Slashdot Mirror

Absolutely. But the economic version of natural selection still applies... if he doesn't do it, his company will tank and another will take over. So the choice is, "Do we push this problem onto the taxpayer or do we go bankrupt while someone else pushes it onto the taxpayer?"

Seems like an easy choice.

Yup. And the owners of many companies made the first choice. How 'bout we tax them for the burden they put on us?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/c...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/h...
https://www.thenation.com/arti...
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://www.commercialappeal.co...

Many more where those came from.

The A380 is facing the same fate.

It may take another 5 years, but with the new planes like the 787 and the other Airbus planes, the need for huge aircraft is going by the wayside.

Or the fact that as economies falter and the native currencies turn to dust and banks fail/are seized, people turn to Bitcoin...

Ah yes the apparent users of bitcoin in Venezuela really skyrocketed up to a massive 0.2% of the population and from the link a whole ONE company, a travel company, is taking payment in Bitcoin which is more problematic than if I just used any other currency. It make much more sense to convert to an alternative fiat currency (like US dollars) that is far less volatile then either bitcoin or bolivar and actually works effectively as a currency without massive transaction fees and long transaction delays.

what about all of the legit companies that accept Bitcoin?

That is a shrinking list precisely because of the rapid fluctuation of the currency, the ballooning transaction cost and the length of time it takes to process the transactions.

In fact what you will find is that most of these companies are not accepting bitcoin at all, they are transacting in US dollars you are simply using a service like coinbase to sell bitcoin for US dollars that are then transferred to the company. This also comes with a number of caveats and additional restrictions due to the problems with using bitcoin as a currency.

Or the fact that as economies falter and the native currencies turn to dust and banks fail/are seized, people turn to Bitcoin...

Again, when you put this into practise you find the exorbitant fees and long transaction times to be prohibitive. Yes the case study points out that the number of bitcoin users has increased in Venezuela because the inflation is so bad that finding anywhere to park your investment, even if it is as highly volatile as bitcoin, is a relative win.

As the supply of bitcoins becomes exhausted the problem of transactions becomes much worse, the incentive for mining goes away and transaction fees need to skyrocket just to have incentive for the network to continue operating. You are suggesting its practical use is as a currency however you seem unaware of limitations of the architecture of bitcoin.

Ignoring the variety of illegal goods and services which will always have value to others and can be bought with Bitcoin, what about all of the legit companies that accept Bitcoin? Or the fact that as economies falter and the native currencies turn to dust and banks fail/are seized, people turn to Bitcoin...

"2.4% of the nation's total health care expenditure"
Source: Forbes
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2010/09/07/the-true-cost-of-medical-malpractice-it-may-surprise-you/#a095cf72ff5b

Are you shitting me? Fully 50% of Amazon's retail business is 3rd Party sellers going through Amazon's marketplace. Amazon LOVES counterfeiters - they help them gobble up marketshare and still provide Amazon with plausible deniability to using counterfeit goods to put other retailers out of business. Do you really think non-counterfeit goods can be price competitive, provide Amazon a 15%+ cut on the revenue, and still keep the 3rd party seller profitable? Hell no.

Amazon - Counterfeiter's Clearinghouse - https://www.forbes.com/sites/w...

I'd be happier to see trump do something about heaty discount given to countries exporting to the US... https://www.forbes.com/sites/w...

These kinds of errors are not just related to Russia.

Mars Climate Orbiter probe lost due to Math error:
English to Metric math conversion error
https://edition.cnn.com/TECH/s...
https://mars.nasa.gov/msp98/ne...
http://articles.latimes.com/19...

ExoMars Schiaparelli lander crashed due to failure to recognize the proper height.
http://spaceflight101.com/exom...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/b...

China is taking the same approach, shutting down factories. source

And in the interest of full disclosure, Fitbit bought Pebble and shut them down.

The bastards.

src.

He wants government to make sure Facebook can't censor your content.

Whatever the clever Anonymous Troll wants, you, quite obviously, want a resurrection of the infamous "Fairness Doctrine". Not that it was not obvious already.

Oh sorry, cold fjord, that is not supporting the claim above:

Most immigrants end up costing the government more a lot more in services than they ever pay in taxes.

