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Read a book?

I would venture that books, at least fiction, share this problem. A quick look at the top 10 from today's New York times bestseller list for fiction reveals: #1 - "dark secret" (not necessarily violent, but quite possibly so); #2 - "killer"; #3 - "tragedy in their past" (not necessarily violence, but probably someone's death); #4 - "a tortured man with particular sexual tastes" (psychological violence, probably S&M); #5 - probably nonviolent; #6 - "murder"; #7 - "terrorist act"; #8 - basically the same as #4; #9 - "mysterious death"; #10 - probably nonviolent. So, 7 out of 10 stories involve murder or violence. I think that supports my point.

You couldn't find something non-violent to do?

On the contrary, I found something perfectly entertaining to do. Did you read my post?

My point is that a large proportion of the entertainment people (in America) buy contains violence -- so much that we hardly even notice it.

To be fair, people said the same things about 720p versus 1080p - that you couldn't see the difference, that it was negligible, etc.
Hell, people had the same arguments about HD in general - DVD was plenty good for most uses and HD was actually slow to catch on:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/technology/13disc.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

DVD sales represent more than half of the revenue studios generate from most of their movies. But those sales are expected to grow just 2 percent this year, a far cry from the double-digit growth the industry enjoyed just two years ago. High-definition DVD's were supposed to pick up the slack, but technical delays and a thorny format war between camps led by Sony and Toshiba have dampened expectations.

So I would expect 4K to have a similar uphill battle in this regard but eventually it'll just be more economical to switch to 4k-only panel production for the major manufacturers. By 2020, we'll probably be on 4K as standard.

That's the kind of story I'd like to see a link to, but let's assume it's true.

If your grandmother has a gun in her house, she's more likely to use it to kill herself, or another innocent party, as she is to use it to defend herself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/opinion/at-the-er-bearing-witness-to-gun-violence.html
At the E.R., Bearing Witness to Gun Violence
By DAVID H. NEWMAN
Published: January 1, 2013
I do not know exactly what measures should be taken to reduce gun violence like this. But I know that most homicides and suicides in America are carried out with guns. Research suggests that homes with a gun are two to three times more likely to experience a firearm death than homes without guns, and that members of the household are 18 times more likely to be the victim than intruders.
Emergency rooms are themselves volatile environments, not immune to violence. Over the last decade, a quarter of gun crimes in American E.R.’s were committed with guns wrested from armed guards.

http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.long
Guns in the Home and Risk of a Violent Death in the Home: Findings from a National Study
Linda L. Dahlberg, Robin M. Ikeda and Marcie-jo Kresnow
Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 1.9, 95% confidence interval: 1.1, 3.4).
The risk of dying from a suicide in the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 10.4, 95% confidence interval: 5.8, 18.9). regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199310073291506
Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home
Arthur L. Kellermann, Frederick P. Rivara, Norman B. Rushforth, Joyce G. Banton, Donald T. Reay, Jerry T. Francisco, Ana B. Locci, Janice Prodzinski, Bela B. Hackman, and Grant Somes
N Engl J Med 1993; 329:1084-1091
October 7, 1993
DOI: 10.1056/NEJM199310073291506
Rather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3713749
N Engl J Med. 1986 Jun 12;314(24):1557-60.
Protection or peril? An analysis of firearm-related deaths in the home.
Kellermann AL, Reay DT.
Only 2 of these 398 deaths (0.5 percent) involved an intruder shot during attempted entry. Seven persons (1.8 percent) were killed in self-defense. For every case of self-protection homicide involving a firearm kept in the home, there were 1.3 accidental deaths, 4.6 criminal homicides, and 37 suicides involving firearms. Hand-guns were used in 70.5 percent of these deaths.

http://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644(12)01408-4/abstract
Annals of Emergency Medicine
Volume 60, Issue 6 , Pages 790-798.e1, December 2012
Hospital-Based Shootings in the United States: 2000 to 2011
Gabor D. Kelen, Christina L. Catlett, Joshua G. Kubit, Yu-Hsiang Hsieh
In 23% of shootings within the ED, the weapon was a security officer's gun taken by the perpetrator.

As a counter argument, about a year ago a bystander with a gun killed an off-duty ATF agent who was struggling with a pharmacy robbery suspect who had a gun. The bystander thought he was shooting the bad guy, but he shot and killed a 20-year Federal agent who had a wife and two kids and was at the pharmacy to pick up cancer drugs for his dad. Then a cop killed the suspect.

Intervening After Robbery, an Off-Duty A.T.F. Agent Is Killed

The summary somehow leaves out anything related to the headline - the view of the fires from space. Didn't even bother linking to the relevant NY Times article. Okay then.

For the real good stuff, though, check out the high res images in the Universe Today coverage, which showcases several of the images directly from Cmdr Hadfield's twitter feed.

Have you actually taken any social science classes? At a high level?

