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Would you be supportive of immigration controls that are effective, such as random ID checks and fines for employers of illegal immigrants?

I'm very much in favor of cripplingly high fines for employers of illegal immigrants. The way I see it, they are the cause of the biggest problems with said illegal immigration. If employers are hiring illegals instead of Americans, they're doing so because they can hire them for less than minimum wage while not paying for required benefits and employment taxes. This creates a second-class citizen situation: yes, we get cheaper products, but we do so because we're supporting a type of slave labor where illegal immigrants are forced to earn significantly below the cost of living for their region, which is why you see them having to group up several families in a one-family house. They don't complain about any abuse or safety violations at their work place because they fear deportation is found out.

Random ID checks, not so much. It's unconstitutional to perform a warrant-less search, and this is what it amounts to. If you have cause to perform a check on someone's resident / citizenship status, then you perform it, such as when hiring a new employee.

That said, I'm not a Democrat. So gauging my opinion on the above isn't a representative sample of that if it's what you're looking for.

Besides, even if it's not perfect, a one-time $5 billion is peanuts compared to the cost of hosting illegal immigrants. Even the liberal politifact says the costs is between $43 to $279 billion per year [politifact.com]. Over the lifetime of the wall, which is probably 20 years or more, that's 0.0008% to 0.005%. So the wall only has to be 0.005% effective to save us money, which it certainly will be. Heck, even Trump's rhetoric about building the wall is more than 0.005% effective.

The $5 billion isn't for a complete border wall. It's what he's asking to build a section of it right now. The estimates are at $25 billion. And it's not a sunk cost. It's not like you build the wall then don't do anything for 20 years. You have maintenance, you have patrolling. Smugglers build tunnels to get past existing patrols. People vandalize existing barriers to get through right now.

Most importantly, even if you're right, and it would save us money, as I've stated, it's not the hot path for illegal immigration. If you apply those funds elsewhere, you can save more money. Trump talked about the cost of drug trafficking, but the majority of that cost would go away for free if we ended the drug war and just legalized all drugs. That would do away with enforcement costs, leaving only the societal costs. Taxation of those sales can be used to offset those societal costs.

Basically, it's not just a question of whether there are positive gains from investing the money on a border wall. Even if we have the money, there's an opportunity cost to not investing it someplace else with a higher return on investment. You'd think a businessman like Trump would understand that concept.

Except when they use their political influence to get the city to reject managed retreat as a coastal erosion adaptation strategy. Guess who those homeowners expect to pay to rebuild the coastline?

That isn't even the hottest temperature on earth, death valley which is 300' below sea level has always had the highest temperature record for earth.

Logically, that's not possible, since Death Valley hasn't always existed. Historically, it is actually untrue. There was a period where a site in Libya had the record, with a temperature of 58 C (136 F). You can still find it in numerous copies of the Guinness Book of World Records. However, it was disqualified after research indicated it was flawed.

The hottest air temperature ever recorded in Death Valley was 134 F (56.7 C) on July 10, 1913, at Furnace Creek, which is the hottest atmospheric temperature ever recorded on earth. During the heat wave that peaked with that record, five consecutive days reached 129 F (54 C) or above.

Unfortunately, that's also a bit doubtful, as the temperature is believed to be 4-5 degrees lower.

Sorry, but it seems you and oolorie are a bit mistaken.

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2014/...

Californiaâ(TM)s eighth place showing in 2013 tells the story of the stateâ(TM)s comeback after years of hard knocks starting in 2007.

"Levy said California is poised to overtake the fifth and sixth largest economies this year."

And...the prior certs are outdated. As of June, it's the 7th largest economy.
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.c...

"California Bounces Back As Worldâ(TM)s 7th Largest Economy, Larger Than Brazil"

There's really a knife's edge dividing the 5th and below economies. California could easily become the 4th largest with a small increase.

However, it's unlikely to exceed that of the U.S., China, Germany, and Japan. Especially since any gains it sees will also increase the U.S. so by definition, it can never be #1.

I'm not finding a lot of support for the california doom and gloom scenario.

I'm a texan who's been to california once in my life so no axe to grind here.

"I've always been concerned about people who can't see the negative side of all the "green", modern technologies today."

And I've found such people exist primarily in the imaginations of the people who complain about them.(I'll concede there may be some exceptions, see Einstein and the limits of human stupidity) Look, anyone with grey cells knows that windmills don't magically spring up from the ground, they have to be manufactured, and manufacturing creates pollution, especially in countries that find it inconvenient to regulate it. The question isn't "are windmills perfect?", it's "Do windmills have a smaller carbon/environmental footprint than using coal to create the same amount of power?" The consensus seems to be yes, they do.

As for the Prius, its environmental impact has been debated to death and yes, it is greener than your pickup.

Finally, "green" and "modern technologies" aren't equivalent. I'm pretty sure the president of Exxon Mobil owns a cell phone, and just as sure he couldn't give two farts about being green. The fact that tech creates pollution is not a blanket indictment of green tech. I do agree that replacing your phone every two years is wasteful, it would be nice if phone carriers provided an incentive to keep your old phone instead of the 2-year churn. They may be getting there, when my two years with AT&T was up I got a new contract that gave me a break for using my old phone.

Look, I enjoy a good football game. It's something my parents and I have done from time to time, usually as the playoffs get closer. I also live in an NFL city, home to a lousy team which had to resort to trickery to get their stadium seating numbers to a point where they could sell / give away / foist tickets on people enough to lift the blackouts, plural.

I won't call it trickery, but when the 72-hour blackout deadline approaches, someone might decide to purchase the remaining tickets to avoid the sellout. Unlike this example, the company that usually buys the tickets is the local TV station who wants to broadcast the game.