Note the immigrants part does not mention legality or not, therefore, you'd have to factor in both. Except your report does not even attempt to reflect all immigration, so it is not even necessary to point out the flaws in it, because well, you neglected to address the issue of immigration in the entirety at all.

Ooops! Your bad there. You needed to consider net immigration.

Sorry, but those numbers work out differently regardless.

California's Growing Imported Electricity Problem

California now imports 33% of its electricity supply from fast growing neighbors, with about 65% of that coming from the Southwest and 35% coming from the Northwest. These numbers increase most in summer months when air conditioning loads peak. Imports have been rising rapidly

From Forbes: California's Growing Imported Electricity Problem "California now imports 33% of its electricity supply from fast growing neighbors". Looks like a numbers game to me, but what do I know.

About 22% of California's imported power comes from renewables

From Forbes: California's Growing Imported Electricity Problem "California now imports 33% of its electricity supply from fast growing neighbors". Looks like a numbers game to me, but what do I know.

Indeed, no currency that is backed by a fully in charge government can possibly go wrong!

The problem with your theory is that while governments can indeed force people to do a lot of stuff, they cannot force value on a currency because in the end a currency is only as useful as the people that will accept it.

People all over the world accept bitcoin, so it has a much broader base of support than any state sanctioned currency, and is also immune to the inevitable gaffes all states make.

In summary you are not able to successfully identify the relevant issues, potential implications, and what drawbacks might be attached to them. . . .

I suppose we can start with the basics. This is bad. The government was bad. The police were bad. The perpetrators were very, very bad.

The things linked to here are bad too. The government was bad. The police were bad. The perpetrators were very, very bad.

This is a pattern you will be seeing more of. Hopefully you survive any instance of it you are exposed to. (You might need someone's help.)

Really? Are you not in the US? Obama said "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it."

It was clearly a lie. The statement implies that 100% of people could keep their health care plans, and in fact it was only 98%+ of people. Comparing the scope of Obama's "lie" with the daily rants from the Twit-in-chief is an exercise best left to those with lower blood pressure than I.

Also:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/t...

https://www.gop.com/the-lie-us...

The US military budget is $597 billion a year (that's billion, with a 'b').

$22 million spent looking for UFOs means that over the program's lifetime they spent .003% of one year's budget on the program.

Now you can argue that that was money wasted, and maybe its was, but if you're going to complain about the US military wasting money, this program is way down the list. And if it actually found something (and who is to say it hasn't? oooooh), then it would have been very well worth the investment for the military to know that aliens are among us -- knowing whether your country is being surveilled or infiltrated (and by whom) is considered very important to know in defense circles.

Nobody has any intrinsic right to be forgiven for something that happened in the past, or deserves to have any record of a mistake expunged ...

Nobody excluding almost everyone under the age of 16 or 18 in almost every high-income social democracy. In some countries, people under the age of 18 amount to half the population.

Note that I'm using a definition of "expunge" roughly equal to "subject to the least necessary controlled and restricted sharing among professionals who would immediately lose their professional certification should they flout this rule".

Secondly, many modern moral philosophers disagree with you across the board, arguing that adults to, in fact, have a natural right to a public reputation that isn't unduly punitive, and that in the digital age, the old de facto social arrangements no longer suffice.

Jennifer Jacquet: "Shaming At Scale" — 2014

She's easy on the eyes, but it's a trap. In Edge's Superforecaster masterclass she practically loses her shit when informed that a certain strand of software developers are disproportionately represented in the superforecasting group because of their superior breadth of knowledge and worldly engagement.

She just can't bring herself to comprehend that anyone can manage to ingest, digest, and mentally catalogue ten Wikipedia pages per every delicious, cheesy Cheeto.

Warning: This Post Contains Spoilers For 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi'

Best line in the post (spoiler alert):

Thankfully, I feel shame like a wet sock feels rain.

This is funny, because most of us feel a 10,000 foot perch on the global pillory of public shame like a 10,000 volt electric chair.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed (2015) — Jon Ronson

He also interviews Adria Richards, who publicised the faces of two tech developers at PyCon for a joke comparing the technical term "dongle" and the slang term "dong", leading a developer named Hank getting fired and an online backlash that in turn led Richards to get fired from her job ...

