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Feminists are always saying there are no mental differences in men in women. And because of that, the gender disparity in CS must be due to sexism.

Now they're altering the content of CS curriculum to appeal to women, and it is apparently working.

So if women do actually need to be taught CS differently, why is all that dark matter sexism still necessary to explain it?

You were right. I found the reference, but I don't understand why you were modded down to oblivion. Perhaps it was Bing shills, who objected to your use of the "Google is your friend" meme.

Also in my search, I found this reference to a video that went viral in China poking fun at Kim Jong Un, and I found it entertaining: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetw...

Your argument would hold more water if it wasn't the US government's idea for Ireland to become a tax haven in the first place:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

Nonsense. Just because a US consultant in Ireland mentioned Puerto Rico's economic successes in passing, does not equal an endorsement of US tax evasion by the American government. And even if the US government agrees with the "Double Irish" (actually this loophole is being closed in a few years), it doesn't mean that the American people would endorse having their money funneled into private corporations that don't even pay taxes. There are plenty of other small countries getting rich through economic injustices and obfuscation as well (e.g. Switzerland).

Your argument would hold more water if it wasn't the US government's idea for Ireland to become a tax haven in the first place:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

Going quite a bit off topic here, but I'll bite:

Build a border that can be enforced

I hope you're not talking about building a wall. A wall is one of those ideas that seems pleasant, simple, and realistic at a quick glance, but when you get into details it starts to break down. Even the Great Wall of China failed many times.

Rather than trying to go back to Isolationist policies, we should be looking at A) why they come here, and B) what steps we can take to diminish A. In the long run, removing their need/desire to come to America illegally will have far more benefit for everyone than simply trying to hide the problem behind a chain-link fence.

A isn't easy; a lot of people will claim "because America is the greatest country in the world!" Except we aren't turning back a tide of Canadians at our northern border, so far as I'm aware, meaning either America and Canada are roughly equivalent in greatness or there are other reasons that Mexicans are risking quite a bit to come to the U.S. While I'm no expert on Hispanic relations, it seems to me that what is happening is not so much Mexicans wanting to come to the US, but Mexicans wanting to leave Mexico and the US being the most natural choice. (I'm not aware of Guatemala offering a lot, and in fact Mexico is facing its own illegal immigrant problem with Guatemalans)

The main cause that I'm aware of is the Mexican Cartels, who mainly use drugs as their source of revenue. The surging movement in America to legalize weed is having a growing impact on that. They still have crack and heroine, of course, but these are far more destructive drugs that will result in fewer return users.

There are likely other other factors, such as poverty, especially in the border towns (driving along the highway by the border in El Paso, TX gives you an eerie comparison between Juarez and El Paso, especially when you consider that much of the El Paso side is still lower class.) Government corruption might be a factor.

For B, I already mentioned the legalizing of weed in America. If we can change the discussion of our "War on Drugs" from punishment to rehabilitation, we could lower the demand for drugs from Mexico (and other countries dealing with the same thing) even further.

For poverty, I don't have a good plan. But let's consider that fence again. It could cost $22.4 Billion to build (though the full cost is hard to figure out, apparently). A quick search tells me that the estimated population amongst the six Mexican border states was 12,246,99... in 1990. So that number's a bit old, we'll bump it up to 20M (another source says 24M by 2020, but that's for both sides of the border.) With about 27.9% being kids, that's about 14M adults, giving us $1600/Mexican adult (more, actually, as the "kids" only includes up to age 14). The average yearly income for Mexico is about $13K, so that's significant but not huge.

What if, instead of spending that money on the border, we use it to improve the cities on the Mexican side of the border? They would give at least a small economical boost, though short-term, and while improving those cities we could have US law enforcement work with Mexican law enforcement to further route the gang

Having a Nobel prize isn't as much fun as you might think. For example, the TSA will hassle you when you fly:

http://www.loweringthebar.net/...

On the other hand, you do get reserved parking at Berkeley:

http://www.npr.org/templates/s...

Around 2000? Try 1980.

I'd considered the question of AI and human conflict a while back, and then I came across Alva Noë's perspective on it. Alva words this much better than I could, so here are his words:

One reason I'm not worried about the possibility that we will soon make machines that are smarter than us, is that we haven't managed to make machines until now that are smart at all. Artificial intelligence isn't synthetic intelligence: It's pseudo-intelligence.

This really ought to be obvious. Clocks may keep time, but they don't know what time it is. And strictly speaking, it is we who use them to tell time. But the same is true of Watson, the IBM supercomputer that supposedly played Jeopardy! and dominated the human competition. Watson answered no questions. It participated in no competition. It didn't do anything. All the doing was on our side. We played Jeapordy! with Watson. We used "it" the way we use clocks.

Philosophers and biologists like to compare the living organism to a machine. And once that's on the table, we are lead to wonder whether various kinds of human-made machines could have minds like ours, too.

But it's striking that even the simplest forms of life — the amoeba, for example — exhibit an intelligence, an autonomy, an originality, that far outstrips even the most powerful computers. A single cell has a life story; it turns the medium in which it finds itself into an environment and it organizes that environment into a place of value. It seeks nourishment. It makes itself — and in making itself it introduces meaning into the universe.

