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New Jersey in particular: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jo...

Australia uses neonicotinoids and they have no bee collapse problems.

Yes, I know the source is a chemical company, but they have a point. Bee collapse is not a problem in Australia.

There is also this:
On the other hand, in Canada and Australia, there is no sign of Colony Collapse Disorder. ...
Despite the fact that neonicotinoids are widely used in Canada to protect canola from pests, Canadian bee populations have been largely unaffected and produce around 50 million pounds of canola honey. ...
For example, in upland areas of Switzerland where the pesticide is not used, bee colony populations are under significant pressure from the mites; and in France, declines in the bee population in mountainous areas (where neonics are uncommon) are similar to those in agricultural areas (where neonics are widely used).

Total US Health Spending is $8,895 per person. If your insurer charges you less either they think you won't cost that much, or they're idiots who will go bankrupt real soon now.

In your case the former is more likely. The fine art of figuring out how much an insuree will cost is called "Underwriting," and if you only paid $100 a month your state probably lets it's insurers do a hell of a lot of that shit. They don;t tell you they're giving you a discount for being male, and young; because they figure you might not like finding out they'd charge your sister/girlfriend/crush loads more in case she gets pregnant. They're definitely not telling you about any youth discount, because you know that in 10 years you ain't getting that discount. You know all those horror stories about people who got cancer and their rates tripled, or the insurer refused to pay their bill because they hadn't mentioned a mole on their application? Those mostly come from plans like yours.

Under ObamaCare a lot of that underwriting is illegal. They can do some age-based discrimination, pardon me under-writing, but a lot less then before. They also can't charge women extra to cover pregnancy costs. Which means that they have to get the money from somebody, and currently that somebody is you. Most people in your situation get substantial subsidies to cover the difference, but there are people who are self-employed, young, male, and make too much to get the subsidy.

So, in the short term ObamaCare screwed you and people like you. But in the long-term it's probably gonna be good for you. I guarantee you that at some point in your life you will be 50, and only a fool charges a 50-year-old man $100 a month for insurance that actually pays for medical care. Adding your wife to your old $100 a month plan would probably have increased the cost a lot because she's a woman of childbearing age, and wives have a much higher pregnancy risk then girlfriends.

As for your wife's new insurance, keep in mind that your wife can always switch jobs. If they go for the fine they'll save money, but they'll also have very pissed off people, a lot will probably leave, and it'll mostly be their top people who do leave because idiots who've been over-promoted have trouble finding work at the same level in other companies. So if they do go for the fine they'll almost have to give her a substantial raise to cover the insurance premium or lose lots of their employees.

And, for the record, if God had come down from Heaven in March of 2010 and made me Dictator I would not have passed ObamaCare. I would have passed a universal MediCare bill. One of the things I hate about the current system for paying medical bills is that it's so fucking complicated that you can't understand why one person would get charged very little money for insurance without putting literally weeks into researching the damn issue. Which in turn means that if somebody changes the system it's very difficult to tell any individual American what this will do to his bills, because odds are that even if he knows the technical vocabulary to describe his policy he isn't using the words right. You can say "In general most people will see reduced bills because the subsidy will cover some of it," but you can't get much more specific. It would be so much easier if Obama'd just fire the entire insurance industry, and the medical Billing Specialists, and all the other finance weenie parasites that have managed to get themselves good jobs in health care without doing anything that actually involves medical care.

But that couldn't have gotten through the Senate IRL, so we're stuck with a half-assed compromise that simplifies some things, complicates others, and is generally a pain in the ass.

The DOJ has shown its self to be incompetent.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ri...
http://gov.louisiana.gov/index...
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

Glad someone reads. Beyond the confirmation bias, the idea that real unemployment doesn't matter displays the sheer lack of any responsibility on the part of the government. This is exactly why we should be curtailing H1-B programs.

After Five Years Of Obamanomics, A Record 100 Million Americans Not Working

You really have to keep an eye out for 'weasel words*' in those reports, as the US government has a habit of lying to the public 'for our own good,' especially in terms of tobacco-related propaganda; the "Truth" campaign of the early 21st century being a prime example.