One dumb sentence, and suddenly you're the blue dress elect of your generation. When most modern moral philosophers look at this, their eyes water.

There are bigger problems.

The AMA defines the codes that are used by billing, and because of Medicare, the AMA makes a huge amount of money from the Government. A great big racket built on lies, and for the benefit of corruption.. https://www.forbes.com/sites/t...

The number elderly (who use most of the health care resources) is increasing far faster than the supply of doctors. We need to streamline and reduce the cost of getting young people through school and into medical fields in order to get a better balance which will tilt the cost balance in favor of the patient, not to mention reducing waiting times to get care.

I would like to see health care coops provided in locally were you pay a membership fee, and your care is taken care of. Whoever sells the membership promises to include care at the ER, hospital, cancer, and other chronic conditions for a reasonable cost, with an option on preventative care, and with multiple different groups competing somewhat on price to keep each other honest.

There is probably some other things that can be done with regard to making sure regulations are reasonable, etc.

Implement these, and I think you'd see costs move toward a more affordable level. The thing is neither side is interested in addressing the long term demographic need to have more doctors to care for a more elderly population because the medical provider lobby doesn't want them to because it keeps prices high and enriches the medical field at the cost of the rest of us.

Mr. Kahlbetzer's net worth is estimated to be between 750 million USD and 950 million meaning this loss represents 0.105% to 0.133% of his total wealth.

If your net worth was $500K, would you shrug being scammed out of $500?

Who cares if the person uses a fake prescription. If they want to do this, then they take their chances. This article sounds like propaganda for the Luxottica monopoly, the one that owns 90% or more of the optics industry, including the optics clinics. These guys are so evil, that when Oakley tried to protest/fight them, the Luxottica monopoly removed Oakley sunglasses from all their stores (which means basically ALL of the glasses stores). Oakley's stock tanked, and Luxottica swooped in and bought Oakley at a bargain basement price. The reason why glasses are so expensive is entirely the fault of Luxottica.

Seriously, this should not be on Slashdot. It is entirely corporate propaganda.

Mr. Kahlbetzer's net worth is estimated to be between 750 million USD and 950 million meaning this loss represents 0.105% to 0.133% of his total wealth.

There are large subsidies for coal, gasoline, etc.

Oil and Gasoline would be much more expensive without those subsidies and coal wouldn't even be remotely competitive.

I'm not sure that there are actually subsidies. I keep reading articles (like this one) claiming there aren't any, and I have never seen reference to exactly what those subsidies are. If there are, please provide examples.

Note: I hate coal and want all coal plants shut down; and the sooner we transition to solar plus batteries, the happier I will be; and I personally switched to an electric car (a used Tesla, the cheapest one I could find, still really expensive). I am in no way an apologist for the oil and coal industries. But every time I see a +5 moderated post complaining about subsidies, and I ask for examples, I get no examples and get moderated down to -1.

Also, please don't suggest that our military operations in the Middle East should be counted as a "subsidy" for oil. A country does things for more than one reason, and I'm not convinced that oil was even the most important reason for the USA's military (mis)adventures in the Middle East.

If George W. Bush really cared more about oil than anything else, then why didn't he order our soldiers to occupy the oil production facilities and just start taking some oil? Just claim that USA would take just enough oil to recompense the USA for the expense of the military operations, then cook the books and take it all anyway. If the "Blood for Oil" theory was correct, why didn't the USA just steal all the oil when it had the chance?

P.S. Posting anonymously, as I'm tired of being modded down to -1.

And yet with their "limited services" we still have worse health outcomes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/d....

Try controlling for the choices people make.

Group A is 100 people who never smoke.
Group B is 100 people who smoke six packs a day.

If I give socialist healthcare to group A and make group B pay for their insurance, group B will cost more.
If I give socialist healthcare to group B and make group A pay for their insurance, group B will *still* cost more.

Of course the real solution is to get group A to stop smoking, and make americans take their health seriously. Can you please try to make americans take their health seriously *before* sticking the taxpayer with their bills?

