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Forbes own September 2015 article that says ad blockers won't hurt online adversiing. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ro...

This article is now blocked as well!

First, the link goes to forbes.com which blocks any browser with an ad-blocker. http://fortune.com/2015/12/22/...
That's ironic and hamfisted, but particularly in light of Forbes own September 2015 article that says ad blockers won't hurt online adversiing. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ro...

Second, the summary of this "anonymous posting" says:

The stars call to us through the ages, with each and every one holding the promise of a future for humanity beyond Earth

No. They don't. Humans evolved to live here, on Planet Earth. Not on our own star, or on any other star, and humanity's future is right here where we have an entire planet we were built for... not on a foreign star.

How CRAZY would we think it of MONKEYS who want to live underwater? We'd marvel at why happy jungle monkeys would leave a comfortable environment free of most predators and full of food to go somewhere hostile where they can't breathe, their temperature will decay, and without machine aids would soon die.

That's no different than us claiming that other stars[sic] becon us to live there. No. There's great scientific exploration to be done, and we could even establish limited outposts where machines keep us alive despite the harsh vacuum and cold [or relative heat] of space. The ISS is a good example of one such outpost. However, there's no "interstellar colonialism" happening because the rest of the universe is inhospitable.

Saturday... when an "anonymous" (friend of the editor?) posts something that makes no sense, and links to a site that's about as close to a paywall as you can get.

Ehud

Russia as a country has pretty much self-sufficient economy.

Yeah, and so does North Korea. Russia does not grow enough food of its own, it can not make its own cars — nor computers. Their sanctions do not support "local businesses" — maybe, they are helping Chinese firms. Russians are increasingly suffering and it will get worse.

But I was not talking about sanctions specifically. Even without the sanctions they would've been overstretched fighting several wars. Too overstretched for traveling to the Moon.

If the IRS says you owe more than $50,000 in unpaid taxes, the State department will revoke your passport. No judge, no evidence involved. Just a 'certification.' We all know how much an IRS agent will be punished for 'mistakenly' certifying that someone who displeased the wrong politician will be punished: not at all. Essentially, your right to move freely can be arbitrarily revoked by the IRS- internationally by clear purpose of the statute, and internally (within the United States) in some cases.

if you're a suspect in a crime in general, your mobility is extensively restrained. "don't leave town!" "OK sheriff"

FTFY

According to the FAA, yes. The FAA believes it has authority over ANY aircraft, including paper airplanes, though the FAA has so far only sought to apply regulation to aircraft over 0.55 lbs.

Is a regular, run of the mill R/C toy that is flown within line of sight of its operator at all times considered a "drone?"

According to the FAA, yes. The FAA believes it has authority over ANY rc aircraft, including paper airplanes, though the FAA has so far only sought to apply regulation to aircraft over 0.55 lbs.

Remember this?

If the IRS says you owe more than $50,000 in unpaid taxes, the State department will revoke your passport. No judge, no evidence involved. Just a 'certification.'
We all know how much an IRS agent will be punished for 'mistakenly' certifying that someone who displeased the wrong politician will be punished: not at all. Essentially, your right to move freely can be arbitrarily revoked by the IRS- internationally by clear purpose of the statute, and internally (within the United States) in some cases.

(1) You can sue them to get such a travel ban lifted. Arbitrary and capricious action is not legally permitted to the IRS and federal judges don't look well on it. (2) You can probably also sue them for money in a 1983 suit.

If the IRS says you owe more than $50,000 in unpaid taxes, the State department will revoke your passport. No judge, no evidence involved. Just a 'certification.'
We all know how much an IRS agent will be punished for 'mistakenly' certifying that someone who displeased the wrong politician will be punished: not at all. Essentially, your right to move freely can be arbitrarily revoked by the IRS- internationally by clear purpose of the statute, and internally (within the United States) in some cases.

From Forbes: (warning: they are annoying about adblockers,...) http://www.forbes.com/sites/jo...

Plumbers, electricians, and carpenters still get paid shit for the amount of training and skill it takes to do those jobs, ignoring the hard work involved entirely.

