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Do you build your own infrastructure or do you use AT&T's (or some one else's) like Sonic ( http://www.latimes.com/busines... ) does? I ask because given the huge costs for a small company in hooking up a hundred square mile region I feel it's quite likely that you use some other company's infrastructure that's only available to you because the FCC forces companies like AT&T to do so. If that's the case then your whole anti government post sort of falls apart.

$4.9 billion in subsidies as of three years ago, and still counting.

"Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, according to data compiled by The Times. The figure underscores a common theme running through his emerging empire: a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups."

http://www.latimes.com/busines...

Solarcity is winding down now, by the way. He hid his ownership interest and then had Tesla shareholders bail him out by acquiring it. Now they are on the hook for Solarcity's billions in debt coming due in a few months.

Among for-profit programs...

There is the problem. Pay attention to the headlines:

More than half of students at for-profit colleges defaulted on loans, study finds

Almost all student loan fraud claims involve for-profit colleges, study finds

The Empty Promises of For-Profit Colleges

http://articles.latimes.com/20...

The next supreme court justice will definitely be pro-corporation.

Corporations will have increasing power over individuals for the rest of our lives.

The current ruling that they are artificial people with all the rights of humans but who can't be imprisoned is already bad enough.

I don't see anyway to stop it so prepare to suffer.

This case seems pretty blatant but age discrimination in the technical field was going on already in 1988. I saw a 45 year old programmer laid off as too old and he couldn't get back into the field then. I decided I needed to be ready to retire by 45. It meant less luxury cars and so on and I missed my goal by 6 years but I was able to retire at 51.

And I was literally laid off one day before I was going to retire.

I was going to retire on january 1 for the five weeks vacation benefits money and had trained two of my team to replace me as manager. In September, the company laid off 90% of programming staff as of december 31st to replace them with Infosys after they had been our "partner" for about five years.

My director never knew why I was so happy to be laid off. I told her I couldn't tell her for legal reasons. She was let go too a few months later.

Some of the people laid off with me have never found a job again and have fallen on very hard times. They were mostly 55+.

I also have another friend who was a manager and being courted by other companies. But once he was laid off, no one was interested in him. He can't even get an interview unless he lies about his age. After six months he tested that. When he lowers his age to the 30s he gets call backs. When he's 40 or older he gets no call backs.

The vast majority of countries are missing their Paris agreement targets.

And globally, the increase in energy production by renewables has pretty much been canceled out by the reduction in nuclear power, meaning the percentage of energy produced by fossil fuels has remained about the same. So if you want someone to blame, blame the anti-nuclear activists.

Charging you the same dollar amount as a sales person or website claimed your bill would be was made a crime in 2015, but those laws were revoked last month by the FCC.

Ajit Pai specifically said it was too difficult for wireless providers to charge the same amount they claimed they would charge you, and it is harming businesses.

So now it's legal to charge you a different amount.

But don't worry, I have it on good authority from thousands of anonymous cowards on slashdot that this was Never a problem in the past and will never be a problem in the future.

https://gizmodo.com/everything...
http://www.latimes.com/busines...

You're assuming that genocide is a genetic trait, when it isn't. Ethics are taught.

Genocide is a word with moral implications. You should ask if the drive to advance your own species / family line over others is a genetic trait. Which it will be, because any species / family with this mentality is going to wipe the floor with one that doesn't.

If we met an advanced space-faring species, what would be their advantage in treating us with respect? Anything they want to know about us they could learn through subjugation. Leaving us to our own devices leaves open the chance that in another 10,000 years we'd be competing with them.

Ethics are taught.

Humans have been warring since they figured out that banding together offered a survival advantage. There were no "ethics", just the drive to survive and propagate.

Who taught our closest relatives, the Chimps, their ethics?
https://www.usatoday.com/story...: https://www.usatoday.com/story...
Murder 'comes naturally' to chimpanzees: https://www.bbc.com/news/scien...
Monkey see, monkey kill: The evolutionary roots of lethal combat: http://www.latimes.com/science...

California raising taxes further to deal with a $52 billion projected backlog of road repairs. I guess having funds to repair 10% of all roads per year isn't enough; we need to raise more funds to deal with the issue - which CA DOT says is 16% of all roads. So somehow funding isn't available to deal with a total 16% backlog (and there is no way in hell that CA DOT is redoing 10% of the roads in California, just drive around and see for yourself).