I can't talk for sociology (though I would love to call it a joke), but in certain areas of psychology, there is real science going on. Predictions, measurements, mapping things to mathematical models, testing those models with highly controlled empirical techniques, etc... Yes, there are the feel good, talky, therapy bits, and those bits are guilty of bad science, and truth by handwaving. But there is also a lot of pure research going on, and many experiments that have been done thousands of times with similar results. Yes, the standard of proof is a bit lower than physics and the like, but this is inevitable. Its harder to control for people, than it is a single atom of cesium in a vacuum.

You also ignore emerging and growing cross over of psychology and neurology, and biology, along with some areas of compsci (whose science-ishness is also a bit dubious).

Anthropology is also a mixed bag. Cultural anthropology is a bout as woo as most sociology, but physical anthropology is pretty much only an offshoot of biology, and thus an actual science.

Some aspects of the social sciences are just as sciency as the hard sciences. Some aspects of the so-called hard-sciences are also pretty damn ridiculous as well, which is only classical metaphysics for math nerds.

Back to Kuhn, oddly I just finished re-reading his book. I read it in college when I was doing philosophy of science, but I came across it when reading about Errol Morris' experiences with Mr. Kuhn, so gave it another go. Errol Morris had some very good complains, mostly hinging on "incommensurability", and what a horribly defined concept it is. In the book, people of two paradigms can't talk to each other in an understandable way anymore, which is obviously idiotic. Mr. Kuhn then spent the rest of his career trying to actually define his own term, a term which much of his theory actually rests on. The fault in this idea was very clear when I re-read it. If you read it as a less extreme version of itself it is rather profound. But if you read it as it sounds, it is a bit absurd with some thought.

Either way, I still love the book, since right or wrong it leads to an interesting conversation, and some fun exploration within the philosophy of science.

When this story came out, the prosecutor told the press that they already had collected the video in question. And still hadn't charged anybody.

Huh? didn't you read the NY Times article in the link? The two teenagers involved were arrested eight days after the incident was reported to the police, which is to say, four months before Anonymous got involved.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/sports/high-school-football-rape-case-unfolds-online-and-divides-steubenville-ohio.html

In other words, there's an untainted trail of the evidence, and the reason that Anonymous got involved at all is that they're trying to shame the prosecutor's office into doing something.

If they're trying to shame the county prosecutor... they are about three months too late. The alleged rapists had already been arrested and charged, and the county prosecutor had already stepped down over possible conflict of interest and delegated the prosecution to the Ohio Attorney General's Office.

As far as I can tell, "Anonymous" saw the New York Times article, said "ooh, there are probably some juicy photos in caches somewhere, maybe I can find them, and spread them over the net"-- but they didn't dig up anything that the police didn't already have, and it was hardly as if the matter was being ignored at the time, seeing as it was the subject of a two-page article in the New York Times.

The prosecutor, you mean the mother of one of the kids on the football team? Hurray small town america.

So, will she prosecute her sons' sociopathic friends and allow her snowflake to be shunned and bullied? Probably not.

Since the county prosecutor stepped off the case three months before "Anonymous" got involved, I'm not sure it matters who she's related to.

It's an 8-page article in my browser at least - make sure you look at the other 6 pages, wherein they detail: that she was passed out and at least two of the players "slipped a finger" inside, in addition to taking her clothes off, inviting other people to urinate on her, and flashing her breasts while she was passed out. And they recovered two photos from one of the suspects' phones, one of which shows the girl "face down on the floor, naked, with her arms tucked beneath her," and the other which they don't describe.

Here's the single-page version of the NYTimes story, and it's got plenty of details to support *allegations* of a gang rape. Whether or not these allegations are true is what will be determined at trial.

Or is it just because its RFID wristband that everyone here is having an issue with?

That's probably part of it, along with the worry that the information on the RFID chip would be unencrypted, such that anyone with a reader could spend a day at the park and walk away with much more than $100 worth of people's identities.

According to a related article, there is no personally identifiable information on the bracelet and, if linked to a credit card, any purchases over $50 require a PIN. Most (all?) customer data shared with Disney can be controlled by the customer.

Lest if fails to be mentioned, lead craters, used to store and transport wine, which was drunk as commonly as water when people figured out it was less likely to make you sick, were (the pottery was) indicated as a potential source of lead poisoning for the Greeks and Romans. Modern leaded glass can contain anywhere from 18-40% lead-oxide. And if you don't think lead oxide has health consequences, then I suggest you look into it.

Leaving wine in leaded crystal decanters is discouraged. In a study performed at North Carolina State University, the amount of lead migration was measured for port wine stored in lead crystal decanters. After two days, lead levels were 89 g/L (micrograms per liter). (The U.S. EPA lead standard for drinking water is 15 g/L = 0.015 parts per million.) After four months, lead levels were between 2,000 and 5,000 g/L. White wine doubled its lead content within an hour of storage and tripled it within four hours. Brandy stored in lead crystal (for over five years) had lead levels around 20,000 g/L.

