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Actually this is not the first time I've read about this. People that live on residential streets that are close to major highways have had problems with Waze and the like routing way more cars through their streets than it was designed for. They design residential streets for a typical traffic flow and not for a lot of cars bypassing traffic on a regular basis. Imagine living on one of these streets and having hundreds of cars come down there daily, when it was never designed for that and thus making your quiet residential road into a high traffic road.
A quick google search turns up lots of stores and people complaining about this.
http://kalw.org/post/driving-a...
https://www.waze.com/forum/vie...
http://www.latimes.com/opinion...
https://www.usatoday.com/story...

The "resistance" is nothing but a bunch of authoritarian leftwing extremists: http://www.latimes.com/local/l...

And CNN, MSNBC, et al. haven't trained their viewers too, for the bigots and falsifiers on the opposite side of the spectrum?

Even when CNN leaks debate questions to a presidential candidate? https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Or Don Lemon says mostly anyone can go out and buy and automatic weapons? http://www.politifact.com/pund...
When three "investigative journalists" from CNN lie so badly they resign over a false story about Scaramucci? http://www.latimes.com/busines...
Or when it deliberately writes a misleading headline to make Trump look uninformed: "Trump asks Japan to build cars in the U.S. It already does" by using a partial quote that deflects the reality of his statement: http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/0...
Or when NBC doctors a 911 tape to make Zimmerman sound like he's explicitly following Martin just for being black when in truth he was asked by the operator to describe the person's race? https://www.theatlantic.com/en...
Confirmation bias is a two way street; it's amusing but not unexpected to see it at work on a person who, in an echo chamber of their own, believes it only exists on the other side.

At least. Or $2,000 or more. Or $3,660. Ambulences are insanely expensive. And the new thing: insurance companies are deciding after you have been diagnosed and treated whether you needed the ambulence. They can decide "oh, that wasn't life-threatening, it just seemed like it to you, but since it was not a heart attack, we won't pay for an ambulance ride.": http://articles.latimes.com/20...

HOWEVER, ambulances also bypass the first stage of emergency room screening-- they have radioed ahead and you get right in and seen. They will also start keeping you alive the moment they arrive.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/health/think-the-er-was-expensive-look-at-the-ambulance-bill.html

At least. Or $2,000 or more. Or $3,660. Ambulences are insanely expensive. And the new thing: insurance companies are deciding after you have been diagnosed and treated whether you needed the ambulence. They can decide "oh, that wasn't life-threatening, it just seemed like it to you, but since it was not a heart attack, we won't pay for an ambulance ride.": http://articles.latimes.com/20...

HOWEVER, ambulances also bypass the first stage of emergency room screening-- they have radioed ahead and you get right in and seen. They will also start keeping you alive the moment they arrive.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/health/think-the-er-was-expensive-look-at-the-ambulance-bill.html

Or by investing in corporations which are killing the very people they claim to be saving.

This is also why Last Week Tonight with John Oliver no longer broadcasts. Oh wait....

Even if you could repeal the 2nd Amendment what happens next?

1) You need to get gun control through both houses. Good luck with that, given that 15 Democrats voted against Obama's Federal Assault Weapons Ban

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

Feinstein won the backing of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who had previously voted against renewing the ban. But 15 of her fellow Democrats, including a number from Western states, and one independent voted against the ban, as did all Republicans except Sen. Mark Steven Kirk of Illinois.

No problem you say, we'll fill CNN with crying children and bring on Jimmy Kimmel, also crying, to emotionally blackmail anyone who is going to vote against the bill so it passes. Well Republicans don't watch Jimmy Kimmel or CNN so you'll have to concentrate of the Democrats. You also need the bill to survive legal challenges, which it's fair to assume there will be a lot of.

However now your problems are only just beginning.

2) You need to confiscate all the now illegal guns. ATF and the FBI will need to go door to door. Most people are going to say "Oh yeah that AR-15? Lost it in a tragic boating accident?". In Australia only about one third of guns were collected

https://www.nationalreview.com...

Gun confiscation is not happening in the United States any time soon. But let's suppose it did. How would it work? Australia's program netted, at the low end, 650,000 guns, and at the high end, a million. That was approximately a fifth to a third of Australian firearms. There are about as many guns in America as there are people: 310 million of both in 2009. A fifth to a third would be between 60 and 105 million guns. To achieve in America what was done in Australia, in other words, the government would have to confiscate as many as 105 million firearms.