* For example, "may cause" or "could contribute to" are used quite often in said reports, and people tend to assume that those terms actually mean "does cause/contribute to." The fact is, intentionally inhaling any smoke isn't necessarily healthy for you, as that's not a function our lungs were designed for; the issue is how tobacco smoke is considered worse than other kinds, even though it's not necessarily true - wood smoke, for example, is considered 12 times more carcinogenic than tobacco smoke. Blew my mind the first time I found that out.

Here's a link that shows another study which found no link between second-hand smoke and any particular malady, and another that, while obviously biased towards one side of the issue, contains some pretty good information dispelling some of the more common misconceptions about tobacco use (and definitions of public space, appropriately enough).

It's my theory that any OS that is secure enough not to get malware is secure enough to not allow AV software.

A user shouldn't be able to install software that scans every other file arriving on the computer, and alters or deletes executable files. If they are allowed to, then they will install every item of malware presented to them.

As illustration I give you iOS. An AV scanner is not technically possible (from anyone other than Apple). 2013 malware threats: zero.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/go...

You could say the same about coal, and be more correct. In fact, WAY more correct.

Coal kills 170,000 people per year; nuclear after Chernobyl and Fukushima only kills 90. Source

440 people die per year from rooftop solar, which is almost 5x as many as nuclear.

Actually, coal is the worst by far. Nuclear is the best. Solar is more dangerous than Nuclear, but not even by an OOM.
Forbes article, deaths per Trillion kWh
Coal, Global: 170k, Coal, China: 280k, Coal, US: 15k
Solar: 440
Nuclear, Global average: 90
Deaths per TWh by energy source(note:1k times less electricity than above)
Coal, electricity, world average: 60. 100 if it's for everything.
Oil 36
Solar .44
Wind .15
Hydro .10(not including Banqiao, including it raises it to 1.4 because the once incident killed 171k. And we thought rare accidents were dangerous with Nuclear? They have nothing on Dams).
Nuclear: .04

Citation needed.

Well, I had to get to page two of a google search on "Walmart Makes Stores Close" before I started coming to articles with numbers from sources I'd heard about, but here you'll find this quote:
"A study published in 2008 in the Journal of Urban Economics examined about 3,000 Walmart store openings nationally and found that each store caused a net decline of about 150 jobs (as competing retailers downsized and closed) and lowered total wages paid to retail workers.".

This article was interesting to read but for those averse to clicking the link:
"But the closer a store was to the Walmart location, the greater the likelihood it would close. Persky and his colleagues found that for every mile closer to the Walmart, 6 percent more stores closed. Close in around the store's location, between 35 and 60 percent of stores closed.
And depending on the type of business, the impact of a Walmart moving in can be much worse. Persky says that the per-mile closure rate increase for drugstores is almost 20 percent. For home furnishings, it's about 15 percent. For hardware stores, it's about 18 percent per mile. For toys, it's more than 25 percent per mile.".

Really, that's all the time I'm willing to invest in refuting the idea that somehow WalMart fosters a diverse / thriving / healthy business ecosystem.

Cash is already suspect for people. Trying to take it out of a bank and you get a chat down after electronic means flag you and your invited in to see a real person.
Driving with some cash makes you something unknown and you might face "civil forfeiture" depending on the area you where randomly stopped in.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/in...
Enjoying a hotel or renting a car? Enjoy that friendly chat down as you make enquiries and pay your bill.
Now we see the same for online efforts unless your using one for 3 or 4 allowed US backed credit cards?

Currently any competition in currency is illegal.

Alternative currencies are legal, as long as they are paper money and not coins (and don't resemble US dollars).

Yes, but Parker Brothers has a Monopoly on the market.

Currently any competition in currency is illegal.

Alternative currencies are legal, as long as they are paper money and not coins (and don't resemble US dollars).

You mean, like this?

And what do you suggest to properly securing your guns? So called gun safes are not actually all that safe.