I'd agree with you normally, but in this case the banks are completely wrong. They're criminal, in fact. Here's a little known fact: name almost any large "institutional" bank, chances are you'll be naming a bank that was and has been complicate in the on-going laundering of drug and terrorist money. Name ANY ONE. To the tune of BILLIONS of dollars. ILLEGAL in ANY jurisdiction and punishable by YEARS in federal PRISON. NOT ONE of these "institutional" bank's major presidents, CEOs, CFO's, board members, NONE OF THEM, have been made to answer for these crimes. Fines have been paid, a billion in the case of HSBC, probably the worst offender, but NO ONE human being has been made to answer for these offenses, some of them used to fund the killing of thousands of people. "Too big to fail" was Obama said, didn't he? The government is complicate, but they at least are the one institution that is at least paying lip service to justice. Seems to me that the banks are the ones doing the screwing.

It's probably worth noting that the Tea Party also did not have any widespread criminal side effects

Damn straight! I searched high and low for the usual felonious shenanigans associated with protest movements, and suddenly find none. I find it pretty fucking hard to imagine my FBI failing in their self-appointed mission of Constitutional violation as if the Tea Party was somehow exempt.

And how do you put a positive spin on suicide bombings, incessant rocket attacks on civilians, constant propaganda devoted to demonization and calling for murder of Jews?

It's hard to have a pro-Israel spin if you are trying to be objective. How would you put a positive spin to constant war crimes,

Whenever there is constant war, there will be war crimes. Compared to other countries, Israel spends millions and millions researching precise weapons to minimize civilian casualties. Show me an army with a better record fighting an urban enemy using its own population as human shields.

settlements,

I am not fond of settlements, but Israel did win the land in a defensive war, so there is no reason Israelis shouldn't be allowed to live on it.

price tagging (i.e. kristallnacht type of terrorism),

No excuse for that -- but that is not government policy by any means.

apartheid

Bullshit. There is no segregation for Israeli Arabs. If you're referring to Palestinians and the wall, you may then as well call the US border with Mexico apartheid (although Mexicans are for the most part not trying to get into the US to murder as many Americans as possible).

checkpoints

Essential to enforcing security. As terrorism waned in the West Bank, many checkpoints have been dismantled. Also no checkpoints or settlements or anything else in Gaza -- still tons of rockets.

destruction of EU financed projects

When a building is used to launch rockets or as a bomb-making facility, it doesn't matter who financed it. It needs to be destroyed.

sieges

Only began after the rocket attacks from Gaza--how would you prevent importation of weapons materials?

and starvation of 1.8 million people?

2279 calories per day per person (Citation) is nowhere close to starvation or even malnutrition. Look up what hunger really means.

How do you put a positive spin to a cruel and unhuman occupation of a people?

I don't know with what biased eyes you are looking, but I doubt anyone reporting on a cruel occupation has it easy to put a positive spin on it.

Try googling there are a lot of interesting reports on the perception of Israel and they seem to update them pretty regulary: site:aljazeera.net israel

Unfortunately, I know the biased eyes with which you are looking only too well.

More Details About 1959 Bel Air Crash Test

Note the absence of an explicit statement that the condition as crashed matched the condition as procured.

There's a reason the video ends without the cars being pulled apart for a look inside the engine and driver compartments. The reason is: Trust us and don't think too much.

This is what always made me LMAO at these chuckleheads, they can't say what they really want which is "He's a nigger!" so they try to find another reason to get rid of him,. . .

Is that so? So I guess that means you would also be implying that John McCain is simply "passing" for white?

McCain's citizenship called into question - Candidate, born in Panama Canal Zone, may not qualify as 'natural born'
Why Senator John McCain Cannot be President: Eleven Months and a Hundred Yards Short of Citizenship
McCain’s Canal Zone Birth Prompts Queries About Whether That Rules Him Out

I didn't see a single news service say a fucking word about the revelation that Blackwater was selling kids as fuck toys to get better deals in both Kosovo and Afghanistan

The allegation is actually against DynCrop, and you're kidding, right? The media is full of that allegation, but what you don't see is this:

This spring, the State Department inspector general began investigating whether DynCorp ignored signs of drug abuse among expatriate employees in Afghanistan. A related review into the dancing incident is "substantially completed" and "at this point, no criminal activity has been discovered," said Douglas Welty, State Department inspector general spokesman. -- Amid Reviews, DynCorp Bolsters Ethics Practices

(If I recall correctly, the Dallas Morning News had quoted a State Deptment IG spokesman that made a stronger statement, unfortunately that story appears to be not online anymore.)

To quote the late Bill Hicks . . .

Must you?