Now, admittedly, unicellular organisms are not very bright — but they are smarter than clocks and supercomputers. For they possess the rudimentary beginnings of that driven, active, compelling engagement that we call life and that we call mind. Machines don't have information. We process information with them. But the amoeba does have information — it gathers it, it manufactures it.

I'll start worrying about the singularity when IBM has made machines that exhibit the agency and awareness of an amoeba.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/...

I think that we're still a long way out from needing to worry about what will happen when artificial intelligence surpasses our own. Humanity has come a long way, and we can split atoms and splice genes, but we still can't create anything. We can't create life, even the simplest of life, let alone consciousness, free-will, and something capable of planning for its future in a way that conflicts with ours yet leaves us helpless to resist.

Perhaps when the day comes that it becomes a valid question, there will be other variables. Like, if the AI rose up and killed all living things on Earth, how would the rest of the colonized planets be affected?

If you are hiding, wouldn't Brazil be a lot more hip place to be? 20,000 Nazis can't be wrong!.

Of course the preferred place of immigration for these bastards was the good old USA, where thousands went. And where, if you were discovered, you just had to move abroad meanwhile receiving all you social security payments.

"We need those attitudes and policies changed by lawmakers, the problem isn't that Police are acting badly, its that they are allowed to act badly."

And that the Justice system is designed/manipulated to protect THEM when they do behave "badly", as you put it.

Here is another bit of information you should all digest, a quote from NPR: ( http://www.npr.org/2014/08/25/ )

"To understand some of the distrust of police that has fueled protests in Ferguson, Mo., consider this: In 2013, the municipal court in Ferguson--a city of 21,135 people--issued 32,975 arrest warrants for nonviolent offenses, mostly driving violations."

Now, if most of those people with warrants for driving offenses are black (Ferguson is 67.4% black, according to the 2010 census), and these warrants preclude them from serving on a Grand Jury (they do), then how is it possible to get a fairly balanced jury of one's peers? In short, the Ferguson Police Department handing out tickets to mostly black residents precludes black residents from ever serving on a Grand Jury, or any jury for that matter, in effect stacking the deck against them, racially speaking. A black person in Ferguson is fucked before they ever even reach a courtroom, and white folks have got it easy as the deck is ALWAYS stacked in their favor.

A similar situation exists where I live because there are NINE overlapping legal jurisdictions in terms of law enforcement--fully 5% of the population here is law enforcement (I live near a border, and as a result fall under the jurisdiction of local law-enforcement, County law-enforcement, State law-enforcement and numerous federal agencies including ICE, Border Patrol, FBI, DEA and DHS.). You cannot put together a jury here that isn't 5% (or more) law-enforcement, in effect stacking the deck against anyone being tried in a criminal court, as other jurors tend to believe them even when, during jury selection, those same officers said they would always believe a cop over anyone else, regardless of content. And yes, I actually heard several cops state that during jury selection when I was called up for jury duty. As a result of hearing this before I was questioned, I stated at that time I thought the cards stacked against any defendant...and was dismissed from jury duty.

The cards were stacked against Justice in Ferguson, and in favor of Darren Wilson. This shit needs to change.

For what it's worth, I'm white (or Caucasian...whatever makes you feel better about yourself).

I mean, no one — not even you — has any evidence of it.

except we do. the docs snowden leaked contain entries going back to around ~2005 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29 PRISM is a clandestine anti-terrorism[1] mass electronic surveillance data mining program launched in 2007 by the National Security Agency (NSA) and government survialence has been consistantly leaked on slashdot since it started in 1997, going back to CARNIVORE, RAPTORE, and this: Narus

Citation needed.

This is the war on drugs
Reagan declares war
This is parellel construction, basicly allowing cops to either plant evidence, and effectively nullifies reasonable suspicion.
This is civil foreiture. As you can see, the government can now just take your stuff without having to provide evidence
far less conviction in a court of law, jury of peers or not

Empty words.

hey mr pot, the kettle called, your fucking black.

It's a big factor. Here is a piece from NPR covering a beat cop working in Skid Row. Skid Row is pretty much a worse case scenario for law enforcement. He's been patrolling the same neighborhood for almost 20 years. He's familiar with the community and they're familiar with him. It has made a huge impact on how the people and the police interact with one another. http://www.npr.org/2014/10/14/...

Wait. You're trying to attract a single sex, but that's not sexism for some reason, despite the fact that you're explicitly trying to make something more attractive to only one sex and not the other. Uh, OK. Not sure how this logic works.

Since you are a single white man (with apparently no nieces/nephews/etc) I will let you off the hook on this one. Frozen appeals to *all* kids aged 3-8, since they aren't at the point where gender bias bullshit matters to them one bit. The important part here is that they didn't choose something from an age range where gender bias definitely kicks in, like Barbie/GI Joe in the 6-12 y.o. group.

