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Less common? How do you measure that? Number of shootings or number of victims?

Either. School shootings are not more common

Because going by number of shootings, according to wikipedia ...

That is not a complete list, nor does it claim to be. In earlier decades, school shootings were just local news, and many were never listed in state or national databases.

Poor minorities who tend to vote Democrat are disproportionately likely to lack government issued IDs.

Having a valid government issued ID is also a pre-requisite to work legally in the United States. So instead of whining about lost votes, you could also argue for a federal law that provides no or low-cost ID options to low-income households.

Arguing that there is no need to use ID when voting is equal to arguing that there should be no border controls: now those poor, poor minorities are not even able to go to Canada. And I'm not even mentioning that they can't legally buy alcohol until they're 30. Are you going to stand in front of your local Bevmo with a sign?

Money isn't the only issue and whatever the cause there is a big discrepancy.

I do agree with you that not having ID is a problem for those who don't have one, but that is the problem that needs to be fixed. Not having an ID causes a shitton of issue, and not being able to vote should be the least of their worries.

I wouldn't have an issue if every legal voter had an ID, though getting minorities IDs isn't a Republican priority and they seem to actively make it more difficult.

I have an overwhelming suspicion that the moment you get all the minorities photo IDs the GOP suddenly stops caring about it.

So yes, the Florida election was stolen by exactly the anti-Democratic voter suppression tactics for which you are now advocating!

For the record, being an immigrant I'm a left-leaning moderate. I'm an favor of universal healthcare and free education. I don't like the policies of our current Supreme Leader. I never liked Bush Jr (Sr was a bit better). I liked Obama and would vote for him with my eyes closed.

BUT. You can not have democracy without fair elections, and showing proof of eligibility to vote is one of the necessary safeguards.

I understand why it sounds like a reasonable safeguard, but until you get everyone photo IDs you will end up disenfranchising eligible voters.

And the only thing that photo IDs fix is in-person voter impersonation at the polls, but if that kind of voter fraud were happening at a large scale we'd see the signs, and they're simply not there.

You're advocating a policy that will disenfranchise people to fix a problem that is not happening.

Really, if you're that concerned about the integrity of the vote go after mail-in ballots, there is way more potential for not only voter impersonation but coerced votes as well.

But you'll never hear about trying to take away absentee voting, largely because absentee voting skews Republican.

Source? Of course you don't have knee because your lying.

OK...I'd think by know you ACs would know better than to challenge me.

This one is to show R&D and clinical trial costs are inflated.

https://www.npr.org/sections/h...

And this one is to show that profit is being reported as costs when a pharma does R&D and clinical trials (this one might be behind a paywall for you).

https://www.nature.com/article...

Forbes did a survey of 100 pharmaceutical companies. The average estimate they gave for the cost of developing a new prescription drug and bringing it to market was $5 billion (with a "b"). It turns out that the average new drug costs $30-40 million for R&D plus clinical trials.

the US economy is doing great

Was already happening during the Obama administration.

illegal immigration is down

Was already on a downward trend before the current President took office.

jobs and employment are up

See the first response.

ISIS has lost 98% of its territory

While the current President has presided for two years over this operation, ISIS was already in decline from the past President's administration's actions.

North Korea seems to be on the verge of denuclearizing

Arguable. North Korea's leadership is less stable than Iran. Who's to say that they won't come back with another nuke program after they get what they want in this round of talks? We'll have to pay attention to what happens after the talks.

the US economy is doing great

Was already happening during the Obama administration.

illegal immigration is down

Was already on a downward trend before the current President took office.

jobs and employment are up

See the first response.

ISIS has lost 98% of its territory

While the current President has presided for two years over this operation, ISIS was already in decline from the past President's administration's actions.

North Korea seems to be on the verge of denuclearizing

Arguable. North Korea's leadership is less stable than Iran. Who's to say that they won't come back with another nuke program after they get what they want in this round of talks? We'll have to pay attention to what happens after the talks.

You left off the DNC's allies in the media as well, especially the constant barrage of negative coverage by the Washington Post.

A DNC funded by Clinton is going to use their associated sock puppets for her benefit.

Pollutants are measured in areas where they are a concern, such as where mine tailings flow into the sea. But the GBR is 2300 km (1400 miles) long, and it is implausible that chemical waste or effluent could have so much effect across such a vast area.

~25% of California's air pollution comes from China. That's around 6700km away. It is not as implausible as you think.

Citations:

https://www.zmescience.com/eco... https://www.npr.org/sections/t...

Because you're applying US constitutional law to EU laws?

