Slashdot Mirror

I have seen people on slashdot accuse you of rape too. Does that make it a fact? Watch, I'll add another: PopeRatzo raped me. Boom! Fact.

Funny thing about the internet. You can check whether stuff has been reported before.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...
http://fusion.net/story/328522...
http://gawker.com/the-time-don...
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...
http://www.inquisitr.com/36114...
http://time.com/4572925/megyn-...
http://www.rollingstone.com/po...
http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/1...

There. That oughtta do it.

Now, where is the evidence that PopeRatzo raped you?

Yes, we want to bring broadband to all Americans... so my ex-clients can gouge the shit out of them with rent-seeking behavior, unneeded service caps and fees, and charging content providers that aren't directly owned by the ISP access fees after we shitcan Net Neutrality!

Not to be all devils advocate but the same thing was said about Tom Wheeler when he was picked by Obama to head the FCC. And Wheeler ended up being a strong advocate for Net Neutrality and tried limiting cable and telephone monopolies. Of course the odds are that Ajit Pai will be so deep in the pockets of the cable and telephone companies that it would take a search team three weeks to find his nose, but it is not unheard of that a former lobbyist bites the hand that fed them.

At least provide a link to the original source (and there's a whole lot more great stuff there also):

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/an-important-message-from-mike-pence

http://www.newyorker.com/humor...

Who is the "KGB" sympathizer?

Trump, his family, and some of his cabinet picks have extensive contacts with Putin (former KGB agent). Putin is the only person that Trump respect and praises repeatedly in public.

Who is the former Nixon supporter?

The most blantent example would be the Trump adviser with the Nixon tattoo on his back, Roger Stone.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/02/the-dirty-trickster

Crony capitalist is so inclusive as to be meaningless.

Most of Trump's cabinet picks, the millionaires and billionaires.

Meh, it's not the marriage bots we need to worry about. It's the sexbots. Within 10 years there will be robots that are good enough to satisfy most of a man's needs. They'll be kind, forgiving, sweet, feminine, encouraging - pretty much the opposite of today's woman who has to make it in a man's world. This will have gargantuan effects on our society. Men will save up for their sexbot, and afterwards drop off the grid. Some men will buy shares in a company that rotates the sexbots once a week, some will buy several, and some will buy one for a wife replacement like in the article.

But the real change will be in the Third World, where women are scarce. From this New Yorker article:

Early last week, while the political world was waiting for Hillary Clinton to address the moral, diplomatic, and technological questions posed by her e-mail habits, the United Nations issued a report asserting that more than one in three women experience sexual or physical violence in their lifetimes. One in ten females under the age of twenty is subjected to âoeforced sexual acts.â In more than thirty countries, it is not illegal for men to beat their wives. In the United States, eighty-three per cent of girls between twelve and sixteen confront sexual harassment in school. Even the earnest bureaucrats of the U.N., who tend to favor euphemism and skip over cruelties like honor killings and âoecorrective rape,â could not help but label the rate and the variety of mayhem regularly exacted upon half of humankind as âoealarmingly high.â

Sexbots will put an end to most of this. Women worldwide will welcome the sexbot revolution as it will mean much less abuse, much less sexual harassment, much less rape. They will finally be able to ditch the unwanted chore of sexually satisfying undesirable men. Permanently. There are thirty million undesirable men in China who will remain lifelong virgins, celibate as monks despite the fact that they really, really want not to be. Sexbots will give these men a chance at happiness, and women will thank them for it. If sexbots mean a single woman doesn't get acid thrown in her face for rejecting an undesirable man, then it's all worth it.

actually this is not new. its actually the umpteenth time (technical term) that he's protected natural lands/resources.
He's now protected more land than any president ever, including Teddy.

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

"He doubled the debt!" ...putting out someone else's fire.
What was he supposed to do? Let it burn down?

The left isn't losing working class voters.
The right is just finally waking up to what really keeps it in power, and embracing it openly: whiteness.

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

The reason solar is relatively inexpensive right now is because of Chinese panel manufacturing costs, or lack of them.

With the planned 45% (or short-term 15%, if he can't convince congress) tariff, solar may not be cheaper for very long. And/or if China continues to be aggravated about Taiwan.

Well, not here in the US, anyway. They'll still be cheaper everywhere else. Unless China actually stops subsidizing its manufacturers.