Venezuela was the richest country in south America.
All the eastern block countries were very prosperous before communism and managed to become rather well off after communism.

The LA Times disagrees with you
http://www.latimes.com/opinion...

Tell me when you say shit that's this wrong do the people you count your friends help you out ? or do they let you persist ?

Are jobs really being lost to automation?

Yes. Or not even created in the first place. See Tesla among other companies that started with 90% automation. A couple of decades ago they would have hired a lot more people. These days they're building alien dreadnoughts, as Musk refers to his factories. Note how many humans are in the photos of Tesla's factories. And yes, they are actively building cars in those photos.

Or is automation making some jobs obsolete while creating new ones?

Could you please explain what new jobs could possibly be created that wouldn't be automated in the first place? And if you have an example of one of these unicorns, would it employ enough people to make up for automation? And would those people be qualified or able to qualify for that job?

Very impressive.

Well, in 2007 we learned that he was magical so I guess it's not a leap. I'm waiting to hear when he submits his first patch to the Linux kernel.

Maybe Obama's too busy using his new coding skills to hack his literary agent's computer to erase that part about Obama being born in Kenya (the item that lead Hillary's people in 2008 to start the "birther" movement, which was later adopted by Trump and SHAZAM became a racist thing which it clearly wasn't when it was started by H's people).

Of course this genius coder has now been exposed in a lie by the Justice Department's Inspector General report which lists Obama as one of 13 officials who exchanged messages with Hillary on her private e-mail server (something he denied knowing about on a TV interview). As a coder, he SURELY would have known that "clintonmail.com" was NOT a ".gov" account.

And then there's a related item: in 2016 Obama publicly said to Bill Clinton (DNC convention if I recall properly) that Hillary was smarter and far more qualified than either of them. Does she code? We certainly know she knows how to wipe a server... "what, with a CLOTH?"

I'm having fun here, but as a rule I actually DESPISE these stories where politicians (of ANY party) "learn to code" in a quick lesson - NO GEEK/NERD/ETC SHOULD TOLERATE THIS STUFF - it's an insult to the profession. Show me another profession that happily helps politicians and the media pretend that its skill can be mastered by any idiot in less than a day!

Cite the statute please - and show where it requires intent to be enforced. She broke her own State department rules. And in fact she violated her own dictates in using her private server and illegally handling classified, secret, and top secret communications.

TDS

Understand it. Recognize it. Ignore it.

Remember, kids. No amount of actual left-wing violence will ever stop the hand-wringing over potential right-wing violence.

And the worst quality of life.
https://www.usnews.com/news/be...

California has worst US air pollution in the nation
https://phys.org/news/2018-04-...

California has the highest poverty rate in the nation
https://www.latimes.com/opinio...

Schools are 39/51
https://wallethub.com/edu/stat...

This is with a high state income and sales tax.

You've been ingesting too much Fox News. They've been lying about California's economy for years.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion...

I guess the idea that high taxes and reasonable regulations work pisses off the Ayn Rand-ites, so they have to constantly say that it's failing? That's some serious cognitive dissonance. You should probably get your head out of your ass.
http://www.latimes.com/busines...

Yes I'd say Deadpool 2 was the major competition, in fact I was going to see it the day I went to see Solo but changed my plans because I was bringing a friend who wasn't fond of excessive cursing. Deadpool 2 drew the crowds, the numbers don't lie.

"Tesla in Autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser" A Tesla sedan in Autopilot mode crashed into a parked Laguna Beach Police Department vehicle Tuesday morning, authorities said. The collision happened at 11:07 a.m. at 20652 Laguna Canyon Road, according to Laguna Police Sgt. Jim Cota. The officer was not in the cruiser at the time of the crash. The Tesla driver suffered minor injuries, but refused transportation to the hospital. “Thankfully there was not an officer at the time in the police car,” Cota said. “The police car is totaled.” http://www.latimes.com/local/l... "Tesla in Autopilot sped up before Utah crash, police report says" A new police report says a Tesla that crashed in Utah while in Autopilot mode accelerated just before it smashed into a stopped firetruck. https://www.sltrib.com/news/20...

