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A Guide to White Privilege For White People Who Think They’ve Never Had Any
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Chernobyl wasn't 'as bad as it's possible to get it'. If the workers there would have said "Fuck you! Risking my life? I'm going home, now." then it would have been much worse.

Fukushima could have been a lot worse in terms of radioactive pollution landing everywhere around the globe. How much Becquerel could Fukushima have released if all stored fuel rods would have exploded?
This story makes me a bit worried, not you?
Oh, and this one also.
And also this one about the fuel pools is worrying me.
But no, it surely must all be FUD...

The IWB is a well-intentioned organisation, but they have no accountability whatsoever. They publish a list of links they claim are child abuse imagery, and ISPs block what's on the list - but the list, for obvious reasons, is super-secret. The processes by which the list is generated is also secret - even those who are put on the list are not informed that they are now on the list. Some (not all) ISPs actively try to prevent those who are censored from finding out by spoofing 404 error page rather than explaining that a deliberate block is in place - they certainly aren't going to contact the site operator. Even if someone wrongly blocked finds out (as happened with Wikipedia only because the block process inadvertently broke the site) there is no appeals process in place. That's a lot of power for an unaccountable and opaque organisation.

This is my primary concern as well. Child pornography is something that should be prevented, but people are going overboard with this - it's in the same vein as the war on terrorism. Child pornography is definitely despicable, but most of the efforts against it are either extremely creepy - such as this, handing over power to an almost completely unknown organization - or evoke incredible amounts of self-righteousness, especially when people start accusing each other of this crime without any proof. Between the overreach of trying to stop, it's hard to say you support, especially when the countries most against it consume almost all of it.

Furthermore, the approach we use today is fundamentally flawed. Currently, we try to block all images of it, but we can only target those existence that we know of - and even then, it's trivial to add an extra byte here and there to through of the checksumming. This creates a drive to make more of it, which more people get, before that too gets blocked. It's very profitable for these businesses and only encourages the cycle, so with all these programs in effect we're making the problem worse and worse. Most shockingly of all, when you legalize child porn, rates of it actually go down, and sex abuse goes much farther down. Given what we know about ancient societies, where children also engaged in sex and didn't show any signs of being traumatized, it's a really hard issue to grasp, because all of the morals we grew up with are being disproved by numbers. If it weren't for the fact I'd be put on a government watchlist for the rest of my life, I might even suggest that perhaps the issue is more complex than we think.

When the Republicans took over Congress, you knew they'd tackle the really important issues. I guess naming the national mammal is at least a step up from the 60 (yes, that's a six and a zero) symbolic votes to repeal Obamacare or another 72 weeks of investigations into "what really happened in Benghazi".

This is why they're too busy to even have hearings regarding trivial items like filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court.

"What do you say, shall we try to get something done?"

http://img.huffingtonpost.com/...

has jack all to do with standard of living because

BS, of course it does. Or are you going to argue for some kind of "holistic" approach — whereby a poor Thai is "happier" than a rich New Yorker? Yeah, would be most convenient for you, because it would not be quantifiable...

GDP that's been adjusted for purchasing power parity [...] once you look at PPP, the countries you disdain so much look to be doing a whole lot better

Most of Europe is still well below the US on the PPP benchmark too — only two real European countries (Switzerland and Norway) exceed us. And they did in the list I posted too, so your "braindead statement" about "a whole lot better" is false.

And then comes the military spending — which Europeans can not afford — and the power of Capitalism becomes obvious.

braindead statement that "The further to the Left, the worse off the country."

There is no successful Socialist country — it is a poison. Where there is less of it — like in France — the country can still survive, though not as well. Where there is much of it — like in Venezuela — the country collapses. Where it evolves into its next logical level — Communism — mass murder begins to accompany the economic disaster (as may well happen in Venezuela soon).

Moron.

It certainly is unusually honest for a moron to admit being one by signing his drivels so...

Well it isn't like the KKK also endorsed Hillary.

Because having a female VP pick worked so well 8 years ago?

A winning strategy by the looks of it.

Presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) intends to name former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina as his vice presidential running mate if he succeeds in winning the GOP nomination, multiple sources reported Wednesday.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ted-cruz-carly-fiorina-vice-president_us_5720e23ce4b0f309baef5657

Just adding a particular symbol ends up directly in copyright hell and can't be tuned to fit with a particular font.

Rather than a symbol every code needs a description of what that code is supposed to show so that each font creator can implement their own take on the symbol without the meaning becoming ambiguous.

On the contrary, differing implementations across devices/platforms is, in fact, one of the major sources of ambiguity when communicating with emojis.

Image copyright is definitely an issue. And beyond that different telecom/mobile OS companies would probably be loath to just settle on one (e.g. Apple Color Emoji) even if it were free to use (it is not). For example, rival phone mfrs may bristle at using the Apple Earbuds for the headphones emoji, or the iPhone lookalike for the smartphone emoji.

One solution might be a handful of openly licensed emoji fonts that are included by default across phone platforms (I dunno how to make that happen, short of getting a telecom consortium to agree to it, or getting the FCC, the states of New York and California, and various EU and Asian regulators to require it).

Make sure these are available as character keyboards, and include a font indicator/bit so the recipient's phone knows which open emoji font it should render with (with fallback on other platforms or where the font is lacking).

That seems like a lot of work, but I think to dismiss emojis (as some in the thread do) as unimportant trivialities is a huge mistake. Billions of people are using these things. On a scale from [affects something in my favorite emacs extension] to [affects the entire human race], it's much closer to the latter. Unicode is the right place for characters that are used on that scale, though presentation issues are rather thornier than with most other types of characters.

I think you are confusing "denier" with "skeptic". See one (commonly accepted) description of the differences
here.

John Podesta, Podesta Group and the Clinton Fund. Google that for some king of sleaze stuff. Podesta Group was BPs chief lobby pre and during the oil spill.

http://freebeacon.com/issues/p...

https://www.opensecrets.org/lo...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

People can become a security interest in other ways than simply grepping bulk data. It may be justified to track convicted criminals, suspected criminals, those with links to criminals or suspects because the likelihood of them being involved is higher than a random member of the public.

So how does an investigator know if I have a link to a known criminal?

Every day, I go to a particular cafe and order fish and chips, served in the traditional paper wrapping. Is that suspicious? A mobster, currently in prison, is visited weekly by his apparently-law-abiding longtime friend. Is that suspicious? The childhood friend owns a cafe that sells fish and chips to loyal customers. Is that suspicious?

What's suspicious is when the officer assigned to surveil the cafe sees that my paper has a name written on it, and that named person ends up dead the next day.

Taking that anology to a modern world, I might now visit a particular news site daily. The friend may post stories or comments to the site, carefully arranging his sentences to pass the target message. An officer watching the site would have so many comments and stories to read that his chances of spotting the hidden message are virtually nonexistent. He'd also have no way to tell which messages I'm looking at, because even if I look only at the friend's comment listing, the officer can't see that.

Likewise if in the course of an investigation you confirm that someone you have collected data on really isn't linked, then you can delete the data.

That's always a risk, because the data might not indicate a connection now, but next week, or next month, or next year it might. A decade after the fact, when a mobster confesses that he ordered hits on several targets, my credit card history might show that I ordered fish and chips every day, confirming the mobster's story.

such a data set can be misused, either if it is leaked, or by corrupt elements within the state itself.

That's actually what I'd rather see argued. I'd prefer to see "keeping data" be to the government what "processing credit cards" is (or was until recently) to small businesses. It should be a hairy mess of regulation and oversight, such that it becomes an option of last resort.

What most people seem to accept is that surveillance be used when either the confidence of the suspicion is high, or the severity is high - i.e. for active investigation of known crimes, for investigation of suspects where there is some known reason for suspicion, and (potentially) for trying to detect and pre-empt terrorism and similar.

What people don't seem to accept is the difficulty in reaching that point. As I understand, terrorist groups are actively trying to recruit previously-unknown individuals to their cause, specifically because they're not high-suspicion.

The world is full of cost/benefit trade offs and arguments about them which assume either the cost or the benefit is infinite - people struggle to actually balance them because they are difficult to quantify.