To the rest of your point, Women DO like to code, and in fact when CS started it attracted just as many women professionals as the population would suggest (in the late 70s/early 80s). It wasn't until gender bias kicked in from the marketing/advertising of computer manufacturers (selling computers as boys' toys) that the women in CS started retreating. Correlation/causation aside, there is certainly nothing about the Y gene that predisposes men to excelling at computer science or disadvantages women; the difference is all in your head.

Give a read/listen to the Planet Money piece http://www.npr.org/blogs/money... if you want your eyes opened.

It isn't just the right-wing media pundits who are climate deniers. Look no further than the new House Majority Leader from the great coal state of Kentucky, re-elected with money from the Koch Brothers, (who are kinda big on coal). Or the Frackin' State of Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, who disagrees with 800 actual scientists on the matter, since forever. In fact James Inhofe wrote a anti-science book, titled "The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future", and among other things he oversees the Environmental Protection Agency.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Grea...

http://stateimpact.npr.org/okl...

Funny you should say that since the Libs want to:

- control what I do in my bedroom
- control my social life
- control what I talk about
- control who I do business with
- control what I believe
- control what business I'm allowed to engage in

It's time to reassess your opinion on who wants to to micromanage your life.

How much credence to you give to the theory recently put forward in a recent NPR Planet Money piece, ascribing the absence of women specifically in the computing industry to 1980s media representation of geeks and computer worker lifestyles?

At 18 you can have a lot of life experiences. Like making close to or less than the minimum wage. See a single parent struggle. See things like how well our public schools do and don't work. Reading a lot of great books. Hint: people less than 30 are reading more than those who are older. Your opinion on when people can drink is irrelevant - we are discussing the laws of our land. As for who is affected when someone enrolls, it is most definitely not just that individual. You could fairly easily argue that it would affect more people more certainly than one vote.

Anyways /. is full of all manner of ridiculous things and I am glad I have gone AC - is it really an ad hominem if you literally repeated something stupid? Life is full of wonderful, horrifying, and enlightening experiences even within an 18 year span! All we have to do is pay attention. It wasn't so long ago that you may have lived over half of your life in that span. People used to be done with school by the age of thirteen and begun to support their family. I find it completely absurd to argue that those who are eighteen should not be able to vote.

TL;DNR

However, I'll just pick one point.

If it's a true statement to say that climate change and higher temperatures in general will cause more powerful hurricanes, does that necessarily mean that every year there will be a large number of very powerful hurricanes?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetw...

Okay, you may be right. But they also said increased number of and more powerful hurricanes. The problem is, scientifically speaking (facts) we actually don't know anything due to a historically long period without a hurricane making landfall. We're going on 10 years without a major hurricane making landfall.

Hard to tell if they are more powerful if they don't show up, don't you think? The problem is that they made predictions that are completely falsified at this point. How can anyone believe anything they say will happen moving forward? I don't believe they know anything other than CO2 is increasing.

Hell, Monsanto NEVER sold Terminator seeds. I find that people who rant about them as an example of the evils of Monsanto invariably don't know what the hell they are talking about. It is a nice bellwether.

True. They've just patented Terminator seeds. But they've promised never to use the patent. So nothing to worry about there then.

It's even on NPR:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesa...

Most of the political positions people take, even those ostensibly related to science, seem to be related to social signaling and tribalism.

Are you seriously claiming to be unaware of the cases where Monsanto has sued farmers who had nothing to do with GMO seeds, just because they were victims of cross-contamination from their GMO-using neighbor?

In fact, Monsanto has not recovered damages even for intentional use of their patented seed:

This convinced the judge that Schmeiser intentionally planted Roundup Ready canola. Schmeiser appealed. The Canadian Supreme Court ruled that Schmeiser had violated Monsanto's patent, but had obtained no benefit by doing so, so he didn't owe Monsanto any money.

And Monsanto doesn't seem to sue for unintentional contamination:

But as far as I can tell, Monsanto has never sued anybody over trace amounts of GMOs that were introduced into fields simply through cross-pollination. (The company asserts, in fact, that it will pay to remove any of its GMOs from fields where they don't belong.)

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesa...

By contaminating the stock of non-gmo seed.

The contamination itself doesn't cause any harm, Monsanto doesn't seem to sue people for accidental contamination, and courts haven't awarded damages. In addition, it doesn't "contaminate the stock of non-gmo seeds". So your claims have no basis in fact.

" I wonder how this happens anyway when their seed is programed for one generation?"
False. No seed has ever been sold with the terminator gene.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesa...

Incorrect.
", GMO has failed big time. Cross pollination has already carried the Roundup resistant genes,"
That makes zero sense.
That's like saying 'Cars have failed big time. The pinto had a higher risk of explosion when rear ended.'

The issues about GMO need to be looked at individual. They have been overwhelmingly successful as a group.
Most people don't mind, especially in countries where they need food. What we have is the scientifically illiterate making things up and using FUD. Those people need to stop.

"But there's no telling if mutations in the wild will be harmless."
which is true of every crop, ever.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesa...

Yep, that's basically how it works.

look at chicken farming. Tyson has almost total control of it, and has reduced the actual chicken farmers to lilttle more than indentured servants, always trying to pay off their debt to Tyson. Its absolteuly shameful. It's very similar to the relationship and business practices between the Music Industry and the actual music artists, and how they keep the profits for themselves whiel shafting the actual producer of the goods.