Go up a few posts. It was opined that a solid-gold asteroid would be worth dragging back from space because sale of it would retrieve ten times the cost of the operation needed to do so. Somebody else pointed out that selling that much gold would depress the price and affect the profitability. I got curious (read: I was bored) enough to see if selling 500 tonnes of gold would indeed depress the world market. Googled around a bit. And discovered that for some fairly obvious, as well as for some non-obvious, reasons it became clear that it would easily be enough to skew the market. And maybe even enough to 'correct' it from it's distorted and manipulated condition. I dug up an interesting blog entry by Krugman on the topic.

From Wikipedia. "It has been estimated that all the gold mined by the end of 2009 totaled 165,000 tonnes. At a price of US$1900 per troy ounce, reached in September 2011, one tonne of gold has a value of approximately US$61.1 million. The total value of all gold ever mined would exceed US$10.1 trillion at that valuation."

So the gold asteroid weighs 500 tonnes. That, by the way, is about what the European Central Bank has on hand. By my calculation (don't trust it) that's 0.3 percent of all the gold ever mined. So, if you dumped it, the effect on world prices would indeed be drastic. (Imagine the EUCB selling all its gold.) And that would assume that gold is traded in a free market, which it decidedly is not. The gold market is seriously bent. My guess is that makes you doubly right.

You could, however, park your asteroid in a safe place and open a very profitable bank, which would more than pay the bills forever more. As the man said. Profit!

We could solve the food-hunger situation in Africa by adopting modern agricultural practices with the existing land, with no need for GMO. Oh, yeah, that would mean Africans give up the subsidence farming model where every person has their own hut and patch of land to grow crops, so that's a non-starter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983–1985_famine_in_Ethiopia

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/07/opinion/zimbabwe-s-man-made-famine.html

Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States.

I fail to see how anyone, of any intelligence, would advocate violating the highest and most important document in the United States.

A couple days ago there was an opinion written by a constitutional law professor from Georgetown University advocating just that.

Important documents should be on paper---for archiving---not faxing.
Too bad nobody wants to get rid of the most worthless use of paper: junkmail and phonebooks.
Of course, the US Government will fight tooth and nail to keep junkmail as a revenue stream for the US Post Office.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/business/seeking-revenue-postal-service-plans-to-deliver-more-junk-mail.html?_r=0

Active styli are hardly new. There are many good active styli, mostly for serious artists. The best sense both pressure and angle. Some have buttons for airbrush-like use. Some come in groups, so you can have a different stylus for each color.

The i[Phone|Pad] is poorly suited for stylus use, because it's intended to sense fat fingers, and there's a minimum contact width of about 4mm. So the business ends of Apple-compatible styli are blunt instruments, more like erasers than pen points.

The wiring job behind the AV CTO is quite embarassing.. what's going on there?

https://www.nytimes.com/images/2013/01/01/technology/01security-web/01security-web-articleLarge.jpg

Nope. All you need is a number of devices greater than the number required to cause a problem. We have evidence that it's greater than 2-3. Can you present any evidence that it's always going to be greater than the number of seats on the airliner in question?

Do we? I call bullshit, please indicate where I can verify this evidence. On the other hand, this article states otherwise:

The F.A.A. then told me that “two iPads are very different than 200.” But experts at EMT Labs, an independent testing facility in Mountain View, Calif., say there is no difference in radio output between two iPads and 200. “Electromagnetic energy doesn’t add up like that,” said Kevin Bothmann, the EMT Labs testing manager.

I believe that you're advocating FUD, although I can't imagine for what purpose. The clincher for me is that no-one that matters believes there may be a problem, particularly the flight crew. As indicated in the article pilots don't need to switch anything off, and they're practically sitting on top of the instruments. It would be hilarious, though, having the engineers who designed a plane say with a straight face "We've proofed the avionics against direct lightning strikes, as that happens all the time. But, beware, the plane will come crashing down if a consumer device tries to connect to a cell tower. Be afraid".

Pilots actually should put their phones in flight mode, as they might otherwise negatively affect networks due to rapid handovers between towers (that's the only thing with these rules that contains a shred of truth). Additionally, if there really was any danger, phones and devices would be confiscated before boarding. As it is, no one checks your pockets for switched-on phones. This is another indication that the people who matter don't really care about our electronics. If they did, the flight crew would have portable RF detection devices.

All this bullshit achieves is to cause unnecessary anxiety to people with a fear of flying, and annoy the people with e-ink devices who can't read for large portions of a short flight. If you start moving the goalposts by pulling the "I don't want people yapping on the phone in the seat next to me" card, I agree with that, but it has absolutely zilch to do with security. I've also been on flights with the European airline Ryanair where cell phone usage was encouraged, as they had an on-board, ridiculously expensive cellular base station.

Curious, I read it. It demonstrated nothing about inflation, in fact it said "I’ll consider the inflation objection at length in my next post".