They regularly have made defects that have actually had fatal consequences, which they often tried to cover up. The most recent GM one (aka Chevy) being the ignition switch scandal that was settled in 2014, which killed at least 124 people over the 10 years that GM knew about the problem but hid it. In addition to compensating the families they were fined nearly a billion dollars for that stunt.

There have been more recent GM ones like in 2016.

And BTW your claim about "every teardown" is wrong. You mean "Every teardown by one Randy Munrone". Ingineerix, Jack Rickard, and Evannex disagree.,

You mean Sandy Munro? You know those guys have chops, right? They're not amateurs. Also, I don't know if you took the time to actually watch the entire interview, but he gave Tesla credit for numerous things that he thought they did extremely well — better, in fact, than literally anyone else. The electronics leap immediately to mind.

Besides that though, there are plenty of other media references as well, not to mention the owners complaining all over the official forums. Please don't pretend like Tesla isn't having quality control problems. They absolutely are, and there's no credibly denying it. When you get in to this kind of money, it's not cute to have problems like that. It's not an especially huge amount of money to spend for a product that does what it does, but it is enough money where it's disappointing for it to have that kind of flaw. If we didn't care about style, we'd all drive identical-looking vehicles which were based on the intersection of crash safety and aerodynamics.

It would be less embarrassing if this were Tesla's first car, but it isn't...

I spent probably 23 hours inside. Between work, my car, and home - i'm inside most of the time.

I've heard there's this thing called teh sun that emits radiation. I don't want skin cancer.

I've heard there's this thing called uranium that emits radiation which transforms it into this thing called radon that emits more radiation. In many homes this stuff can build up and you don't want to breathe in too much of it and get lung cancer either...

Also, i'm in Los Angeles, where our motto is, "never trust air you can't see."

If I'm not mistaken, the Alabama was an Ohio-class submarine, not Los Angeles ;^)

Here's an article: http://articles.latimes.com/20...

The California Public Utility Commission has for many years been a classic case of regulatory capture by industry -- rubber-stamping virtually every power plant proposal brought before it. Rate payers are required to pay for these plants, and the builders make a profit even if they never produce a single joule of electricity, so California has some of the highest electricity rates in the country (though not the highest - yet).

The perennial excuse for forcing rate payers to fork over cash to private builders who provide no electricity is that this grossly excessive capacity is "insurance" against a shortage that has never happened.

Often the Enron brown and black out crisis of around 2000 is cited as "evidence" of needing these plants -- but at no point in Enron's artificially created crisis was there ever a shortage of power production, in fact there was ample capacity the whole time. Enron did cr@p like buying up power, pulling it off the market (by routing it out of state) then selling it back at an enormous mark up. This was possible because a Libertarian lawmaker named Steve Peace pushed for, and got, a power trading system set up (because private markets are just so totally awesome) which was promptly abused.

Unilaterally ending the agreement makes us seem untrustworthy and that's just what Iran needs to justify any action they take against us.

Instead, we should be working to humanize ourselves, exporting our best, most Iran-compatible culture to Iran as much as possible. Show them how much we're similar to them. A little kindness and respect go a long way.

Reading law doesn't require tons of intelligence. It does requires hard work and a particular knack for dealing with stuffy dusty lawbooks

Obama worked on just 30 cases in four years. He was absolutely terrible as a lawyer, this indicates he had no knack for it at all.

You do have to put in a lot of work memorising stuff, though. So a smidgen extra intelligence

Memory has nothing at all to do with intelligence.

is what gets you "magna cum laude" from harvard law school.

That just means he graduated along with 90% of his class.

Again, he is credentialed, not intelligence. The fact he was given what amounts to a participation trophy is not impressive.

serious work done making sure that all phases of the workflows creating systems "that have the potential to cause human casualty or death" are secure and error free.

Well some companies are indeed building tracks to begin neural net training live. Additionally, there's been enough failures and near misses from other car companies to begin edge testing as well.

Additionally, map makers are now refocusing on a new emerging market of maps for self driving cars. These maps differ from the typical on-line map in that they need typical pattern usage of a given intersection or piece of road that initial algorithms create too many edge cases for. Good example might be the 65/440 split in Nashville where I've seen map cars out there going over and over the exact same spot. Apparently it's confusing to self driving cars.

I think some companies are nearing the peek of the Dunning-Kruger chart and realizing that this problem is a lot harder than they expected. However, there is a lot of money if someone gets the self driving car right and so where in other ventures that peak would mean the end of research, the potential profits are driving some past the peak into the long valley.