And yet with their "limited services" we still have worse health outcomes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/d....

The internets are a big consumer of electricity

Baloney. In America "the Internet" (datacenters, switches, routers, etc.) use about 70 billion kwhrs. That is less than 2% of power consumption.

We save that much just by people dimming the lights to watch Netflix.

How much energy to run the Internet?

This is what happens when Microsoft and big government collude to put recycling company CEO's in jail.

Big industry LOVES selling new stuff, they HATE when people re-use old stuff. Can't make quarterly sales goals if everybody is re-using old stuff and not buying new.

• https://www.forbes.com/sites/q...
• https://www.nasa.gov/missions/...

not the cause. The cause is 40 years of stagnant wages as all the gains from decades of increased productivity go to the top 1%.

The working class actually tried to organize. Remember Occupy WallStreet? It was shut down by a coordinated effort of the FBI and local police using legal tools put in place by the Patriot Act that everybody pinkie swore would never be used against American Citizens.

What gets my goat is the same folks who keep putting these jokers in power yell the loudest about government overreach except when it screws with somebody they don't like. Whether it's liberal elites, Muslims, college students or just plain whatever racial background they don't like. It's all a scam. It's how the Aristocracy has maintained power for centuries: get the working class to blame their plight on somebody else (Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Mongolians, the Untouchable class, whatever) while they laugh all the way to the bank. Works too.

Actually, that is known to happen.

The US government spends more per capita on healthcare than almost any other nation. Yes, the US government, excluding the private sector.

Per capita what? Per population? Per taxpayer? But what about in terms of healthcare received, or in terms of assessing the costs of healthcare?

Think about the difference. Then cite your sources. I'm sure you realize that hand-waved declarations of vague assertions are not especially persuasive when we know how easy it is to lie with statistics.

The problem with the US healthcare system isn't excessive stinginess by the government, it is excessive costs and excessive prices.

Indeed, among other things, it's lack of coverage. And bankruptcies.

Which isn't caused by the government being stingy, it's because the government isn't being thrifty enough by operating its own healthcare facilities. Oh wait, that's because the government is being made to be stingy under the false pretense of not providing its own healthcare facilities!

And the ACA did nothing to address excessive costs and prices (because drug companies, lawyers, and doctors tend to be big donors), instead it simply tried to force Americans to pay those excessive prices in perpetuity, which ensures that this will never get fixed.

Yes, it didn't have a public health insurance provision, let alone a healthcare provision, but we knew this at the time.

Do you not have any actual recall of the situation?

However, you forget the specific subsidies that did reduce the costs for the poor.

That some of us would have preferred hiring more doctors and providing better medical care directly, well, we didn't get a vote on that, now did we?

So if the money allocated to the border wall is unused, it does not go to healthcare

And by "healthcare", you mean the yachts and estates of wealthy doctors, insurance company executives, and pharmaceutical companies.

Now now, we're told "trickledown> " is essential by the GOP. It's their tax-plan now.

Sorry man, you've got less than you think.

But hey, at least you can get your pills.

Look, you know what's happening is due to the GOP, they're the party that's responsible now. And they're going to do their best job...of filling their own pockets. And baking

A recent analysis from Bloomberg New Energy Finance suggested that electric vehicles could account for half of all new cars sold by 2040. While electric vehicles consume electricity, they can also export power to the grid as mobile energy storage units. An increase in electric vehicle adoption may mean more flexibility for the grid to respond to supply and demand.

The FCC is about coordination to increase the ability of Americans to use the 1st Amendment... by playing nice with other nations who can just as easily jam our communications.

So, in your opinion, FCC is in regular contact with representatives of other nations? Could you name, when such a contact last took place — or identify a person or two involved?

1. To enforce radio treaties between the US and other nations. That way everybody can hear radio clearly.
2. To separate the radio spectrum into chunks so information could be transferred most efficiently.

Nothing the "Office of Spectrum Management" can't do. The crap like "Fairness Doctrine" and "Net Neutrality" are things so dangerous, an agency that originated and/or enforced them ought to go away... As a precaution.

Given that net neutrality regulations haven't taken effect yet, there's nothing to dismantle.