Here we go, this is hte link i was looking for: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesa...

Contract farming is ruining farmers.
It's not a market, it's a racket.

Production is all tme highs thanks to technology and methods, but through the the use of contracts the companies like Tyson are keeping all the profits for themselves, and treating their suppliers little better than sharecroppers or serfs. Much like the similar statistic about the economy as a whole: productiona nd productivity are 3x what they were 40 years ago, but do workers see any of it? No. Wages are flat; the comapnies keep all the increased revenue for themselves.

Leonard depicts that relationship as something like a con game run by the companies for their own benefit. "Almost invariably, from everything I've seen, the farmer loses," he told Morning Edition. "The farmer takes the brunt of the volatility; the farmer swallows the worst of the losses when there is a problem with their chickens."

The food pyramid was created by the United States Department of Agriculture, not the National Institute of Health.

There's this, as well as 30 or 40 years of studies which suggest similar. As Atkins said, high amounts of starch are probably bad for you; mind you, the Atkins fad diet is ridiculous, and extends these claims to eschewing all starch. Dr. Atkins suggested we shouldn't intake the great majority of our calories from starch, but rather largely from protein and fats.

Hunter-gatherer humans ate foraged fruits and vegetables more than grain. Before agrarian society, finding a potato or a squash was hard; celery, spinach, and similar leafy plants we've likely never heard of are easier to grab at. A fruit tree or a squash vine is fantastic... and quickly picked bare, as well as highly seasonal. Berries are more plentiful.

These considerations lead to some interesting conclusions. Salt is likely harmless up to 6000mg/day, if you have enough potassium--and early man eating little grain, hunted meat, and whatever greenery and berries he got his hands on would have been loaded with potassium. Likewise, as scientific evidence has suggested (not proven, but firmly suggested), early man probably had a high amount of protein in his diet from nuts and hunting. Mexicans still eat grasshoppers; like apes, we would have eaten bugs. Farming probably evolved to grain after cooking, when it was discovered you could smash and grind grain into porridge; the first mass starch introduction was probably tuberous roots or squash.

Such conjectures lead to modern fad diets like the Paleo diet, where people will only eat bison meat and nuts. I prefer to consider these as potentially correlated to a number of things we've seen from scientific studies:

* Fat doesn't make you fat, or cause heart disease (trans-fats possibly, but the evidence is weak)

* Cholesterol intake doesn't correlate strongly to blood cholesterol levels, as over 90% of blood cholesterol is produced in the body

* High protein intake is better than high starch intake

* We're apparently deficient in minerals such as potassium and magnesium

Considering the digestion methods for starch, protein, and fat is more interesting than considering the origins, although they're both interesting. Starch effectively becomes sugar by a long-chain breakdown and a short-chain breakdown: complex chains are broken into small fragments by one enzyme, which are then broken into individual sugar molecules by another enzyme. By contrast, fats undergo lipolysis, while proteins go through a long and complicated process to derive energy.

Energy conversion from sugar isn't readily controlled: it spikes glucose, and then is bound into glycogen by insulin; this is why diabetics are told to avoid sugars and starches, favoring meats and vegetables. We're well aware that too much sugar, starch, and alcohol intake can lead to diabeetus by damaging the body with glucose and insulin spikes, again suggesting that perhaps 50-75% of our diet being starch isn't a good idea.

Even so, the food pyramid does suggest meat and dairy. I'm dubious on dairy, but I don't think a meal of green things and potato bread is going to keep you optimally healthy. It works for a few people; for many people, it's livable; there are a very few people, like me, who would flatly die (my immune system fails catastrophically within two weeks without animal protein and fat intake, mechanism unknown); and there are a great many people who are healthier with a fair amount of meat and a fair amount of vegetation in their diet, along with some starch for a pad.

Anyway. Most of that was from the Atkins reference. I don't like these fad diets; I just think we shouldn't be stuffed with bread and grain for 1200-1500 calories each day.

veganism is completely unnatural

It's believed that the human brain greatly evolved from eating meat afterall.

I had a quick search to fact check your post, and it doesn't really seem accurate. It seems 12.9% of oil comes from Persian Gulf countries (i.e. the Middle Eastern nations where war is a problem), whilst 14% of European oil comes from the same place, so there's little in it:

http://www.npr.org/2012/04/11/...

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/art...

The gulf is bigger for Africa (US 5%, EU 21%) but apart from a temporary foray into Libya for a few months the nations in question aren't nations where there has been any Western intervention for a long time.

Which isn't to say EU's energy purchases aren't a problem, as the whole Ukraine crisis has shown the EU needs to cut dependence on Russian gas and oil.

But ultimately your claim that the EU should be stabilising the middle east because it uses more oil is basically false, given there's a mere 1.1% gap in purchases between the EU and US from the major problem areas in middle east where American blood keeps getting spilled.

Your argument is irrelevant however, it's a distraction, an attempted play on technicalities to avoid the real reason it's always the Americas that end up the middle east- it's not about oil consumption, it's about oil control. America doesn't keep meddling in the middle east because it consumes their oil, it meddles in the middle east because it wants it's companies to profit from production of that oil, and to control who gets to consume that oil.