Hmm roaming costs you say. Well that is marginal problem with people crossing the boarder and can be addressed in ways any traveler knows already anyway.
The problem the GGP wanted to show is that there are always scenarios which could lead to the self driving vehicle to be confused - in your scenario with bad reception or lost connection for any other reason (aliens eating the antenna etc). This is what somebody pointed out already about airplanes - autonomous airplane control systems can let the pilot sleep most of the way after he programmed the target. The programming of the target may be wrong (in themiddle of Indian ocean?) or you end up in the airfield having no support for autonomous landing or it is out of service or whatever such thing. Good engineering practice and most likely also law will require to have a backup that can support such automatic system by not ideal but better than nothing system called human.
Unless of course we reach end of human development which is a completely different discussion but think of this - humans are last resort in such unpredictable situations because after appropriate training they are universal enough to realize what to do and give it a shot. System with such ability may be technologically possible one day but they would have enough of general human ability to adapt to environment that they would warrant some of our rights to be given to them. At the same time such systems will be complex enough that the probability of error will increase. The cost of such systems will increase too at least initially yet the problem with rights will have to be addressed - in other words at some point costs of enterprise will be not in technical ability but legal rights of the robots. Where this leads you can read up in Washing Machine Tragedy. This story may be a joke but the problems of complex systems will at some point arrive. I for one cannot wait for a good washing machine - a self driving car I do not really need.

Markets are markets, by and large.

That's true. But stocks and pork bellies are different from each other when it comes to fungibility and elasticity. There are distinct markets in fossil fuels and pork bellies, but there is no distinct market in fossil fuel stocks, just the stock market.

Fear and greed, supply and demand, gluts, panics, quants, HVTs, it's all there in both.

Well, yes, and the same kind of people who believe that stock market prices are a fiction based on irrational investors, and that people who make their livelihood with investments are useless parasites living off unearned income,those are the people who believe that divestment works for reducing stock prices. That group strongly overlaps with progressives, which is why they often engage in these divestment campaigns.

The New Yorker, right wing rag that it is(*), explains it pretty well:

However, if the aim of divestment campaigns is to reduce companies’ profitability by directly reducing their share prices, then these campaigns are misguided. An example: suppose that the market price for a share in ExxonMobil is ten dollars, and that, as a result of a divestment campaign, a university decides to divest from ExxonMobil, and it sells the shares for nine dollars each. What happens then?

Well, what happens is that someone who doesn’t have ethical concerns will snap up the bargain. They’ll buy the shares for nine dollars apiece, and then sell them for ten dollars to one of the other thousands of investors who don’t share the university’s moral scruples. The market price stays the same; the company loses no money and notices no difference. As long as there are economic incentives to invest in a certain stock, there will be individuals and groups—most of whom are not under any pressure to act in a socially responsible way—willing to jump on the opportunity. These people will undo the good that socially conscious investors are trying to do

There is an important difference, therefore, between divestment and product boycotts. If a group of people believes that the Coca-Cola Company is harming the world, whereas PepsiCo isn’t, and accordingly switch their consumption from Coke to Pepsi, the Coca-Cola Company is harmed. Their sales decrease, and they make less profit. By contrast, if the same group of people stop investing in Coca-Cola, and invest instead in Pepsi, things will quickly balance out, and neither company will notice much difference. As soon as an ethical investor sells a share, a neutral or unethical investor will buy it..

Seems to have eluded all my mates who work in the City, are distinguished economists, etc. [...] You appear to think you have a point that is very obvious. You are deluding yourself.

Your mates don't understand basic economics very well, but they don't have to. Neither success as an investor nor success as a "distinguished economist" depends on actually understanding much economics.

(*) That was sarcasm; I know you Brits often don't know much about the US, so I thought I'd mention that.

Evidence seems to show that divestment does not lower stock prices. (A consequence of the "efficient market hypothesis", incidentally)

It's official. http://www.newyorker.com/humor...

Everything else in the summary is conjecture.

Sure, you just have to follow the lead to the source.

Flynn broke rules he thought were stupid. He once told me about a period he spent assigned to a C.I.A. station in Iraq, when he would sometimes sneak out of the compound without the “insane” required approval from C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia. He had technicians secretly install an Internet connection in his Pentagon office, even though it was forbidden. There was also the time he gave classified information to nato allies without approval, an incident which prompted an investigation, and a warning from superiors. During his stint as Mullen’s intelligence chief, Flynn would often write “This is bullshit!” in the margins of classified papers he was obliged to pass on to his boss, someone who saw these papers told me.

So this is information the reporter collected from sources which include Flynn himself. The question is if you believe the reporter and if you do, do you believe sources like Flynn.

He's only "apparently not good at business" to people who don't know jack shit about business.