So, you read an article about one model of one brand of gun safe that was fundamentally flawed, and extrapolate that to include every model of every brand of gun safe?

Your high school science teacher must be ashamed.

And what do you suggest to properly securing your guns? So called gun safes are not actually all that safe.

No, developers (the ones who want to earn a living, at least) care about MONEY, and again, iOS still dominates here.

"An average Android app makes 5 times less money per download than an iOS app. Even though Android has by far passed iOS in terms of global market share, the picture is not so clear-cut in terms of revenue. Despite Android's dominant market share, for many app developers, iOS is still the biggest platform."

From
http://venturebeat.com/2014/02...
referencing
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tr...

By the numbers, lots of people buy Android tablets, but don't use them very much for either web browsing or applications.

For example, if you look at http://gs.statcounter.com/#tab... Safari is 67.7% of mobile browsing activity, while Android is 15.4% and Chrome (runs on both iOS and Android) is 10.5%. Even though by sales reports Android devices are outselling iOS by wide margins.

Similarly, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ew... is just one example of numerous developers seeing iOS downloads and revenue vastly (10x) outpacing Android.

I can't say why, but I imagine that Google is hard at work trying to figure out why Android users don't browse or use apps the way iOS users do. I used to think that it was market segmentation - people who have money to buy apps have money to buy iOS devices, and people with no money buy cheaper, Android devices. But these days there are high-end Android tablets that are as expensive as iPads, and of course web browsing is free, but people still aren't using either apps or browsing. It also doesn't explain why free apps on Android don't do well.So perhaps it's usability?

"But when you know ahead of time that if the death penalty goes through you're going to see a human being have a good chunk of the head taken off in front of you, maybe you might not sleep so well knowing it happened because you broke the rules."

That is of course assuming that the people witnessing the execution aren't the type who would enjoy the experience of seeing it, or feel nothing due to differences in brain structure/chemistry.

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

How many people in such positions of power can we say are "normal" or in some way "deviant?"

I just googled "best watches" and I got this, a $20,000 watch. The target for luxury watches is indeed way different.

It does if you're a government contractor, apparently...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/je...
http://www.computerworld.com/s...
(and thousands more...)

In some countries, maybe there's some blame to be had for escaping taxes...but France is a whole other argument. I mean shit, 75% tax on the wealthiest has resulted in a lot of them just flat out leaving that country. It got so bad that their dear leader is now lobbying against his own tax plan; the same plan that put it there to begin with.

Here's a good read on the subject:

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

The Forbes guy says the cost reduction is largely due to subsidies and incentives. But he also says we need to worry about depletion of silicon too like worrying about depletion of fossil fuels.

Also, Clean Tech supporters often assert that the point of competitiveness will be accelerated because conventional energy prices must rise, primarily because of depletion of fossil fuel resources. But they don’t seem to think that the depletion of silicon needed to make photovoltaic cells; depletion matters, but the rate of depletion is often exaggerated.

. This guy says depletion of fossil fuel is over estimated and depletion of silicon is something to worry about. This genius does not seem to understand half the mass of planet Earth is silicon! Silicon dioxide is sand/earth/mud/rock. Of course it costs tons of money, energy and effort to separate silicon from sand. But we are not going to run out of silicon before we run out of fossil fuels. And the capital markets will listen to this Einstein because he writes for Forbes. Not to you and me because we are Dilberts who work a wage and write in Slashdot. Eventually solar will become cost effective, and there will be a mad rush into it. This is how booma and busts are created, methinks.

It's worse than you think

I think though, this is the result of the bungling OPK and even a bit before him Jorma Ollila, where the company wasn't focused on putting out great products but rather became concerned with infighting and territorial control. The whole place was dysfunctional from the inside out.

"Such launches are done with a Russian rocket right now"

more correctly, the launches are done with an American rocket, using a Russian engine (RD-180).

see: http://www.forbes.com/sites/lo...
http://www.parabolicarc.com/20...

(the article has it right; the summary is inaccurate).