The EU isn't engaging in the middle east as much as the US is because EU foreign policy hasn't been so focussed on controlling the flow of oil and building it's economy on the basis of taking control as much of the global oil and gas market as possible.

You mention China also, which is a similar case, you talk of lack of power projection, but that's not true- China's power projection just isn't military, it's economic. But whilst the US spent the last decade bombing Iraq and Afghanistan China spent the same decade courting under-developed African nations to build up their infrastructure and to exploit their resources- whilst America went to war to control the oil already being pumped, China invested in just pumping new oil in as yet untapped markets by funding production of wells, road, telecomms infrastructure and so on and so forth. It's been pretty busy:

http://www.businessinsider.com...

It's also interesting if you look at some of the widely available pre-2010 maps- you'll see there's barely a section of Africa that hasn't been touched to the tune of billions of dollars by the Chinese in the last 10 - 15 years.

So your misdirection was a nice try at excusing America from the problem, but it misses the very reason America isn't excused from the problem - America isn't there because it's the good guy doing the EU, China and Japan a favour. It's there out of choice because it has created and intertwined itself in the problem because it views that as a key part of it's global power projection priorities. It realises that messy military agreements and dealings with the Saudis may not net it much oil because it doesn't need it from them, but it does mean that US companies can rake in billions from helping exploit those resources whilst also providing it's military companies with lucrative defence contracts to defend those investments.

It's the very nature of the fact that America's power projection is military that's the reason it's always engaged in wars unlike China with it's economic power.

This is also in part why Saudi Arabia is more than happy to help keep oil prices low at a time when fellow OPEC members like Venezuela could be pushed to the brink of collapse by low oil prices- partly because Saudi gains in seeing a competing major oil producer crippled for a

I've read that Linus Torvald's brilliance (aside from management) has been mostly in creating good APIs for the Linux Kernel. His initial implementations of those APIs was not too good and was replaced by the community, but the APIs live on. It takes a lot of effort to imagine, design, and redesign good APIs. It is overall often much easier to implement an API than to design an API because the design of the API is a creative act of deciding how to partition the problem space and prioritize aspects of it. Naming things well and creating elegant structure are often creative acts, and those are core tasks in creating a good API. A good API may seem so obvious we take it for granted, but that ease-of-use may be the product of years of hard-won experience. As in: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)"

See my other post questioning the value of copyright to society, but if copyright is about creativity, then IMHO APIs are often creative, and sometimes much more creative than implementations.

Copyright expansion is continually being pushed, most lately for fashion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

However, by the same argument fashion can't be copyrighted because it is "useful", likewise *no* software should be copyrightable.
http://www.npr.org/2012/09/10/...
http://www.mttlrblog.org/2013/...
"Fashion design in the U.S. currently lacks copyright protection. Section 101 of the Copyright Act states that "pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works" are only protected if the design can be separated from and exists independently of the usefulness of the article. In the U.S., fashion designs are not seen as having creative value, but are rather seen solely as utilitarian."

Really, why can someone copyright "Microsoft Office", which is essentially just a bunch of instructions when they can't copyright a Gucci purse? It makes no sense, but that is so true about so much of copyright.

Short of repealing copyright (a good thing to consider IMHO), and because copyright is now effectively infinite and the bargain with the community has been broken by copyright holders by extending copyright, another approach is to tax it, as I suggested a decade ago based on an idea in someone slashdot sig:
"Copyright Tax for the Privilege of the Monopoly"
http://journalism.berkeley.edu...

Personally, I'd rather see copyright replaced with a basic income so all would-be authors had the time needed to create. That is based on this idea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the âoecultural inheritance of societyâ as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception."

https://www.drfuhrman.com/dise...
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Treating Type 1, Type 2, and Gestational Diabetes with Superior Nutrition ... With proper care, a type 1 diabetic can live a long and healthy life, with almost no risk of heart attack, stroke, or complications. Type 1 diabetics need not feel doomed to a life of medical disasters and a possible early death. With a truly health-supporting Nutritarian lifestyle, even the Type 1 diabetic can have the potential for a disease-free life and a better than average life expectancy. I find that when Type 1 diabetics adopt my high-nutrient dietary approach, they reduce their insulin requirements by at least one half. They protect their body against the heart attack promoting effects of the American diet style. They no longer have swings of highs and lows, their weight remains stable, and their glucose levels and lipids stay under excellent control. Even though the Type 1 diabetic will still require exogenous (external) insulin, they will no longer need excessive amounts of it. Remember, it is not the Type 1 diabetes that is so damaging, it is the SAD, the typical dietary advice given to Type 1s and the excessive amounts of insulin required by the SAD that are so harmful. It is simply essential for all Type 1 diabetics to learn and adopt nutritional excellence; they can use much less insulin, achieve a normal, healthy lifespan and dramatically reduce their risk of complications later in life."

An important aspect is getting enough micronutrients and fiber, which were not mentioned in your post (but you may well do).