Some percentage of gun owners will decide that a government which confiscates guns is Literally Hitler and it is their patriotic duty to die fighting it. So you'll need the National Guard. Maybe the army too - though at that point you've admitted it's a civil war. Though it's fair to say that people who join the army and National Guard might sympathize rather more with the people who believe in the 2nd Amendment than the politicians telling them to confiscate guns. But hey, don't worry. The US's armed forces are pretty well indoctrinated into the importance of following orders from civilians, even if they disagree with them. There hasn't been a mutiny since troops in Vietnam fragged their superiors.

Still do you see gun deaths going up or down in this process? Do you see civil liberties being enhanced or radically curtailed as the government ends up fighting an insurgency on its own territory and supported at the very least by ex military types? If you're the delicate sort who cries when a few dozen people get killed in gun violence, be prepared to be crying all the time as the ATF and right wing militias duke it out and a few people in the armed forces announce they're going over to the rebel side.

American gun control would be like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube, i.e. a complete mess. On the other hand it's not like putting the toothpaste back in the tube causes a bloody civil war. So actually it's significantly worse than putting the toothpaste back in the tube.

Meanwhile the Russians and Chinese will be celebrating because the government of their only strategic competitor has just done something which makes overseas military action impossible. And they'll be sure to take advantage of that. If the US is having a civil war, what's top stop Russian sending troops into the Eastern members of NATO or China sending troops into Taiwan?

Bigger concern is, is this kind of braking possible with a real (i.e. manual) transmission?

That won't be a concern for much longer. The market share of manual transmission is down to 3% - "That number is never going to go back up," Drury said. "The trajectory is down, headed for zero."

There are ups and downs but the vector over time is clearly towards zero. Most models do not even offer a manual any longer.

So the impact of manuals on safety features can be ignored. They are not relevant any more and will become less so over time.

They are going to freak out when Trump bans bump stocks.

No, they really aren't - most lawful gun owners are interested in convenient, accurate shooting, not "quickly spraying a room full of bullets" - the purpose of the "bump stock" it the latter, not the former.

The "libtards" tend to be upper income

Question, why is it that California, the Mecca of "Libtards" (your term) has the highest concentration of residents living in poverty? One in five California residents lives in poverty, the highest percentage of any of the fifty states even besting states like Mississippi, Louisiana and West Virginia.

https://www.reuters.com/articl...

With more than three killings per hour, Venezuela last year was the worldâ(TM)s second most murderous nation after El Salvador, a local crime monitoring group said. The homicide rate in Caracas alone was a staggering 140 per 100,000 people, according to the group, the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence.

Authorities say nongovernmental groups inflate figures to create paranoia and tarnish the government, but even so the most recent official national murder rate - 58 per 100,000 inhabitants for 2015 - was still among the worldâ(TM)s highest.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion...

The Venezuelan government stopped publishing comprehensive crime data more than a decade ago, and the discrepancies between what authorities say and data released by independent organizations are extreme.

For instance, local officials announced that 17,778 Venezuelans were victims of homicide in 2015. But the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a nongovernmental group, estimated that there were 27,875 murders that year, which would make Venezuela's homicide rate one of the highest in the world, at 90 killings per 100,000 residents. The group found that the rate climbed higher in 2016, to 92 per 100,000.

Venezuela's capital, Caracas, was proclaimed the most violent city in the world last year by the Citizens' Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, a Mexican research group that tallies an annual index of the world's most violent cities. The homicide rate supposedly topped 119 per 100,000 residents, the group said. But there are no official statistics to support the claim and, predictably, the Venezuelan government has denied it.

One reason for the data discrepancies is that the Venezuelan government has excluded extrajudicial killings from its homicide count, while human rights groups such as violence observatory do not. Also, the government has traditionally relied on statistics gathered by the Ministry of Health, while the observatory combines this health data with unofficial information about so-called resistance deaths attributed to state security forces and other deaths being investigated by independent forensics agencies.

In the absence of concrete and comprehensive statistics, some groups are attempting to gather oblique data on Venezuela's crime wave. Our organization commissioned a study on perceptions of violence from the Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University. Early data indicate that 6 out of 10 Venezuelans reported at least one murder in their neighborhood over the previous 12 months. By way of comparison, only 3.5 out of 10 respondents said the same in El Salvador and Honduras, considered the two most violent countries in the world.

The public opinion project survey also found that 80% of Venezuelans are "very" or "partly" afraid of being murdered in the coming year. This fear of violence is fueling a migration crisis as Venezuelans flee to Brazil and Colombia.