I tried to book a flight on Trump Air, hoping to have a delicious Trump Steak, wash it down with a clear shot or two of Trump Vodka, maybe get a bottle of Trump Water as a souvenir, on my way to enrolling at Trump University.

I wonder if I can get a Trump Mortgage.

http://gawker.com/a-complete-l...

I never counted Paul Newman as someone who knew jack shit about business but his Newman's Own brand has generated more money in charitable donations than Trump has accumulated - yes, I'm implying he's not a billionaire - while Trump donations are as underwhelming as he is overbearing

http://www.newyorker.com/news/...

If it's not this "joke" then it's some other "joke", a call to say there's no need to vote or that you're guilty of a voting violation.

It's all mean spirited, disrespectful and crooked and should be prosecuted whichever side is doing it.

Just dropping three points here:

* Sea levels *are* rising, and its negatively impacting the lives of people already, today: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/...
* greenland ice is melting http://www.independent.co.uk/e...
* glaciers are melting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

All three of these things are hopefully undisputable.

Yes, science isn't sure about everything, but it is quite sure about this, sure enough that it should be trusted. And please do base your political decision on what the scientific consensus provides, everything else would be totally irresponsible.

Florida is predominantly swampland and sinkhole ridden. Florida is being developed at an alarming rate.

Couldn't POSSIBLY have anything to do with either of those things though!

Yes, it could have a lot to do with it. But that doesn't mean the ocean levels are not rising. Especially in the southern part of Florida, the land is all very near to sea level. This means that small increases in sea level will have large effects on real estate. So places that were not affected years ago, are now. Portions of Miami regularly have incursions of seawater diring spring tides, that did not have them in years past.

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

But fear not, The Governor of Florida has simply banned ocean level rise, so the problem has been fixed.

That and a lot of pumps. We are not truly pissing against the tide. http://miami.cbslocal.com/2014...

And as noted, the sure fire cure foro this is , as noted “Let’s pray, let’s pray, let’s pray, it’s going to get better,” said Caballero."

Who knew?

He was labeled anti-black for reasons I have yet to be able to find.

Donald Trump violated the civil rights act by refusing to rent homes to black people.

* http://www.nytimes.com/times-i...
* http://new.www.huffingtonpost....
* http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...
* http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

Trump continued to refuse to rent homes to black people three years after Justice Department ruling on the matter sides against Trump.

* http://www.nytimes.com/1978/03...
* http://www.nytimes.com/1983/10...

Trump ordered blacks to leave casino floor whenever him or wife arrives on property.

* http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

1991 book written by Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino President quotes Trump as saying:

"I've got black accountants at Trump Castle and Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day⦠. I think the guy is lazy. And it's probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It's not anything they can control."

* http://articles.philly.com/199...

Trump built a casino in black majority city and breaks promise to mayor about hiring locals, refrains to hire the minorities and opting to staff the casino with almost exclusively all Caucasian employees.

* http://www.nydailynews.com/arc...

Trump was asked about replacing TSA's 'heebeejabis' with veterans, responded with:

"We're looking at it"

* http://www.npr.org/2016/06/30/...
* http://www.businessinsider.com...
* http://time.com/4039658/trump-...

Trump responded to accusations of racism by hiring a former aid for Joseph McCarthy to sue the government for half a billion dollars.

* http://www.salon.com/2011/04/2...

Trump kept books of Hitler Speeches by his bed.

* http://www.businessinsider.com...
* http://forward.com/the-assimil...
* http://www.gq.com/story/donald...

Trump's campaign photoshopped a white model black.

* http://www.huffington

He was labeled anti-black for reasons I have yet to be able to find.

Donald Trump violated the civil rights act by refusing to rent homes to black people.

* http://www.nytimes.com/times-i...
* http://new.www.huffingtonpost....
* http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...
* http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

Trump continued to refuse to rent homes to black people three years after Justice Department ruling on the matter sides against Trump.

* http://www.nytimes.com/1978/03...
* http://www.nytimes.com/1983/10...

Trump ordered blacks to leave casino floor whenever him or wife arrives on property.

* http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

1991 book written by Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino President quotes Trump as saying:

"I've got black accountants at Trump Castle and Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day⦠. I think the guy is lazy. And it's probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It's not anything they can control."

* http://articles.philly.com/199...

Trump built a casino in black majority city and breaks promise to mayor about hiring locals, refrains to hire the minorities and opting to staff the casino with almost exclusively all Caucasian employees.

* http://www.nydailynews.com/arc...

Trump was asked about replacing TSA's 'heebeejabis' with veterans, responded with:

"We're looking at it"

* http://www.npr.org/2016/06/30/...
* http://www.businessinsider.com...
* http://time.com/4039658/trump-...