He also has a book out on it:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/...
"This New York Times best seller offers a scientifically proven, practical program to prevent and reverse [type 2] diabetes -- without drugs. Diabetes does not have to shorten your life span or result in high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney failure, blindness or other life-threatening ailments. In fact, most type 2 diabetics can get off medication and become 100 percent healthy in just a few simple steps. This book offers no compromises, it is the most aggressive and effective approach to reverse obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and heart disease; which typically accompany type 2 diabetes. The information about Type 1 diabetes is simply life saving. It is a must read for every diabetic, as well as any nutritionally-aware person wanting to understand the failure of conventional medical care for diabetic treatments and the "no-brainer" of using nutritional excellence, not drugs."

Another aspect of this may be gut bacteria. You don't drink diet soda by any chance?
http://www.prevention.com/heal...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesa...

Ongoing research on vitamin D deficiency and diabetes:
http://www.nih.gov/news/health...

BTW, in general, I've heard that exercise, while good for our health, does not help with weight loss because we just eat more afterwards to make up for it. What controls weight in the long term is what we eat, especially micronutrients and fiber, but also good fats and some other things.

Anyway, thanks for the informative post! Glad you found an approach that works for you. Good luck. I helped manage my mother's diabetes for a time (including for a time after my father died giving her injections three times a day and monitoring blood glucose with finger sticks four times a day) and it was not easy (she had dementia and could not do it herself, and even denied she had diabetes sometimes). As you point ou

Also remember many jobs will drug test you.

This is already being tested in the courts. There's not yet (as far as I know) a test for marijuana intoxication, only detection that you've used marjuana at some point in the past few days/weeks, so there's little justification for testing for marijuana when it's already legal for recreational and/or medicinal use. It's particularly controversial when an employee uses marijuana medicinally -- cough medicine is going to affect employee performance much more than smoking pot over the weekend.

Legality is irrelevent to on the job testing. A valid medical reason would mor ethan likely give the employee a pass but recreational use could still result in adverse actions.

Also remember many jobs will drug test you.

This is already being tested in the courts. There's not yet (as far as I know) a test for marijuana intoxication, only detection that you've used marjuana at some point in the past few days/weeks, so there's little justification for testing for marijuana when it's already legal for recreational and/or medicinal use. It's particularly controversial when an employee uses marijuana medicinally -- cough medicine is going to affect employee performance much more than smoking pot over the weekend.

Irony: Americans inundated by government propaganda from even "liberal" sources like National Pentagon Radio, complaining how RT repeats talking points from the state.

First, the cop had a job in a quiet town...

False. That "quiet town" had more arrests than people! (I agree with your implication that Wilson was a bottom-of-the-barrel police officer, however.)

Second, why would he be scared when he pulled next to him. All he knew at that time was they were obstructing traffic with their jay walking. As i already pointed out, once the jaywalking turned into someone trying to kill him with his own service weapon- that is when he got scared. You would be too had someone surprised you and tried to kill you. And whether or not Brown did try to kill the cop is irrelevant because we are going off the cop's point of view or interpretation of events.

He created the situation. He escalated the situation. I don't believe for a moment that Brown actually tried to kill him or that Wilson was justified in thinking he might (unless he believes that every black man is a murderous animal, which is of course invalid). Moreover, even if Wilson were legitimately scared for his life when he shot Brown from inside the car, he sure as Hell wasn't when he got out of the car and hunted him down!

And you have absolutely no clue if the cop was racist.

How fucking ignorant can you possibly be? Darren Wilson was fired from the Jennings, MO Police Department for being racist! And even if he weren't racist before joining the Jennings PD, he was certainly so by the time he left it -- you cannot exist in such an environment without the racism rubbing off on you.

I'm not even sure you understand the meaning of that word either.

I'm a white man, with a mixed-race wife, living in a majority-black neighborhood in the South. If you think I don't understand racism, you've got another think coming.

It certainly does not default to racism simply because of the color of skin involed.

Indeed, it does not default to racism whenever people of different races interact. However, when a white police officer (who spends all day, every day, looking for criminals in a town where just about every criminal is black (because only black people live there)) starts out his interaction with some petty jaywalkers by yelling obscenities at them, and somehow manages to escalate the situation from jaywalking to fucking homicide? Yeah, that's some fucking racism there. I do not believe for one femtosecond that he would ever have treated white jaywalkers with such utter contempt, and if he had exhibited even the barest shred of professional decorum or common human decency (let alone respect for the fact that he was talking to a person, not an insect) the entire incident would never have happened.

So yeah, to recap, the cop most likely wasn't the best cop out there. He more than likely made a lot of mistakes including killing brown.

Indeed he did, but he would not have made all the same mistakes if he were working in a white town, dealing with white jaywalkers.

Ray: Don't die like my brothuh.

While some may find this distasteful, I have absolutely no doubt that Tom would find this joke hilarious.

Also, the family does indeed want to say "Don't die like Tommy":

the Magliozzi family is asking that in lieu of flowers, friends and listeners make a donation to either the Alzheimer's Association ...

(ref)

You can dismiss the study as bullshit, but can you explain away things like Americans "overwhelmingly" support expanding background checks after Sandy Hook, yet the NRA has overridden the public will on the issue?