Are you aware of the history of Net Neutrality battles? Because this statement seems to underscore either a complete lack of knowledge or inherent dishonesty. The FCC Open Internet Order went into effect June 2015. So your statement is factually incorrect or a lie.

So the Obama administration SAID they'd implement net neutrality.

And the FCC issued an order which went effect in 2015. Your point?

Does that bind the Trump administration?

As much as any new administration having to follow what a previous administration did. There are rules and procedures in place.

If so, it's going to be interesting to see what your response is when that logic is used to force President Bernie Sanders to build a wall on the US-Mexico border...

What the fuck does that have to with this action? Bringing up unrelated hyperbole about things that may not happen isn't remotely relevant to my point: Undoing something isn't always easy.

A while back, I made a list of various predictions saying that climate change was irreversible, or soon would be irreversible.

Of the seven links you give, five are "404 not found" or "Error 553 Website is offline". That's an amazing record, five of seven links dead. But these were mostly to sites like "examiner.com", which was (it's dead now) a site where people could upload blog posts that, if they got enough readers, would give them pocket change.

Two of your links still worked.

The first was to a NPR story in 2009 quoting a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences saying that if we stop emitting carbon dioxide immediately, the effects due to the carbon dioxide we have emitted will last for "more than a thousand years," basically due to the lag time it takes for carbon dioxide to be desorbed by the ocean. There's no real prediction here- basically, it's an article about the system hysteresis. So, no, this is not a failed prediction.

The second was a link to an article about an editorial by James Lovelock. In a 2006 article in the Sydney Morning Herald: "Professor James Lovelock said billions would die by the end of the century, and civilisation as it is known would be unlikely to survive." I have little respect for Lovelock, but nevertheless, the end of the century is still 83 years away, so this is not an example of a prediction that has failed.

Of the links that were 404 not found, I could dig up one on archive.org, an article on "commondreams.org" about a report from "Washington-based World Resources Institute (WRI), a leading environmental think-tank," headlined that "Damage from Warming Becoming 'Irreversible'." That's not actually a prediction. All the way at the end of the article are two things that might be predictions:

The first: "Even if climate change is more gradual, recent studies have argued that as many as one million plant and animal species could be rendered extinct due to the effects of global warming by 2050."

That's a prediction for over thirty years from now, so, no, that is not a prediction that has failed.

The second: "A recent report by the world's largest reinsurance company, Swiss Re, predicted that in 10 years the economic cost of disasters like floods, frosts, and famines caused by global warming could reach $150 billion annually."

An actual prediction! It's hard to say whether any given damage is "caused by" global warming. However, if you consider hurricanes "caused by" global warming, or droughts, or wildfires, that easily adds up to well over 150 billion. So at best I'd call this a prediction that needs some data analysis to say whether it's accurate or not. For what it's worth, here's Forbes-- not exactly a left-wing cheerleader-- saying the same thing: https://www.forbes.com/sites/e...

So, final summary: NO, this is not a list of predictions that have been turned out to be false.

The actual predictions-- by which I mean, the ones from actual climate scientists-- have mostly been pretty accurate. If you're looking at the sensationalist predictions-- sea level rises of many meters, cities innudated by floods, etc.-- they are for the most part predictions for after the year 2100, not for now.

But the real science predictions aren't sensational enough for the tabloids, and journalists tend to downplay the "in a hundred years" part of predictions in popular articles.

Banks and exchanges are barely starting to look at this because the whole Cryptocurrency market is still pocket change compared to "traditional" financial world.
Crypto market cap hovers at around 200 billion dollars(*), while an article from 2016(**) lists 60 major stock exchanges worldwide totaling 69 trillion dollars. Rounded up, it means Crypto represents 0.29% of the overall market.
As I was saying... pocket change. Banks didn't even give a shit. They start giving a shit because the blip on the radar starts looking like it's here to stay, and they obviously want to get their dirty paws on some of that shit early.

  (*) https://www.forbes.com/sites/c...
  (**) http://www.visualcapitalist.co...

Not quite.
From wiki-- "As such, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits employment tests (when used as a decisive factor in employment decisions) that are not a "reasonable measure of job performance," regardless of the absence of actual intent to discriminate. ..."