You need to educate yourself before making a stupid comment like that. The skilled trade shortage is real because our current work force is aging out, foreign workers have left the country, and high schools have been diverting students to colleges for years.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/emsi/2013/03/07/americas-skilled-trades-dilemma-shortages-loom-as-most-in-demand-group-of-workers-ages/

Try: http://www.forbes.com/sites/st... Still the forbes site, but it seem to bypass the anti-adblock page.

Also...

http://www.rollingstone.com/tv......
http://www.forbes.com/sites/in......
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/......
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bro......

In any case, glad this abusive, corrupting program was shut down.

A time article on John Oliver's influence including noting his show on civil forfeiture. Here's an article where you could read that he had an effect on CF...

http://time.com/3674807/john-o......

Quote:
After the increased exposure given to the issue by the (Washington) Post and Oliver, Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week that he would enact major limitations on the law.

Stay logical. Jeff Bezos apparently does not have a technical background. If he did, he certainly would not want to be involved in the introduction of a new technology that has so much potential to kill people and destroy their property. Amazon is not, in some ways, managed well.

Mr. Bezos hired people to do the technology, many years ago. Amazon was originally just an online bookstore. He has a huge amount of stock. Quote from a 2013 Forbes magazine story: "Bezos is still by far the largest shareholder in Amazon, with just under 85 million shares, or approximately 18.5%"

You are laboring under the misapprehension that all US states do education the same way they apparently do in our part of the country. Students in some states get world class educations; if Massachusetts were a country it would be tied with Japan for student math achievement.

Massachusetts does have charter schools, but they're a relatively small part of the system. Although Massachusetts charter schools perform well, so do public schools there on average. Only about 3% of students attend charter schools there so competition doesn't drive it's overall excellent public school performance.

They seem to be working on changing that

The US is ALREADY printing that money. More than that, actually. Every month.

One Source, but you can find more.

"Philanthropy" is often a name for a destructive person or organization buying support.

Windows 10 is Malware. "Malware means software designed to function in ways that mistreat or harm the user." Will Microsoft top managers be the targets of a court case? Other spyware makers have been convicted. Will there be an anti-trust case against Microsoft's virtual monopoly?

Microsoft has a long history of extremely incompetent management. For example, the cover of the January 16, 2013 issue of BusinessWeek magazine has a large photo of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (now replaced by Satya Nadella) with the headline calling him "Monkey Boy". See the BusinessWeek cover in this article: Steve Ballmer Is No Longer A Monkey Boy, Says Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The BusinessWeek cover says "No More" and "Mr.", but that doesn't take much away from the fact that the magazine called Ballmer Monkey Boy -- on its cover.

Worst CEO in the United States: Quote from an article in Forbes Magazine about Steve Ballmer: "Without a doubt, Mr. Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today." Another quote: "The reach of his bad leadership has extended far beyond Microsoft when it comes to destroying shareholder value -- and jobs." (May 12, 2012)

MSBC presents less factually based content than any other cable news channel.

Actual Link (warning: still Forbes): http://www.forbes.com/sites/st...

I'm no lover of Forbes but that doesn't mean they never hire a journalist with some credentials. In this case:
"Ethan Siegel is the founder of Starts With A Bang, NASA columnist and professor at Lewis & Clark. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, G+, Tumblr, and pre-order his first book: Beyond The Galaxy."

Starts With A Bang is a group of contributors.

Actual Link (warning: still Forbes): http://www.forbes.com/sites/st...

An account repeatedly posting links to the same website, forbes.com. That website is full of ads, which are being shown to the audience that clicks through from Slashdot. The content is scienc-y stuff that would attract an audience's like Slashdot. I don't know what the ad was because the adblocker caught it, all I got was a forbes.com landing page and a famous quotation. Then I clicked to enter the article and was directed to http://www.forbes.com/sites/et... which is a "4-0-Forbes" error which means 404 not found.

The fact that this is happening again and again is no coincidence. There is clearly collusion and someone is getting paid. A shockingly low amount, I suspect. Or a favor is being repaid, or other non-monetary gain. But damn there are too many ads going off for it not to be. On the other hand, I don't really know how successful the operation is. You have to question the wisdom of an operation that doesn't even bother disguising the posting account, and then markets to the one audience in the world that is most enthusiastic about ad-blockers.