I'm sure you can craft another thoughtful argument. You've looked at it in detail and everything!

Interesting interview on the reasons behind the DST was on NPR with the author of "Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time". "The upcoming shift in the daylight-saving time change is designed to help retailers — and is a substitute for a genuine energy policy, says author Michael Downing. Congress moved the time shift up this year. Melissa Block talks with Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time." http://www.npr.org/templates/s... No DST is fine with me.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/allte...
"He says it was as if "we removed the PowerPoint slide, and like a big glass barrier was removed between the speaker and the audience. "The communication became a lot more two-way instead of just the speaker speaking at length for 15, 20 minutes. The audience really started to come alive, to look up from their laptop computers and actually start participating in the discussion, which is what we were really trying to foster.""

That said, I still think more tools for empowering people to more easily make educational 3D presentations and such is a good thing. I think the long-term potential of something like Tao3D could be along those lines. Of course, there is already Alice and some other similar things:
http://www.alice.org/index.php
"Using an innovative programming environment to support the creation of 3D animations, the Alice Project provides tools and materials for teaching and learning computational thinking, problem solving, and computer programming across a spectrum of ages and grade levels."

Although, I don't think Alice runs in a web browser, and it Tao3D moved to run in a browser that might be interesting (although it does not now).

I see, so instead of constructively engaging to modify a plan built on a Republican plan, they decided to take their ball and go home. That's so mature of Republicans

The legislative agenda surrounding the 100% partisan ramming-through of the ACA precluded any Republican involvement. The Republicans put forth a constant barrage of their own ideas and (looking back on them) very accurate predictions about all of the wreckage that the ACA is now causing. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi ran the entire show, and shut down any involvement by Republicans.

  [...]

The Republicans had no ability to "constructively engage" in the creation and underhanded passage of the ACA. They could only shout out loud about how outrageous so much of it is, since their votes - in committee and generally in the house and senate - were incapable of impacting the law.

I guess this never happened. I quote:

A small group of key senators known as the Gang of Six was once looked at as the key to passing a bipartisan health care bill in the Senate.

But the group of Senate Finance Committee members has, instead, proved a time-sucking bust, with no compromise after months of negotiations and plenty of Senate Democrats peeved at the influence ceded to the gang's GOP members.

[...]

"No public option. No play-or-pay. No things that are going to lead to any rationing of health care. No interference with the doctor-patient relationship," says [Republican] Grassley. "About the only place we haven't made progress along the lines of what Republicans are wanting on the bill is in tort reform."

In response to being modded FLAMEBAIT for simply recounting (relatively recent) history, I present to the mods a shit-ton of sources at this location: Tada and that quote by Grassley

Unless it's in your backyard, amiright?

A driving factor in their departure was a series of email and Twitter exchanges between Megan, who ran the church's social media efforts, and David Abitbol, the editor of the Jewlicious blog, who repeatedly challenged the church's stance on Jews. They eventually met in person.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetw...

It's worth noting that Abitbol didn't just try to silence them and shout them down. He engaged them in discourse, and challenged their ideas directly. But yeah, let's keep everybody from ever having to confront an opposing viewpoint, or have to defend their own irrational thoughts from challenge by others. It's much better to Balkanize into like-minded gangs, so nobody ever has to feel uncomfortable except when they're killing someone who isn't part of their gang.

Because they set the rules, schedule the games, helps set the pay – which makes more teams competitive and the game more enjoyable. Mostly housekeeping stuff. So I have low objectives here.

Here is a link.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

That being said, I am looking at a construction site for a new sports stadium which I am helping to pay for via my taxes. Subsidies for billionaires. That I grumble over.

Thanks for your insightful post. It makes sense and I agree, except that I understand from first hand accounts that sometimes protests and demonstrations attract people that are there expressly to get into fights with the police, so it's not always only AFTER the melee starts that they act. Sometimes these elements actively incite the conflicts. However, that doesn't take away from your point that the police showing up in riot gear is starting with an escalation.

NPR had an article a few weeks back about exactly the kind of alternative style of policing that you describe. It's a worthy read (or listen) if you or others reading this are interested: http://www.npr.org/2014/09/25/...

Automation increases jobs.

Automation does require the displaced employee to get another job. This may require retraining, returning to school to upgrade or acquire a skill set that is marketable. The may require a change of career. Most displaced employees will find other jobs.

Imagine the Chinese, Indian etc workers as robots[1]. Have all the US workers who've lost their jobs to these "robots" experienced the increased number of jobs you mention? Now imagine what happens when Foxconn et all replace those Chinese workers with real robots (as Foxconn is actually doing).

What will these Chinese workers do? Some of them will take your higher end jobs: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetw...
From the article:

And it turns out that the job done in China was above par â" the employee's "code was clean, well written, and submitted in a timely fashion. Quarter after quarter, his performance review noted him as the best developer in the building,"

If the population growth remains at X% and the Earth resource/wealth extraction rate does not increase by much more than X% if robots and automation take some human jobs, there will NOT be replacement jobs that pay out the same amount of wealth. Because in most cases automation is about reducing costs and increasing profits. Furthermore the resource extraction rate cannot continue increasing as long as we are stuck on Earth[2].