Trump responded to accusations of racism by hiring a former aid for Joseph McCarthy to sue the government for half a billion dollars.

* http://www.salon.com/2011/04/2...

Trump kept books of Hitler Speeches by his bed.

* http://www.businessinsider.com...
* http://forward.com/the-assimil...
* http://www.gq.com/story/donald...

Trump's campaign photoshopped a white model black.

* http://www.huffington

>Just like it did in the Wiemar Republic? Hitler was jailed for the terrible things he said and did. That didn't stop him from gaining power

Every single word in that is a flagrant lie.

Learn grasshopper:

The horror of the Holocaust serves as the founding narrative legitimizing European integration, and it's the key motivation for hate-speech laws on the continent. The European Union has called on all its member states to pass laws criminalizing Holocaust denial. This European narrative is based on a widely accepted interpretation of what led to the Holocaust. It basically says that anti-Semitic hate speech was the decisive trigger, that evil words beget evil deeds, that if only the Weimar government had clamped down on the National Socialists' verbal persecution of the Jews in the years prior to Hitler's rise to power, then the Holocaust would never have happened. I was confronted with this argument during the Danish cartoon crisis, in 2006. People condemned the cartoons as Islamophobic, and warned that the demonization of Muslims might trigger mass violence. "We know what happened in the twenties and thirties," critical voices argued, referring to the seemingly inevitable link between speech and violence.

Researching my book, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic. I found that, contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der Stürmer [Streicher's newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters. The courts became an important platform for Streicherâ(TM)s campaign against the Jews. In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.

Reading the history, Hitler's trial for treason was a flagrant failure which devolved right away into a propaganda exercise for Hitler that made him known throughout Germany. The authorities apparently never bothered him about hate speech as far as I can tell and given the consequences of the treason trial, it may have been well that they did not. So in that point, I was incorrect. I had thought that hate speech laws had been applied as part of his trial for treason.

2) No laws had anything to do with Hitler gaining power. Because his gaining of power was entirely extralegal. Contrary to popular belief the NAZIs NEVER won an election. The best they ever did was 11% in 1929. That did, however, gain them some seats in parliament. The conservative government panicked and hoped to appease and quiet the extreme fringe by giving Hitler the presidency. In theory a good move since the presidency was almost entirely a ceremonial role. The president did get to appoint the chancelor but only if the current one resigned, retired or died. Other than that - almost no real power

Ford chose death and destruction over the lives of customers.

To this day I won't own Ford.

Get ready to change your mind! Hear from the engineer who caused the pinto not to be recalled:

But does a rear-positioned gas tank qualify as traceable cause? Traceable cause suggests a deviation from the norm. It turns out, however, that most compacts of that era had fuel tanks behind the rear axle. A former head of the N.H.T.S.A. testified on Ford's behalf, stating that in his opinion the Pinto's design was no more or less safe than that of any other car in its class, like the Chevrolet Vega or the A.M.C. Gremlin. Under cross-examination, one of the chief witnesses for the prosecutionâ"an automobile-safety consultant named Byron Blochâ"conceded the point.

and

"Yet, from an engineer's standpoint, the same information is much more ambiguous. Every car on the road is differentâ"safer in some ways and less safe in others. So does the one area where the Pinto is worseâ"by two miles per hour in an infrequent subset of a rare kind of fatal crashâ"mean that the car is defective? A radically redesigned Pinto would not have saved the Ulrich girls. In the trial, the defense successfully argued that Duggar was driving at close to fifty miles per hour, and nothing short of a Sherman tank could have survived the impact of a four-thousand-pound van at full speed."

That is, these were people who cared about the problems they thought were problems. The entire time that Gioia was working on the Pinto case, he drove a Pinto. "Look, the facts of the matter are that in normal use this car is perfectly fine," he said, shrugging. Later, he sold his Pinto to his sister, for six hundred dollars. At the time, the Pinto was being tried in court for the murder of three teen-age girls. But it should be remembered that, in the end, Ford won the Ulrich case. The engineers got the chance to present their evidence, and their testimony carried the day.

I cant possibly quote the whole article but its really quite good: You can believe your simplistic version of events, or you can read the truth as illustrated in a way only malcom gladwell could do.
http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

Actually, in NYC 1) Uber is not responsible for putting more vehicles on the road (we had more than 55,000 black and livery vehicles prior to Uber's existence and the system worked just fine where we would call and order a car, and 2) we consider our private hire vehicles (including both medallion taxi cabs and livery vehicles) to be part of the public transportation system and a necessary good, not a luxury because we don't want everyone owning a car.