Even worse, the cost is dynamic and dependent on quantities that are intentionally difficult to observe.

As more of a society follows the rules, it becomes more costly to find the remaining individuals who are not following the rules. In short, with every crime that is prevented, preventing the next one becomes more difficult, because new methods of detection and enforcement must be applied, while the old methods must continue to be used. Of course, it is impossible to know how many crimes are actually being prevented by a given method, and it's very unlikely that a criminal will come forth and say "I didn't do the crime because of this method".

On the other hand, with every crime that succeeds, the cost to commit further crime is reduced, because it is known that tho

We should pay.
And gladly.

Basic science research is an investment.
An investment that yields tremendous returns.

Not just in the abstract of knowledge being good and the next someone building on the knowledge we gained today.
But also in the form of economic growth, employment, advancing industry, productivity.
Not just in our nation, but across the whole world (though of course those who harness it best tend to profit the most).

It's one of the most powerful positive loops in a nation's (or world's) economic engine.

Government investment in science research is one of the fundamental underpinnings of the US's prosperity and leadership following WWII. Air flight, air travel, communications, computers, internet, data storage, cellular phones, transportation, materials science, historical research, biology, nutrition, medicine....

Nearly every scientific advance in every field of science has been positively impacted by government investment in basic research.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Exponential economic growth such as we have experienced comes from positive feedback, where the production of something enables you to produce even more. Economists note that only capital — including human, intellectual, and environmental capital — can fuel exponential growth. Solow and subsequent researchers found that at most half of historical growth could be attributed to known factors. The unexplained part, sometimes estimated to be as large as 85 percent of growth, was termed the “Solow residual.” Subsequent work showed that the bulk of that residual could be explained by positing a new factor in production: technological progress.

Technology produces wealth, and it produces more technological progress, which produces even more growth, thus enabling a virtuous cycle of exponential growth. Technological progress depends on basic research; this is why economists have found that investments in basic research can produce returns between 20 percent and 60 percent per year.

The problem is that those extraordinary returns frequently go not to the investor in basic research but to the entire world. The applied research that follows on basic research does not necessarily take place in the same company or university. Basic research leading to scientific discovery is, therefore, a public good. The purpose of companies is to provide a return on investment, not to provide for the public good per se. However, the public good is the purpose of government, so this national investment must come from the federal government — as it has, in a major way, since 1947.

That last paragraph both perfectly explains why many companies are hesitant to invest in research (because there's guarantee of a return, or that they will be the beneficiary of the return), and why government (re: the public) picking up the tab is in the public interest.

Exactly! Hollywood loves Hate Whitey plots. Avatar is a White People Suck plot applied to the whole human species:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Voters in America recently discovered that they live under an Iranian type of system and didnâ(TM)t know it. In the primaries, voters participate in some sort of ritualistic placebo voting while party leaders select the candidates.

Remember, boys and girls, only the outcome matters.

Trump has to be stopped, by any means possible!.

The same thing is happening on the Democratic side. Clinton has a narrow lead among delegates determined by popular vote - 1289 vs 1045, or 55% vs 45%. But because of the Democrat's system of party-appointed superdelegates which are breaking for Clinton 469 vs 31, it gives the illusion of her lead being an insurmountable 1758 vs 1076, or 62% vs 38%. Essentially, the Democrat party bosses have rigged it so in any primary where the top candidates are separated by less than about 10% (which is pretty much all elections in the U.S. which are contested), they get to decide who wins, not the people. And the "lead" is exaggerated earlier when not all states have held their primaries.

Both parties are exploiting a long-standing problem with our voting system - the idea that whoever gets the most votes wins. While a truly fair voting system is impossible, it is possible to reduce the chance of outcomes contradictory to the people's general will. Our current voting system - plurality wins - is just about the worst system possible. More accurate results come about from an instant-runoff system, where the least popular choices are eliminated one at a time, until only the top two choices are pitted head to head and one of them has to get the majority of votes.