You referred to human rights — the kind, all human being posses regardless of where they live. Right to privacy is not among them. Nor is the Freedom of Speech, actually, but modern societies all pretend to support it...

That said, corporations don't have the exact same set of rights as a human being does either.

That is subject to quite a bit of a debate, actually.

But we don't have to engage in it, because CNN, National Inquirer, New York Times, and Facebook are all corporations. So, if a media company can publish whatever it pleases, including a pictorial obtained from a paparazzi against the subject's will, then certainly Facebook can do what it wants with the information handed to it voluntarily. End of story.

Nobody shot up the Walnut Grove schoolhouse, despite approximately every teenager there having access to guns. Something's changed, but it's not the access to guns.

Nothing has changed. There is no rise in school shootings. That's just an alt-fact.

Study: School Shootings Are Not On The Rise, Incidents Involving Students Declining Since 1990s
Despite Heightened Fear Of School Shootings, It's Not A Growing Epidemic

fucking disgusting how pro-corporate, pro-cia, pro-pentagon everyone seems to be

Have Comrade Putin confiscated your cheese recently?

"... although not all that income comes from farming."

So apparently not doing that well economically.

Side note: A lot of that extra income in agricultural states comes from trucking... which is about to undergo it's own upheavals.

https://www.npr.org/sections/m...

This is the basic reason that a private healthcare system can never be an ethical or ideal system. Making a profit can only come at the expense of someone's health, life, or livelihood. It ultimately places the burden of providing that profit on society as a whole.

I've never heard of a pharma company that says it needs more sick people. The reality of that industry is that the big players in the US are by far and away at the forefront of finding new cures and new therapies. After their market exclusivity and/or patents expire, they move on. Do you know who takes over from there? Companies with much smaller margins that make generic medications that are the same from one manufacturer to the next, effectively making them commodities. TFS mentions Gilead Sciences cure for Hep C, so let's drive this point further home using them as an example:

Contrary to popular conspiracy theories, they had the opportunity to create a permanent cure for the disease, and they made no attempt at all to prevent it from being fully effective. The prior-existing pharmaceutical treatments for Hep-C (i.e. anti-viral drugs, treatments for cirrhosis) were already profitable, and they could have simply spent their resources coming up with drugs to treat those symptoms that apply to all people with liver disease, or even in the case of anti-viral drugs, they could have worked for more than just this. But no, they went after the cure, and it cost them a lot of money. Meanwhile, guess what? Other companies are already jumping into this market without waiting for any patents to expire by developing new formulas:

https://www.npr.org/sections/h...

If a cure doesn't pay off, or if Big Pharma doesn't want it to happen, then why the fuck would they bother? Call it unethical all you want, but if any more ethical approaches work, they damn sure aren't delivering anywhere close to the results than the existing "unethical" system does.

So which do you prefer?

1. You pay money to motivate somebody to be interested in creating a cure, and you don't die
2. You say "paying money for a cure is unethical!", nothing ever gets done, and you die

Besides that, the rest of the world should be grateful that the US works the way that it does. The democrats and the rest of the world love to bash our health care and bash the "megacorps" that operate here, but the US private sector has been providing ALL of them the cures, treatments, and therapies to more diseases than anybody else for the past few decades. Cures like this come here for a reason: The political situation here allows cures that work to receive great returns. Meanwhile, the rest of the world (typically) only pays a fraction for these treatments compared to what US citizens do, which effectively means that the US private sector is subsidizing the "free" health care that other countries provide.

So please, try not to take it for granted. And no, this is not to say that our health care system is perfect (believe me, there are plenty of legitimate complaints against it.)

Don't get me wrong, I personally think that ACC is real, and a problem. But––

The story I heard on NPR [1] today said:

...scientists disagree about what's behind the sluggish ocean current...

but did go on to say:

The only thing we really can do is obviously try and prevent global warming because that's the root cause of why we think it's weakening now...

[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/04/13...

name a SINGLE government agency that is efficient at what it does.

The Department of Energy loan program which had Solyndra. Yes, that one is efficient and successful. Of all the loans it has given out, only four have failed. The loss rate for the program (as of 2014) was 2.28%. Right now that program is making money even though it was never intended to do so.

Further, Republicans were so sure the taxpayers would lose money on this program (which was started during the Bush administration), they set aside $10 billion to cover losses. Those four failures cost less than $1 billion.

Compare that to private industry which lost over $1 billion on Solyndra alone. Even Tesla paid back its loans nine years early, with interest.

You wanted one example, there ya go. Now go ahead and move the goalposts.

