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They're talking about training "Data scientists". The folks who, for example, look at Twitter hastags to find out who will the PResidential election.; turned out the guy got it better than anyone - even the statisticians came in second.

Marketing people are wetting themselves over this type of shit so they can sell us more crap - there is a reason why our economy is 70%+ consumption and why more and more stores are demanding personal information. Not because they need it, but so that mind the data.

but you have been pushing complete and utter bullshit very hard despite my initially polite rebuttal

Perhaps you see it as bullshit, but now I think part of the problem is that you were conflating me with Blindseer, causing you to make assumptions about my views and going ballistic. It doesn't help that I generally respond to personal attacks by becoming more abrasive myself.

A lot of the problem is that your posts mostly seem to be attacking me, not my statements. That's bad debating, not very useful. You're not going to change my views by merely doing the equivalent of screaming 'YOU'RE WRONG!!!' at me. I will change them if they turn out to be incorrect, but you're going to have to prove it. Really, that's what I kept asking for. Pointing out avoided power plants a dozen posts ago would have short-circuited a lot of this.

BTW, Hawaii is hitting the 20% mark and the local power company is actually refusing to let more homes with solar panels hook up to the grid. Well, at least requiring permission and thousands of dollars in feasibility studies and grid upgrades, which amounts to the same thing...

These days solar and wind are increasingly filling that niche.

At least in the states, the marginal cost of solar/wind is so low that you want to use as much of it as you can, however it's not 100% reliable(maybe when we get some more interconnects; the continental USA is actually 4-5 power grids right now). We really need more load balancing - things like shutting off high-demand appliances like AC units and water heaters during high demand times*, or even just when solar/wind isn't producing like it normally does.

Hydro in the USA is already pretty much maxed out, and usage is tightly controlled by environmental concerns. It's still a good peaking plant, but we have a severe water shortage in many reservoirs.

So most peaking plants are natural gas, and it's expanding. But that's expensive for electricity. Me, I'm kinda hoping that EOL Tesla batteries can still be used for a number of years to help provide peaking power....

*Though I do advocate solar water heaters.

Earnings out today. iPhone sales up 17% YoY. Like every quarter.

As I say, you're in fantasy land.

For kids, Apple products are something your mom has.

If that is so, what's the problem? Mom is the one with the money, not the kids. It's certainly true that iPhone is more popular with moms than Android is. Do you have something against women? Or just women with children?

Other things iPhone users are more likely to be:

Urban, graduates, liberal, more wealthy, optimists, extroverts, have travelled abroad, be early adopters, have used the internet since the early days, people who backup their data, less gullible to telephone marketers.

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

The data appears to support her stance. Also the "why" matters a great deal. If she doesn't think they're capable of getting in because there's some type of discrimination against them, then no, that's not racist. If she's saying "Because hispanics, like me, are just lazy and stupid," then yeah, that's racism. But I doubt it's the latter.

The thought processes behind the research can often give insight to new data that arises later. Many of Einstein's theories would not be as well understood if not for his correspondence with other notable scientists of his day.

Funny you should mention that. Einstein's theory of relativity was also subject to these dirty tricks by right wingers.

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

The right wing propagandists were just as wrong and just as dirty back then as they are now.

Spending 2 minutes reading Feinstein's Wiki page discounts any possible claim you have of "extraordinary". You could not possibly be claiming that everything I stated was dependent on Feinstein explicitly stating one sentence in one way, because that would be idiocy.

Here are One, two, three references, all of politicians calling for the death of Snowden (and one of those contains 6 references).

I can not find the exact quote from Feinstein either, but this is not uncommon nor does it make my statement wrong. Feinstein called Snowden a traitor, which has a punishment of the death penalty. If Feinstein was not a supporter of the death penalty I may cut some slack. Her Wiki page speaks for her very well.

Feinstein is a supporter of capital punishment.

Even assuming she did not state "kill him" directly, there is a very obvious indirect statement by her calling him a traitor (on numerous occasions).

Just because the article is a terrible piece objectively and doesn't link to any hard data doesn't mean the data doesn't exist. There are plenty of data to suggest that tablet use isn't the best for kids' brains. Enough evidence to suggest that ANYTHING else would be better, including (OHMYGAWD) playing with LEGOs.