The parties reject this because such voting systems tend to elect centrist candidates (they are, after all, more representative of the entire population). Both parties are controlled by extremists, either on the far left or far right. In fact the whole primary system exists to select candidates which are centrist-to-extremist within their own party (far left or far right relative to the entire voting population), and eliminate candidates who are centrist and more representative of the entire voting population. That's why Paul and Christie were eliminated early (they're both centrist), and the RNC is working so hard to prevent Trump from winning the nomination (he's also fairly moderate, which some of his philosophies actually aligning better with the left).

If Trump doesn't win a majority of delegates, the control wielded by the Republican Party bosses will be plain for everyone to see. Whereas the control wielded by the Democrat Party bosses is masquerading as popular votes which weren't decided by popular vote.

You made it necessary to spell out certain basic axioms that everyone else would take for granted. Perhaps I should also say we are talking about human beings, not gods. And on planet earth.

Another lie. Look at your post again (including the part of mine that you quoted):

"If people are putting profits ahead of human lives and the greater good then they should be punished."

What kind of marxist nonsense is that? Profit -is- for human lives and the greater good.

If you think that I made it necessary to spell out basic axioms that others would take for granted, why were you unable to understand my quote which was referring to doing illegal acts that were against the public interest AND would result in punishment. One doesn't call for people to be punished for making profits, but one does call for people to be punished for profiting from illegal activities. It is you who have (deliberately?) misinterpreted what has been said just as you did when you claimed that Bill Nye et al were talking about locking up deniers in general when they were specifically talking about one particular group of people. It is a recurring pattern with you.

Science and scientists may be attacked and misinformation spread about them. There are, thankfully, few limits on free speech. And unless you can formulate some specific theory of crimespeak that is consistent with current law (slander, etc.), stop talking about it. Referring to your quaint notion of "public good" doesn't cut it in court - or here.

It looks like you didn't read the link that I provided earlier, because it talks about (and I even mentioned this) that they have done similar things in the past with the tobacco industry:

In 1998, New York State's Republican Attorney General Dennis Vacco successfully invoked the "corporate death penalty" to revoke the charters of two non-profit tax-exempt tobacco industry front groups, The Tobacco Institute and The Council for Tobacco Research (CTR). The two groups Vacco annulled were creatures of a decade long campaign funded principally by tobacco giant, Brown & Williamson to avoid costly health regulations that would diminish the profit margins of an industry that was killing one out of five of its customers. "Doubt is our Product," explained B&W's notorious 1969 memo outlining the reptilian communications strategy that hatched its front groups.

There is has also been an example (to which I don't have a link at the moment) where shareholders sued their board for not disclosing the scientific risks that the board knew and which they had deliberately hidden from the public. There are many ways that this behavior can be addressed.

Nuclear Energy Survives Only on the Basis of Faulty Risk Assessment:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://thebulletin.org/nuclear...

John Podesta, Podesta Group and the Clinton Fund. Google that for some king of sleaze stuff. Podesta Group was BPs chief lobby pre and during the oil spill.

http://freebeacon.com/issues/p...

https://www.opensecrets.org/lo...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Bill Nye, and many others, have said that "deniers" should be punished or charged.

But did Bill Nye really say that all deniers should be charged? Just watch the video where he was asked about this.Firstly, look at the expression on his face when he hears the question. He looked rather surprised to get that question. This wasn't him making any grand proclamations, but rather just answering a question about what Robert F. Kennedy Jnr said.

Secondly, the question specifically mentioned energy CEOs and not all deniers. It is not about jailing any old Joe average who makes a statement against climate change, but about the heads of the large corporations spend millions of dollars spreading FUD and misinformation. Nye's answer even mentions the similar actions taken against the tobacco groups who did similar campaigns against health regulations when they knew that their products caused cancer. This refers precisely to what Kennedy said about the subject.

If you want to claim that this is an attempt to silence all critics, then you are either stretching the truth yourself or don't understand what was actually said.

Gender dysphoria is not just a replacement label - it refers to the discomfort that is the result of transsexualism, not transsexualism itself. Big difference.