What this means in practical terms is that the employer cannot impose such tests, done themselves. If the applicant has passed such tests elsewhere or not, was not a matter considered by the decision.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/g...

I've got a degree, but I got in the UK before tuition fees and in a subject where it's kind of necessary, i.e. engineering. Still it's harder to justify asking for a degree in other subjects, like the arts. For a lot of programming jobs like web development it's also arguable that you don't need a degree to be able to do it. Even writing embedded code like I do isn't something that actually needs a degree - I've met a lot of people who do it well and don't have one, and a lot of people who do it badly who do.

On the other hand if you have more applicants than jobs why not pick the best qualified ones? And of course if employers demand a degree, more people will do one.

Now since I got mine, more people are getting degrees, prices have gone up and they're doing them in subjects where it is less necessary.

I think it's a classic case of inflation. If employers can eliminate candidates on the basis of graduate/non graduate, of course they'll do it. And if they do it, more people decide they need to get a degree. In the UK the percentage of graduates has increased enormously, tuition fees have risen because the government can no longer fund all those graduates to study without them paying and so now doing a degree means taking on a lot of debt. In the US of course it's probably a fair bit worse.

Of course it's hard to get out of this trap of people only needing a degree because employers demand one, and employers demanding them because they know they can find someone with one. Meanwhile most people are doing degrees in subjects which aren't really helping them do their jobs. Because if you're force to do a degree you don't actually need why not do it in a subject you like.

One option would be to allow people to default on their loans. But that would burst a bubble way worse than subprime mortgages

It was $1 trillion in 2014 and has a high delinquency rate

https://www.forbes.com/sites/h...

The total outstanding student loan balance is $1.08 trillion, and a whopping 11.5% of it is 90+ days delinquent or in default. That's the highest delinquency rate among all forms of debt and the only one that's been on the rise consistently since 2003.

It's easy to see why. If you borrow $100K or more to get a degree and end up in a bad job, you're going to end defaulting.

Maybe if the government only offered degree loans in subjects which have some justification economically they could deflate the bubble because it would forces universities to drop the price of degrees in everything else. Of course telling academics their subject is no longer eligible for loans will cause a massive shitstorm and accusations of philistinism from self interested academics.

Another option would be for the government to get out of the student loans business. Bursting such a large bubble of bad debt will have dire economic consequences however it is done though.

Here is the Forbes article (you know Forbes, right? Not exactly a left-wing-socialist-tool) explaining it: https://www.forbes.com/sites/f...

The argument in Forbes is "since government tops up wages to a living wage anyway, companies will simply pay less and let the tax payer pick up the rest". The premise of that argument is wrong. If the premise were right, the correct solution would be to change government policy, not to add a bad policy (minimum wage) on top of another bad policy (topping up wages). That article's argument has nothing to do with your argument.

The take-away calculation is that if minimum wage increases, while some businesses will decide not to hire some workers because their productivity now is less than their cost, pay increases for the rest of the minimum wage workers, the ones who had been being paid less than their marginal value. It turns out to be a net win-- the workers not hired are the ones who were producing minimum value.

So you agree then that minimum wage increases cause people to lose their jobs, you just erroneously consider that a "net win". Of course, it's not a "net win" at all.

(1) While nominal salaries may go up for some people, the people who now don't work at all still need to be supported, and that comes out of taxes of working people or salaries of their spouses or relatives. But since these people are now out of work, the rest of society not only has to "top up" their salaries, they also have to make up for the "minimum value" that these workers would have produced but aren't producing anymore because they have been priced out of the market.

(2) Another way of looking at this is that the people dropping out of the labor force due to minimum wage may produce less than what you consider a "living wage", but they still make a net positive contribution to the economy. By removing them from the labor force, you lose their contribution, that is, on average, everybody ends up being poorer off.

(3) Minimum wage jobs are usually entry level jobs where people get started in the workforce. By pricing inexperienced workers out of entry level jobs, you risk serious problems with youth unemployment, career changes, long term unemployment, etc. And minimum wage laws end up primarily hurting minorities and immigrants (eugenics and racism is, in fact, why Democrats and progressives have been pushing minimum wages in the past).