There are many causes of the spiraling homicide problem in Venezuela. Political and economic crises have undermined the legitimacy of institutions. The military and police have been largely discredited. State security agencies are said to both commit and ignore lethal violence. Impunity is rife and the cost of murder low, with an estimated 92% of homicides not resulting in a conviction. And gang violence has soared in the capital city.

But without solid statistics, Venezuela has little chance of slowing the crime wave anytime soon. It is next to impossible to make effective public policy without reliable data. Over the last decade, Venezuela has implemented no less than a dozen anti-crime initiatives, with no visible results to

I agree about the confusion. Also, let's apply the "Google" test to it.
"You don't know what this is? Let me bing it for you."
"You don't know what this is? Let me 'Microsoft Search' it for you."
The second one doesn't roll off the tongue as much.

In any case, to say that Microsoft has improved its reputation means that this CNET contributor is either completely out of touch with current reality, or is being paid to shill for Microsoft.

Personally, I've never hated Microsoft is as much as I do now.

I hope Microsoft and its lawyers go to hell!

You 'duck' it. [duck as in dodge-the-bullet-of-surveillance]. #duckduckgo

Low level? You can find newspaper reading employees at all levels of government. Political appointees, however, are worse.

So maybe we shouldn't be surprised that at least four current top officials have apparently decided that they deserve to travel like capitalist rock stars — one took a private charter to his summer home in Montana, for example, and another flew first class on the 45-minute ride from Washington to New York City — rather than what they are: top government bureaucrats doing the taxpayers' business at the taxpayers' expense.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-shulkin-trump-zinke-pruitt-travel-20180216-story.html

I agree about the confusion. Also, let's apply the "Google" test to it.
"You don't know what this is? Let me bing it for you."
"You don't know what this is? Let me 'Microsoft Search' it for you."
The second one doesn't roll off the tongue as much.

In any case, to say that Microsoft has improved its reputation means that this CNET contributor is either completely out of touch with current reality, or is being paid to shill for Microsoft.

Personally, I've never hated Microsoft is as much as I do now.

I hope Microsoft and its lawyers go to hell!

Name a piece of information, known by Christopher Steele to be false, spread as if it were true.

But first off, let's back up. Who is Christopher Steele? From Wikipedia:

From 1990 to 1992, Steele worked under diplomatic cover as an MI6 agent in Moscow, serving at the Embassy of the United Kingdom in Moscow.[7][9] Steele was an “internal traveller”, visiting newly-accessible cities such as Samara and Kazan.[4]

Steele's identity as an MI6 officer was one of 115 names Her Majesty's Government attempted to suppress through a DSMA-Notice in 1999.[10][11] He returned to London in 1993, working again at the FCO until his posting to Paris in 1998, where he served under diplomatic cover until 2002.[9][12][13][14] In 2003, Steele was sent to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan as part of an MI6 team, briefing Special Forces on "kill or capture" missions for Taliban targets, and also spent time teaching new MI6 recruits.[9] By 2006, Steele was heading the Russia Desk at MI6.[4][7][15]

Steele's expertise on Russia remained valued, and he served as a senior officer under John Scarlett, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), from 2004 to 2009.[15] Steele was selected as case officer for Alexander Litvinenko and participated in the investigation of the Litvinenko poisoning in 2006.[9] It was Steele who quickly realised that Litvinenko's death "was a Russian state 'hit'".[15]

Not exactly some fly-by-night amateur. And rather amusing that you'd accuse someone whose job had been spying on Russia and later investigated the Litvinenko poisoning, determining it to be a Russian hit, of "spreading Russian propaganda"

Steele - again, the former head of MI6's Russia desk - had been an FBI source for years prior, where he had proved useful in a number of investigations unrelated investigations.

During the last election, Steele was hired - first by Republicans, then Democrats - to research Trump. And that he did. It's not even clear that he knew who was the source of his funding; he worked for Fusion GPS. The so-called "Steele Dossier" is not a curated/filtered "report", but rather a series of independent memos from varying sources - and was never presented as anything else. He was paid to collect information, not to analyze and curate it. Some of the information from the dosier that wasn't public at the time has since been independently confirmed. The vast majority has been neither confirmed or denied.

Concerning the Carter Page "memo" from Trump transition team member Devin Nunes (yes, he was part of Trump's own transition team... "Hey, let's investigate ourselves!") suggests that A) the Steele dossier was the foundation of getting a warrant on Page, B) it did not inform them that the dossier had been paid for by a political entity, and C) the fact that it had been noted that Steele made a statement about being worried about Trump becoming president disqualifies him as a biased source.