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

how about dog on man gun violence?

the explicit purpose of guns is to harm others, in this case creatures inclusive. but how many hunters are there? and how many pistols? and how many assault rifles? you don't need 16 rounds to take down a deer, or a handgun. the explicit purpose of guns that aren't meant for hunting, is for harm, or the threat of harm.

also, generally you need someone else's help if you want to kill a man with words, you just need a gun to kill a man with a bullet.

don't be facetious. if nobody had guns, the gubermint still won't take your freedom, your neighbor would be no more murderous than the day before, and you'd go on living the way you've been living... just without as much fun, cuz guns really are awesome. but japan looks fine, and australia hasn't burned to the ground yet... unless you just believe you have more need to defend yourself against those savage americans than australians have to defend themselves from their countrymen, or japanese to defend against japanese.

Once upon a time in the 1990s the US wanted its citizens to file taxes for free. The IRS was preparing a system for web-based filing.

That's when a company called Intuit got involved. They lobbied and lobbied, and soon the free IRS system was in the garbage. In exchange, Intuit had to provide a free option for lower/middle class citizens. Of course, they didn't have to actually tell anyone about it. Over the next decade, they lobbied and lobbied to protect their business interest and got that income level for the free software lowered...

The program still exists, but Intuit has been lobbying to keep tax filing hard, certainly harder than necessary. Why have government actually perform its essential service for free when the private market can double the effort at greater expensive for the profit of a few? And stress people out all at the same time?

Fuck you, Intuit.

Congress needs to establish a commission of inquiry to help us identify people who don't agree with gay marriage, so they can be outed and ostracized. You know the routine: "Are you, or have you ever been, a conservative/orthodox/fundamentalist Christian, Muslim, or Jew?"

As we find these scumbags, we can work to deny them the right to start businesses in our cities like Rahm Emmanuel did in Chicago. Some of them are artisans: we can attempt to commission artistic works in conflict with their beliefs, and sue them into oblivion when they refuse. We can pressure them to resign from their jobs.

As recent Obama voters, it's not like we're huge hypocrites or anything. Please understand that the Democratic party is about democracy -- that's why we rejoice that California's popularly-voted Proposition 8 was overturned by a few activist judges. And we're about tolerance -- that's why we're trying to drive Christians, Muslims, and Jews out of public life by destroying their ability to hold jobs or participate in commerce.

Sharyl Attkisson (formerly of the Washington bureau for CBS News) explains it here.

They don't want hard hitting stories. They're cowed, either by government and political forces or corporate forces and pressure groups.

Uhh.. The point of the article is that her op-ed is disingenuous and doesn't correspond to what she has said over the years. Quoting from that op-ed to argue that the article writer isn't giving her true position... well, that's not really grasping the chain of argument here.

The reality is that she's been virulently anti-vaccine over a long period, has played a real part in convincing others to forego vaccination, and is now trying to sell us on something like "she didn't really mean it that way", and pretending she's always held some more moderate position. I mean, go read stuff she wrote years ago.

I did. Did you? Here's a quote from her in January 2011:

Why aren't there any tests out there on the safety of how vaccines are administered in the real world, six at a time? Why have only 2 of the 36 shots our kids receive been looked at for their relationship to autism? Why hasn't anyone ever studied completely non-vaccinated children to understand their autism rate?
These missing safety studies are causing many parents to approach vaccines with moderation. Why do other first world countries give children so many fewer vaccines than we do? What if a parent used the vaccine schedule of Denmark, Norway, Japan or Finland -- countries that give one-third the shots we do (12 shots vs. 36 in the U.S.)? Vaccines save lives, but might be harming some children -- is moderation such a terrible idea?

That seems to coincide with what she's saying now - that she's in favor of slower and reduced vaccination schedules.

Similarly, here's the transcript of her Larry King appearance, where she says (emphasis added):

CARREY: We are not saying don't vaccinate. That's the thing we want to get really clear right now with ...
KING: Let's make it clear.
MCCARTHY: Yeah, we're not.
CARREY: This is the thing. There's a lot of misdirection going on. We hear the Campbell Browns and people like this that are saying, you can't not vaccinate. No one has ever suggested not vaccinating.
MCCARTHY: Go back to 1989 schedule when shots were only 10 and the MMR was on that list. I don't know what happened in 1990, there was no plague that was killing children that we had to triple the amount of vaccines.