Umm, yes. They have won suits in New York, Washington, Massachussets, and Ohio, to name a few. Not all of those rulings were permanent, but this map is pretty recent.

His point is that whilst that might be what Cook said, what Cook said may not be true, or only partially true. Macworld will not comment on the reliability or truthfulness of Cook's statements because it's an inherently biased publication so all you'll get is a backing up of Cook's comments.

So no one should rely on the comments of Time Cook whose job before CEO was COO and ran Apple logistics for many years about what moves Apple has made in supplies in the last several quarters. Of course Macworld will not comment on the truthfulness of his statements; they can't know. No one can at this point as it was reported just days ago. Macworld is simply reporting his comments as well as the earnings during a financial earnings conference call. Macworld did no less or more than say Forbes, or Business Insider, or Motley Fool.

An objective news outlet would examine those claims and comment on the truthfulness of them, rather than simply parrot them and blindly claim they are gospel.

This is Macworld. This is not Frontline or 60 minutes or the Washington Post. They don't do investigative or financial journalism. I bet you a million dollars that Reuters and USA Today did not examine the claims either. In fact Forbes not only took Cook at his word, they even praised him for it. Objective news outlet simply report what someone says? That's the definition of objective. Now if they praised him or put in opinion of some sort, that's called an editorial.

I'm not commenting on the truthfulness either way, but RyuuzakiTetsuya is one of the most prolific Apple shills here and Macworld is similarly and incredibly biased news outlet. To take information from either at face value is just asking to be fed lies. Perhaps in this case both are right, but it requires further examination, or an objective source before you can just assume it's all true.

Macworld simply reporting on what someone says in a news conference is biased according to you. I see. That is actually the opposite of bias. When the President makes a speech and news outlets show parts of the speech, they are being biased in your world. I guess unless they are Fox News that tries to twist or words in the name of fair and balanced reporting are the true news outlets to you.

To do otherwise would be simply to admit that you yourself are a fanboy and just want to hear that one side of the story because it's the side you want to hear, not necessarily that is true.

Frankly I don't care what Tim Cook says. Macworld reported what he said. Period. What don't you simply admit you are a hater.

Obama ran on a policy of net neutrality support and staffed the FCC board with members with the intent of establishing net neutrality.

Now the FCC (which the Obama administration controls) is doing a 180.

Is this being done because Obama and the DNC doesn't want it or because Comcast is throwing money around?

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

http://thehill.com/blogs/hilli...

Ask and ye shall receive.

TL;DR: There are risks associated with all HUDs, but the likelihood of developing problems stems from having the eyes compete. A monocular display (or well-aligned binocular) should be fine, as long as the display is sufficiently different from the background view that the brain knows it's seeing something different.

You're kidding right?

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/...

http://www.activistpost.com/20...

Android is the tool that Google is using to enable these things in the mobile space. Hooking you in with Google Apps is how the linkage to all these other data collection realms. Do you think it stops with your mobile device how about tracking you in your home now? It's not so much about the government collecting all of this, it's about commercial data collectors mining you for information, your preferences, your contacts, your phone calls etc. to develop a profile of you and your social network. While most would argue that it is "anonymous" in most cases or that it's for "marketing", it's not because these kinds of things erode your privacy and I chose not to be mined in my day to day activities or interactions with others.

Solar storms are not that infrequent. Besides the one in 1859, Canada had one in March, 1989. And last July, we had a near-miss of a major solar storm.

it's not the bigotry, its the fact they have no zoning laws and some megacorp can build a fertilizer plant next to residential housing and kill people when it explodes
or build some oil refinery next to someone's home and poison their air and water

While I'm sure that Texas has totally managed to avoid the scourge of zoning laws, the California approach has its own drawbacks that are becoming apparent, especially as California is now practically speaking a one party state run by Democrats with super majorities able to pass whatever they want.