I definitely echo your sentiment in that more testing to harden the product is needed and I think a few folks early on knew that (BMW, Ford, etc...). I think that Uber and Tesla might be going too fast, too soon on their implementations.

Let's hope other countries do the same thing too.

Remember, agencies of the US government regularly attempt to influence elections overseas, and, oppose the natural desires of their electorate

Below are a selection of links about the same, from across the political spectrum that are quite well-documented.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

https://www.channel4.com/news/...

https://www.straitstimes.com/w...

https://www.telesurtv.net/engl...

http://www.latimes.com/nation/...

https://www.wnyc.org/story/his...

http://www.truth-out.org/opini...

https://www.foreignaffairs.com...

https://www.thenewamerican.com...

https://www.npr.org/2016/12/22...

https://www.politico.eu/articl...

https://www.strategic-culture....

So lets just say for shits and giggles that you did find some way to go your own way. Here is what would happen. You would be taking your $700B debit with you. But then you would have no way to pay it because what makes you the "5th" largest economy is being attached to the largest economy, The United States.

California gets back somewhere between $0.78 and $0.99 for each dollar paid into the system, while the average return is $1.22. But hey, Trump is literally talking about withholding federal funds from California if it doesn't follow along with his executive orders, so the return could be $0 which would leave us with really no choice but to secede if we wanted to pay our bills.

Once you go your own way that support will go away as will all the federal contracts you have plus most of the tech industry will vacate too. So you will lose all that and you can say bye bye to that large economy.

HAHAHAHAHAno. The tech industry is fed up with the federal government dicking them around over data security. Instead of leaving, they would be staying in droves. And go ahead, tell us exactly what those federal contracts are worth. Meanwhile, marijuana production and tourism would explode, oh and by the way we grow half of the food the nation consumes. If you want to eat more than corn and wheat, you'll pay what we ask, fuckers.

The USA needs California far more than the other way around.

Both environmentalists and Paul Ryan's pro-Chinese corporate shills are missing the point. This isn't about the total amount of Lake Michigan water used or even the significant percentage of treated water used. As the article points out, Paul Ryan's pet project sets a precedent of diverting water out of the Great Lakes basin. Only a few kilometers and a few meters of elevation divide the Great Lakes water from the Mississippi river system. Where the plant is located, wastewater would flow away from the Great Lakes but they applied for permits a few miles away n Racine on the Lake Michigan shore.

To put things into perspective, the city of Racine (pop 77,571) consumes 16.9 million gallons per day. So this plant would increase the city's consumption of treated water by 41%. But under the Great Lakes Compact (2008) nearly all of Racine's water and water from other cities bordering the Great Lakes must return to the Great Lakes. With this, 40% of Racine's consumption would diverted outside the Great Lake's basin. This sets a precedent so that Milwaukee, Chicago, Toronto, Detroit, Gary and other large cities with reason to sell or divert Great Lakes water can point to Racine and say, "They did it, so why not us?"

Hand-waving arguments about man's insignificant effect on the Great Lakes system fall flat. As one who grew up in Racine I've watched Lake Michigan's eco-system change several times with algae, lamprey eels, alewives, lake perch, salmon trout, zebra-mussels and the Asian Carp (coming soon). The latest threats come from a 100-year old project to divert Great Lakes water to prevent Typhoid fever in Chicago. The damage and/or cleanup from this may cost billions.

The administration and politicians owned by Foxconn have lost all credibility when it comes to the use of scientific principles to assess the wide-ranging and long-term economic, social and ecological effects of short-term business misadventures such as the Foxconn con job.

r/aznidentity reader detected

There's half a dozen class action lawsuits on this already, and it's already well known. The LAtimes even did a piece on it back in 2015. Affirmative action is cancer in a meritocracy, which is the way society *should* be going. The people promoting socjus however, have really been pushing "sexuality, skin colour and race" as most important factor.

It always blows my mind when I see users who constantly post pro-Trump free market posts on slashdot calling for the death and hanging of someone or some organization who is doing just that!

Except last year the con artist said he'd lower drug prices. Then he picked a guy who is a former pharmaceutical executive who raised drug prices.

Even in February's State of the Union address he said he'd lower drug prices.