This is all wrong. Surprisingly wrong.

There have always been grey market or black market cabs and bus services in New York City. Loads of them. It is so well known that it has even been featured in the New Yorker. So the need is well known and has been being filled for decades before Uber and Lyft came along.

And the notion that Uber didn't add any vehicles to the transportation fleet is just silly. There is a strictly limited number of medallions. They cost 7 figures, a crazy expensive number. So every single one of those cabs is run 24/7. There is zero underutilized capacity in the cab fleet. Uber wouldn't exist if your version were reality. If Uber charged more for worse service, nobody would use it. They charge less for better service, so the entrenched industry is pissed. I'd be pissed too, if I paid a million bucks for a stupid cab medallion and found out that there was a huge black market undercutting me.

Nobody considers cabs and livery vehicles to be a part of public transportation. They are a part of the transportation system. And they are vital to the functioning of the city and its transportation system. But they are not public, not even in perception. Granted, there has been an immense amount of regulatory capture in this industry in this city. But still not enough that anyone would consider hiring a cab to be "taking public transit".

We are simply not interested in the market forces of supple and demand when we do not all have the same amount of money. There are 8 million people in this city and price is an incredibly bad indicator of utility when there is a wealthy banker who can afford a 4.0x surge and city transportation worker who cannot.

So.... no steak for anyone. Because steak is too expensive and the guy who cleans the floors at the Marriott can't afford steak, what with the 4 kids, and it isn't fair. And food isn't a luxury. And that arrogant rich guy should't be allowed to fly his private plane. We all own the airspace, and I can't afford a G3, so nobody else should get one either. In fact, why should all those business travelers get to fly back and forth to places like Washington DC and Los Angeles? I can't afford that! It isn't fair! Supply and demand breaks down when things are too expensive. Nobody who lives in a Brooklyn Heights housing project can afford to fly to Washington! So we need to make it fair and have everyone take the bus.

Except buses are wasteful for long haul travel. So everyone needs to take the train. It is better for the environment anyway, right? And then we can have that high speed rail line like they have in Europe. That would be fair. And just. Except some people still couldn't afford it. So we should have vouchers. And price controls. The government should set the price. And if they don't have enough money to run as many cars as they need on Monday commutes, we should issue rationing tickets to make sure everything is fair. ....

Yeah, your vision for the world is soooo much better.

Do some actual research. Trump saying that he's a successful businessman and saying that "people say" he's a successful businessman do not make him a successful businessman. Look into his business past, he racks up debts on a corporate ticket, moves the cash over to his own interests and sticks shareholders with the bill. Letting him tap into the US budget would be the biggest fiduciary mistake in modern history.

Scotland Yard, for one, has a bunch of specialists with a talent for grainy security footage. It's taken a while, but now that super-recognizers are actually looking through all that footage, it looks like the cameras in London are starting to put people in jail.

Where I live, it seems cameras have at least convinced crooks to put on ski-masks before they rob a bank teller or a convenience store. I've got mixed feelings about a world gone all Minority Report, but if you live in a neighborhood where this kind of shit-crime is common, you start to get frustrated at the grainy blob on the 11 o'clock news carjacking a lady at a gas station. It's these assholes who'll make it easy for toothy salesmen to sell politicians on armed security drones, DNA sniffers, cyborg security-dogs, and whatever else crazy shit the future has in store for us.

> After all, Coyote v. Acme was this country's longest running product liability suit.

I don't see where he'd have standing to sue under the ADA in any case, since Wile. E. Coyote _won_ his lawsuit for manufacturing defects in 1990.

                        http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

Well, perhaps we could find a better way to hand out grants to scientists, so we don't end up wasting it. I mean there's the Replication Crisis to consider, and the Decline Effect, and then somewhere north of 40,000 neurology papers that were a waste of time (not all British of course).

Those things pretty much demonstrate that funding of this "science" is mostly empty waste of money. Acquiring funding and doing science are two totally different skillsets and this pretty much guarantees that people doing actual (that is replicable) science will get jack shit. I see nothing bad about those pseudo-scientists, whose only "productive" contribution to society is to elicit citations from other such pseudo-scientists in endless circlejerk, to get a tiny bit less grants which are mostly wasted anyway.

Well, perhaps we could find a better way to hand out grants to scientists, so we don't end up wasting it. I mean there's the Replication Crisis to consider, and the Decline Effect, and then somewhere north of 40,000 neurology papers that were a waste of time (not all British of course).

I think Ford are closing plants all over the place. Their sales are weaker in the USA and China too, which is absolutely nothing to do with Brexit, although Brexit is a wonderful excuse for useless executives to hang their poor performance on.