"For any senator who wants to study the draft TPP language, it has been made available in the basement of the Capitol, inside a secure, soundproof room. There, lawmakers surrender their cellphones and other mobile devices. Any notes taken inside the room must be left in the room.
Only aides with high-level security clearances can accompany lawmakers. Members of Congress can't ask outside industry experts or lawyers to analyze the language. They can't talk to the public about what they read. And Brown says there's no computer inside the secret room to look something up when there's confusion. You just consult the USTR official."
A Trade Deal Read In Secret By Only A Few (Or Maybe None)

You seriously don't think human trafficking is a thing, eh?

Are you also denying that Pagepage.com was pimping underage women?

Seriously?

Maybe someone should be checking your computer.

Geek Squad!

The FBI paid Best Buy Geek Squad employees as informants, rewarding them for flagging indecent material when people brought their computers in for repair.

Yes, this one contradicts last month's study saying that contrary to previous belief humans do NOT grow new neurons: https://www.npr.org/sections/h...

https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/07/health/new-brain-cells-adulthood-study/index.html

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-the-adult-brain-really-grow-new-neurons/

Agreed 100%!

Originally, corporations could NOT own other corporations but I'm not sure what year that got hijacked.

This whole "I want to reap the benefits of a company but not have _any_ responsibility for when they are liable" has gotten WAY out of hand.

The fact that corporations are treated like people in the eyes of the Law just makes things worse.

Some interesting reading:

https://www.npr.org/2014/07/28...
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/co...
https://consumerist.com/2014/0...

Monsanto added terminator genes in it, second generation seeds are sterile. So farmers have to rebuy from Monsanto.

Please, try not to spread misinformation.

People drive 3.22 trillion miles a year

It is pretty obvious there are a lot more than 16,000 accidents per month, if you just look at how many cars are in repair shop yards. This site https://www.driverknowledge.co... claims 6 million car accidents a year which is 500,000 per month. However if you divide your 3.22 trillion figure (confirmed here: https://www.npr.org/sections/t...) by that you get 533,333 which is close to what you claimed, so I think you screwed up with your quote somewhere.

I'm still a little doubtful. I have a car with about 50,000 miles on it, and I backed into a post once to cause permanent damage to the car (I never fixed it). So my admittedly limited sample claims accidents are 10x more likely than your statistics show.

Particularly hard hit have been middle-skill and middle-income jobs

This time, it may be different. At least the people picking strawberries seems to be fine so far.

Of course. If you can't see the curvature of a 12,000km sphere from 1,900ft it's scientifically flat.

It has already been shown that Kansas, at least, is flatter than a pancake:

https://www.npr.org/templates/...

I think he recently became a flat earther, so your statement about not being a real flat farther might be truer than you intended

He did. From an article posted last November:

Still, Hughes converted to the flat-Earth belief recently, shortly after his first fundraising campaign for the rocket earned just $310 of its $150,000 goal. His second campaign, this time posted after his conversion and with the support of the flat-Earth community, succeeded in hitting its $7,875 goal.

If outside is so great, why have we spent the last 9000 years perfecting inside?

More like 30,000 years, and...

Because we have yet to get it right. :)

Let's review your claim again:

People are upset because the data was used in a way that affected the integrity or our elections.

We're not talking about whether Trump is a good president or whether he violated any laws. We are talking about the integrity of the election, and you have failed to make any rational argument that there was any problem with the integrity of the last election. Now...

It does appear to be being pursued as an illegal campaign contribution. https://www.npr.org/2018/03/21... [npr.org]

The NPR article says nothing about the integrity of the election. It also doesn't say that CA's activities were "pursued as an illegal campaign contribution", it's merely Peter Overby's opinion that it might be.

The one thing that seems to be consistent among the Trump defenders is that inappropriate activities weren't effective ... Just because you suck at cheating doesn't mean that you didn't cheat.

I'm not defending Trump. We are discussing your claim about the integrity of the last election. Even if Trump tried to cheat, but then sucked at it, then the integrity of the election was still preserved.

We have to take this type of thing seriously because we have no way to roll back an election.

Well, and when you have an argument that the "integrity of this election" was actually affected, by all means, do share it. CA using Facebook data clearly did not affect the integrity of the election, even if you could construe it to be illegal in some way.