Again, that's not anti-vaccination generally, that's opposed to the current schedule. Farther down in the transcript:

HANDLEY: Larry, it's on the old schedule. We welcome the people doing the measles and mumps shot.
KING: You want the measles and mumps shots ...
HANDLEY: Absolutely.
CARREY: Vaccinate for the measles, vaccinate ...
KING: So people are overreacting in canceling that vaccine.
CARREY: Absolutely, and vaccinate for polio. That is on the '89 schedule. But what happened after that?
MCCARTHY: But things like the rotavirus which is a diarrhea vaccine, we say really?
CARREY: If you have access to clean water and health care, it's very difficult to die of diarrhea.

Again, that was 2011. If she's in favor of measles, mumps, and polio vaccinations, it's tough to claim she's anti-vaccination, and you can't really claim she's changed her story by saying she's not anti-vaccination now.

Now, let me be clear - I disagree with her about the science, and don't believe that the vaccinations contain toxins that must be "cleaned out" between rounds, nor do I think there's any link between autism and vaccination. I also think that many of the new vaccinations are great and should be given to kids, such as the HPV vaccination. But this isn't a dichotomy - she's clearly not "anti-vaccination" in any general sense, and she doesn't appear to have changed her argument at all from "let's space out vaccinations and return to the fewer number that were given in the 80s". I can disagree with her without having to call her a liar.

Nice fairy tale. The IRS had their budget cut and the chances of being audited is the lowest it has been in years, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/....

Now, you probably think this is a good thing, except that the sainted American people will do anything to cheat on their taxes. Whether you like it or not, much of higher and lower education rely on taxes, as does most fundamental research. But Congress has been cutting that as well because research grows on trees, right.

And the problem isn't with the IRS, it is with the tax code. Congresses and Presidents have written that. The last simplification happened because Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan agreed to simplify it and rammed it through Congress, although it took them several years. The current crop of congresscritters cannot agree on where the sun rises, good luck in simplification.

When I had a T-Mobile G1 phone with the lovely five-row hardware keyboard AND prior to "no texting and driving" laws going into place, I could cruise down a highway with low to moderate traffic, texting away for the entire ride, and still watch everything going on around me. I did this regularly. I could see every brake light and every erratic movement. I could also easily drop my phone and jerk the wheel if someone nearby got way too unstable. I'd hold the phone at the top of the wheel with both hands on the wheel and the phone at the same time, and my field of view included both the tiny phone screen and the massive windshield.

Hardware keyboards made this relatively safe, as I could type text very accurately without looking except to check periodically. No five-second distractions. On-screen keyboards ruined this; now I have to deal with an inaccurate touchscreen and pray that my auto-correction works properly (and that I didn't hit a letter that auto-corrected to the wrong word!) Texting while driving became a traffic ticket, on top of the demise of the hardware keyboard. Now I can't text at all; it's not safe because I'd have to hide it and on-screen keyboards are difficult to use without a great deal of focus.

People don't stop texting while driving when it's illegal. They get smart and do the texting well out of view of an officer, which means you have the long distraction of on-screen keyboards and looking far away from your driving environment to read and write combined. The perfect storm of texting while driving, and it's the drive for thin phones and banning texting while driving that caused it. Then cops do this shit which illustrates the utter ridiculousness of the situation. If you have to buy big pimpin' SUVs to catch people texting while driving, maybe you should consider whether you're attacking the root of the problem or just one of the symptoms.

You can't stop people from texting while driving, so my solution is as follows. Drivers would need to not text when in heavy traffic or poor weather, which I think is really stupid in the first place and should be common sense. Phones need to return to slide-out 4-5 row hardware keyboards which allow the typing to happen without requiring concentration on it. Texting while driving should be made legal as long as it happens in such a way that the driver's eyes are still within the general "windshield field of view" while doing it, which means hands would have to be on the wheel and peripheral vision would be doing its job.

This would be the safest combination. You will never stop people from texting while driving. Punishment is not a deterrent. No one thinks they're going to get in trouble for minor shit like this until they actually do; why not greatly reduce the risk involved instead of increasing it with laws that ban it? Then again, they still haven't understood this concept about marijuana and other currently illegal drugs, so I suppose we should expect no less.

But good luck scaring the kids! It might even last for a few hours until they figure out we've dumped a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere for the past decade with almost no upswing in temperature. Once you realize that, you start caring about real pollution again instead of hating on poor old carbon so much.