Except:

A) Page had been on the radar long beforehand, having previously been caught up in a Russian spy scheme and having not only made numerous statements condemning the US and supporting Russia (on Russian TV), but even claimed to be a Kremlin representative. (Seriously, if the FBI hadn't been spying on this guy they should all have been fired for incompetence)

B) The warrant application did state that the dossier had been paid for by a political entity; Nunes's complaint has now amusingly morphed into "the font size was too small".

C) Intelligence courts generally presume by default that sources have some sort of motive, because as a general rule, people who aren't motivated don't act as sources. Furth

I know there are a lot of audiophiles who have good things to say about the Apple products.

Do they use a green marker on the edge of their iPhone too? Or tape Brilliant Pebbles to the headphone jack? What about the Blackbody? Just curious.

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

Let's parse.

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.

So you start off by pretending that SpaceX and Tesla are the same company. Clever move! What is this "government support"?

New York state is spending $750 million to build a solar panel factory in Buffalo for SolarCity. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company will lease the plant for $1 a year. It will not pay property taxes for a decade, which would otherwise total an estimated $260 million.

Wow, OMG, a state government gave financial incentives for a large company to build a factory in their state. This has never happened before in the history of business! Except bloody always, but apart from that, OMG!

Nevada has agreed to provide Tesla with $1.3 billion in incentives to help build a massive battery factory near Reno.

Stop the presses again!

That's nearly half of the $4,9B in the article, and it's just your standard "incentives to get a large company to move to your state" game that all large companies play.

The federal government also provides grants or tax credits to cover 30% of the cost of solar installations. SolarCity reported receiving $497.5 million in direct grants from the Treasury Department.

All solar installers received this; it is nothing SolarCity specific. You could start a solar installation company yourself today and receive tax credits.

The Palo Alto company has also collected more than $517 million from competing automakers by selling environmental credits.

Same story. The other automakers wouldn't have sold credits had they actually made the ZEVs that the legislation was intended to make them produce. And any automaker could get the credits.

Meanwhile, everyone shoulders the huge financial costs of air pollution from fossil fuel power (the healthcare costs alone from the worst coal plants can be up to 45 cents per kWh). But I know you want to slap down renewables with everything and give fossil fuels a pass for everything, so let's keep going!

Since 2006, SolarCity has installed systems for 217,595 customers, according to a corporate filing. If each paid the current average price for a residential system — about $23,000, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists — the cost to the government would total about $1.5 billion, which would include the Treasury grants paid to SolarCity.

Oh, so now we're taking in subsidies to consumers and pretending that they're subsidies to SolarCity? Clever girl! But okay!

But wait, that article was just for $4,9B (and that includes SpaceX). Where did your other $3B come from? Oh right, this:

The California state Assembly passed a $3-billion subsidy program for electric vehicles, dwarfing the existing program.

So we can now play the game where we pretend that Tesla gets all of that! But of course, we know that there are other other EV manufacturers; again, any company cam make EVs and get incentives. But let's go with it. How much money does Tesla

CSBF's been busy protecting loan sharks, er payday lenders. http://www.latimes.com/busines... And now you want them to also find time to probe criminals at Equifax? Silly Rabbit! Just who do you think they really work for now?

Wells Fargo is simply a feel-good tactic.

Feels so good Wall Street is tanking. Or maybe you're just full of shit.

No, what's "impressively stupid and cunning" is having a member of your own transition team supposedly investigating you and writing propaganda memos while muzzling the opposition.

"Seriously, how is this joke of a company still allowed to do business?"

Some links, if you haven't been following the story:

Equifax hired a music major as chief security officer and she has just retired.

Equifax Faces Mounting Costs and Investigations From Breach.

The Equifax Breach Was Entirely Preventable

Equifax's data breach sins live on to this year's tax season

Equifax, Fox, NFL top report of most-hated U.S. companies

You Can't Fire Equifax, but Your Employer Can. Mine Just Did.

Senators want 'massive' fines for data breaches at Equifax and other credit reporting firms

Thanks to Equifax, the risk of fraud is higher this tax season

This Will Make Equifax Think Twice About How They're Protecting Your Data
"If this policy had been in place during the Equifax breach last year, Equifax would have paid at least a $1.5 billion penalty, half of which would be returned to consumers affected by the breach."

Every poll is adjusted by some kind of likely voter turnout model, and in state after state anomalously high rural turnout knocked those models into a cocked hat.