You conveniently ignore that the brains of transsexuals are themselves different. That is a physical, not mental, phenomena. And as for "all the political lobbying wrt homosexuality no longer being a disorder", the reality is that there was NO proof that being gay was a mental disorder, but that it still took a lot of lobbying for crusty old farts to either admit it or die off.

The satisfaction rate of people who transition is at least 95%, and as high as 99%, so I don't get where you are getting off stating that there are "plenty of cases where people would have been better off withut transitioning". The only people still pushing these lies are religious fundamentalists, and they have their own agenda.

One, it is pointless because it won't happen.

If you told me 20 years ago, that a self-identified "Democratic Socialist" (and a bona-fide Communist underneath) will soon have a fair shot at becoming President of the US, I would've dismissed it with the same derision... But today's youth does not care any more — the Socialism/Communism's 100 years of failure (and mass-murder) are not taught in schools.

Two, it is a pointless claim because there are no democrats currently in Washington who are willing to propose anything that even slightly resembles an initiative to "give control of healthcare to the government".

Currently is the caveat-emptor, is not it? Look on this very board — numerous people speak in favor of "single payer", and they all vote...

Even the most socialized of all medical systems still give the physicians at least as much autonomy as our system does.

TFA is not about "authority" — it is about incompetence. When doctors become government-employees — as they are in Cuba so beloved by the likes of Bernie Sanders and Michael Moore, and other worker paradises — the healthcare will suck just as it does there.

And we are on our way — by many indications, Obamacare was designed to fail, and is failing as "CO-OPs" go bankrupt, and major commercial insurers threaten to withdraw. It did not "bend the curve" of the costs either — the grows of healthcare costs is accelerating.

It will continue to suck. Which will allow the next "progressive" President to claim "the market approach has failed" — and turn to a government-owned (euphemistically called "single payer") system. Obama himself would've done it — with enthusiastic support from morons like certain anonymous cowards replying to you — but "the nation was not ready" so he simply laid down the ground work for the future:

"I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that's what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. That's what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we've got to take back the White House, we've got to take back the Senate, and we've got to take back the House."

In other words, you are just parroting standard slashdot conservative FUD.

You seem like the kind, who'd be trying t

It's probably a good idea to link to some references about the University of California, Davis pepper spray incident.

China is also dumping coal. See: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... and http://www.smh.com.au/business...

India is investing 1.2 billion in solar: http://cleantechnica.com/2014/...

The third world was the last hope for the coal industry.

>> I read an analysis which posited a list of things that would turn the election around for Trump

I think you were reading Chris Weigant's "How Trump Could Win It All" article from December 30, 2015 in The Huffington Post.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Thank you for the followup.

The article I read literally had a bullet-point list with some ten or twelve entries, so it wasn't your *exact* article.

But I note that outlets report on each others' news stories, and your link may have been the original, or Chris Weigant could be reporting on the one I read, or they could have both been independent.

Mine was also before the California terrorist attack, so it was awhile ago. That article came immediately to mind when the attacks happened, and... yep, Trump's popularity surged.

To me, it drove home the point that polls are not accurate metrics, because they only take a "snapshot" in time.

Polls are largely used to bully the voters into a sense of "give up, you're not going to win anyway".

That's the real purpose of polls, and the reason lots of polls are biased or skewed.

They're an attempt to get people to change their votes, based on an emotional argument.

That's completely, utterly irrelevant. Unless the woman who made it is the Archetype who speaks for all women and whose opinion is globally considered to be the final word.

Well then, you can't claim feminists speak for all women either. Not when polls have repeatedly shown that less than one in four women is a feminist.

If Sharyl Attkisson's Such a Fair Reporter, Why Is Right-Wing Media Defending Her?

The SLS is dubbed the Senate Launch System in some quarters.

How the hell did one of these equal pay stories get posted where they actually attributed for things like similar job and experience? If they keep this up the 77 cents on the dollar myth will be exposed for the lie that it is.

http://www.washingtonexaminer....
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/th...

I already have, but here we go again:

http://mercatus.org/statefisca...

https://wallethub.com/edu/stat...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

(Note that many education rankings consider amount of funding or student/teacher ratios as part of the score; that really isn't valid, but even that doesn't rescue California's poor showing.)