The people denying man made climate change are also the same dickholes that refuse to enact or properly enforce job-killing regulations on "real pollution".
Look at the recent shit show in North Carolina with Duke Energy and the Republican Governor as a prime example.
Or those idiots in Texas who can't be bothered to inspect massive stockpiles of fertilizer that blow up towns.

story

If we didn't have H. Clinton in charge of the State Department for 4 years we would have an additional 6 billion that they lost. Yep, a single department lost that much over 4 years and no one is accountable, once again.

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').

I am disconnecting anything which I have which still points to DropBox since I haven't used it in a while anyway.

And I am going to install their app on my parents' phones too now, whereas before I only had it my own.

You might as well appoint Alberto Gonzales as a Constitutional scholar and privacy expert.

I'll certainly take Mr. Gonzales over Mr. Holder, who, without being much of an expert in anything (not even manners or sense of decorum), presided over dramatic expansion of warrant-less surveillance.

Actually, last year, we got surpassed by Mexico. We're number two now! Sadly, it's not because we got any healthier. They just got fatter.

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

Or maybe he just doesn't want it to stop.

I tend to agree with this. They could have repealed the patriot act when Obama first got into office, but all the democrats did was trash talk the right about it and focus on health care. In fact, when the time came, Obama chose to extend the patriot act another four more years. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Or the left wing scream. When the patriot act extension was passed, Harry Reid was busy with comments like "When the clock strikes midnight tomorrow, we would be giving terrorists the opportunity to plot attacks against our country, undetected," speaking about those evil tea party republicans holding the law up trying to amend it while tea party candidates like Rand Paul was asking whether the nation "should have some rules that say before they come into your house, before they go into your banking records, that a judge should be asked for permission, that there should be judicial review? Do we want a lawless land?"

Of course Obama has taken Bush's programs to new heights while arguing legal interpretations of wording to justify the bulk collection of data. One outraged republican said "the suggestion that the administration can violate the law because Congress failed to object is outrageous."

Please stop making excuses for this behavior. Especially when it is pretty easy to find examples that cause them to fail. Plenty of republicans as well as democrats appose this crap. The tea party members actually attempted to limit it at one time but were ignored and scoffed at out of spite. Obama is not running for office any more. If he actually thought the programs some of which were created under his watch, some were expanded from the previous administration, were wrong, then he would not defend them and simply not care about what the republicans or democrats thought and end them as the chief executive officer of the land.

You are right, freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. However, I'd argue that there is a difference between spouting a view in a public forum and supporting a cause through what should be an anonymous donation. Should I be persecuted for voting Democrat? What about voting for or giving money to gay marriage? It cuts both ways remember.

You could be. Here's a church telling you what is in store for you:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/w...

Here's a fellow who lost his job for being a Democrat

http://www.newsobserver.com/20...

Yeah, being gay is a reason for being fired too

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

Your argument is specious anyhow, because he wasn't fired. He quit.

I am a lesbian and I still think hounding Eich for standing for Prop. 8 and threatening to boycott a cornerstone of the internet and internet development if he was CEO of the Mozilla foundation is complete and utter intolerant bullshit. I am very disappointed with people doing such things and disappointed he caved to such.

I am straight (though I'm not sure that sexual orientation really matters since it's a matter of supporting human rights -- I could be against homosexuality yet still support homosexual marriage) and I think that if you don't believe in someone's views (especially a public figure like the CEO of a well known organization), you definitely should speak out against his views and not support his product.

Everyone should have the right to support whatever cause they want to support, just like everyone should have the right to *not* support that cause or the people that support it or even outright protest it. Some supporters of gay marriage have also faced outrage and boycotts, so why should opponents of gay marriage not expect the same? Or should we all just keep quiet when some cause offends us?

I mean, Fox-News-claiming-Bush-kept-us-safe-from-terrorist-attacks breathtaking. As in you cannot believe that someone just said something that brazen with a straight face.

No, they didn't, but it was obvious to everybody and clear from history that the USA wasn't interested in annexing Iraq into US territory.

Nah, they just forced Iraq to privatize it's oil industry and sell it off to for-profit foreign interests. Because America's record post WWII has been that of a rampaging imperialistic shitbag that has all the power of a British Empire without any of the responsibilities. Rather than setting up a colonial government, which might actually do shit like build roads and schools, you just overthrow dozens of governments, including democratically elected ones, to get those sufficiently subservient to your "national interests".