The turnout was as expected. The discrepancy was that people likely to vote for Trump were unlikely to tell pollsters that they were going to vote for Trump due to public shaming of Trump supporters by the media. That USC/LA Times poll was pretty much the only one to predict a Trump victory. They reached that conclusion when they noticed that Trump supporters reported they were very uncomfortable telling pollsters that they were Trump supporters. They tweaked their model to account for that (that more Trump supporters weren't telling pollsters who they were voting for, than Clinton supporters).

The polls were not particularly "wrong", but the reporting surrounding them was. fivethirtyeight.com, betting markets, and many others were forecasting around a 20% chance of a Trump victory. 20% is not zero, and it isn't even particularly uncommon. One in five stuff happens pretty frequently (about one fifth of the time).

Of course, when most people see 1-in-5 they see it is the least likely outcome, and that tends to settle in their mind as "not-going-to-happen", and that feeling colors every later thought or feeling. I was surprised by the outcome, even though I intellectually know that 80-20 one way is no guarantee of a particular outcome.

Every poll is adjusted by some kind of likely voter turnout model, and in state after state anomalously high rural turnout knocked those models into a cocked hat.

The turnout was as expected. The discrepancy was that people likely to vote for Trump were unlikely to tell pollsters that they were going to vote for Trump due to public shaming of Trump supporters by the media. That USC/LA Times poll was pretty much the only one to predict a Trump victory. They reached that conclusion when they noticed that Trump supporters reported they were very uncomfortable telling pollsters that they were Trump supporters. They tweaked their model to account for that (that more Trump supporters weren't telling pollsters who they were voting for, than Clinton supporters).

The press broke the #1 rule of reporting news - do it in an unbiased manner so you don't affect the story with your presence. By not only participating in but apparently gleefully encouraging the shaming of Trump supporters, they caused said supporters to disappear from their own polls, creating the "surprise" Trump win in 2016.

Stalking you, hardly. You just seem to float to the top but not to worry. After this post I'm applying a -2 freak award to you. I will never have to see your crap again.

https://www.statista.com/stati...

http://www.latimes.com/politic...

https://www.usgovernmentdebt.u...

I really like this one.

http://www.usdebtclock.org/sta...

$17.5K/ea less any expenses for a two-man crew. That would NOT be worth it to me to even daydream about... in Canada the sentence for a conviction of Theft over $5000 is a max of 10 years... $1,750 per year (not indexed to inflation!) that you may not get to keep, though I suppose you do get free room and board.

People who turn to a "life of crime", even highly intelligent ones, don't think like "most people", and seldom think that they might get caught. A single $15,000 payout might be very enticing, even if it actually takes a whole lot of work to get it.

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

Why Drug Dealers Live With Their Moms
If you had a job paying $3.30 an hour, you'd be bunking at home too.
April 24, 2005|Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner |

During the crack cocaine boom of the 1990s, the image of the millionaire crack dealer implanted itself on the public consciousness. But anyone who spent time around the Crips or Bloods or any other crack-selling gang might have noticed something odd: A great many crack dealers still lived at home with their moms. Why was that?

Sudhir Venkatesh, a University of Chicago graduate student at the time, discovered the answer.

He had originally been sent by his thesis advisor into a Chicago housing project to administer a sociological survey. But after a harrowing encounter with a local crack gang, he befriended its leader and virtually embedded himself with the gang for six years. He was given a pile of notebooks containing four years' worth of the gang's financial transactions -- a trove of data that, when subjected to an economic analysis, proved incredibly revealing.

At root, economics is the study of incentives -- how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. The rules apply just as well to a crack gang as to a Fortune 500 business.

As it turned out, the gang worked a lot like most American businesses, though perhaps none more so than McDonald's. If you were to hold a McDonald's organizational chart and the crack gang's organizational chart side by side, you could hardly tell the difference. ...

Remember that the Democrats literally nominated a cable company lobbyist to head the FCC when they had the chance

Gaslight for the fail.

During the Bush years, under Chairman Michael Powell (Colin's son) the FCC went to the Supreme Court in order to kill net neutrality (and succeeded in 2005).

Then Obama appointed, Tom Wheeler, former lobbyist turned Benedict Arnold who not only brought back net neutrality but also pushed for a bunch of other consumer freedoms like killing the Comcast/Time-Warner merger, and forcing cable companies to let customers use their own set-top boxes to save on rental fees.