It is at least an order of magnitude more rare than people who have only one set of bits at birth.

So you're happy for the govenment to pass a law which makes live very hard for 10%[*] of the population because you're (a) too stupid to understand the topic and (b) petrified of evil men?

Wow.

[*]You do know an order of magnitude is a factor of 10, right? Right?

Regardless, this whole thing is just another example of a very small part of the population wanting to change things for the majority,

Except no they don't. This is cowardly, ignorant and fearful people wanting to tyrannize that small majority because of some imagined fear.

Anything other than normal, straight males and females of all types is by far the minority, even if you combine all groups together.

It's odd that you're lumping gay people in with something that's a transgender issue, not a gay one. It's almost like you think of everyone not identical to you as some nebulous "other" to be feared and punished with punitive laws.

even if you combine all groups together.

Yep. Why bother considering the rights of 6% of the population. I mean we outnumber them. While we're at it, fuck disabled people too, because we outnumber them and could totally beat them up in a fight.

If you're not careful, you'll get a nasty backlash at some point, us normal folk get really tired of it after awhile.

Ah so you think it's "normal folk" versus the werirdos. Right. As a moderately normal person (to outside appearances), I think it's funny that you lump yourself together with me.

We are NOT against you,

Yeah you are. I mean you claim to not be, but you advocate laws wo make their life difficult. "I 'm not against you, I just want to make your life hard because I'm afraid of something that has never happened".

Okey dokey.

Imagine the insanity if I held a "straight-pride" parade.

Go ahead, and allow me to laugh when you're literally the only person who turns up.

I think you misunderstand the definition of "wage gap." The wage gap is that an equally qualified woman performing an equal job to a man in the same position is earning significantly less (I think the current estimate is around 80%.)

Holy shit, if that is the case why am I not hearing about lawsuits flying around about this? Especially since it would be prima facie against the Equal Pay Act. Hell if I was a lawyer I would be salivating at those cases as a slam dunk win, if what you said was true.
Or you could be pulling shit out of your ass since the wage gap you described has been debunked multiple times. There is no evidence I could find of a pay gap as you described it, There is a gap when looking at all men vs all women but this is because of career choice and hours worked. If you are aware of any woman who is being underpaid as you described I would recommend they contact their nearest competent attorney because they are due a hell of a settlement.

And more effective in getting humans to follow instructions?
While also more effective in establishing an emotional connection with the brand?
Haven't we figured that out already? Like... years ago?

I really don't understand the "gee this is boilerplate" milquetoast shrug-and-bear it response. Boilerplate dogshit is what it arbitration clauses are.

These include details like waiving your right to a juried trial and agreeing to go into arbitration instead

Did you know you can opt-out in many cases?

"All things considered" has more on why these arbitration clauses are evil and you should always say "no".. So does the la times, the nation, lifehacker", and pretty much everywhere.

When you agree to arbitration you're agreeing to wave your right to a try in lieu of a system that is biased for business and rules against consumers 94% of the time

TIL that the Oculus Rift is toxic.

no one in a bigger company (and nobody at all on a publicly traded one) is spending their own funds either.

Though you are right about some level of inefficiency creeping in due simply to the size of the enterprise, there is still a big disadvantage to government-run ones. Private corporations have a "chain of command" with owners/share-holders at the top. They wield control in proportion to their stake and are empowered to hold people responsible.

Government officials reports to the head of the Executive (Mayor, Governor, President), who is elected based largely on the on popular vote with the size of the voters' "stake" having no relation to their vote. Even legally a duly-elected Executive can not usually be sacked for mere inefficiency — normally some sort of "crimes and misdemeanors" is required.

Do you suppose, anybody will be fired in LA government over this scandal?

And then, given that neither corps nor government can work

Corporations can — and demonstrably do — work quite well. Name me one success of the Federal or State government, that would compare to, say, the spectacular success of Apple with an iPhone or even, to put us back to topic, the more modest (but still impressive) success of Comcast with Xfinity WiFi.