What has he done so far? Reduce regulations on oil and gas drillers, put a guy in charge of the EPA who is vowed and determined to let polluters off the hook, and started a trade war with China which is already costing Midwest farmers.

But I'm not sure I'm going to buy into a group that honors Hilary Clinton. They look like a right wing group crouched in left wing rhetoric. In any case if they're cosying up to Hilary then they belong to the wing of the party that the left is actively trying to purge (e.g. the corporate Democrats).

Still, good on you for finding them. Now if we can get them to understand they're doing more harm than good. But I'm guessing doing good isn't their goal. I'm guessing it's more about clamping down on prostitution without actually spending the money to help people who are forced into prostitution.

No matter how good it gets, someone will always sue, claiming it isn't perfect. The law needs to be adjusted to accept the reality that nothing is perfect

Adjusted how? Self-driving cars already killed their first pedestrian, I don't see any manslaughter charges filed. Liability for damages could be, but you don't get infinite damages for a wrongful death even if it's due to faulty products or recklessness. Here for example $750000 for a life. Here's $2.2 million. Here's $2 million. Here's a $950000. Probably the most expensive one I saw that's actually settled is $9.5 millions, not juries making crazy judgement that'll go on appeal. This review (pdf) across 100+ cases say the same thing $1-2M on average. That's maybe not the value of a life, but it's the value of a life in court.

That's the missing number you can plug into your equation. Well that and the cost of maiming a person for life and property damage. It may be cruel to put it this way, but it all has a price tag. Even if some super-bug made the car run a red light and mow down pedestrians, it's not necessarily the end of the company. There are many companies with more blood on their hands, if you add up all their faulty products...

I'd like to see a citation for that

Geez, you're just incapable of using Google? Heck, even leftist rags are talking about it in the context of the US Census.

You also said that you do want your country to be a federation of sovereign parts, like Canada and somewhat like the European Union.

The EU is an authoritarian, illiberal, bureaucratic shithole; I know that because I emigrated from there. I'm afraid whatever problems the US faces, it will have to face alone; neither Canada nor the EU have anything meaningful to contribute, beyond serving as examples of what not to do.

That ship sailed in the 1860's.

Oh, these things can be reversed. In fact, I think the way forward for the world will be exactly that: to return to smaller, more local government, and resign big central national governments to the dustbin of history.

Every tame little skirmish is "World War 3" to liberals these days. Just like every attempt to enforce immigration law is "naziism", every pushback against PC orthodoxy is "white supremacy", and every innocent interaction with any random person who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who vacationed in Russia once is "Treason".

Watching them pinball between "Trump is Putin's lapdog!" and "Trump is provoking a nuclear war against Putin!" is hilarious though.

The mid-level stages of TDS have a profound effect on the victim's vocabulary: Sufferers speak a distinctive language consisting solely of hyperbole. Politico recently ran a piece that noted Trump's supposedly unprecedented decision to continue using his private security force, which provoked former independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin to tweet: "A predictable move for a kleptocratic authoritarian who wants to operate outside the bounds of law and basic ethical standards. Even more troubling, he may use the force's lack of government oversight & presidential veneer to carry-out extralegal acts of force."

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-raimondo-trump-derangement-syndrome-20161226-story.html

I'm not entirely sure whether you're trolling, or if you genuinely believe the uninformed jetsam you wrote there.

Failed yet again by my local main-stream media. I dont recall any coverage of the event, but i guess thats to be expected from a group of conglomerate advertisers

Well, of all the failures among news outlets, it was reported twice before on that awful "Slashdot" site. One of those even linked CNN as a source, but they're hardly mainstream, are they? There was, of course, also coverage on Fox News, which in turn links to coverage on the Wall Street Journal. On the other coast, the LA Times also ran a Bloomberg-syndicated story.

thanks to the sausage-factory machinations of our federal government, im sure we'll never be privy to so much as a general idea of what this satellite was designed to do

Well, let's go gather a few facts, and guess. First, its contract details are all secret, which strongly implies it's for military purposes. It was aimed for low-earth orbit at 51 degrees inclination, which would put it over many places of military significance. Indeed, a more knowledgeable source theorizes it's for space-based radar, which would certainly be in accordance with recent US military doctrine of "get more pictures, engage from further away, and use fewer people".