Actual Link (warning: still Forbes): http://www.forbes.com/sites/st...

Good post. As an aside, here's something interesting I stumbled across recently: applied mathematicians are actually in very high demand right now and salaries have caught up with that demand.

And it kind of makes sense given what's happened in the last 20 years in finance (quant), biotech (statistics), etc. But before that it was pretty much assumed that any math major would be limited to a lower paying field like education.

http://www.forbes.com/pictures...
http://www.careercast.com/jobs...

This method is used during the development of a theory and is based on collecting indications which increase the physicists’ confidence that a theory describes nature. These indications are, for example, the amount (or absence of) alternative solutions to a problem, the degree by which a theory is connected to already confirmed theories, and the amount of unexpected insights that the theories give rise to.

However, the reason you should read the article is because it manages to reasonably work this image into the discussion.

Well while the two of us might be acclaimed economists, so hey who knows, obviously someone out there thinks Amazon is doing ok since the amount of money Bezos made this year alone would put him in the top 10

Medical records are sheer gold for identity fraud http://www.wsj.com/articles/ho...

Stolen medical records can be used for medical insurance fraud and taking out loans in your name. If you don't pay up, they send debt collectors after you. They are paid by commission so don't care if they debt is legit. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/fem... http://www.philly.com/philly/b... http://www.startribune.com/cri... http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news...

What to do if they send a debt collector after you http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

Shit IT security by health providers is a big problem http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/1... http://www.wsj.com/articles/an... http://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/17...

So is doctors collecting information about you they don't need like your SSN which staff can sell to identity thieves http://www.forbes.com/sites/la...

Windows 10 is Malware. "Malware means software designed to function in ways that mistreat or harm the user." Will Microsoft top managers be the targets of a court case? Other spyware makers have been convicted. Will there be an anti-trust case against Microsoft's virtual monopoly?

Apparently Microsoft is moving towards these arrangements: With Windows 10, Microsoft has complete control over any computer connected to the internet, so Microsoft can use its spyware, which it calls "telemetry", to gather personal information to be sold to advertisers. Eventually there may be monthy payments to use Windows, as with Microsoft Office-365. Apparently Microsoft is paid by secret agencies of governments to steal personal information.

As many people have said, putting spyware into Windows 10, and not allowing people to know the purpose of "updates", will obviously be bad for Microsoft, eventually. So, why is Microsoft becoming even more offensive? It seems that the company is amazingly badly managed. For example, the cover of the January 16, 2013 issue of BusinessWeek magazine has a large photo of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (now replaced) with the headline calling him "Monkey Boy". See the BusinessWeek cover in this article: Steve Ballmer Is No Longer A Monkey Boy, Says Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The BusinessWeek cover says "No More" and "Mr.", but that doesn't take much away from the fact that the magazine called Ballmer Monkey Boy -- on its cover.

Worst CEO in the United States: Quote from an article in Forbes Magazine about Steve Ballmer: "Without a doubt, Mr. Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today."

Another quote: "The reach of his bad leadership has extended far beyond Microsoft when it comes to destroying shareholder value -- and jobs." (May 12, 2012)

Articles about Microsoft abusing customers:

How Can Any Company Ever Trust Microsoft Again?

NSA Backdoor Exploit in Windows 8 Uncovered

Microsoft Gave the NSA Direct Backdoor Access to Outlook, Skype

Microsoft has no plans to tell us what's in Windows patches. Each update is a black box, and it's going to stay that way.

Leaks show that Microsoft writes release notes, so why can't it publish them? The lack of documentation of Windows' updates is a baffling move on Microsoft's part.

Microsoft [lack of] Privacy Statement

Here's how to Block Windows 10 "Spying" (But, of course, Microsoft can change the spyware to avoid blocking.)

From the article;

That doesn’t sound like opposition to me; that sounds like someone with legitimate concerns who wants to be heard.

Others seem more opposed:

The National Science Foundation should not build this telescope on Haleakala summit.

That's odd... actual benchmarks seem to disagree with you - iPhones are significantly faster than anything else out there:

http://cdn.bgr.com/2015/09/iph...
http://cdn.bgr.com/2015/09/iph...
http://blogs-images.forbes.com...
http://images.anandtech.com/gr...
http://images.anandtech.com/gr...