Trump's ghostwriter spent 18 months with him and thinks he's a sociopath.

If he were writing âoeThe Art of the Dealâ today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, âoeThe Sociopath.â

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

I particularly enjoyed how Clinton paid for this message with ill-gotten proceeds from Russia via a backdoor uranium deal. The scummy treasonous bitch is trying to pin shit on Trump while rolling in Russian money like a pig in shit.

Ted Cruz didn't got booed off the stage of the Republican convention because the audience disliked his politics: it was because - for the reasons Cruz gave - he wasn't going to endorse Trump as the Republican candidate. I'll grant you that if there was a popularity contest in the Senate, Cruz would probably be in the 101st position.

Disclaimer: that's the first - and probably the last - time I've defended Ted Cruz. If I lived in the US and my only choice was to vote for Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, I'd probably go to the nearest desert and stick my head in the sand. As it happens, I live in the UK, and we have our own problems with political clowns and demagogues. It's interesting that Donald Trump's former campaign manager had such a low opinion of Trump's supporters that he thought they'd have problems understanding words like "demagogue" and "denominator". And that he has sufficent science expertise to be able to call Stephen Hawking a "so-called genius".

The scientific method does not allow for intentional deception when practiced correctly

You need to emphasise the when practiced correctly because, let me see, around 40,000 MRI neurology papers are now considered invalid, there's something called The Decline Effect in medicine and there's a Replication Crisis is psychology.

So what, specifically, are you proposing here?

I've always viewed the entire net neutrality debate as a (hopefully) temporary sideshow while/until we fix the larger problem of lack of competition. The only reason (e.g.) Comcast is able to pull the shenanigans that they are is because we can't go anywhere else.

The problem is, such regulation impedes competition — the more "reasonable regulations", that the governments — Federal and lesser alike — throw at the ISPs, the harder it is to unseat the incumbents. Comcast CEO plays golf with Obama — do you suppose, Obama-appointed FCC-commissioner(s) will be equally fair to Comcast and a challenger?

The less free the market — and government officials deciding, what the owner can do with his cables, is unquestionably reducing freedom — the harder it is for Capitalism's usual forces to work their magic.

It should be noted that Trump’s unfamiliarity with Duke is a recent condition. In 2000, Trump issued a statement that he was no longer considering a run for President with the backing of the Reform Party, partly because it “now includes a Klansman, Mr. Duke.”

Throughout last fall and into the winter, Trump continued to accumulate support among white nationalists. In November, on a weekend in which he said that a black protester, at a rally in Alabama, deserved to be “roughed up,” Trump retweeted a graphic composed of false racist statistics on crime; the graphic, it was discovered, originated from a neo-Nazi account that used as its profile image a variation on the swastika. In January, he retweeted the account “@WhiteGenocideTM,” which identified its location as “Jewmerica.” Shortly before the Iowa caucuses, a pro-Trump robocall featured several white supremacists, including the author Jared Taylor, who told voters, “We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people.” Each time Trump was asked on Twitter about his white nationalist supporters, the candidate, who is ready to respond, day or night, to critics of his debating style or his golf courses, simply ignored the question.

Because you can't prove a fucking negative. They NEVER claimed what the article say.

If only they recorded TEDMED talks and wrote articles concerning them prior to the WSJ article.

Or was the New Yorker conspiring with the WSJ 10 months beforehand, with both of them drugging Holmes into publicly stating gems like:

Since then, she told the audience, the company has developed blood tests that can help detect dozens of medical conditions, from high cholesterol to cancer, based on a drop or two of blood drawn with a pinprick from your finger.... From that one sample, Holmes said, several tests can be runâ"all less expensive than standard blood tests, sometimes as much as ninety per cent below the rates that Medicare sets.

Do us a favor and specify what you think they never claimed, and I suspect that we can document that they did.

voted for Obama and cheered as Harry Reid exercised the "nuclear option" to eliminate Republican filibusters in the Senate in 2013. The specific point of that action was to pack the federal courts of appeals that cover the DC area (and thus are the ones that rule on cases challenging the power of the federal government over individuals) with "progressive" judges. Obama and Reid were absolutely committed to packing the 4th circuit and they did it. The Republicans had been using the filibuster to prevent that court from being packed. There are 19 judges on that court now (thanks in part to Obama adding more seats) and 12 of them were put there by Carter, Clinton, or Obama (the remaining 7 were put there by Republicans).