See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
tldr; the automobile destroyed the jobs of the horses, there was no increase in replacement jobs that the horses could do.

And that is what will happen to most humans once the robots get good enough.

[1] Many of these workers are actually doing jobs that are "robotic" and could be automated- it's just that they are cheaper and more flexible than current robots and someone else paid for much of the manufacturing).

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

When the minimum wage went up in San Jose, the downtown pizza parlor raised the per-slice price by $0.25 USD and per pie price by $1.00 USD. Business remained steady and the world didn't come to an end. Never mind that states with higher minimum wage have higher job growth

San Jose is the largest city in Silicon Valley, third largest city in California, and 10th largest city in the United States.

Silicon Valley is a terrible example to demonstrate the effects of a minimum wage increase and corresponding increases in local product/service costs. The area is too wealthy, this distorts the reaction to $1 more per pizza.

"The median household income is $90,000, according to the Census Bureau. The average single-family home sells for about $1 million. The airport is adding an $82 million private jet center."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

When the minimum wage went up in San Jose, the downtown pizza parlor raised the per-slice price by $0.25 USD and per pie price by $1.00 USD. Business remained steady and the world didn't come to an end. Never mind that states with higher minimum wage have higher job growth.

Did you read your own article link?
"The rate of job growth was the highest in North Dakota, where the local oil and gas boom has spurred the economy but there has been no minimum wage increase. "

As you have stated, everything will go up, inflation. The value of the dollar decreases and negates any increase in wages. This will only move the poverty line up.

Also... we are talking about the lowest rung of employees. Minimum wage or close. Raise those wages, and what happens to everyone elses wages? They go up. Wages go up, prices go up. Wages won't pay for themselves - those increases WILL be passed on to consumers.

When the minimum wage went up in San Jose, the downtown pizza parlor raised the per-slice price by $0.25 USD and per pie price by $1.00 USD. Business remained steady and the world didn't come to an end. Never mind that states with higher minimum wage have higher job growth.

This will put more people on welfare, food stamps and beholden to the Democratic party.

I'm still waiting for my FREE iPhone from the government that Republicans always talk about but can never provide a link to the sign-up page.

*sigh*

The guy in Texas who had Ebola transmitted it to exactly two people, both of which were caring for him while sick. He didn't transmit it to ANY of his family members. I'd say that's a good indicator that the virus really is very hard to catch.

As far as your "idiot" theory goes, smart people screw up, and constant vigilance is hard, especially in an environment like in west Africa. At the moment, you're thinking with the fear generating part of your brain, not the thinking part of your brain. That's very bad, and causes more harm than good. Health officials are telling you it's hard to get because it IS hard to get. The average number of people that Ebola is transmitted to is about 2. That's a very low number. AIDS, which is also hard to catch is transmitted to an average of 4 people. Measles, which is very contagious is 18.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/healt...

So please stop with the conspiracy theory. It's a disease, not a government secret. You can't keep a tight lid the real facts about a disease that people study and publish papers about in medical journals.

Also, consider there's thousands of health care workers in west Africa. There's been a handful of American healthcare workers who've caught the disease, but MANY OTHERS who haven't.

Solvent? There is nothing but IOU's in the "trust fund" - future taxation is the plan for paying out SS. Between that and Medicare for the boomers, each non-retiree (man , woman, and child) is on the hook for $900K in additional taxation over the boomers' retirement. Gene therapy will be banned and age wars seem possible. Arithmetic is inflexible that way.

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/06/...

These aren't just whatever, "it's just people making choices". It's clearly social and political influence.

you also shouldn't care about us people trying to effect social and political changes.

We're not supposed to care about your deliberate interference, but you're allowed to care about the choices women make, because society got in their heads and made them make the wrong choices?

Normally I don't care. But people like you are not trying to eliminate the sexism (probably because your assertions of it are vastly overstated), but trying to change the nature of the field to make it more friendly to stereotypes about women, without any consideration as to whether these changes will actually improve the field and the skillset of CS graduates.

Read this article about one presumably successful effort.

And let's look at the assumptions these efforts make, and their solutions.

"The first class you take is a weed-out class, and they are shocked by the fact they don't get any women at the end."

CS is too hard for women because, despite growing up with computers, they never learned how to program before. Lighten the intro courses to be less "weed out".

"Know-it-alls in any section are told to cool it so no one is intimidated."

Women are intimidated by knowledge and enthusiasm. Don't show off. It's too... manly.

"Along with changes to the introductory courses, Mudd works hard to keep women interested in the field."

Women need to be pandered to to keep them interested.

"Women and men work through problems in very different ways"

Women's brains are different. But still, ignore those troglodytes who said women are naturally less inclined to be interested in abstract machines.

"They bemoaned middle and high school math teachers who didn't engage or inspire."

More pandering is the solution. Nevermind the boys who never got that encouragement either. (High school CS curriculum was a joke twenty years ago, and it still is.)

Is coddling women going to make them better programmers? Who knows, maybe it will. But don't pretend you aren't coddling them.