So the comparison to what Russia has done with part of Ukraine is a false one.

No shit. America got a million people killed in Iraq, created millions more refugees, and bombed the country into the stone age. Call us when Putin does the same or starts having 16 year old kids murdered on the other side of the planet from Moscow.

They split up a sovereign country, then annexed parts of it after invading it.

The hell they did. Any reason in particular you're ignoring the illegal, western-backed coup of Ukraine's democratically elected president less than 6 months before the next elections? Aside from all that, if Russia "invaded" Crimea by moving troops to a navel base covered under an existing treaty with Ukraine, than the United States has been busy invading western europe and Japan for over 60 years.

It takes some serious neocon balls (with a hefty dose of willful dumfuckery) to treat the self-appointed junta in Ukraine as a legitimate organization, while flatly ignoring the fact that the people of Crimea just overwhelmingly voted to join Russia. This is invariably countered with some BS about how this vote was done "at the end of a gun barrel", ignoring the fact that the the first things the junta did after sizing power was to strip Crimea of it's autonomy and start oppressing minorities. And ignoring the fact that the United States has 900 military bases throughout the world and special forces operating in more than half the world's countries.

Seems clear to me that Iraq remains it's own entity, despite the US winning decisive military actions in Iraq TWICE.

You mean after the Wikileaks cables showed Bush giving free reign to death squads, after the U.S. built military bases and a fortress of an embassy, and made it clear that it would re-invade on a moments notice from military bases in surrounding countries in the event of 'instability'?

Time and time again, the USA has taken territory it could have just kept for itself, but we insist on giving it back to puppet governments it set up after forcing the privatization of industries and infrastructure.

FTFY. Compare how many governments Russia has overthrown since the fall of the Soviet Union, and get back to us. How many countries has Russia bombed or invaded. How many people Putin is keeping in gulags, and force feeding them (which is torture), after they've been cleared for release since 2007? Is Russia violating the sovereignty of nations thousands of miles away from it by bombing innocent people inside them with impunity?

The United States lecturing modern Russia about imperialism is like Jack the Ripper lecturing Alec Baldwin on how to treat women.

The response

But laying this at the feet of "The Left" much less Obama is utter horseshit

Not really, no. This tactic of destroying people's livehoods by virtue of internet slacktivism is unquestionably a page out of the leftist playbook.

You're kidding right?

• Conservative groups call for national boycott of Girl Scout cookies
• Don't Buy Liberalism
• Talk of a religous conservative boycott of Delta, Home Depot and Coke
• American Family Association: Boycotts
• Conservative Group Calls for Boycott of Ben & Jerry's 'Schweddy Balls' Flavor
• Don’t Do Business with Progressive Appeasers
• Oreo Cookies' Gay Pride Backlash: 25 Companies And Products Boycotted For Supporting LGBT Rights

If you think that only liberals boycott companies and people they disagree with, you are living in a cognitive bubble.

It's just the latest Chik-Fil-A.

Well then, it looks like a rosy future for Mozilla.

Chick-Fil-A Sales Soar In 2012 Despite Bad PR

We're talking about uber-rich rich, the ones that have hundreds of millions in the bank - THEY are mostly Republican.

Not true.

In fact, 8 of the 10 richest Congressional districts are long-time Democratic strongholds.

From the article:

...in Congress, the wealthiest among us are more likely to be represented by a Democrat than a Republican. Of the 10 richest House districts, only two have Republican congressmen. Democrats claim the top six, sprinkled along the East and West coasts. Most are in overwhelmingly Democratic states like New York and California.

The richest: New York's 12th Congressional District, which includes Manhattan's Upper East Side, as well as parts of Queens and Brooklyn. Democrat Carolyn Maloney is in her 11th term representing the district.

What I envision is a sci-fi battle where Google laser beams are attempting to shoot down Facebook drones.

I envision Zuckerberg teaming up with these guys... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Lasers mounted on SHARK Drones for world domination.

Easy, just dope the whales with some radioactive materials. Not enough to harm the whales but enough so the japanese will be too scared to eat them.

You're too late. The Japanese already thought of that idea.

Come on, it was a hoax

Maybe that's why so many rich people commit suicide.

Is this a thing, or is my snark detector out of phase again?

This story Suicides are more common in wealthy neighborhoods went around a couple years ago. If you read past the headline, it means that the poorer people in the rich neighborhoods were more likely to suicide than someone making the same income in a poor neighborhood. Suicide increases from failing to keep up with the Joneses.