This is a progressive ruling, completely consistent with "early 20th century progressive" ideology which favors totalitarian governance, and put in place by a court stuffed full of progressive judges. It's absolutely disingenuous for ANY progressive/Hillary/Obama supporter to complain about this ruling; it's EXACTLY what you support when you support those politicians. To complain is on par with jumping off a cliff and then complaining that you are going to hit the ground and it will hurt - in both cases you took the action and it had completely predictable and inevitable consequences. If you hate this ruling and think you are a progressive then you have no understanding of "progressive" political ideology and probably just stupidly fell into it because the word sounded like "progress" and your teachers/professors successfully propagandized you; If you'd ever bothered to turn off the Kardashians and READ A BOOK about 20th century progressivism you'd have known better. Any ACTUAL progressive would be celebrating this ruling.

Oh don't worry, Obama plans to keep them after he leaves office, problem solved.

That reminds me of the good old days when Uber claimed to be a "ridesharing" service, something you would use when you want to cut back on the costs of traveling alone.

I think this was real. The first time I remember hearing about Uber was in stories about commuters in places like San Francisco where they have big tolls to cross the bridge. I remember one story - NPR I think - where the driver picked up 3 separate riders on the way to work. They all met him at more central locations, not at their home. They specifically mentioned the toll to get across the bridge being split because they weren't taking 4 cars. I think they were pitching in like 5 bucks each for the ride.

The Uber part was helping match riders with drivers. It was more of competition for the bus than for cabs. They mentioned that the bus would take about 2 hours, where a direct commute was more like 30-45 minutes. So the driver saves like 30 bucks a day, gets some company on the ride and the riders avoid about $20-25 in expenses (paying 10 for the privilege) while getting some company for the ride and avoiding an extra couple hours on a bus every day. Win-win.

There also was a big bit about the etiquette of ride-sharing.... when to talk, when not to talk. What you can and cannot talk about. The stories at that time were definitely about regular folks commuting to work and sharing rides.

I suppose what happened is that once the infrastructure was in place, people living in locations that were ripe for black market cab operations figured out that they could use this service to make a few bucks filling the unmet need for cabs. Even before Uber there were big markets for black market cabs in places like New York City. Heck, New York is so over-regulated that they even have black market bus lines.

Just was recently reading a great profile of her as the "healthcare industries steve jobs", becuase of her secrecy and wardrobe.

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

Shame that her company is not living up to the hype, but it does say that they were reluctant to reveal any trade secrets about their device all along. Worth the read for some background on theranos (the company she founded when she was 19)

This brings back into my mind the photo-stitching work done by the Chudnovsky brothers about 15 years ago. Photo-stitching large mosaics has been around for a long time, but the work by these two mathematicians on the Unicorn Hunt tapestries rises to a much higher level.

The tapestries has been hanging for a very long time. During a restoration they were taken down, soaked clean, and photographed on both sides. (The back side, being against the wall and with a fabric backing on it, had much more vivid color.) But the resulting images were completely un-stitchable by conventional techniques - nothing lined up! The tapestry, being a textile, had relaxed and subtly distorted by being laid horizontal and cleaned. The tapestry was not a static image, but rather a dynamic, breathing object. The Chudnovskys applied serious math and computing power to subtly distort each image in the mosaic, cross-referencing the front and back sides, in order to get the threads to line up.

TL;DR. See this article for more details.

This Google camera, I'm sure, has very sophisticated stitching algorithms. But in the end, it is probably assuming that it is capturing images of a static object. I wonder how it would handle a similar challenge.

I was just reading this last night:
http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

The flaws in the US prison system are huge.

You'd better hope they don't thaw out - there's a lot of methane trapped in the permafrost, and methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2. Plus, it has a tendency to explode in the ground.

I do not trust the APA anymore in regards to LGBT and its stances on mental illness in this subject matter. They are just as political as the rest of us. They place politics over medical evidence or attempt to form that evidence to fit their narrative and stay as middle-of-the-road as possible.

Confirmation bias abound...

http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~ju...

http://www.newyorker.com/scien... (opinion article, but still relevant)

https://www.lifesitenews.com/n... (article from former APA President, although this news source is rather right-leaning)

https://drhurd.com/2012/03/29/... (Another opinion article discussing this issue)

https://www.minnpost.com/secon...

Proof is that rich people's kids don't work and don't live in ghettos either.

No, rich people's kids find other creative ways to fuck with the common man, like: mowing over people while giving 0 fucks, or arbitrarily hiking prices on life saving drugs.

...Osama is laughing his ass off.