California: CEOs Rate It Worst U.S. Business Climate For 8 Years Running
Hundreds of Thousands Flee Democrat-Run California
Just How Bad is California’s Business Climate?
California, a bad bet for business - Why would new enterprises come to a state like this?
Texas v. California: The Real Facts Behind The Lone Star State's Miracle
State leaders closely watch migrating millionaires

1) A typical well-diversified index fund delivers returns over the long-term well over the interest charged on mortgages or car loans if you took out those loans when you have decent credit.

Buy and hold! If you buy-and-hold, you are nearly guaranteed not to loose--and if you do, it'll probably be less than a 3% loss over 20 years. Sure, you might gain 14% in 20 years (not the much touted 10% per year), but importantly you won't lose so much. Of course trying to time your investments to the market can make you 56% gains per year, or lose you 48%--and that's a lot more loss than a buy-and-hold strategy might expose you to, and a lot more likely to happen!

Yeah, the market is hard. The easy version of the market is slow.

(Yeah, credit cards do suck and you should pay those off ASAP after you get your max 401(k) match, if offered.)

My credit cards cost me less than my house. Consider $150/mo per payment, versus a one-time $80 payment and a year and some months with no interest. I do some monkey business with the cards to get that kind of thing going on (BAC has 14 month no-interest balance transfers all the time), and I frequently have exceedingly high credit card debt which costs me all of $200/year in fees and interest the worst of times. If I ever bought a $6000 motorcycle, I'd finance it with my credit cards in part, due to 6% motorcycle loans. For the most part, my cards stay high because I target other debt or stack up cash before paying them--it's a strategy that has saved me thousands of dollars.

My employer's 401(k) match is a lower immediate return than paying extra into my mortgage, which is nearly a 70% return. To make this more physical: If I put $225 in my 401(k), I get a match of $112.50. If I put $225 in my mortgage payment, I skip about $150 of interest at the moment. $150 > $112.50, even though they both end in 50.

You have not done full-scale investment. I can tell. I can tell because you obviously have not spent several 8-12 hours per day analyzing the indexes against each other (it's just division), analyzing technical metrics, analyzing news (yay Marketwatch), waking up at 4am to read the news and check the foreign markets, making trends predictions, drawing arcs and channels and other funny things on graphs, squinting hard when you see multiple indicators in conflict, trying to resolve the conflicts to work out a good guess at what the market will do, and then just gave up and cashed out on Friday so that you don't have to worry about 2 non-trading days and what might happen while you can't do anything about it, come back Monday to start again.

Have you ever seen someone who was completely sober, had gotten 2-3 hours of sleep per night for weeks, and talked reallyreallyfastliketheywereonmeth? That was me for a few weeks.

This is not a leisure job. You don't lay back, masturbate some while checking out Playboy Asia, idly click on a few things, buy, sell, mmhmm... It's not World of Warcraft. It is a vicious game of absolute timing, of completely predictable behavior that requires mountains of knowledge to actually predict, of a complete lack of those mountains of knowledge, of strife and fear and reflexes and reaction and bounds and calculations. It's chaos theory: the random element is what you don't know. Insider traders get to look at all the cards, high-level traders look at some of the cards and do card counting, and the fish are there just throwing down chips and hoping they can get a full house.

I don't care to work that hard. I got an honest job instead, and worked on minimizing my mandatory expenses and enhancing the stability of my financial positi

No climate model of note considers CO2 to be the only variable of note. However variations in solar output are very well understood and no, they are not particularly significant at all. Yes, there is broad consensus on this.

Yet CO2 emissions have continued nonstop for the past 15 years while global temperatures remain essentially unchanged.

Something else is having a larger effect on global temperatures than CO2. Either CO2 is warming less than expected, or something weird is making all that heat vanish, which seems like rather magical thinking to me.

As I said, the current models include proper statistical modelling that lets us have a probability of being correct. They are getting quite accurate and the error bars are steadily going down. As I said, its not sigma-5 type stuff yet, but its certainly accurate enough to start making precautionary policy on.

Can you show me even one model from ten years ago that correctly predicted the temperatures of the past ten years?

I don't care how many models you have that "post-dict" correctly, i.e. if you give them the historical data they produce a curve that matches what was actually recorded for that period of history. I care about models that made predictions that came true.