> Anyone care to comment on the legality of using ANPR in public?

Not only is it legal, there is an enormous industry that's been exploiting it for years. Nowadays all repo-men have ANPR camers on their vehicles and they upload their data in real-time to a couple of different data brokers. It started off as just data for other repo men, but now for $10 anyone can look up plate scans in their database.

So yeah, turn those cameras on the powerful instead of just the pitiful. Let them learn first hand what its like to live under the panopticon. I'm especially looking forward to real-time tracking of un-marked police cars in waze.

An idea by itself is almost worthless, unless you can turn it into a business. THEN try to sell it to a big company if you still want to.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/am...

There is evidence that diverse teams are more productive: http://www.forbes.com/sites/le...

You start with the assumption that having a diverse team has a built-in cost. That may not actually be true.

The entire pharmaceutical industry is based around market-based solutions. .

You are kidding right?

If I have strep throat, I have to go to an AMA approved doctor, which has a government enforced monopoly on licensing medical practice. I cannot simply pay for his service, I must pay a lot of middle men in my government mandated insurance or get a fine from the IRS, in order to get a prescription to go to a government licensed pharmacy, where I must wait about 1 hour for getting government mandated confirmation to get an FDA approved dose of amoxicillin. All this red tape means that I end up paying hundreds of dollars for 10 pills that cost a few cents to produce.

The whole thing is about the most regulated market we have in the US (no wonder it is such a mess). It is as far from being market based as it can possibly be without being fully socialized.

If big pharma sucks, surely little pharma would have a field day and eat it for lunch no? Well, it turns out that getting FDA approval on a drug costs on average $4 billion . This pretty much means that because of government, it is impossible for little pharma and new competition to exist at all. This exorbitant cost, is one of the main reasons drugs cost so much in the US. It is also a huge disincentive for companies to invest in R&D in medicine. Why would anybody spend time and money finding a cure for something that affects say "only" 100K people, if getting it approved will cost $4 billion dollars? Helping those people would bankrupt anyone.

As it is the government treats us like cattle that is too stupid to know what is good for ourselves, and charges us for it, no personal responsibility at all.

You know what market based solution looks like? I get sick, I go to the pharmacy and I buy the drug I need. I can consult a doctor if I want professional opinion. I would not pay insurance middle men for a cold or for a yearly checkup, insurance would be used only to hedge against the risk of catastrophic health problems, and would be ridiculously cheap.

Probably not going to complain about "the descendants of the same ones that crucified Christ" dominating the world as Chavez did.

Probably. And he may even be nicer to Israel than Chavez was and than his own core constituency are. But that's not something, that has much bearing on economic and other internal policies... And it is those policies — not the anti-Semitism and not the anti-Israel denunciations — that stalled Venezuela's economy (even while oil was still expensive), destroyed its infrastructure, and quintupled the murder rate and other violent crime.

To the extent that people end up using their degree directly in work, Women's Studies is valuable in areas like healthcare, social care, politics, psychology, education, HR, journalism and more. There are shortages in healthcare, social care and some areas of education, so such degrees might attract favourable student loan terms.

So basically fields where many many other degrees can also prepare you for?

I guess this is why so few women get into STEM. Why take a degree in STEM when a degree in women's studies is just as good at getting good paying jobs?

Ignore the reports that engineering degrees pay the best while social work and psychology pay the least

And the rumor was totally on point. Not about the dropping of the jack part of course, but that there would be active headphones for the Lightning connector.

But maybe Apple will finally cut the jack in half? http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/08/18/1736235/apple-patents-cutting-35mm-jack-in-half

No, the most fundamental problem is the skewed risk assessment humans suffer from. Somehow we are unwilling to accept very small chances of a relatively big disaster, while at the same time we seem to have no problem in accepting many smaller incidents, almost certain to happen. Even if the latter results in much more damage and many more deaths in the long run.

regarding the human lives part of the damage:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...
but similar estimates can be made for other type of damage, like environmental/ecological damage, economic damage, etc.