You're basically saying that you want to increase wages by creating an artificial scarcity of labor. Why do you even go through the trouble of dressing that up as a minimum wage? Just do what leftists traditionally do to create artificial labor shortages!

Real economics is actually somewhat interesting-- you should learn some of it, instead of the oversimplified cartoon economics that libertarians hold so dearly to. You might like it.

Good heavens, in light of your ridiculous argument above ("hey, we price people out of the labor force, but that's good for society!"), that is laughable. Why don't you read some real economics and then actually try to understand it?

What the minimum wage does is put a "bottom" on the "race to the bottom"-- the drive for corporations to maximize profits by minimizing wages.

That's the economic equivalent of believing that the earth is flat. Thanks for demonstrating your complete and utter ignorance so clearly.

Here is the Forbes article (you know Forbes, right? Not exactly a left-wing-socialist-tool) explaining it: https://www.forbes.com/sites/f...

It would be easier to show this by showing graphs of demand curves, but /., with an old-fashioned text-only interface, doesn't support that. The take-away calculation is that if minimum wage increases, while some businesses will decide not to hire some workers because their productivity now is less than their cost, pay increases for the rest of the minimum wage workers, the ones who had been being paid less than their marginal value. It turns out to be a net win-- the workers not hired are the ones who were producing minimum value.

Real economics is actually somewhat interesting-- you should learn some of it, instead of the oversimplified cartoon economics that libertarians hold so dearly to. You might like it.

Probably because Volvo will accept liability for self-driving cars. https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

What the minimum wage does is put a "bottom" on the "race to the bottom"-- the drive for corporations to maximize profits by minimizing wages.

Try this one, from Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/f...

The "climate change" concern in the 60s and 70s was global cooling, not global warming. The only bit you got correct is that Carter got involved; he signed the National Climate Program Act to deal with "the global cooling crisis."

I worry for Slashdot when I see such revisionism as yours upmodded to +5.

See this report from the National Research Council, which the Carter White House commissioned in 1978 about carbon dioxide and global warming:

See, also, Wallace Broecker, "Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" Science 189 460 (1975).

Going back to the 1960s, we can see Lyndon Johnson requesting a report from the Presiden't Council of Advisers on Science and Technology about global warming:

On 5 November, 1965, the group now known as the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) cautioned President Lyndon B. Johnson that continued accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide resulting from fossil-fuel burning would “almost certainly cause significant changes” and “could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings.

The nuclear parts of the plant itself survived both the earthquake and tsunami just fine even though both events were well beyond the plant's design specifications.

The failure was loss of power to run the plant's cooling systems. Basically, the tsunami swamped the backup power generators and contaminated the diesel fuel reserves for the generators. The destruction of the surrounding roads prevented new generators and fuel from being brought in in a timely manner. And when they eventually did arrive, workers discovered the power couplings for the trucks were different from the ones the plant used, and they had to gerry-rig a connector. All of this took critical time which could've mitigated the severity of the accident. This wasn't an explosion like Chernobyl, it was a gradual event as the cooling water slowly evaporated allowing the fuel rods to melt.

A single diesel generator situated on higher ground with an independent fuel source could've prevented the entire accident. Instead, in stereotypical Japanese fashion, they placed all the generators in a neat row right next to each other in the basement, where the tsunami swamped all of them simultaneously. See, the thing about redundant backup systems (e.g. multiple generators in case some do not function) is that they have to be different to be redundant. If they're the same model, in the same location, using the same fuel source, then any single event which affects one generator will affect all the generators, defeating their redundancy. In fact the two newer reactors at Fukushima on higher ground were just fine because their generators and fuel supply worked as intended. They just didn't have a really long extension cord to reach from those generators to the problem reactors. Basically the failure at Fukushima was the same as when you store your backup drive next to your computer (although the consequences were much more severe). If your house burns down or you're burglarized, both your computer's main drive and your backup drive will be lost. Because you're storing both in the same location, the redundancy of a second copy is defeated by any event which affects that entire location.

