pornography giant, now controlled most of the top ten porn "tubes" - aggregators that, like YouTube, contain thousands of videos and are wildly popular, because much of their content is free. If he could get hold of the two biggest, XVideos and XHamster, he could put it all behind a pay barrier and build an online porn empire. If competitors emerged, he would buy them, too. What antitrust authority would rein in a monopolist in a business that upstanding people pretend does not exist?"

"But neither of his targets would sell. The French owner of XVideos is said to have turned down an offer of more than $120m with a scornful "Sorry, I have to go and play Diablo II." Mr Thylmann later sold out of Manwin (since renamed Mindgeek), after coming under investigation by tax authorities in Germany, his home country."

That's indeed the kind of ideas that is now floating around. I rank it in the category of Iraq coming to kill us all, with the same combination of inflating the threat and at the same time regarding the opponent as a pushover. I think Colin Powell has made some sensible comments on that. Russia is paranoid about us, about NATO. We scare them. They are a small power, we're a big one that is surrounding them more and more, and then sabre rattling is a sensible response.

That doesn't explain why they weren't rattling their sabers a few years ago. The Economist has a recent article that does offer an explanation that covers that as well The thesis is basically that domestic troubles caused by a weak economy have motivated Putin to seek ways to distract his people from domestic concerns. Specifically, he's tried to recapture the superpower position of the Soviet Union. He can't, really, because Russia isn't the Soviet Union. Without the central planning structure to force the massive overproduction of military resources, the Soviet Union wouldn't have been the Soviet Union, either.

But his people don't really realize this and, frankly, the rest of the world tends not to realize it much, either. So Putin can rattle his rusted and broken saber and the rest of the world reacts as though he was the mighty Soviet Union. Except... there is one area in which is military isn't so rusted or broken: nuclear weapons. Oh, his nuclear armament is aging and dilapidated, but it's still very real and Russia has the technological wherewithal to build highly functional nukes and missiles to carry them. Russia can't afford to build very many of them, but it doesn't really take all that many.

So, as it becomes more and more apparent that Putin doesn't really have the conventional forces to make the world treat Russia with the fear and respect that the Soviet Union got, he's almost certainly going to be making more and more use of the nuclear threat that the world can't ignore. And that will help to keep his people feeling like they're a major world power again, which will keep him in power.

Is this true? I don't know. Makes sense to me.

"Tech giants have been particularly successful in getting their voices heard. They were originally reluctant to play the lobbying game, but soon realised that was a mistake: Microsoft’s prolonged legal battle with the Department of Justice over whether its was abusing its dominant position in the software market, which was finally settled in 2001, persuaded the whole industry that it pays to have friends in Washington. Since then tech companies have turned into some of America’s most assiduous lobbyists and most enthusiastic employers of Washington insiders." -- The Economist, "Dark Arts", September 17th, 2016

It was comical, really.

Nearly a decade ago fraudulent scientific papers had already become a serious problem for Chinese academics, including fraudulent citations (from the linked article):

From 2002 to 2012, more than 1m Chinese papers were published in SCI journals; they ranked sixth for the number of times cited by others.
...
In 2010, however, Nature had also noted rising concerns about fraud in Chinese research, reporting that in one Chinese government survey, a third of more than 6,000 scientific researchers at six leading institutions admitted to plagiarism, falsification or fabrication.

(There are possibly mitigating factors, so read the link before drawing too strong of a conclusion)

Oh, I'm quite familiar with this particularly gruesome neologism, and I'm most certainly not the only one that has a problem with it., as I have just learned. But maybe you should check your own grasp of the English language before looking stuff up in the dictionary to lecture others.

How about a little bit of intellectual honesty...

The truth is, that those who politicized Global Warming are the #1 reason it is questions.

1. Scientific Consensus - dumbest claim, there has been a consensus about nearly every wrong belief in science. Until it was disproved. A claim of consensus is NOT a scientific argument.

2. Scientific studies - the track record of many, if not most, scientific studies is very poor.

> The amount of financially influenced studies.
> Incorrect studies.
> Out-and-out fraudulent studies

All lead to skepticism. Remember, this is the generation in which every dietary instruction of the 80's all derived from so-called scientific studies, have no essentially been disproven.

Furthermore, the science of studying studies has some interesting results. The fact that bad studies often are more influencing. The fact that most studies, even those purported to use proper techniques, cannot be reproduced. And it's not just limited to psychology studies.

http://www.economist.com/news/...