Because from what I have read, the models from 15 years ago all predicted more warming than actually occurred. I gave you one link about this already; here's another two:

http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/7360901-robert-wagner/1870791-climate-change-consensus-bubble-burst-by-the-facts-at-near-95-percent-confidence-level

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/03/new-paper-falsifies-climate-model.html

This is obsfucation based on the fact that the effects of CO2 are measured in kelvins, not celcius. Within the ranges of temperatures required to maintain human life however, the effect is extremely dramatic.

No, it is you who is obfuscating here. The claim is that CO2 is already doing about as much "greenhouse effect" as it can, that it is already blocking nearly 100% of the wavelengths that it blocks, and that increases in CO2 in the atmosphere have progressively smaller effects.

I gave you a link earlier, here's another:

http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/ed-caryl-modtran-shows-co2-doubling-will-have-almost-no-effect-on-temperature/

Could you please provide a reference documenting the consensus position on how CO2 affects global warming?

We havent had 15 years of non-warming. That is a trope that is constantly repeated by denialists that has no basis in reality. In fact we've had significant warming. Please actually read scientific research on this matter instead of garbage from denialists.

And yet, you provide no link to support your position.

Here's another three links about the "pause" in global warming:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/09/26/as-its-global-warming-narrative-unravels-the-ipcc-is-in-damage-control-mode/

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/08/observed-rate-of-global-warming-half-of.html

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/11/rss-global-temperature-data-no-global-warming-at-all-for-202-months/

[Global warming] might be [catastrophic]. It might not be. Try and not strawman

We have to estimate using the best data we have. And the best data is strong support.

.. And estimations vary drastically depending on who's estimating. What's the point of estimating then? To make oneself feel a bit better regarding something you have no definite data of ?

So far there has been very little violence. Conversely the overthrow of the pro-Russian government by the pro-Western faction was extremely violent from the start. I'm not sure how this standard doesn't cut the other way.

It surely works both ways. Over a 100 people were killed in Kyiv by Ukrainian armed forces while Yanukovich was still in power, backed up by Putin. Now, you observe all of that in your TV set for 3 months while sitting comfortably in Crimea. The killings are over, new intermediate PM is in power, etc.. And suddenly you see armed people in the streets, supported by Putin. Are you entirely sure no killings will occur in your city?

And there was violence - a lot of people were beaten, some killed, thousands had to relocate to mainland Ukraine. And who's to say that more is not to come ? Chechnya, Pridnestrovye, Abhasiya, South Osetiya - these places were captured by Russian military and not showing any signs of prosperity, long after the war aggression was over. Are you entirely sure that the Crimean people are that stupid as to not realize that the Russian troops freely walking on the streets aren't exactly the sign of the same "prosperity" coming to Crimea as well?

- a lot of Russians think Alaska should be "returned" to motherland as well.

That analogy doesn't fit because Alaskans don't want to return to Russia. They are happy to be in America. There is no harm to self determination in allowing Alaskans to remain American.

This is not an analogy. This is an example of how Russians think these days. There's a large number of Russians supporting such world views - and they were carefully brainwashed by Russian propaganda machine. I don't know how far this is going to go, but the outlook surely does not seem to be in support of freedom, self-determination and democracy - ironically enough, the very values Russians claim to support fully while erecting a new kind of hatred and outright stupidity.

I'd use language spoken at home as a better metric then you get: http://blogs-images.forbes.com... [forbes.com]

Okey, so originally it was ethnicity, now it's language. You can also try perhaps the color of skin, theological views, left- or right-handedness. All of this is nothing but pure speculations.

Those 2.5m people are asking for it to be redone.

Do you realize this claim is not supported in any way, except for wild speculations?

I know lots of people in Russia they do like their life there. Obviously some want to leave. OTOH I also know Ukrainians who want to leave.