Now, if you could provide a study that actually broke down who was using the health care system and how, I'd love to see it.

Most of the studies I've seen have shown that everything is simply marked up insanely (and almost entirely arbitrarily): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

So more or less like this: http://www.southparkstudios.co...

And rather than doing something about it, like forcing competition or transparency in costs, we've just spread the enormous cost across paying taxpayers (very similar to Social Security and Medicare, which just absorb the massive costs, efficiency be damned).

You "intend" to have the money "when" misfortune strikes. Yet by its very nature, you have no idea when misfortune will strike, whether multiple misfortunes will strike, or the scale of the cost. Or do you seriously contend that everyone should strive to have millions in savings just in case? Because anything less is unreasonable. Insurance is more of a risk pool precisely because of that and not merely for even "catastrophic" emergency because such a term because untenable very quickly on the cost of many medical procedures.

That is entirely untrue. Scale matters. You're trying to pretend everything out there is a million dollar expense and it simply isn't. Maternity care, for instance, while expensive, is not a bankruptcy causing condition. And it's oft (80%: http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs...) seen coming ahead of time. So why then is "insurance" mandated to cover it? Moreover, why are my premiums paying for it, a childless adult with no intention of having children? This is just one such example. There are others.

For the former, you can't get blood from a stone.

Except that's disingenuous. The definition of "poor" has slid significantly so far over the years to the point than you can have a home of your own, two cars, and a vacation or two a year -- AND STILL PAY NO TAXES (http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/29/pf/taxes/who-doesnt-pay-federal-income-taxes/). 12% of people who pay no taxes make between 50 and 100k a year. There's plenty of blood in that stone.

I would be if I actually thought any health care law passed in the US would do such a thing.

But wasn't that the whole point of the law? Yes we can and all that? Grandiose change was exactly what his whole administration was supposed to be about. In fact, ACA, even as written, is one of the most sweeping, drastic changes we've ever seen to our healthcare since Medicare. The only problem is that it's a huge negative change rather than a positive. It cemented us permanently into the existing system rather than attempting to reform it.

Actually, it's most strongly linked to age as is stroke most strongly linked to age. "It is estimated that 82 percent of people who die of coronary heart disease are 65 and older."

That's a terrible yardstick. All sicknesses get worse with age. Just because someone dies at 65+ doesn't mean the stuff they did between age 1 and age 64 didn't help get them there. Let's take two groups of people: The first is a bunch of generally fit athletic people who take care of themselves, the second is a group of fat slobs who don't exercise. On average, who develops heart disease and when? That's a relevant test.

So, cut all the health care to the old since invariably they're the ones we all know inevitable should be accountable for their age.

You scoff, but the

I don't know any actual christians who think God has spoken to them directly.

Please. Here's a very famous and prominent Christian who claims exactly that God speaks to him. Regularly.

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

Problem is, God's pulling his leg. But it's not just Ol' Pat. Many American Christians believe God speaks to them:

https://www.christiancourier.c...

They're openly considering actual psychoactive dosing now. Lithium might still be in testing, but they're certainly planting the rhetoric for future handwaving of dissent at least. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Maybe not. The complaints and hugely embarrassing (too obvious?) political fixes have finally drawn in a Federal grand jury .. for what that's worth.

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

I'm in Nawth Ca'lina; hope something works out. I wonder if anyone has a clue as to how to clean a river once it's been polluted by sludge like this? Vacuum the bottom?

Revealed: secret plan to push'happy' pills
http://www.theguardian.com/soc...

Big Pharma Could Win International Price Monopoly, Unlimited Profits in 'Free Trade' Deal
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

US patent moves are 'profoundly bad' in leaked TPP treaty
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1...

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a proposed free trade agreement under negotiation between Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam. Leaked documents show the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) is pressuring TPP countries to expand pharmaceutical monopoly protections and trade away access to medicines.
http://www.citizen.org/TPPA

The medical industry the third-leading cause of death in the United States; after heart disease and cancer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Big Pharma Shamelessly Shills Dangerous Bone Drugs You Don't Need
http://www.alternet.org/story/...

The H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic: Manipulating the Data to Justify a Worldwide Public Health Emergency
http://www.globalresearch.ca/t...