It does appear to be being pursued as an illegal campaign contribution. https://www.npr.org/2018/03/21... The one thing that seems to be consistent among the Trump defenders is that inappropriate activities weren't effective. I grew up near Camden NJ which at the time was the most dangerous city in the world. The police chief would always point out that the only different between aggravated assault and homocide was how well the perpetrator aimed. Just because you suck at cheating doesn't mean that you didn't cheat. We have to take this type of thing seriously because we have no way to roll back an election. Regardless of what illegal things happen, the winner stays in office unless they are convicted of a crime. And even then they can't be removed sometimes. We're in agreement that many laws are designed to impact the integrity of elections and provide unfair advantages. (See voter ID requirements, congressional districts) but that's a different kind of cheating.

I asked how you wanted me to quantify my statement and then addressed your argument that you brought up.

Your comment said: " owning a gun makes you many times more likely to die by one than not owning one." which is a fallacious statement as demonstrated above and is akin to "getting in an airplane makes you many times more likely to die in a plane crash. Are you going to stop flying now?".

Then you asked "Is there a benefit that offsets "more likely to die"". I gave you a quantification of a benefit of defensive gun uses compared to "gun deaths" and broke down what "gun deaths" amount to and how gun ownership are unrelated to violent crime or suicide which dramatically inflate "gun deaths".

Does 500,000- 3,000,000 defensive gun uses offset the ~30,000 "gun deaths" (which include suicide)? Even if I didn't include those statistics to discredit your fallacious statements and reasoning: "the inalienable right of self defense and the philosophy behind the 2nd amendment supported by historical precedent." very much does support the fact that gun ownership is a good thing. If you need a historical example or if you want a more recent example.

Self defense is a basic natural right.

Let's assume this is true - is murdering someone who is committing a nonviolent crime actually self defense? Or for that matter, possibly committing a violent one? Let's set matters of legality aside for a moment - what's the ethical response?

I'm reminded of a guy who was getting mugged by a teenager in the inner city... this guy could tell that the kid was scared to death and desperate, and offered to buy him dinner: https://www.npr.org/2008/03/28...

That story has made me reconsider how I might handle such a situation. Would it be preferable if this kid was dead?

I haven't seen any of that on NPR or the other media I follow.
https://www.npr.org/2018/03/21...

I don't know where you're getting your information, but the bit about tuition is not correct according to what I've heard. Average tuition has not gone up dramatically, private schools have just started to advertise high tuitions in order to lure in more desirable students with "savings" in the form of "generous" grants and bursaries. Also, since a higher sticker price carries with it the sense the the student is getting greater value, i.e.: more prestigious schools are more expensive, none of the schools want to be the only one to drop their prices. Even while they acknowledge that the situation has gotten ridiculous.

The biggest problem with this, of course, is that even though average tuitions are relatively reasonable, there are some students who get suckered into paying full sticker price with the rhetoric that they're "investing in their future" or some such. Attitudes toward the value of education haven't changed to match the new situation.

So, in other words, it's basically just another example of increasing inequality - some students are paying a huge amount while others coast through paying almost nothing. You'd hope that maybe this would be proportional to those students' ability to pay the tuition (or their parents' ability)... I don't have any numbers on that, but it doesn't jive with what I've seen.

I think you've got it backwards, as far as voting. Turnout rates are pretty much directly proportional to age.
https://media.npr.org/assets/i...
https://www.npr.org/2016/05/16...

I think you've got it backwards, as far as voting. Turnout rates are pretty much directly proportional to age.
https://media.npr.org/assets/i...
https://www.npr.org/2016/05/16...

That's why these comparative statistics are handled per 100,000 people. You are 55 times more likely to be a victim of a violent gun death in the U.S. than the U.K. https://www.npr.org/sections/g...

Humm, this article says ameobas are smarter. Maybe that gap has gotten smaller in the last 2 years.

https://www.npr.org/sections/1...

You are just parroting Russia's discredited conspiracy theories about Seth Rich. Save it for the Trump / Russia propaganda channel.

I was going to go to the trouble of linking to an article about Pizzagate, a Russian misrepresentation of Hillary's emails that fooled a Trumptard into bringing an AR-15 looking for a non-existant basement which allegedly contained Clinton related sex trafficing.. according to Russia's misrepresentation of Hillary's emails, backed up by Moscow Donald.

But I don't even have to do that, because you are yourself spreading the same baseless claims that Russia is, so luck in the mirror, Trumpnick and see if you can muster a little bit of loyalty to your country. Stand up to Russia, and its treasonous puppet Moscow Donald.

With the explosion of school shootings, we should be asking ourselves "what's changed?" and one of the obvious answers is the increasing violence and realism of video games.