I still prefer government to be the one managing funds for all the basic things

Then you aren't only a Statist, but a fool! Because competition is a much more effective tool than a vote. If I don't like Coke, I do not need to "raise awareness" nor picket city hall — I can just switch to Pepsi. If I don't like Verizon, I can switch to AT&T. But — thanks to sentiments like yours — I can not switch my commuter-rail company and all of the highways in my State are equally ill-maintained. Likewise the poor in LA can not, probably, get a decent WiFi now, because the government already picked the "winner" for them...

at least there I have ballot power.

You can buy stock too, you know — and gain ballot power over a corporation that way. But, if you put all your trust in the citizen's right to vote, wouldn't you prefer the government to take care of everything — not just "the basics" — for you? And, if not, why not?

cope with corporate greed or created by corporate greed

Corporate greed is normally best satisfied by delivering the goods and services consumers want . The main diversion of that greed into other, less useful, channels is government officials spending monies confiscated from captive taxpayers on something, consumers do not care for (or even actively oppose).

Except in a very few cases (such as military), the matters — including charity — are best left to citizenry, rather than entrusted to government.

If you choose to reply, please, be sure to state unambiguously, whether you agree, that

1. taxation is confiscation;
2. such confiscations by the government against the will of the governed should therefor be minimized.

Replies without clear answers to the above two questions will be returned unopened. Thank you.

Why would you be averse to Huffington Post when they're the ones who did the reporting?

Seems a bit irrational.

It is one thing to prefer wire news from a particular source... or to avoid the story entirely because you don't trust the investigative reporters. But to prefer to hear it second hand is... insane.

Not really. HuffPo does some good reporting but they also do bad. Their worst stuff was posting really whacky and dangerous BS like the whole anti-vaxx nonsense. But even on politics they post articles suggesting that Bernie Sanders is winning the Democratic primary when the vast majority of expert analysis suggests it's almost impossible for him to come back.

The fact is that HuffPo will post articles completely out of step with overwhelming expert consensus and seriously misleads its readers to promote its world view.

Now that doesn't mean everything they do is wrong, but you need to be really cautious when HuffPo who hates big business and big oil posts an article claiming that the global oil industry is completely corrupt. It's exactly the thing I'd expect them to potentially exaggerate and take out of context.

Now HuffPo might be giving us a completely accurate account of the scandal and its implication, but I'm going to wait until more trustworthy news sources have started digging into it before I start using this article to update my world view. At the very least I'll see what other news sources think of HuffPo's reporting to see if it passes the smell test.

Why would you be averse to Huffington Post when they're the ones who did the reporting?

Seems a bit irrational.

It is one thing to prefer wire news from a particular source... or to avoid the story entirely because you don't trust the investigative reporters. But to prefer to hear it second hand is... insane. Does it become more truthy if your friend repeats it to you?

The linked article from The Age who is the other investigator than Huffington Post, and the Huffington Post links to that article too as the "full investigation."

See: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Does it have to do with the fact that crime has a higher prevalence rate among the black?

No, it doesn't. Black people are more heavily policed, are more likely to be arrested than a white person for the same crime, they are more likely to be convicted if they face charges that a white person for the same crime, they are more likely to be incarcerated for the same crime, etc. This holds true even if you control for factors like poverty and other demographics.

Nah I think it's expected that sometimes police kill people and in a small fraction of that it's totally unwarranted, wrong and avoidable; in such a case these random outliers will of course more likely impact blacks than non-blacks, males than females, etc.

That's a very casual and inappropriate dismissal of a real, complicated, and nuanced problem.

So maybe blacks are wrongly killed but non-blacks, even more so, relatively speaking.

It sounds to me like you are trying to justify the problem rather than solve it.

The 80% gang/drug related figure has been debuked: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

In fact, even in the worst cities it's less than 30%. and much lower overall. Even if you remove all those murders form the stats, the US still looks terrible compared to Europe. Even with the recent terror attacks included.

The Republicans shut down the government rather than work with him, or did that little fact slip your memory?

Are you sure that is the way it went?

http://www.washingtontimes.com...

Or if you mean the budget

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

So, who was not doing their job? The Republicans tried to do exactly what has always been done on every bill, negotiate with the other side. Obama called them terrorists and refused to negotiate, so was shut out. As soon as negotiations started, the issue was resolved. You have an odd memory of these issues.