As for Idjit Pai being an "Obama appointee" not so much. By law the 5 member comission can only have 3 members from the same party. Idjit Pai was one of the two non-democrats during Obama's term. The way it works is that the senate minority party comes up with a list of acceptable candidates, in this case Pai was Mitch McConnel's first choice. Maybe Obama should have fought harder, but it didn't really matter since the 3 people he did pick could always overrule the Idjit. Now that the banana republicans are in charge, who Obama appointed is moot because killing NN was always a republican goal and they would have done it one way or another - since that is what they did back in 2005.

You're not smart enough to make an informed decision yourself!

You can't decide whether a completely waterproof design is worth having a non-replaceable battery!

We're the government! And we know what's best for you!

Now, pay a ludicrous tax on your soda, and no, you can't have a drinking straw!

Again, you can't read. The law is that for people who apply for a normal drivers license, they are asked if they want to register or not. If they say yes, their information is passed along and verified. If they are applying for the special license for illegals, they are not asked if they want to register to vote. Because they already know they're not eligible to vote if they're applying for that type of license. So why ask them.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-me-pol-ca-motor-voter-law-20151016-html-htmlstory.html

The Obama administration also accused China of cheating on solar panels via government subsidies; and tariffs were tacked on as punishment. As I understand it, the World Trade Organization agreed that China cheated, but disagreed with the US's remedy.

While I cannot stand Trump in general, he is sometimes right about trade and visa workers. Just because you are an idiot does not mean you are always wrong. Go 15% of Trump!

How exactly is he in the US? He's an australian.

Murdoch became an American citizen in 1985.

Cali politicians act like parasites to advance their failed political policies and transportation boondoggles.

As for New California, it would largely be an agricultural and natural resources state, while the science, technology, business, arts, shipping, R&D, tourism, and transportation would all be in the left-wing, high-growth, profitable "old" California.

You're overlooking a pretty big gaping hole here. If something like this happened, Calexit would happen first, and these counties would simply opt to remain in the US a la West Virginia. This is significant because one of every three people living in poverty in the US currently reside in what you'd later call old California:

http://beta.latimes.com/opinio...

Let that sink in for a second: Your old California now has an insanely high per capita poverty rate while at the same time shedding many of those in the middle. These poverty stricken people, by the way, are the same ones who work all day and night to serve lunch and carry out the garbage for Hollywood celebrities and Facebook employees...you know, the most outspoken of self-labeled progressives who claim to represent them...while being hopelessly dependent upon California's welfare system which works under the assumption that you solve poverty by giving more and more money to the poor, in spite of the fact that the local poverty rate just keeps growing every time this happens.

But that doesn't stop the rather progressive elite politicians, hollywood actors, and silicon valley billionaires from advocating UBI and increased minimum wages as if it will somehow work. No siree, because we can somehow solve homelessness and poverty by making sure that there is more money to go around, in spite of the fact that there simply isn't enough housing for them all to begin with. So who cares that rent is already the highest CPI line item, and who cares that rent nearly beats all of the other line items combined! (Except in California, where it exceeds all of the others combined.)

After all, the science, technology, business, arts, shipping, R&D, tourism, and transportation in the left-wing, high-growth, profitable "old" California has plenty of money that it can throw their way, so the fact that they all have to outbid one another for the same finite housing to perpetually keep raising rent prices doesn't matter! Hence, California's progressive elite, who represent these poor and downtrodden, can safely continue to refuse to make more housing available time and time again whenever the issue comes up.

But who needs those middle income no-good rednecks and their sparsely populated red counties? Old California sure doesn't!

That all aside, in all likelihood, no splits will happen. Nonetheless, I personally believe that California is currently in an unsustainable position in at least three major metro areas. By sheer necessity, the minimum wage will keep increasing, the welfare benefits will keep growing, hence the local money supply will grow along with it for quite some time, but only until the costs necessary to sustain those with low incomes exceeds that of the money brought in by the multi-billion dollar companies that reside there. This is when the homelessness problem starts looking more like a struggling to survive problem. At that point, people and companies just begin to leave, which begins a period of chronic negative growth and urban decay. We've seen this happen before in fact.

Splitting California's electoral votes is a right wing wet dream. Makes you wonder if it's the Koch family or the Mercers behind this push. Or some combination of billionaires and Russian foreign intelligence.

Ah yes, the ol' formulaic "I don't like this, therefore it must be right wing, and therefore must be koch involved" line of thinking. I think if the right were concerned about electoral votes, they would simply allow a real (as opposed to imagined conspiracy theory) left wing movement funded by an actual billionaire happen:

http://www.latimes.com/politic...