However, I don't need a Interwebs wacko to tell me that you can dry water and drink it. If you produce money with no actual wealth to back it up, be it old-style gold reserve or economic worth of the issuing country, it will cause inflation the moment it hits the economic system. Of course if you kept the quadrillion-dollar coin under your bed and told no one, it would cause no inflation as no one would know it existed; but if you use to pay the US government's debts, you have more currency around and no wealth to back it up; by simple supply and demand, value of currency will plummet (there is less than a trillion dollar circulating worldwide), i.e. inflation will boom so much it will make Zimbabwe look like Switzerland.

Even if the quadrillion-dollar coin would not start inflation, it would tell the rest of the world that the US are ready to issue fiat currency to pay their debt: that would start a bank run to get rid of their petrodollars (guess what, there is no fiat fuel, and you would not be able to buy much oil with those petrodollars). See the link above, according to the Fed most dollars are outside the US, a lot of them in the coffers of countries that need to buy oil.

What the US need is not "more" or "less" spending, it is more of the right spending and less of the wrong spending. The US have humongous military spending, which is by definition unproductive (in fact, destructive by its very nature, though the destruction is usually externalised to other countries). Yes, the military also finances R&D, but that R&D would be better aimed for the US economy if it were financed by universities or the private sector with governmental financial support, instead of being trickle-down adaptations of military technology.

The US have too low welfare, with insane amounts of poverty rampaging across the country; these people have no opportunity of becoming productive citizens because they never receive appropriate education. The point is not giving the poor food and shelter (which is of course still necessary), but giving their children good public schools that give them an alternative to crime as the best option for gaining wealth.

Also, there is a disproportionate amount of inmates in US jails. US prisons house more inmates than China, not just per capita— in absolute numbers . All these have to be fed, clothed and guarded, and this is expensive. It is way cheaper to institute education programs to make sure they don't recidivate, but then again some politicians would not look though on crime, which seems to be more important than to be smart on crime. Also, several states outsourced jail management to privates, who are paid by the inmate and have thereby no interest in re-educating their inmates (in fact, they do want their customers to come back!). More government, less market here.

Actually, one of the things that struck me about the life of Rita Levi-Montalcini and her circle was that so many of them were Italian Jews who had married Italian Christians and vice versa. They were atheists and socialists or Communists, and many of them fought in the resistance.

One of my childhood heroes was Enrico Fermi, whose wife, Laura, was Jewish.

You seem to be referring to this argument about Tay-Sachs carriers http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03gene.html?pagewanted=all As this article, and the Wikipedia article, points out, the argument has just enough evidence behind it to be intriguing, but not yet enough evidence to be convincing.

I once had a psychology textbook that was written in the 1950s. It was full of bell curves of Negro IQs, white IQs, and Jewish IQs. The Negro IQ curves were 15 points to the left of the white curves, and the Jewish curves were 15 points to the right of the white curves. Data like this led Charles Murray to conclude that Negroes were just plain genetically inferior, although, Murray hastened to add, they did have those mental skills that were useful in the jungles of Africa. So it's futile to try to bring Negroes up to the intellectual accomplishments of white people, Murray argued in the Wall Street Journal, and affirmative action will merely make them frustrated and unhappy. So the lower educational accomplishments of Negroes wasn't due to the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crow, it wasn't due to the segregated schools where Negroes got textbooks after they were thrown out by white schools, where Negroes were taught how to be carpenters while white students were taught how to be lawyers. Negroes just didn't have the genes for intelligence that like white men did. And, as Charles Murray liked to say, they didn't have the genes like "you guys," the Jews.

I was not very comfortable with these theories, which were not confirmed by later examination.

In fact, I work in biology today, and my own favorite biology teacher, who taught me the important ideas in genetics that I use today, was a black woman. It would be the height of ingratitude for me to tolerate racism towards her children and grandchildren after all she gave me. And I've met a lot of black kids who were smarter than me, particularly in the sciences, which leads me (and a lot of other people) to suspect that Murray must have dropped a decimal point, or has a screw loose, somewhere.

In my understanding, most geneticists are ready to believe that about half of intelligence is due to environment, and half due to genetics. In countries like Finland, which is probably the most egalitarian society in the world, everybody gets a relatively equal educational environment, so much of the variation could be due to genetics. But in countries like the U.S., which is one of the most unequal countries in the world, the effect of environment washes out any genetic effect. At least 20 points of IQ is due to the environment. In the US, and in much of Europe, the Jews are an affluent, successful minority, http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/images/cartoon.jpg particularly in the scientific professions, so it's understandable that they would be winning Nobel prizes disproportionately. It may turn out that Jewish success is entirely environmental.

But these Italian scientists, and their political inspirations like Rosa Luxemburg, said that it's time to put our ethnic identities and religious superstitions behind us, and build a socialist society where everyone -- Jew, Christian, African and everyone else -- will be educated and contribute to their fullest potential.

Lets keep this discussion fair at least. here

For 2012: Pensions $805 Billion Medicare $432 Billion Welfare (Medial and handouts) $764 Billion Deficit $1.1 Trillion (Remember how unacceptable Bush's $500 Billion was?)