"Somewhere in Rayong or Chon Buri on the coast of Thailand, a young woman may at this very moment be baring her arm for a shot of an experimental Aids vaccine that many of the leading scientists in the field say categorically has no hope at all of working.

She will be one of 16,000 volunteers recruited for the second large-scale Aids vaccine trial, a $119m exercise many scientists believe is a farce."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/scie...

Fraud has become so endemic in this country that it's woven its way into America’s DNA. 2). Big Pharma Fraud.
http://www.alternet.org/story/...

Drug Makers New Targets for U.S. Fraud Inquiries, Report Says
http://prescriptions.blogs.nyt...

Merck drew up a "hit list" of doctors that needed to be "neutralized" because they criticized the now banned drug Vioxx.
http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Merck invents its own journal to publish bogus research findings to promote it's own products.
http://blog.bioethics.net/2009...

Why Aren't These Fraudulent Papers Retracted?
http://truth-out.org/news/item...

Doubts about Johns Hopkins research have gone unanswered, scientist says
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

A National Survey of Physician–Industry Relationships
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...

I'm guessing he also wants them to overlook criminal convictions in their hiring process?

As we can see, the incarceration rates for African-Americans is much higher than the general population.

It is easy to just brush it aside as it being a sign of the inferiority of Black Culture in the US - like how "those people" do not value education or being smart.

Granted, there is (some) truth in stereotypes, but I just have to ask why? Is it really true that it is believed that being smart is acting "white" in that community? Is that attitude a way of dealing with lack of opportunities - sour grapes "I really don't want to be an engineer because it's acting white."

Now, I'm sure there will be folks that will jump all over the "lack of opportunities" stated above and point out all the scholarships and the affirmative action policies of universities. Much of that IS true; no doubt. What I'm talking about is education UP TO college.

It sucks in black neighborhoods.

But wait! There's more! There is the family unit. With so many Black men in jail, it's pretty hard to have stable families.

Side note: Now I am over simplifying a very complex problem for a Slashdot post - but the theme is something we all can understand.

Anyway back to incarceration rates. It's the way Black neighborhoods are policed and our idiotic drug laws.

And as we all know, in this society, jail birds are fucked for the rest of their lives and you can kiss ANY decent paying work good-bye forever.

So, we as a society can just say (by implication) there are no minorities because they have inferior character or we can actually work to solve the problem.

Yeah, I thought so. Sorry Black people, you're fucked.

"Male Homosexuality Study: Gay Men Have Evolutionary Benefit For Their Families, New Research Suggests"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/12/why-are-there-gay-men_n_1590501.html

Again, who do you guys think you're kidding? Cops who kidnap and sexually assault people don't get hauled in front of a jury by a DA, they get promoted.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/03/john-mccain-poker_n_3862592.html

While I ponder why the parent got modded down, here are some citations to support those claims...

Universal background checks
"Public Option" healthcare
Minimum wage increase

Admittedly, I was just "guesstimating" the numbers above from vague memory, but as the links here show, I'm right in the ballpark on all of them.

It would be nice to see a lucid argument, rather than just getting down-modded reflexively.

This would be the same Eric Schmidt who said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."?

And now we're expected to believe him, when he says he's keeping us safe from letting anyone know what we're doing? He killed a lot of trust with the original comment. He just killed a whole lot more.

He's also the same guy who said in self righteous indignation that guns should be banned from the citizenry; then a few minutes later breathlessly stated how the ubiquitous cell phone will improve humanity and government accountability.

"Imagine how the tragedy of millions being beheaded in Somalia could have been averted if everyone there had had a cell phone." [Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, 2013]

An interesting bit of synchronicity here. If you go to the link above you'll see this as to where the Goliath was used:

First Battle: Sevastopol

Sevastopol is in Crimea, Ukraine, where Russian troops have recently moved in as they did in Finland. In both cases, Finland and Ukraine, the Russians (nee Soviets) said they were there to fight fascism. That would be so much more convincing if they didn't have this going on:

Russia: Far-Right Nationalists And Neo-Nazis March In Moscow

I doubt that the Ukrainians will give the sort of bloody nose to the Russians that the Finns did in the Winter War.

The Soviet-Finnish Winter War
Battlefield Scandinavia the Forgotten Front Finnish Winter War

This would be the same Eric Schmidt who said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."?

And now we're expected to believe him, when he says he's keeping us safe from letting anyone know what we're doing?