These companies don't publish sales numbers but I'm willing to bet he's taken at least 1/4 of their business by how quickly they are trying to respond to a market they all said was pointless two years ago

Yes, the companies do publish sales numbers. You just have to know where to look.

According to Elon Musk, Tesla sold a little over 33,000 cars by the end of Q3 this year. Cadillac sells more than that in less than two months. Lexus and Mercedes are at 249,956 and 249,890 respectively for the year through Q3.

1/4 of their business? Hardly.

The depreciation is $500,000 and only on assets above $2 million - and must be for business purposes.

That's only half. The owner can also expense $500,000 in the first year.

Not everyone was happy on January 2 when President Obama signed into law the American Taxpayer Relief Act, notably those whose first 2013 paychecks were smaller than the ones they’d received in 2012.

But the law gave Thoroughbred horse owners a reason to raise a glass in a belated New Year’s toast, as it enacted retroactively favorable provisions that had expired at the end of 2011.

“What was supposed to happen in 2013,” said Joe Bacigalupo, director of member development for the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, “was that the bonus depreciation for 2012, which was set at a 50% schedule, would disappear entirely. The passage of the American Taxpayer Relief Act extended it for 2013.

“There’s a significant improvement between what was expected to happen and what actually happened.”

According to an NTRA release, the bonus depreciation on purchases of race horses was reinstated at 50%, which was the 2012 rate. The expense allowance was increased to $500,000 for this year and retroactively increased from $125,000 to $500,000 for horses purchased in 2012.

Said Joel Turner, a member of Frost Brown Todd attorneys in Louisville, Kentucky, and a specialist in equine legal services, “These incentives are real.”

While conceding that the announcement of the retroactive provisions wasn’t great for tax planning, he said their beneficiaries will be “rewarded for legitimate reasons” and that the aggregate of benefits will mean that in some cases, 80% of the purchase price of a horse can be deducted in the first year.

“The ability to expense the first $500,000 and take depreciation on the next $500,000 means that essentially you’re almost getting a 100% write-off in the first year,” he explained.

Estimating the value of all aspects of the Thoroughbred racing industry to be worth about $4 billion dollars to his home state of Kentucky, Turner approved of the renewal of the provisions.

“Buying horses and writing them off was included in the law because of the ripple effect to the economy,” he said. “This encourages investment in assets.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/te...

It's not about sympathy, and may not even be about the family. It's about lawyers, and whether it can be shown that the kid was singled-out because of his appearance or (what people assume to be) his religion.

Yeah, today it's fun/acceptable to assume he's a bad guy because his name is Ahmed. But sub in some other minority (e.g., Asian, Canadian, Mutant, Prawn, or White-Male) who got the third-degree over a completely false alarm, and you clearly have a case that has been time-tested in the courts. The lawyer just has to show a jury that none of this would have happened if the offensive clock had belonged to Susie Blue-eyes with curly red hair and a polka-dot skirt, instead of a brown-skinned boy named Ahmed (or an even darker-skinned fellow named Flav). If so, he was singled-out because of his ethnicity/color of his skin, and we can move on to discussing damages.

Q: How do you know she is a witch? A: She looks like one!

Regardless, it's entirely about lawyers now. Ahmed is reduced to just a pawn in a bigger game, particularly as he's just a kid and all. Chances are anyway this will end in a settlement. By the time this ever gets to trial, maybe some other ethnic group will be on the hot-seat.

. Does the food that you purchase identify the conglomerate which entirely owns the folksy subsidiary whos name appears on the product?

That's because they're not required to. I presume most of the population would be shocked to find out that 99% of the stuff they buy at the supermarket comes from approximately 12 companies. All of them recognizable.

Companies behind the brands.

(That image was created as part of an Oxfam report, Behind the Brands).

Banks are worse http://www.forbes.com/sites/af...

You don't even need to be a government.

Snooping: It's not a crime, it's a feature

Facebook Wants To Listen In On What You're Doing

Big Brands Use Mobile Apps to Direct Offers as You Watch TV

Google looks to patent tech that listens to calls to promote ads

and people will stand in line for days to pay $99 and sign a two-year contract for this.

Except if you do it right - and UX can be done right. After all, it's how the largest company on earth got where it is.