So yea, we can keep hammering defence and ignore other areas, but that just shows you as a partsian shill.

Really? Please show some honest links on those. You will find that the 'welfare' section includes Medicare as well.
Here is a nice pic
here is another.

The fact is, that the items that YOU hate (wic, medicaid, HUD, etc) are next to NOTHING. If you wipe them out, we would still have about 3/4T deficit. Worse, our costs would rise elsewhere. So, you COULD go after Medicare and SS, but good luck with that. I noticed that even the republicans that voted for the neo-cons expect that THEIR ss/medicare will continue. Of course, none of them want to raise THEIR taxes either.

without proof that the regulated activity will harm anyone.

Give me a break. What happens is the EPA acts based on scientific evidence like this:

The E.P.A., following the recommendation of its scientific advisers, had proposed lowering the so-called ozone standard of 75 parts per billion, set at the end of the Bush administration, to a stricter standard of 60 to 70 parts per billion.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/science/earth/03air.html?pagewanted=all and then the politicians caves in to industry. Mercury regulations were delayed 20 years despite that based on the scientific evidence.

EPA estimates that the new safeguards will prevent as many as 11,000 premature deaths and 4,700 heart attacks a year. The standards will also help America’s children grow up healthier – preventing 130,000 cases of childhood asthma symptoms and about 6,300 fewer cases of acute bronchitis among children each year.

http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/d0cf6618525a9efb85257359003fb69d/bd8b3f37edf5716d8525796d005dd086!opendocument of course, now industry is suing to block the new regulations. http://www.edf.org/health/timeline-delay

Your comments about dimmers are entirely true in my experience. I gave up and replaced all my dimmer switches with regular switches.

But I believe this remark is false:

Meanwhile legislators are in the process of banning incandecent bulbs when there is as of yet NO replacement for many very common applications.

Yes, bulbs with poor efficiency are being legislated away, but it doesn't matter if they are incandescent or not. This is an important distinction - especially since we probably could've had super-efficient incandescents 30 years ago if there had been any incentive to develop them. Setting standards for markets - such as efficiency and safety standards - is a very different thing from banning specific products! Don't be part of the right wing corporate FUD machine.

This is hilarious:

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/29/pakistan-lifts-then-reinstates-youtube-ban/

To be fair it does appear the Pakistani government would actually rather have youtube unblocked. Sadly this may be more due to international pressure than due to liberals in government, or even the need to garner the support of the intellectual class (or at least mitigate the damage to their support). It seems to me that the church is behind the outrage, but how does a government go about reforming a church? I don't think it's even a government's role to do that. With such a large following and organisational power the church can be quite an enemy for any government. Although with events like bomb kills at least 19 Shiite pilgrims in Pakistan causing ill feeling between the Sunni and Shi'a communities and perhaps even fractions within the sunni community, any chance of enough people working together to seriously threaten the government is out of the window. Providing the people are sufficiently well fed, entertained and allowed to worship.

Although I'm no expert, I know little of Pakistan, governance or religion so what I just wrote could all be total and utter hogwash.

Whatever the design, it's if made in the Foxconn factory, I will never buy such product from slave labors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/business/signs-of-changes-taking-hold-in-electronics-factories-in-china.html?_r=0

If you really want to be honest with that attitude take a good long look at the labour practices of every manufacturer you buy products from. I think you'll find your list of acceptable brands will have to be drastically reduced. Every major manufacturer takes advantage of mistreated labor forces somewhere in the world and that includes most of the food stuffs you buy.

freetards

I know adding "tard" to the end of thinks magically makes you cleverer than they are. It doesn't

But I love the irony of you defending Microsoft an abusive multiple offending monopolist, a nasty company by every measure, has shenanigans, by recent favourite by this awful awful company is to hirer Mark Penn who unlike you is a professional shit slinger, who has has a department to match “strategic and special projects” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/technology/microsoft-battles-google-by-hiring-political-brawler-mark-penn.html?_r=0 what a nice man

You're thinking of this supreme court case: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/28scotus.html?_r=0

Among others, yes.

You're thinking of this supreme court case: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/28scotus.html?_r=0

Even with a restraining order, the police had no legal obligation to respond.

The sickening part of it all is that Bush attempted to fix the housing bubble before it actually trashed our economy: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/business/new-agency-proposed-to-oversee-freddie-mac-and-fannie-mae.html

But Democrats blocked it.

So what you're saying is that if only Democrats hadn't stopped Bush from creating this new agency, the housing bubble would have magically disappeared? Has there ever been a bubble that just went away without popping? Would this agency have had any oversight at all over all the "Alt-A", NINJA, and other sub-prime loans that Freddie and Fannie didn't insure?