He killed a lot of trust with the original comment.

He just killed a whole lot more.

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

The great recession of 2009 became the justification of many companies to lay off workers despite healthy revenue and increasing profits. While this may contribute to the GDP, it doesn't do much for employment.

Last I checked, The Gubment isn't using drones to send hellfire missiles into American Citizen's homes without Judicial Review.

Check again; Anwar al Awlaki was an American citizen who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen.

Oh, I get it - you mean they haven't drone-struck (striked?) any American citizen on American soil! Well, technically, that is correct, although I recall it being discussed during the manhunt of Christopher Dorner, and in fact the President and Attorney General have already discussed the legality of such an action - they agree that it would be legal to murder US citizens without trial, on American soil.

Which means it's only a matter of time before it happens. Government types aren't likely to give up a power once they've established it.

Two points:

1) It's not murder if it's legal, by definition, so you've inserted your conclusion into your argument.

2) If cops can kill a guy in a shoot-out, why wouldn't they have the ability to kill him with a sniper rifle? If they can do it with a rifle, why can't they do it with the mechanical aid of a scope? If they can use that mechanical aid, why can't they use the mechanical aid of a drone?

The key question here has nothing to do with drone technology, it's do the cops/Army/etc. ever have the ability to blow the shit out of some dude who is not actively trying to kill them. And they do. If they have an honest belief that you're an insane serial killer who will open up on the next person you see, they can take your ass out. If they turn out to be wrong your family will get a really nice settlement check, but that doesn't mean they all get arrested for murder.

The citation you mention did not have anything to do with the statistics I mentioned, but something to read regarding the industry as a whole. Unless you meant a citation outside of what you replied to. That source mentions released information from CDC which you can go read for yourself.

Like most of life, vaccination vs. anti-vaccination is not a clear black and white issue. If you are educated you may change your opinion and that is your right. I'm not claiming vaccines should be outlawed as you seem to be implying, I'm claiming that people should have a freedom of choice to make educated decisions.

Lets go back to Gardasil. First, there are many potential permant side effects with the vaccine. Chronic permanent migraine headaches are one, sterilization is another, and chronic fatigue syndrome is another. A complete list is here. When you separate them out the numbers look pretty low. However if you have a 1 in 10,000 chance of getting any one of these things the risk from the vaccine is really 3/10,000 and not 1/10,000. Extrapolate that out further, and suddenly it's not a 1 in a million chance of something happening. This is basic mathematics and should not provide any challenge to you.

To go a bit further, the vaccine only prevents certain types of cervical cancer and not all cervical cancer. Claiming any number of saved lives due to the vaccine is simply fallacy.

Sure, numbers can be skewed in either direction to try to make "my way" should be the rule. I have not argued that "my way" should be the rule, I have advocated educated choice. You on the other hand are advocating no choice and no education.

Again, that does not mean vaccines are evil and should be banned. That means that people should be aware of the risks and be able to choose whether or not they want to get the vaccine. Let me extract that same advocacy and question from a different source here.

The HPV vaccine is at least as safe, if not safer, than the other recommended vaccines in use today in the U.S. Is it 100% safe? Of course not. No medical intervention is. And anybody demanding (or offering) absolute guarantees doesn't understand medicine. Because like it or not, all medical interventions have risks. There will always be someone who is allergic to something or doesn't respond properly or who has something going on that we don't know about. Medicine is not one-fits-all, and so there will be risks for some people. The big question is: do the benefits outweigh those risks?

Since those risks are not _yours_ why not drop the "do it my way" nonsense and let people choose?

Last I checked, The Gubment isn't using drones to send hellfire missiles into American Citizen's homes without Judicial Review.

Check again; Anwar al Awlaki was an American citizen who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen.

Oh, I get it - you mean they haven't drone-struck (striked?) any American citizen on American soil! Well, technically, that is correct, although I recall it being discussed during the manhunt of Christopher Dorner, and in fact the President and Attorney General have already discussed the legality of such an action - they agree that it would be legal to murder US citizens without trial, on American soil.

Which means it's only a matter of time before it happens. Government types aren't likely to give up a power once they've established it.

... to "gotta-pay-for-those-social-welfare-benefits" dept.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/21/air-conditioning-military-cost-nasa_n_881828.html

So? I agree that NASA should have a larger budget in proportion, but if you're going to have a military so big, I don't want everyone to have heatstroke in the desert.