WTF are you talking about? Walmart's website is nothing special, nor do they get all that much revenue from their web operations.

Or are you talking about the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China? I don't think UX is a big factor in their business either.

The report says just twelve countries (the USA, Germany, Canada, China, Brazil, France, Mexico, India, the UK, Spain and Australia) account for 90 per cent of US multinationals' âoemissingâ profits.

Those profits get processed through various implementations of the âoeIrish-Dutch sandwichâ to be booked in low-tax countries like the Netherlands, Ireland, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Bermuda.

If the numbers are accurate (the report's authors put a number of caveats on the data), then between $500 and $700 billion gets shuffled around in this way, which is how Bermuda found itself home to $80 billion worth of profits in 2012 (its GDP in the same year was a paltry $5.47 billion).

That's a fair bit of neck that's not getting slit and a fair bit of impotent rage in comments for any tear collectors out there. I also see from a link in the discussions that this may be the tip of a very large iceberg.

A new report finds that around the world the extremely wealthy have accumulated at least $21 trillion in secretive offshore accounts. Thatâ(TM)s a sum equal to the gross domestic products of the United States and Japan added together.

But sure, lecture on how the rich will get their throats slit when they and their wealth are out of reach.

The main experiments were back in the 1960s. There are some proof-of-concepts for future commercial plants from what I've heard and read. There are some being used to provide power to high-use single users like high-energy research labs I think.

Nobody's producing power to sell just yet. It's supposed to be soon, though. A Canadian company has a design they're putting into pre-licensing review in the coming months to hopefully be online around 2020. The US DoE which first developed MSRs (a program which Nixon axed) is helping China build a full-scaled 100 MW preview unit to be operational by 2024.

These things are safer (thorium vs. uranium for the bulk of the fuel, lower pressure inside the reactor), more efficient (higher temperatures transferred to the water/steam so more work gets to the generators), have easier spent fuel requirements (the half-lives are much shorter and it's much easier to keep them from breeding bomb-grade elements). They'll be cheaper to operate and produce cheaper, safer electricity. China's into the hundreds of millions researching building these things. It should happen.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
http://fukushimaupdate.com/tho...
http://www.technologyreview.co...
http://fortune.com/2015/02/02/...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ke...

Wallmart didn't reduce the price - they outsourced their wagebill to the taxpayers, you're paying the difference with your taxes - and all the people who never shop at Wallmart are forced to subsidize your savings.

Bullshit. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ti...

Whether those kinds of government programs are a good idea or not is another question, but they are not subsidy to Walmart.

If you ever wondered why a 15 dollar inflation-bound minimum wage is a good idea - there it is right there, so companies cannot outsource their wagebills to the taxpayer like Wallmart does.

If you raise the minimum wage to $15/h, Walmart will only hire people that are worth $15/h, and that's not their current set of employees. In addition, they will simply automate more, and much of what they do can be automated; just look at Europe where labor costs are higher and shops and restaurants run with less staff. No matter what the law, the minimum wage is always $0.

Whatever costs they can't control that way will simply be passed on to consumers in higher prices, hurting particularly the lower income groups that shop at Walmart.

In the real world even wallmart would rather make a slightly smaller profit than no profit at all.

What exactly do you imagine Walmart's profit margins to be? Walmart has very low profit margins compared to other corporations:

https://www.aei.org/publicatio...

Walmart can't and won't reduce their profit margin; any increase in operating costs is simply passed on to customers. Since their customers are often lower income, it places an extra burden on them. So, even if your fiction of government aid to Walmart workers keeping prices low were correct, it would simply mean a wealth transfer from rich to poor (since only about 97.2% of income taxes are paid by those making more than median income, 70.2% by the top 10%), which you argue should be eliminated.

But you are right to a degree: the goal of all this hullabaloo over net neutrality and minimum wage is indeed to eliminate low profit margin, low priced, domestic, diverse companies like Walmart into the kind of high profit margin, high priced, outsourcing, privileged upper middle class company like Apple. It's disgusting that you pretend to be doing that in the name of "social justice" or "benefits to taxpayers".

2spooky4me Usually average faces are considered attractive, not eerie. And of course they're just called eerie in the Slashdot summary, not the article.