How about this: if the rating agencies hadn't rated all the toxic CDOs triple A doubleplusgood, Fannie and Freddie would not have bought the derivatives as investments to back their insurance of prime mortgages. They'd still have had large losses when (if) the economy crashed and prime mortgages started falling through, but it would have been nowhere near the total collapse they had. Not only that, but if the CDOs were honestly rated, the pool of suckers would be significantly smaller, which would have put the brakes on the banks and unregulated non-bank lenders (that originated over 50% of the subprime mortgage pool) that were making hundreds of millions of dollars by giving away their money to bums and selling the debt to suckers, which probably would have prevented the bubble in the first place.

What is the solution? Should we follow the Chinese example?

Let me guess -- in a "real" police state, the police are soldiers, mass numbers of people are imprisoned without a fair trial, communications systems are built with government surveillance in mind, prisoners are a source of cheap labor, and the government uses propaganda to remind everyone that this is how life should be?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALEA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWAT

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to-trial-crash-the-justice-system.html?_r=0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_labor#United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_McCaffrey

Worse than China? No, not worse than China. Better? Well, at least we have not started harvesting organs from our millions of prisoners.

Here's the exact quote from a [US] senate resolution...

So? Whoever wrote that was blithely repeating a myth. The Israeli minister of intelligence, Dan Meridor, conceded that Ahmedinejad never actually said that Israel “must be wiped off the map.”

I mean, what -- do you really think they're keeping all your data just to mail you the weekly flyer that they're going to send to every house *anyway*, as "current resident"?

Here's an NYT article from Feb that answers that very question. Companies like Target can actually tailor those weekly flyers on a per-address basis. Target apparently has a pregnancy-prediction model that pretty accurate (see article excerpt below). It's a long article, but worth the read:

How Companies Learn Your Secrets

About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

Our people tend to have life expectancies in the very late 70s

Only if you tend to be upper middle class to wealthy. Lifespans are actually shrinking for the poor.

The NYT had a pretty good commentary on the topic yesterday. (I know, I know. Gotta log in to see it. Sorry 'bout that.) There were a couple of excerpts that I found really fascinating. For example:

In the last year Google has scored an impressive string of wins, including at the Swiss drug maker Hoffmann-La Roche, where over 80,000 employees use the package, and at the Interior Department, where 90,000 use it.

One big reason is price. Google charges $50 a year for each person using its product, a price that has not changed since it made its commercial debut, even though Google has added features. In 2012, for example, Google added the ability to work on a computer not connected to the Internet, as well as security and data management that comply with more stringent European standards. That made it much easier to sell the product to multinationals and companies in Europe.

And this one:

In a recent report, Gartner, the information technology research company, called Google âoethe only strong competitorâ to Microsoft in cloud-based business productivity software, though it warned that âoeenterprise concerns may not be of paramount importance to the search giant.â

Google is tight-lipped about how many people use Google Apps, saying only that in June more than five million businesses were using it, up from four million in late 2011. Almost all these companies are tiny, but in early December Google announced that even companies with fewer than 10 employees, which used to get Google Apps free, would have to pay.

The FBI doesn't care about your porn habits unless they involve underage kids.

Maybe he's an Occupier.

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble. Judging by Mr. Greenspan's remarkably cheerful recent testimony, he still thinks he can pull that off. But the Fed chairman's crystal ball has been cloudy lately; remember how he urged Congress to cut taxes to head off the risk of excessive budget surpluses? And a sober look at recent data is not encouraging.

- NYTimes, 2002

By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.

Red herring.com (1998)

If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. There was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.

Paul Krugman: Fake Alien Invasion

In July 2008 Nobel laureate Paul Krugman wrote that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the GSEs) "didn't do any subprime lending, because they can't: the definition of a subprime loan is precisely a loan that doesn't meet the requirement, imposed by law, that Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income." (New York Times, July 18, 2008)
How did Krugman get it so wrong?

The poster can't read, or summarize.

Here's the link to Krugman's column: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/is-growth-over/

And this means that in a sense we are moving toward something like my intelligent-robots world; many, many tasks are becoming machine-friendly. This in turn means that Gordon is probably wrong about diminishing returns to technology.

Ah, you ask, but what about the people? Very good question. Smart machines may make higher GDP possible, but also reduce the demand for people — including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.

And then eventually Skynet decides to kill us all, but that’s another story.

Anyway, interesting stuff to speculate about — and not irrelevant to policy, either, since so much of the debate over entitlements is about what is supposed to happen decades from now.

Limits to the campaign directly. I'm quoting figures from the Obama and Romney Super PACs.

Strange that. According to the NY Times the numbers you quote seem to exactly match those they report for direct donations. So I guess the NY Times are idiots too?

The numbers for the Super PAC donors actually fairly closely match in levels for both Obama and Romney, respectively: <$100k 11% and 14%, 100k to 1m 40% and 44%, >1m 49% and 42%.

Correct, and who is more likely to have the power to strong arm someone? a business executive. And who do they majoritarily favor? Romney.

Please actually look at the link I provided earlier. Arguments work much better if actually look at information that supports them rather than just spouting what you think is right.