I haven't heard of a team dropping ticket prices("give away") to avoid the blackout. I'm guessing this is because the NFL haven't reach the point where it's profitable to do that-- even with today's broadcast revenue.

Help me out here - those of you who live where /good/ teams are, don't you normally avoid blackouts because your team is worth watching? Wouldn't it be the stinkers that have to be propped up by rules like this?

Yes, having a good team(or at least a competitive team) for the season does help avoid blackouts. But that's not the only reason. A team that is located in an area with a large population will usually have enough of a fanbase to sellout consistently--even if the team is bad. Being the "only game in town" also helps.

I found this page on the last time each team had a blackout.

Interesting when the last blackout occurred for the 49ers, Bears and Cowboys-- about one to two years before a Super Bowl winning season.

Yeah, but would the rate have kept rising if she hadn't stuck her two cents in?

I don't know, but the that the trend started decades before strongly suggests it as I've seen no evidence of anything in work that would have slowed, stopped, or reversed it..
 

It does look like the change of vaccine type had a role here, per the marked CDC graph. But how many of those cases are unvaccinated vs vaccinated??

In San Diego 85% of the cases reported in 2014 involve individuals with up-to-date immunizations. There's a lot more going on here than simple immunization rate.

It seems like at least a few states us a thing called the "Average Daily Attendance" to track how many kids are actually going to school. Then this is the number that is actually used when allocating funding to the school. Here's a story about how much 1 student being chronically absent costs the school (87 days missed, school lost $2464).

This isn't all the funding a school gets, but it is part of it.

You are assuming 60 years of continued economic growth (averaged out). What if that paradigm is wrong, if we are at the downslope of a temporary 150 year economic growth fueled by an anomaly of cheap energy (see Peak Oil)?

So I did, how myopia-timistic of me. That's an interesting point because it happens that in 2012 SDG&E grew weary of looking at all that money just sitting there, proposed loosening the rules to allow this fund to play riskier markets for a (hopefully) greater rate of return. In its proposal is a delectable menu of recipes for Wall Street money-goblins to pimp the flava of this low-hanging fruit. This was supposed to be voted on by the Public Utilities Commission but I cannot find the result. I would hope it was HELL NO, and that the suggestion to invest it in derivatives and Real Estate tripped shrieking alarms at the plant.

In a shrinking economy, those future decommissioning costs will loom larger and larger. See also Jared Diamond's Collapse, and John Michael Greer's Long Descent.

Depends who does it and when. If you hire the Mafia and Hell's Angels it would certainly come in on time and under budget. And in a shrinking economy you will find more people willing to face the risks and just get it done. There is a real shortage these days of people and methods that just get out there and do things.

Seriously, I would be willing to go there and take a higher than occupationally permitted cumulative dose of radiation to help them cask the fuel and transport it, reduce the plant to rubble and turn this intricate and beautiful industrial complex into an ugly, desolate public park with horrid little shrubs, useless fountains and despicable art. I'd demand a high wage that would deliver enough money for that span to set my life on a much better course.

We have ways to handle and safely transport highly radioactive substances. Those that exist and better ways we would invent. Life without risk is not worth living, and a world without risk-takers is a world bereft of heroes. Would that be a better world?

The real problem is that there is nowhere to ship and store the casks of waste, so the good people of San Diego country cannot obtain the closure they desire at any price.

I would rather think of this as the Dawn of the Age of Thorium rather than Peak Oil Declining. But the dawn will not arrive unless all of us sing together.

This will be coming to America soon.

What do you mean "SOON"?

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2011/may/18/no-warrant-needed-search-laptops-phones-border-cro/

The 9Th Circuit ruled this unconstitutional, but for now that only applies to the 9th. Other circuits may make other rulings.

"The other important thing to remember is that we will no longer accept cash at any of our branch locations -- no exceptions," http://www.kpbs.org/news/2012/nov/29/san-diego-property-taxes/

I completely agree, because this is a problem that is going to get worse as more people try to remake "victory gardens".

I'd just like to offer up a "good" anecdote, to offer some hope!
http://www.kpbs.org/news/2012/feb/01/san-diego-city-council-approves-backyard-chickens-/

The government's abilities to use finances in creative ways of thwarting science (in particular) continue to amaze me. I was just listening to a broadcast this morning on NPR (KPBS) of "These Days" which discussed various ways, both active and passive, of manipulating research counter to progress.

If you get the chance to listen to it, lemme know what you think.

A lot of organizations are taking advantage of "Web 2.0" technologies, especially since the city/county-run emergency service websites are completely broken or abandoned. The local public radio station KPBS is using Twitter to update listeners with text/SMS emergency information every few minutes. The Port of San Diego is mirroring this information using a javascript-based RSS scraper of the same Twitter feed and is mirroring KPBS's amazing interactive Google map.

What *I* can't understand is why people think that reference books (even Internet ones) are up to date and provide indebatable evidence or proof. They are at best a snapshot of word meanings by a single author or group. The simple fact is that language constantly changes and sometimes you end up with terms that should be opposites (flammable and inflammable) but actually mean the same thing.

Since you seem interested, I refer you to this periodical or even better, this public radio site and specifically the letter that people send in and the responses. You may or may not like it.

What *I* can't understand is why people think that reference books (even Internet ones) are up to date and provide indebatable evidence or proof. They are at best a snapshot of word meanings by a single author or group. The simple fact is that language constantly changes and sometimes you end up with terms that should be opposites (flammable and inflammable) but actually mean the same thing.

Since you seem interested, I refer you to this periodical or even better, this public radio site and specifically the letter that people send in and the responses. You may or may not like it.

:) I actually used m-w.com for their definition of acronym; but indeed their definition of initialism is wrong. I got my information from "A Way With Words" a KPBS radio show.
Joseph Elwell.