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

https://www.jove.com/blog/2012...

3. Bad and untrustworthy science. The big problem that GW has is that they burned a lot of credibility. They did this by seeking a desired result and bending data to their expectations - that's bad science.

a. Most of the climate science involved taking multiple divergent data sets (satellite records, mercury records, tree ring records, ice records, etc) and merge them into one large pan-historic set. The problem is, there really is NO WAY to truly do that. And a certain part of that requires guesswork.

Rather than be honest about the guess work, they erred by choosing what best fit their goals. When you're debating an increase in a degree or two, yet are dealing with that much variability. The guesswork often exceeds the statistical data.

b) There has been criticism of the "recording centers" and strong, scientific based observation that many of those record keeping centers have been compromised.

c) Statements made directly contradicted with historical evidence. While they later made adjustments to correct, it wasn't until they were pressed hard publicly and politically.

d) Scientific models used for predictions, but fail to correlate. When ALL the models used fail to properly predict, it is clear that the models are not accurate. I believe the Russian model which was far less extreme was the only one that came close to being on track.

e) Media claims. Weather NOT Climate. Dumb BS. How many times have I been told weather isn't climate. And I am told this, in debates discussing weather being used to claim climatic warming. *facepalm*

Recently, there was a report that a spring was hottest on record. I laughed, because we had one of the coldest springs and I joked that the media would still claim it was the hottest on record. I said that as a joke, not expecting it to be true. Okay, so it was....and my thought was regional vs continental vs global. I expected the data to show that my region was cooler than average, but that the continent overall was warmer, and so was the globe. But then I looked at the temperature index maps. And my region was listed as above average temps for the spring. Okay, gotta call BS....when we're having one of the coldest springs, everyone is wondering if summer is even going to come, and I've lost a ton of crops due to extremely late frosts. And you are trying to tell me that I had an above average temperature spring. Bullshit. And that is the crap pe

Did you know that most "Nigerian" spam doesn't actually come from Nigeria?

Here is an article that explains the strategy of making spam look like obvious spam. Not only do spammers explicitly mention Nigeria, they also intentionally use bad spelling and bizarre capitalization. All this is designed to weed out sensible people, so they can focus their efforts on only the most credulous respondents.

For spammers, "Trump" is the new Nigeria.

if the developing world actually develops, it's going to be more like the US in the future than like itself on this day so it's won't matter in the long run - we know that the global economic inequality has been decreasing for the last thirty years or so

It was expected that, with rising education and incomes, the African continent would see declining birth rates. It seemed to work at first, but with large parts of the continent stuck at 6 kids per family (the continental average is 4.5), poverty will increase.

The income level for poverty is set at $1.90/day. Using this stat, there are fewer people living in poverty, and yet real poverty is increasing

Someone living today at the new poverty line does not necessarily enjoy the same standard of living as someone at the old line did in the past, however. PPP figures do not measure the affordability of a specific bundle of goods from country to country. Every country experiences its own unique pattern of inflation, and so the new poverty line, translated into local currencies at the PPP rate, will be more than enough for a square meal in some countries, and much too low in others. Looking at national price indices rather than PPPs, half of the world’s population live in countries in which $1.90 buys you less now than $1.25 did back in 2005, according to a paper released this week by Sanjay Reddy of the New School for Social Research in New York.

So saying poverty is going down is misleading, even if it makes for feel-good stories.

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

Um, the whole point is that IKEA *IS* the "charity".

Ah, it makes it easier to exploit employees.

Is it exploitation if the employee wants to work late? Employment gives autistic people purpose and social engagement that is often lacking in other areas of their lives. So if they choose to work late with their co-workers rather than going home to sit in an empty apartment, why is that a bad thing? That decision should be theirs, not yours.

but I see this going to extremes.

You shouldn't. Rates of employment among autistic people vary widely by country. Some countries do a way better job of integrating these people than others. The Economist recently had a good article on the reasons for this. From the article: About 80% of autistic people are not employed. 87% of autistic youngsters who were given assistance to find a job, got one. Only 6% who did not receive support were successful. There is enormous potential for improvement, and we are a long, long way from "going to extremes".

Kim's killstick kills sticks and ISB ports alike - no protection is possible.

Since it's getting increasingly unacceptable to ask about and disqualify candidates who have criminal records ...

One reason is that having a criminal record is not correlated with poor performance for most jobs. It may be sensible to run a criminal background check if you are hiring a cashier, but not if you are hiring a carpenter or a programmer.