Actually, it's apparently a guy named Khalid the Droll. As humorist Calvin Trillin predicted the Underwear Bomber in 2006:

I'm convinced that the whole shoe-bomber business was a prank. What got me onto this theory was reading that the shoe bomber, a Muslim convert named Richard Reid, had been described by someone who knew him well in England as "very, very impressionable." I had already decided that the man was a complete bozo. He made such a goofy production of trying to light the fuses hanging off his shoe that he practically asked the flight attendant if she had a match. The way I figure it, the one terrorist in England with a sense of humor, a man known as Khalid the Droll, had said to the cell, "I bet I can get them all to take off their shoes in airports." So this prankster set up poor impressionable Reid and won his bet. Now Khalid is back there cackling at the thought of all those Americans exposing the holes in their socks on cold airport floors. If someone is arrested one of these days and is immediately, because of his M.O., referred to in the press as the underwear bomber, you'll know I was onto something.

Trillin did indeed say this, and you can find clips of TV interviews from 2006.

His theory makes as much sense as anyone else's:

after the shoe-bombing scheme worked to perfection, Khalid the Droll announced to his cell, "When they've had a few years of taking off their shoes, I bet I can make them expose their private parts to full-body scanners." Not once has one of these after-the-fact analyzers considered the possibility that... Khalid the Droll is engaged in an elaborate scheme to embarrass us to death.

more than that they now claim to have destroyed the phone after gaining access but before accessing the data:
The NewYorker
"Unlocked iPhone Worthless After F.B.I. Spills Glass of Water on It"
By Andy Borowitz
http://www.newyorker.com/humor...

If he aint talking about government ownership of all means of production....he isn't a communist.

He may not be talking about it openly, but there are enough dog whistles in there to attract vast packs. But, whether he talks about it is irrelevant — whether he believes in it is important. And he does... Bernie Sanders is a member of an organization, that is a thin front for Communists.

They know of the toxicity of the "Communist" label (preferring "Socialist" instead), but aren't shy about their admiration for Marx. For example, here DSA speaks fondly of the founder of Communist Party of Italy. Separately a member of DSA's "National Committee" David Green once wrote:

Our goal as socialists is to abolish private ownership of the means of production. Our immediate task is to limit the capitalist class’s prerogatives in the workplace.

— David Green, 2007 (page 10)

Ah, you'll say, that's all from capitalist haters, just can't be true, right? Well, here is fresh from DSA's own mouth (emphasis mine):

And while Sanders’ platform calls primarily for government to heal the ravages of unrestrained capitalism, it also includes more radical reforms that shift control over capital from corporations to social ownership

Good enough for you? Far less evidence was used to claim "Trump is a KKK-supporter" or something like that...

Anyone replying to this post and expecting to continue the conversation, please, be sure to state unambiguously:

• Whether you dispute DSA being a Communist organization (at least in substantial part).
• Whether you dispute Bernie Sanders being a member.
• Whether or not you think there is anything wrong with Communism to begin with.

Responses missing clear answers to the above will be returned unopened. Thank you.

The end result may be a boom in tech businesses that choose to do business where these cheap labor pools are available.

Like manufacturing jobs returning the US because China is getting too expensive?

But despite what the rhetoric would have us believe, global manufacturing is trending in a positive direction for the U.S. Factory jobs are on the rise here, and many of these new jobs are coming back to North America from China, which is struggling to maintain its manufacturing capacity. Since March, 2010, when manufacturing employment in the U.S. hit a trough of 11.45 million jobs, nearly a million new factory positions have been created, most of them in the Southern states, particularly North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Better still, the jobs are typically good ones: across that same five-year period, average hourly manufacturing wages have increased over ten per cent, to more than twenty dollars. On the whole, U.S. manufacturing, as measured by the Purchasing Managers' Index, has steadily expanded.

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-donald-trump-is-wrong-about-manufacturing-jobs-and-china

Or it could just be that there are too many idiots whose brains have ossified to the point that it's not even worth arguing with - and this applies to a much larger age group than just old folks having "senior's moments."

That is probably a good pre-indicator of future dementia.

Yes but at a sea level rise rate of 2-4mm/year, I think that people will have time to adjust!!

Well, yeah. Sortakinda. Adjusting can mean everything from moving to drowning and there ya go.

Sounds so benign, so manageable. Next thing ya know, its 2100, and the levels have risen by 3 feet (conservative) to possibly 6 feet. That is death for places like Miami.

Flooding is a regular even there now. http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

And the right weather event, at the right time - even in the near future - will just grease the skids for it.

Now of course, its pretty easy to say "Well - they shouldn't have built there!

Problem of course, is after Miami is gone, you'll be able to say the same thing about the new lowest lying land.