I think you mean: with the DECLINE in school shootings, we should be asking ourselves "what's changed"? and one of the obvious answers is that video games give kids, and especially troubled kids, an alternative outlet.

involving foreign nationals is a criminal enterprise

Oh, wow... Would hiring a British spy, who then engaged his contacts among Russians, qualify?

Fine, arrest everyone who is guilty of such a crime

There is no crime described in TFA... At the most, there is a violation of Facebook's TOS...

Is there anything positive he has actually done? H1B reform perhaps. He was a useful idiot for Kim. Not much of an achievement.

I hate trump, but one positive thing was the first ever audit of the DOD 'misplacing' 21 thousand billion dollars Given that this could have paid off nearly all national debt, or expanded health care to everyone and paid for free college for all, I think some kind of accounting for unconstitutional appropriation of vast sums of money is a good thing.

I figured out the female lead when the movie of this whole tawdry and treasonous Trump/Russia affair is made. This is the story of the nice-looking young lady who went undercover in the Russian troll farm and exposed them to the world.

https://www.npr.org/sections/p...

My main concern is that the Chinese government might use this as low-level punishment (lower than imprisonment) for political crimes. For example, punishment for talking about the heroic "tank man" in Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989.

Or rolling your eyes at easy questions asked by a reporter.

By the end of the day, Liang Xiangyi's name had been censored on China's largest search engines, the video deleted from Chinese websites and millions of Chinese netizens were suddenly worried about what would become of their newfound hero.

Not control, logs. For instance an app from work has GPS permissions to know where I am when on duty, which is fine. But does it track me off the clock? Like with Uber:
https://www.npr.org/sections/t...
How would users know?

Most Plastics leach hormone like chemicals original study link is broken.

Setting this aside we'd still have to deal with the estrogens from birth control pills that are in the water but this can't help.

Of course they do! They constantly "play down/block" a lot of conservative posts, stories etc, but, PROMOTE liberal causes & stories. http://dailycaller.com/2016/05... https://gizmodo.com/former-fac... http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/0... https://www.npr.org/sections/t...

The US EPA and NOAA have found that NOX and O3 pollutants come from Asia, especially China and India. https://www.npr.org/sections/t...

There is evidence of this kind of voter fraud on part of some Democratic party supporting organisations:

https://www.npr.org/2016/10/19...

It's likely fairly minor, but it appears to be practised by some.

That's some interesting revisionist history you have there. I remember the polls putting Clinton as winning by a wide margin. Could you remind me who won?

A fun little article if you think I'm wrong, feel free to post your evidence to counter mine if you'd like.

The link you posted ( https://www.npr.org/2016/11/14... ) does not seem to match your statement. In fact point #1 is basically what I was saying. It states as point #1 that the polls (at least the Real Clear Politics' final polling average) in 2016 were closer to the vote results than they were in 2012, when they were off by about 3.2%, well within the stated uncertainty ranges. The polls were indicating nothing like a "landslide", and just like "Brexit", a single "polling error" away from deciding between choice "A" or choice "B".

Then, after basically saying, "the polls were within their measurement capabilities", the author of the article goes on to look at reasons why the polls might have been wrong. But they were not "wrong"! They were correct within the published accuracy of their measurement! Might there be ways to increase their accuracy? Sure, but it is impossible to eliminate all uncertainties, even if you somehow were able to actually poll every voter in the country and get their true feelings about how they would vote - some of them will change their minds, and some of them will die before the polls even open. The polls were "better" in 2016 than 2012. Hopefully they will be better still in 2018.

In any case, maybe I just wasn't reading widely enough before the elections and maybe there was a widespread narrative that Clinton was winning by a wide margin - I was mostly looking at poll aggregators. So maybe I had less of a feeling that the last few months before the election had Clinton with an insurmountable lead. I went into election night thinking that Trump had about a 20% chance of winning, as reflected by the polling and various models derived from that. It made the morning news that he had won a surprise, but not something amazingly unexpected. I think the betting markets had similar odds.

Here is a postmortem from late January, with slightly better data than the mid-November NPR article linked above:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...

"Another myth is that Trump’s victory represented some sort of catastrophic failure for the polls. Trump outperformed his national polls by only 1 to 2 percentage points in losing the popular vote to Clinton, making them slightly closer to the mark than they were in 2012. Meanwhile, he beat his polls by only 2 to 3 percentage points in the average swing state.3 Certainly, there were individual pollsters that had some explaining to do, especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump beat his polls by a larger amount. But the result was not some sort of massive outlier; on the contrary, the polls were pretty much as accurate as they’d been, on average, since 1968."

Everything's bigger in Texas, even the cost of routine lab tests.

LOL, check your facts, but you knew that.