As a pedestrian; there is generally no hazard from texting, and all the danger is caused by the fact there are cars

Man 'walks off cliff and plummets 60 feet to his death on Christmas Day while distracted by his cell phone'

Girl Falls Into Manhole While Texting, Parents Sue

Bonnie Miller, Woman Who Fell Off Pier While Texting, Saved By Teen Rebecca Van Zant

Texting While Walking Causes More Accidents Than Texting and Driving

Want to rethink that stance?

The secret service? Do you think they'll take time off from the drunk driving and the whoring to do some security work?

>>Are Communications Records of Americans Retained Forever?

The official answer is yes :
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
The communication records of everybody are retained forever.

I sit in a cubicle for 40hrs/week, and supossedly excessive sitting is the new smoking.

Or not.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Really, you can prove you conceptions, with current and historical numbers ?
Lets analyse the drugs consumption.
Drugs and Race - White and Black

Let's go with the assumption posited so frequently by the press that Donald Trump called women Bimbos and Pigs. He never said 'All women are bimbos and pigs'. He said 'Rosie O'Donnel is a pig' and 'Megyn Kelly is a bimbo'.

Before he said any of those things, there was already a long list of ugly things he'd said about women.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

People who speak in women this way have low character. They are nothing more than accessories to him. Hell, his wife gets her minks the same way minks get minks. It's all about appearance to him, and like everything else regarding Trump, that's shallow.

Forget for a moment that Trump himself is a profoundly ugly person. He's orange, with a bad combover and a neck that looks like it's filled with 2 gallons of vanilla milkshake. As my sainted grandma used to say, "You can see his soul in his face".

http://inthesetimes.com/images...

I love your comment. At the same time you accuse Trump of being harsh to women, you point out that he is profoundly ugly, and suggest that his soul is just as ugly as his face. Well, then how come he has had so many very good looking women in his life? Because women are angels, right? They dated or married him out of the inifinite goodness of their hearts, right?

Ha! Women are shit. Most women are hopelessly spoiled by being so sought after and therefore having high market value, they are selfish, vapid, manipulative, cowardly, obsessed with their own survival and self-preservation, and usually get involved with men for the social or financial assets men possess, not for the persons they actually are. The so-called "bad boys" understand that and that's why they score so often, and women like them. Only fools are kind to women more than occasionally. So you can only be a woman or a fool. Trump has may flaws, but that is not one of them.

For what its worth, Netflix was among the net-neutrality supporters back in 2014... According to TFA, they were already deliberately degrading videos for certain customers then.

Let's go with the assumption posited so frequently by the press that Donald Trump called women Bimbos and Pigs. He never said 'All women are bimbos and pigs'. He said 'Rosie O'Donnel is a pig' and 'Megyn Kelly is a bimbo'.

Before he said any of those things, there was already a long list of ugly things he'd said about women.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

People who speak in women this way have low character. They are nothing more than accessories to him. Hell, his wife gets her minks the same way minks get minks. It's all about appearance to him, and like everything else regarding Trump, that's shallow.

Forget for a moment that Trump himself is a profoundly ugly person. He's orange, with a bad combover and a neck that looks like it's filled with 2 gallons of vanilla milkshake. As my sainted grandma used to say, "You can see his soul in his face".

http://inthesetimes.com/images...

Muslims are responsible for the vast majority of terrorism in the world today.

In the Middle East where they mostly kill other Muslims that might be true. In the West however, that is miles away from the truth.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/n...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.vocativ.com/news/25...

These articles do a pretty good job of citing sources.

Not that I think this will change your opinion though. Your dumb assumption of 20% of all Muslims being radicalized shows that you don't care about terrorism and just want to demonize Muslims. If 212 million people where crazy terrorist radicals the world would be on fire now as opposed to the safest it's been in god only knows how long.

Looks like St. ALGORE is a denier then: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

[wipes away tear] St. Gore's sacrifices for the cause are just so inspiring!

You suspect incorrectly. Let me give you a civics lesson then.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...