Seriously, it's crazy to do that to an infant. An infant is still developing their visual system and learning (by pruning their brain synapses) about the reality of the world around them and how they (the infant) interact with it physically. Providing examples of useless GUI interfaces and ongoing stimuli with poor interaction is a crazy thing to do to an infant.
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They need physical toys like rattles and pacifiers and blocks that they can touch and move around and make noise with and learn the "intuitive" laws of physics from them. Give them a few years before you throw Emacs at them. The only Gnu they need to interact with at that tender age is a stuffed Gnu plush toy. And I say this as a fervent believer in children playing with computers: do NOT make infants and toddlers play with computers and tablets.
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The American Academy of Pediatrics itself recommends limiting access to screen time for children under the age of 2 years .

Well, maybe.

Trouble is, they're building ghost cities, they build railroads with subpar concrete (hint, since it's not explicit in the NYT article: to make proper high speed rail concete you basically need a derivative of volcanic ash, and the amount thereof produced per year is lower than the amount needed to fit the needs of China's yearly consumption, which dwarves the consumption by that of all other countries; in other words, their railway infrastructure's lifespan is roughly 10-20 years, vs 50-100 in developed countries), they need to rebalance, and so many other things can go wrong...

"Oh, look, he was also interested in electronics, we could a) teach him to become and engineer, helping to ensure our future prosperity and competitiveness in the world, or b) lock him in prison!"

AC, your point is another application of the idea in my sig which I have not thought about before. Thanks for pointing it out so clearly. From one assumption of human nature, this kid has the potential to be a productive member of our society on an upward spiral. With another assumption about human nature, this kid is set on the course of becoming a drain on our society in a downward spiral.

And the further we all go down the downward spiral, the harder it gets to find the resources to help children grow well into productive members of society (whether good public libraries, or healthy nutrition, or good chemistry sets). So then, as our society decays further, the more and more likely we are to assume the worst, and then we get the worst.

Echoing another of your points, when I was in High School, I found out the Junior Engineering and Technical Society (JETS) club had been disbanded a couple years earlier because the students had been working towards purchasing enough materials to build a big rocket (because it could in theory have hit an airplane). So, it became a "Computer Club" probably because that seemed "safer". So, I got support to learn about computers but not about how to make rockets. About a decade ago, I talked with someone at NASA who said they had a very difficult time hiring anyone these days to be an actual "rocket scientist" because kids have not experience anymore with rocketry and explosives. Is it any surprise NASA has a hard time "getting it up" these days and could not design a good successor to the Space Shuttle despite so much time and money? So, because of that 1970s fear, probably duplicated across the USA, we all remain imprisoned on planet Earth rather than being able to move into the "High Frontier" and reach for the stars. Meanwhile, we have to worry about "The Singularity" and Terminator-like military AIs getting out of control. And we also have to worry about robots taking most of the jobs (without an adequate economic policy like a basic income to distribute what robots can produce, see Marshall Brain's book "Manna") in part because we are still locked in a scarcity-assuming economics from lack of access to space resources like solar energy and asteroidal ore.

Around the globe, the USA is unfortunately busy creating terrorists like by killing women and children as "collateral damage" against suspected militants (intentionally or not). In the same way, out of the same emotion of fear, it looks like the USA is certainly working hard to take a potential engineer as this student was and turn him against society.

Some people might strongly disagree with going much further with that analogy though:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100195201/comparing-obamas-drone-attacks-in-pakistan-to-the-shooting-at-sandy-hook-is-the-most-infantile-kind-of-anti-imperialism/

US president Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." I might not go that far, but it is a good thing to think about. Related: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html?_r=0
"But the satire was rooted in a statistical fact: in the ranks of captured and confessed terrorists, engineers and engineering students are significantly overrepresented."

With about two million US citizens in prison (10X what if probably should be) and several times that on probation, with about half for non-violent drug offenses and/or for being a minority, it would be easy to argue this self-fulfilling prophecy has been operating for decades. It is just now expanding further and

Value is value. US dollars is simply one way of storing it. (...) You might say that value is simply based on what they decided, and that could change at any time. But that's true for every form of value storage, including dollars.

Actually, currency -- or more precisely legal tender -- differs from other stores of value in that you use it to pay taxes. This ensures guaranteed demand for it, and this makes it a more proper yard stick when measuring value than gold, pig iron or Florida condos.

In light of this, also keep the difference between realized and unrealized gains and losses in mind. A store of value is worth what the next guy will pay for it when the next guy actually pays for it. Upon doing so, you can book the realized gain or loss (and pay the taxes where applicable). Until then, it's an unrealized gain or loss that sits on your balance sheet, and you're free to value the asset pretty much any way you fantasize. (Though admittedly, the taxman might pry into your accounts if you book nonsensical values.)

To be an actual billionaire, Woodman needs to find a pigeon who pulls out his checkbook.