And if it did, you can guarantee that California won't take all of its counties along with it; see West Virginia. The "right" doesn't need to do anything. Though California WILL keep its overwhelming poverty since it is all concentrated into the counties that would participate in a calexit:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion...

Splitting California's electoral votes is a right wing wet dream. Makes you wonder if it's the Koch family or the Mercers behind this push. Or some combination of billionaires and Russian foreign intelligence.

Ah yes, the ol' formulaic "I don't like this, therefore it must be right wing, and therefore must be koch involved" line of thinking. I think if the right were concerned about electoral votes, they would simply allow a real (as opposed to imagined conspiracy theory) left wing movement funded by an actual billionaire happen:

http://www.latimes.com/politic...

And if it did, you can guarantee that California won't take all of its counties along with it; see West Virginia. The "right" doesn't need to do anything. Though California WILL keep its overwhelming poverty since it is all concentrated into the counties that would participate in a calexit:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion...

California's debt passed $400 billion under Moonbeam, and the deficit is back. But we'll tax more and borrow more, that'll fix it! Never mind that California has the highest poverty rate and is firmly in the bottom half in terms of educational quality. At least we get warnings that just about everything can cause cancer!

Every citizen gets a vote.

But not all votes are equal. And that is where the problem lies, because in aggregate, a vote for congress in a rural district has more influence than a vote in a city.

In 2016, 45.2 million Americans cast a vote for a democratic Senate candidate, while 39.3 voted for a republican, but the senate still went 52/48 for republicans.

Same thing with the house of representatives, republicans got less than 50% of the popular vote, but still won more than 55% of the seats.

BTW, this same phenomenon happens even more strongly in state legislatures where republicans from rural districts regularly vote to over-ride local city-only policies like minimum wage, transgender bathroom usage and, apropos to this topic - 21 state laws to quash broadband competition.

"Global Warming Will Kill Us All." Is probably a lot more likely than most climate scientists would like it to be - as unfortunately, the most accurate Climate Models tend to be the most pessimistic (I would love to be wrong in this)!

https://www.technologyreview.c...
"Global warming’s worst-case projections look increasingly likely, according to a new study that tested the predictive power of climate models against observations of how the atmosphere is actually behaving.

The paper, published on Wednesday in Nature, found that global temperatures could rise nearly 5 C by the end of the century under the the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s steepest prediction for greenhouse-gas concentrations. That’s 15 percent hotter than the previous estimate. "

Even the mildest predictions of Global Warming show increased threats to American security and economy - yet Trump claims that security and economy are more important than dealing with Global Warming:

http://www.latimes.com/world/e...
"The Trump administration will stay focused on economic growth and national security no matter the outcome of its climate change policy review, a U.S. official told delegates at a United Nations convention in Germany on Saturday.

http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/s...
"Navy Rear Admiral (retired) David Titley has stated very clearly that it's a threat to U.S. national security, and President Obama went as far, correctly, as to say that climate change denial is a threat to our security as well. Interestingly, current Secretary of Defense James Mattis — one of the very few people in Trump's administration who understands that climate change is real — has called it a threat to national security as well."

Yes, BMW is worse than Harley Davidson in terms of maintenance and cost of ownership, but both are actually pretty bad. LAPD should just have gone with a Japanese brand like Yamaha instead.

Right .. . . .

By the way, this is in the submission queue now courtesy of another person on Slashdot:

Why is liberal California the poverty capital of America?

Thanks, American Govt for lending our tax money to Tesla and getting them all back 9 years earlier than expected with full interest.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/tes...
Maybe the knuckle-draggers, once they go electric, will also repay their loans.

If they are trying to fully repay the government they have a long way to go.
http://www.latimes.com/busines...

And then there is this too
http://www.slate.com/articles/...

California (of which I am a resident) is already whining about losing the Federal subsidy on State taxation via Federal deductions. The estimate is that 6.1 million Californians will now pay taxes on $8,000 more income. That's about 40% of all CA taxpayers who were previously subsidized (if you consider others paying taxes for which you are exempt) now having to pay taxes.

Diablo canyon is down the road.

I've got nothing against nuclear. I toured the plant last year or the year before. Super impressive.

Anyway, it's my understanding that Diablo Canyon isn't being shut down by regulators so much as PG&E can't make a profit from it. Solar and Gas are too cheap for [heavily regulated] nuclear to be profitable.

Here's the story from 18 months ago:
http://beta.latimes.com/busine...

News?

I'd love to see one shred of objective evidence to support that -- if you have one.