Flint Michigan looks set to go another year without clean water

...which has absolutely nothing to do with spaceflight, or the military, or anything related to this discussion. Not only are the military branches and intelligence agencies expressly forbidden from assisting Flint, the restoration efforts are already underway and progressing as expected. What the fearmongers like yourself conveniently ignore is that essentially Flint has had to rebuild its entire water system due to the years of neglect, and as of last year, the vast majority of test samples are clean. There's still work to be done, but the situation is no longer a failure of government.

Congress brand oversight. ... Well it wasnt as prevalent for this 3.5 billion dollar satellite

Which is perfectly normal for classified projects, regardless of where they go. Since part of OPSEC is to minimize dispersal of classified information, there are bipartisan committees that debate classified projects in great detail, and their unclassified comments are usually distributed to the other congresspeople.

it did such a bang-up job of everything from the timely restoration of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina

...which isn't in Congress's authority, since once the national emergency has passed, the authority goes back to the state per the Tenth Amendment...

to ensuring healthcare for our veterans is the best in the world

...which isn't mandated by any law, or even really practical, and still not directly under Congress's authority, being wholly delegated to the Veterans Health Administration, itself wholly under the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is itself organized under the Executive branch under the President...

one can on

Fast Tracking has been pushed by the last 4 administrations. #FTFY #Troll

I thought that was a liberal California thing. Y'know, the whole "not informing a sexual partner that you have HIV/AIDs" is now just a misdemeanor instead of a felony thing.

Source
Source
Source
Source
etc.

Sounds like a great place for all those bug chasers to go after they realize nobody wants to bone somebody who is such a severe biohazard.

In the advanced stages of the disease, the afflicted lose touch with reality. Opinion is unmoored from fact. Life resembles a dark fairy tale in which the villain – Trump – is an amalgam of all the worst tyrants in history, past and present, while the heroes –Trump's critics – are akin to the resistance fighters of World War II.

It's almost as if the behavior from the Republicans during Obama's administration never happened. Sorry, you don't get to talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome after the Terrorist Fist Bump, the Birther movement, Obama as a Socialist, rants about Obama phones, however many Beghazi hearings and investigations that turned up nothing, and whatever other paranoid stupidity that came out of the Republicans between 2008 and 2016.

Sure, some on the left have lost their minds over Trump. But the right has a lock on losing their shit over the other party inhabiting the White House.

In the advanced stages of the disease, the afflicted lose touch with reality. Opinion is unmoored from fact. Life resembles a dark fairy tale in which the villain – Trump – is an amalgam of all the worst tyrants in history, past and present, while the heroes –Trump's critics – are akin to the resistance fighters of World War II.

They implemented strict gun laws sometime around 2016. Here is a nice little article discussing how helpful that was http://www.latimes.com/opinion...

Out if interest I had a look at the way spaceX is funded or at least seed funded and it's clear that Musk has risked the fortune he earned from paypal (100 million) to get spaceX going. There is no doubt there is risk however he has his own skin in the game so I've never understood why people give him a hard time, just because he is living every kids dream and having a go? It say's a lot about the hater mentality that wants us to sit around doing nothing, not wearing deodorant criticizing people reaching for the stars.

I can't see him doing this without some sort of government funding and the la times seems to thinks so however I don't really see this as grounds for criticism, how could he do it without government funding and contracts?

Should Musk expect government funding to continue to develop rocket systems via spaceX. Why not? If his companies are meeting the specified goals to receive funding then why shouldn't they receive funding. We've been told for years by Boeing and Lockheed Martin that re-usable launch systems were not possible however clearly that is not true.

So while I don't think I fall into the category of being a fanboy, I certainly don't want to see him fail. So if you are going to make up allegations about the companies financial state, let's have a look at what you've got so we can evaluate it.

One thing is for sure, whatever you think of the guy, Musk has generated a lot of interest in space flight. There is nothing boring about a pair of launch boosters making a double sonic boom before they land.

$1.7 billion, to be precise. And we didn't even get all of our hostages back:
http://www.latimes.com/nation/...

Just what is wrong with lower skilled people getting less income? Or inversely, what's wrong with paying higher skilled people more? You should be paid based on what you bring to the table. If all you offer is a warm body that's nominally slightly smarter than a chimp, we should pay you slightly more than we would a chimp.