There's always plenty of "patriots", lots of people who are satisfied with what they have, and a lot of those who simply can't leave. After all, USSR dissolved only very recently. Think Africa, again - there are language barriers, educational barriers, inability to get visa, find jobs or sustain any kind of "modern" life in a modern society. Plenty of people don't even have a slightest idea what these things mean. The Russian brainwashing machine is quite successful at making people actually NOT want to have democracy, free society, separation of state and religion. For example, 30% of local municipalities in Russia do not elect mayors; they are assigned instead. Orthodox christianity taught by priests is a mandatory course in schools and universities. A "rotting EU", "gay EU", "rotting US" are popular terms even among intellectuals. Like I said before, the concrete criticism of modern Russia is enormously and dangerously rich area of discourse full of plan and simple facts.

Now, a lot of my friends here had a cha

You see, anything beyond proper referendum is a wild guess, and we really ought not to take it into account.

We have to estimate using the best data we have. And the best data is strong support.

seeing armed people and violence in the streets is quite another.

So far there has been very little violence. Conversely the overthrow of the pro-Russian government by the pro-Western faction was extremely violent from the start. I'm not sure how this standard doesn't cut the other way.

- a lot of Russians think Alaska should be "returned" to motherland as well.

That analogy doesn't fit because Alaskans don't want to return to Russia. They are happy to be in America. There is no harm to self determination in allowing Alaskans to remain American.

See here for % of ethnic Ukrainians, per region:

I'd use language spoken at home as a better metric then you get: http://blogs-images.forbes.com...

The entire western 2/3rds are obviously staying in Ukraine.

All of this needs to be redone for 2.5 million people!

Those 2.5m people are asking for it to be redone.

140 million of Russians, who don't really want to live in their home country, just added 2.5 millions, out of whom perhaps 1/3 want to live there, but have a high chance of changing their minds pretty soon!

I know lots of people in Russia they do like their life there. Obviously some want to leave. OTOH I also know Ukrainians who want to leave.

Yes. It is very much like America where people's ethnicities are mixed and their are issues of identification. And BTW there was intermarriage for centuries before the Soviet Union as well. On the other hand what language is spoken at home isn't an unreasonable standard:

http://blogs-images.forbes.com...

Accidents happen, yes, but nuclear is still arguably the safest (deaths/TWh) form of energy on the planet: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja... Even wind, hydro and solar are more dangerous.

If left to market forces, and not state planners, the markets would not build nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is Hooked on Subsidies. Notice how that is a CATO Institute reprint of a "Forbes" article first published on November 26, 2007. And in case you don't know what CATO is, from their about page "The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization — a think tank – dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace. Its scholars and analysts conduct independent, nonpartisan research on a wide range of policy issues."

FalconWolf

In Texas, yes.

Back when programming magazines were useful, unlike the fluffy tripe that is passed off as a computer magazine today.

Even the linux magazines today are worthless for learning from.

Could it be deliberate? They don't want to publish something useful (I thought this is what magazines are for unless they are simply ad rags nowadays or teasers for the "good stuff") i.e. like this person argues "No, You Can't Pick My Brain. It Costs Too Much" http://www.forbes.com/sites/wo...

I think it's worthwhile to note that the Free File Alliance is the same group of assholes behind the decade-long lobbying campain that is preventing us from having return-free filing done by the IRS itself.

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

Except that most "subsidies" that oil companies supposedly get are subsidies for OTHER people that happen to benefit oil companies. Also a lot of the remaining "subsidies" are tax credits that lots of other industries get for manufacturing.

They cancelled this policy almost immediately after it was brought to light.

I dunno. Are the 0.01%ers trying to figure out a new way to fuck over the middle class?

Since middle class wages have stagnated since the late '70s our share of the tax burden hasn't really been able to grow, and the rich have had their burden reduced quite a bit. So now we have massive debts. Gotta pay 'em somehow. I know, sounds kooky, right?! Look at the filial responsibility laws. Parent racking up huge debts to the state because of the care they need in old age? Think you won't have to pay for that? Think again.

I expect that we'll start to see enforcement as a way to shift more of the tax burden onto the middle class (at least what's left of it). Banana Republic here we come.