See the current cases against Yale and Harvard. Or one of the dozens of articles on it, this isn't new or unknown. That's not even touching on the "affirmative action" bullshit with SAT scores, where blacks and mexicans are give massive point boosts simply because they're black or mexican. While asians and whites are punished and have points removed.

Basically if you're asian or white, you need to do twice to four times better then anyone else to land a position. Seriously, there's real racism going on here. But it's sure not in whites or asians favor.

Give back to the people who worked for the corporations you drove out of business with illegally anticompetitive business practices, Bill. Give back to the people who had to clean up after your deliberate attempts to sabotage Linux. Give life back to the people that your investments have killed. Give back the tax revenues you've avoided paying even though you're one of the biggest beneficiaries of the system. Let us have back control of education. Please, Bill. Give Back.

I think these folks trying to demand that they have the sole ability to utilize white noise might think twice about trying to assert that theory, because they will be set upon like wildebeests crossing a crocodile filled river.

It's pretty much a signal with zero mean and statistically uncorrelated finite variance. If these people can prove that he somehow infringed upon any rights they have they will have to prove that their signal isn't white noise, and prove that he used their non-white noise signal.

This is right up there with the time that Harley Davidson tried to copyright the sound their motorcycles make. They lost that case http://articles.latimes.com/20...

Tesla delivered only 1,550 Model 3 vehicles in the Q4, lower than the lowest "analyst" guidance. But as they say, "Hope springs eternal". http://www.latimes.com/busines... [latimes.com]

If you don't have a clue, just shut up. They don't sell shares that other people already have, there is no cashing out. They create new shares from thin air and sell those. Why do you feel the need to post your idiocy on every topic you clearly know nothing about?

Two big Uber investors SELL SHARES to Softbank. Yes, if you don't have a clue, you should just shut up.

If I've said it once.... I've said it a hundred times.

Our technology is evolving faster than our species.

• 
  Suicides of teen girls in the USA are up due to cell phones and social media.
  Cell phones are killing our necks.
  In addition to carrying a personal tracking device, governments are using and abusing any and all technology to spy on citizens
  The Sun could wipe out our power grid with a direct hit from a geomagnetic storm, and utilities aren't doing anything to mitigate the risks.
  5 Countries are destroying the ocean with plastics and covering the earth with asbestos.
  And let's not forget about the Doomsday clock and Nuclear Weapons. We still have a cold war posture that could end badly.
  We have governments with cheap gene editing tools CRISPR/CAS9 working to make designer pets that glow in the dark and super biological weapons
  Video Game Addiction is rampant
  The Internet is a Pandora's box of garbage and porn, bad behavior are shaping your minds through YouTube and other video streaming sites.
  The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. There will be a tipping point and this will lead to global unrest.

We can truly say it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. If we could all just grow up and use our technology for good, but we can't. Just like light and dark, yin and yang, the good of technology is always accompanied by the evil dark side.

My prediction for 2018 is that AI and machine learning are going to be applied to hacking. AI's will be trained to write code to exploit all things and the exploits will be endless. Humans won't even be able to understand the exploit code as the AI software churns them out. Further I predict human cloning will happen this year and that China/Russia/North Korea will test some pretty nasty hacks on Americas Banks, Stock Market, Telecommunications, and/or gas/electric/water. I also predict that US drug usage will continue to increase (opioids, weed, alcohol) and the life expectancy will continue to decrease and suicide rates will continue to increase. I also predict that based on an increased energy in the atmosphere that storms will continue to grow in intensity. I also predict there will be a war in North Korea due to an error in a rocket test hitting a US ally. Further I predict Russia will take over another ex-Russian republic and China will continue to flex it's military muscle.

7 billion people on the planet. Technology everywhere, and we still can't figure out to behave and share.

I was watching TV with a little child and she was horrified by the war videos on the news and she asked me, "Why is there war? Why are they fighting?"

My answer, "Because, Sharing is hard."

To all reading this, in 2018 do a better job of sharing, loving your neighbor, and using less plastic.

Happy New Year!

Here's one, from the Dorner adventure. Both of the people in the truck survived, neither of which were their suspect. The truck didn't even match the description.

Of course, you could also just Google it. It looks like they even charge their intended target for the injuries that they cause to bystanders.

These kinds of errors are not just related to Russia.

Mars Climate Orbiter probe lost due to Math error:
English to Metric math conversion error
https://edition.cnn.com/TECH/s...
https://mars.nasa.gov/msp98/ne...
http://articles.latimes.com/19...

ExoMars Schiaparelli lander crashed due to failure to recognize the proper height.
http://spaceflight101.com/exom...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/b...