Fukushima wasn't a failure of nuclear power. It was a failure of backup (non)redundancy which had nuclear consequences. Basically, because of unwarranted paranoia about nuclear power, everyone concentrated on going over the nuclear parts of the plant with a fine-toothed comb to make sure it was safe. As a result, the non-nuclear backup systems didn't get enough scrutiny, and that's what failed.

It's like airliner safety. Air travel is already far safer than other modes of transport. But because any airplane crash gets disproportionate news coverage, we spend billions of dollars trying to reduce the couple hundred airliner deaths per year even further. Meanwhile the tens of thousands of people dying each year in car accidents gets very little attention. Even including the estimated future cancer deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power is still the safest power source we've invented (yes, safer than wind and solar based on both on deaths and lost man-days per unit of electricity generated).

You seem to have a distorted view of what goes on in the United States at times, including this issue. The US has a full range of public assistance programs although they can be structured differently than in Europe.

Poverty and the Social Welfare State in the United States and Other Nations

One unfortunate aspect of some of these programs, together or in isolation is that they can trap people in poverty due to the incentives they create that make progress difficult.

The Welfare Trap: Maze of Programs Punishes Work
How To Liberate America From The Poverty Trap That Is Enslaving Us

As far as job creation and enterprises go, there are lots of things that can go on. In general they tend to not hire unneeded people, but "need" is sometimes squishy unless times are very tight, and is subject to being redefined based on experience. And that is before you get to interns, charity, and so on. Sometimes the charity is in who gets hired as opposed to creating a job that isn't strictly and completely needed.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with the exploding cost of education, it must be all Trump's fault.

When he signs the save-the-billionaire tax deform bill, U.S. citizen graduate students earning $20-35k on tuition waiver assistantships will face the very highest tax rate. For example a graduate student earning $32,500 on an assistantship at a private university would pay taxes on $81,440. They would face a higher effective tax rate than Warren Buffet, George Soros, Bill Gates, Donald Trump...

This punishment for those who seek a Masters or PhD (doctors for example) would apply to U.S. citizen graduate students in the U.S. and those who study abroad for example on a Rhode's scholarship at Oxford UK. But the republican anti-edumacation tax would not apply to foreign students on a scholarship in the U.S. This means the xenophobic Republicans out there are going to have to cope with more doctors, TAs and professors who speak with a foreign accent. All this because education is toxic to the Trump fork of Republicanism.

Quality of life in Germany remains high. Base energy cost is comparable to the rest of western Europe, including France, it's just the tax that makes it more expensive to consumers.

Germans and French people pay more way more than Americans for energy

http://dailycaller.com/2016/05...

And German CO2 emissions are still rising, not falling

https://www.cleanenergywire.or...

German energy-related COâ emissions rose almost 1 percent in 2016, despite a fall in coal use and the ongoing expansion of renewable energy sources, according to first estimates by energy market research group AG Energiebilanzen.

Meanwhile US CO2 emissions are falling

https://www.forbes.com/sites/r...

Last week, in an interview with Fox News, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt claimed: "We are leading the nation - excuse me - the world with respect to our CO2 footprint in reductions."

The Washington Post fact-checked this claim and rated it "Three Pinocchios," which means they rate the claim mostly false. They further wrote that Pruitt's usage of data appeared to be a "deliberate effort to mislead the public."

I agree that this is a nuanced issue, but the data mostly support Pruitt's claim.

According to the 2017 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, since 2005 annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have declined by 758 million metric tons. That is by far the largest decline of any country in the world over that timespan and is nearly as large as the 770 million metric ton decline for the entire European Union.

By comparison, the second largest decline during that period was registered by the United Kingdom, which reported a 170 million metric ton decline. At the same time, China's carbon dioxide emissions grew by 3 billion metric tons, and India's grew by 1 billion metric tons.

It's interesting they mention the UK. The UK's CO2 emissions fell during the 'dash to gas'. Newly privatised electricity companies switched from coal to cheaper gas powered stations. And those gas powered stations emitted less CO2 per MW generated

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

I.e. if you want cheap power and falling CO2 emissions privatise and deregulate. If you want expensive power and flat or rising CO2 emissions, go the German route.