The IRS has already stopped collecting these old debts, but let's not let that get in the way of a good political rant..

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

Accidents happen, yes, but nuclear is still arguably the safest (deaths/TWh) form of energy on the planet: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...

Even wind, hydro and solar are more dangerous.

As far as why are so many being diagnosed now? It's because of better detection, plain and simple. In the past, many with autism were written off as being "shy" or "weird" or (worse) "retarded." (NOTE: Don't use that last word around a parent of a child with autism. I'm only including it as a reference of what was used in the past.) Furthermore, theories of what causes autism have changed. In the past, mothers were blamed. The so-called "refrigerator mom" theory said that moms who weren't loving enough made their kids autistic.

Yes, more are being diagnosed now because it has a) become acceptable to be autistic and b) we have a more encompassing definition of what symptoms are to be called autism, but we still have little clue to the causation. In short, we still have little clue with ASD what it really is and what it's root causes are. Until we do, we're merely acting like the late 1800s physicians and throwing all people with a set of symptoms into a single ASD bucket.

[ Citation needed ] I did a quick Google for this and the statistics I found at http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja... showed this to be wrong. There are plenty of other resources which show the same thing.

You are apparently not aware of what the media has said about Microsoft. From my article:

The cover of the January 16, 2013 issue of BusinessWeek magazine has a large photo of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer with the headline calling him "Monkey Boy". See the cover by scrolling down in the article Microsoft sued for misrepresentation. The BusinessWeek cover says "No More" and "Mr.", but that doesn't take much away from the fact that the magazine called him Monkey Boy -- on its cover.

In my years of following such things I have never seen such disrespect of a CEO. Of course, whoever wrote the cover headline was merely repeating a common phrase applied to Steve Ballmer by people in the computer industry.

Worst CEO: 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)

Fired for temper tantrums: In my opinion, there is something that is necessary to understand about the Microsoft Windows 8 operating system. It is a typical attempt of Microsoft to make more money by releasing software that is not finished. But even for a company that intends to be abusive, releasing it was an example of extreme incompetence. News stories say that Steve Ballmer was fired because of severely incompetent behavior that lasted many years. For example, see the article Steve Ballmer's temper tantrum over Nokia buyout led to his firing, says report. (March 5, 2014)

“I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”

First off the wage gap myth is exactly that, it's been debunked a dozen times over:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/th...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/re...
http://www.slate.com/articles/...

Second off women are NOT overwhelmingly the victims of domestic violence, they are in fact more likely to be the PERPETRATOR of non-reciprocal violence than men, excerpted from an article on the subject:

"in nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70 percent of the cases," and men incurred significant injuries ('http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/42/15/31-a') ('http://www.ajph.org/cgi/content/abstract/97/5/941').

"In addition to the CDC data, a recent 32-nation study by the University of New Hampshire found women commit half of all partner violence and are just as controlling as men ('http://www.unh.edu/news/cj_nr/2006/may/em_060519male.cfm?type=n') ('http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/ID41E2.pdf').

A University of Florida study recently found women are more likely than men to "stalk, attack and abuse" their partners ('http://news.ufl.edu/2006/07/13/women-attackers/').
The University of Washington recently found similar results ('http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070625111433.htm').

In fact, although men are less likely to report the violence - which distorts crime data, virtually all randomized sociological surveys show women initiate domestic violence as often as men and use weapons more than men, that men suffer one-third of injuries, and that self-defense explains only a small portion of domestic violence by either sex. Professor Martin Fiebert of California State University summarizes this data in an online bibliography at ('http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm').

A recent study in the Journal of Family Violence found many male callers to a national hotline experienced severe violence from female partners who used violence to control them ('http://www.springerlink.com/content/a7q0032j88817218/fulltext.pdf').

A University of Pennsylvania emergency room report found 13 percent of men were assaulted by a female partner in the previous 12 months, 37 percent with a weapon, and 14 percent required medical attention ('http://www.aemj.org/cgi/content/abstract/6/8/786').