I would say that depends. I would not want to hire a carpenter that has a history of robbing the houses they are working on or a programmer who has a history of putting exploits into his code in order to later hack companies he's work for. But I probably wouldn't care if my programmer got busted for possession of marijuana or something like that.

Since it's getting increasingly unacceptable to ask about and disqualify candidates who have criminal records ...

One reason is that having a criminal record is not correlated with poor performance for most jobs. It may be sensible to run a criminal background check if you are hiring a cashier, but not if you are hiring a carpenter or a programmer.

If the renter can supply a good credit rating it should be safe.

Nobody runs a credit check for a one or two night AirBNB stay. Even if they did, that is not a fix to discrimination, since blacks, on average, have worse credit scores.

Because blacks tend to have worse credit scores, in 2007 the state of Washington banned the use of credit reports in hiring. This of course, made discrimination worse. This is an example of a market for lemons. Since employers could no longer tell "good" black candidates from "bad" black candidates, they played it safe by just hiring fewer blacks overall. Yet another perverse unintended consequence of a regulation.

Or maybe psychopaths have a finely-honed ability to become CEO of companies.

Why is that a bad thing? There is evidence that psychopaths actually make better leaders because they don't let their emotions cloud their judgement. They will dispassionately make the hard decisions for the good of the organization, rather than dithering out of misplaced compassion.

Really, when a company like Apple decides to test boundaries of the law

By "test the boundaries of the law" you actually mean "comply with a 25 year-old agreement with a sovereign nation that still argues that the agreement is wholly correct and is considering suing the EU for attempting to invalidate it".

Apple should expect the authorities to do exactly the same.

And by "do exactly the same" you mean "move the boundaries".

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21706267-european-commissions-assault-technology-giant-wrong-bruised-apple

It's awful because it judges people to be dangerous based on a small number of bad individuals.

Small? 51% of America's Muslims would rather be governed by Sharia. That's huge, not small.

existing fences do next to nothing

Huh? Would you care to substantiate this?

what works for Israel and their much, much smaller border is unlikely to work for the US-Mexico border

Why is it "unlikely" to work? And mean work as in "make crossing harder and policing easier" — it does not have to eliminate the problem, the wall just has to reduce it.

the reasons for crossing are different - there's too much money and opportunity in border crossings

The reasons are different, but the difference is in favor of my (and Trump's) argument: terrorists trying to cross into Israel are highly motivated men bent on murder. Folks crossing into the US are (mostly) coming here for economic opportunities. If the crossing is too difficult (hence too expensive) far fewer of them will be crossing. And they'll be less likely to bring their pregnant wives with them, thus reducing the problem of "anchor babies".

Ah, so legal immigrants only have to not send money back home

Yes. It is — and always has been — legitimate for governments to tax, what they wish to discourage. Trump may even simply freeze the remittances — the way Iran's accounts were frozen — until Mexico agrees to do, what he wishes. And then unfreeze the monies...

But when you have large, nonpartisan agreement, and actual empirical proof

All you've shown were publications in popular press. I don't blame you — neither of us is an economist. But, given the profession's failures, susceptibility to opinions and tendency to be politically-influenced, I wouldn't be basing a decision on the opinions of those "experts".

That doesn't mean we should double down on them and vow to kill even more innocents

The point is, we may end up killing far fewer if we threaten to target not bystanders, but the terrorists' kin. But killing may not be necessary — simply seizing these people may be sufficient.

I'm saying even if it is effective, we shouldn't do it.

Your sentiment does credit to your morality. And yet, it is akin to the sort of misguided pacifism, that frowns on "killing" until it is too late and the pacifist's own blood reddens the sand...

Would you accept demolishing the terrorists' homes and detaining their children (up to age 3) for an anonymous adoption in the US?

I dislike the "give serious consideration" to funding yet more research in areas that have been thoroughly debunked

What research "debunked" the idea, that porn — in the amounts available today — is harmful? What makes you dismiss the idea, that it may be a reason (at least partial) today's youth aren't interested in sex, for example?

are harmful to free expression

Are you saying, production of pornography is protected by the First Amendment? If so, even child pornography is protected... But, if we can exempt certain kinds of "expression" based on the harm it is causing, it would be legitimate to evaluate the harm — or lack thereof, would it not be?

Either way, this pornography thing is minuscule compared to the rest of your "beef" with Trump, it is hardly worth discussing.

Or I could vote third party