The first official (and required by the Dodd-Frank laws) CEO vs. Employee pay ratio reports are in, noting the average ratio is currently about 270:1 (it was 42:1 in 1980) with the CEO of Honeywell, Darius Adamczyk, topping the list at 333 times as much as a median Honeywell employee last year. From: http://www.latimes.com/busines...:

The raw figures are these: Adamczyk, $16.8 million. Median employee: $50,296.

I can't seriously believe any CEO brings that much to any table, and this kind of disparity implies we're all worker chimps.

On the other hand, if you're talking about concentrating solar thermal plants (like the ones described in this story) there are no hazardous materials involved in their manufacture, which is definitely environmentally friendly.

You are a fucking monster.

And you didn't actually refute PopeRatzo's statement. Let me repeat it, since you seem to have misread it the first time:

On the other hand, if you're talking about concentrating solar thermal plants (like the ones described in this story) there are no hazardous materials involved in their manufacture

Can you tell us, SuperKendall, exactly what the hazardous materials involved are?

On the other hand, if you're talking about concentrating solar thermal plants (like the ones described in this story) there are no hazardous materials involved in their manufacture, which is definitely environmentally friendly.

You are a fucking monster.

And, once they are manufactured, there are no emissions when they make electricity.

You are discounting how much carbon living screaming birds on fire generate.

Yep, a few thousand bucks paying a few dozen 'vocal shills' to post generic political propaganda in broken english on the biggest SJW haven on the internet swung an election, but billions spent on all manner of actual professional campaigning and marketing and astroturfing was a total waste.

Somebody pointed that out to Podesta on Meet the Press, iirc. Asked him how the Ruskies knew to target swing states, but the Hillary campaign did not. She just took for granted that she would win states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Iowa and didn't bother to campaign in them - that went to Trump. Hell, she nearly lost Minnesota as well.

Russiagate is nothing more than a sad, sad attempt to excuse Hillary losing the most winnable election in history.

I don't buy that.

Because Obama spent the day before the election in Michigan - so the Democrats did know Hillary was in trouble in those states.

President Obama didn’t set foot in Michigan in the final months of his reelection campaign in 2012. But he started there one day before the 2016 election, telling voters that Hillary Clinton is the candidate best equipped to further the nation’s economic recovery. ...

Throwing Obama into Michigan at the last second like that is evidence of "Oh fucking SHIT!!!" at the highest levels of the Democratic Party.

I can't find it now, but I do recall an article published shortly after the election (Politico, maybe?) that stated Hillary didn't go to those Rust Belt states because every time she campaigned there, her numbers actually got worse.

Yes, she was that bad of a candidate.

And the upper levels of the Democratic Party knew it.

That also explains what looked like crazy overconfidence from Trump's campaign...

It's a combination of Virtue signalling and the whole "but we gotta do something!!!!Anything!!!".
If you really wanna be confused, read this Los Angeles Times interview with students at the Florida School where the shooting happened. Then wrap your head around how people are making these people out to be heroes.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/...

compares the firm's alleged Facebook intrusion to burglars who set out to rob a vault full of diamonds and end up hauling home a bag full of worthless cubic zirconia

It's all cubic zirconia. Despite the privacy snowflake flurry, your individual preference and opinion data is worth less than the postage on junk mail.

> Target in Canada didn't fail because of competition. It failed because it
> didn't secure it's supply chain and didn't have the products people wanted.

Let's start at the beginning...
* Walmart buys bunch of Woolworth/Woolco stores in Canada http://articles.latimes.com/19...
* ***KEEPS STORES OPEN***
* this maintains the supply chain and customer base
* renovates a store one section at a time, keeping 3/4 of the individual store open at all times
* when the "rolling renovation" of the store was finished, a sign company came out, and replaced the "Woolco" sign with a "Walmart", and the store never skipped a beat in the process

* Target buys a bunch of Zellers leases
* ***THE IDIOTS SHUT DOWN ALL THE STORES FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR***
* chase away former customers, who now get used to shopping elsewhere
* former suppliers either go out of business, or find business customers elsewhere
* after an entire year of gutting the old stores, they re-open
* now they have to beg all the former customers to come back (didn't work)
* and they try to ramp up supply chain for an entire store chain all at once (didn't work)

If you ever want to write a "How *NOT* to expand into another country" book, Target is the obvious case study.