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According to him, Obama has a 69% chance of winning, but will only barely get a majority (not even 51%).

Dream on.

University of Colorado model that's nailed every election since 1980 say Romney in a landslide.

Hmm. 1980. So Jimmy Carter II will be a one-term failure just like Jimmy Carter I.

I guess every generation has to learn what a dumb idea it is to put Democrats in charge of both Congress and the Presidency.

Don't forget all these shitty capacitors they used in everything for a while. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/technology/29dell.html?pagewanted=all

According to him, Obama has a 69% chance of winning, but will only barely get a majority (not even 51%).

NY Times? Isn't that the paper that the last two ombudsmen have called biased? BWA HAHAHAHA!

Try this

Obama has HUGE problems there - after four years in office, he only gets 41% of independents while Romney gets 40%. If you call yourself "independent", and you won't go for Obama after four years, you ain't going for him in November in the polling booth.

Gender gap? Yeah, Obama has a huge problem there - he's down 9% among men.

Likeability? Both Obama and Romney are a bit under water, but Obama has no upside - 32% are undecided about Romney's likeability. Obama's stuck underwater and he ain't surfacing. Romney has just weathered Obama's negative "But what about Bain Capital" crap.

Kind of a shallow poll, too. Wonder what the results would be if they asked who'd you vote for after asking about real-world concerns like gas prices or unemployment.

Oh, yeah, there's one more major issue Obama's going to have to overcome.

Joe Biden.

Suppression won't do it either. There are only about 7 states legitimately in play right now, and Romney has to pretty much win all to get past the magic 270 electors requred. Obama is ahead in all but one of them (it was all but two, but thanks to nominating the anti-SS/Medicare/Medicaid guy for VP, the lead in FL has now switchted to Obama too).

The only possible path to victory for Romney/Ryan now is to somehow change the entire map in their favor. They need something big to change in the next two months. No amount of nibbling at the edges is going to do it for them.

According to him, Obama has a 69% chance of winning, but will only barely get a majority (not even 51%).

New Orleans is going to be fine. After Katrina $14.5 billion was spent upgrading the flood protection including hundreds of miles of levees, flood walls, the largest pumping station in the world (which is self powered), and the "Great Wall" of New Orleans. New Orleans is probably the best protected city on the planet from flooding right now. And yes, all of the work is complete and the systems are operational. While it is true that it is untested, you would need a hell of a lot more than a Category 1 hurricane to plausibly cause any stress to this system. It is really an engineering marvel.

We just believe that people, not governments, are the best source of help for the poor. Ron Paul probably doesn't belong in that particular list with Sarah Palin and George Bush, by the way.

I agree about Ron Paul. However the NYT article doesn't tell the whole story. Red States Feed at Federal Trough, Blue States Supply the Feed explains how blue states pay more in federal taxes than they get back in spending whereas red states get more from the feds than they pay in taxes. For every dollar blue state New Yorkers pay in federal taxes they get back $0.81. Red state North Dakota residents receive $2.03 for every dollar they pay.

Falcon

I agree with your general sentiment, but hate being painted the same color as "our religious wingnuts."

A couple of points to correct:

. . .most people would consider progressive as to be a joke.

Pardon if we don't just follow the herd. While I hate on republicans, I'm happy to hate on knee-jerk progressives as well.

. . .George Bush, Sarah Palin, and Run Paul all reinforce that. You're a country who figures the rich should stay rich, and the poor should go fuck themselves.

Not Quite. We just believe that people, not governments, are the best source of help for the poor. Ron Paul probably doesn't belong in that particular list with Sarah Palin and George Bush, by the way.

It's not just Europeans -- most of the world is tired of putting up with how your country behaves . . . it's that they're tired of putting up with your shit.

Please don't confuse the country and the government. In many respects, the government has an "inertia" that makes it very hard to change. Further, many citizens here, are also getting tired of the government.

Besides, if you hate us so much, you can probably do something about it.

To the UK, Germany, Japan, Korea, et al: Would you please boot our soldiers out? My (unborn) grandchildren will be paying for their presence today, and I resent passing debts on to my grandkids. Our military convinces (waterboards?) whatever politicians we send to Washington, that we can't close bases abroad. WE DESPERATELY NEED YOUR HELP.

To Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, Russia, et al: Please reject our foreign aid. No good can come of it. We don't actually have the money to give to you, and when creditors cut us off, you'll also be, quite suddenly cut off. Besides, you end up dependent on our grain or money (or weapons) without the infrastructure to make your own. Please, do us all a good turn.

Social Security has been paying out more than it collects in revenue for a couple years now, and is projected to get worse from here on out (unless our politicians do the grossly unpopular but inevitable thing and raise the retirement age so it keeps pace with increases in life expectancy).

Also, the SS fund is not separate from the general fund. The money you pay into FICA taxes is not held in a separate interest-bearing account until you retire, then given back to you. It's used to pay for the SS payments of current retirees. When you retire, your SS payments will come from the FICA contributions of the then-current workers. If you treated SS as a pension plan and did a proper accounting of it, it would be a huge red hole since future liabilities far, far exceed revenue collected at any given moment. (This is a side-effect of the way SS was started - retired people in the late 1930s received full SS payments even though they never contributed a dime. People who retired in the 1940s-1970s received full SS payments even though they only contributed during part of their working career.)

The longer people deny the existence of the SS/Medicare problem, the worse it's going to get. Right now SS + Medicare are projected to exceed all Federal tax revenue (average 18% of GDP) some time around 2050 (figures 1-1, B-1). Something needs to be done to rein them in, and the sooner the better.

Try this link instead. I think the submitter forgot to strip the URL junk...

Exactly. Sorry. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/business/book-reviewers-for-hire-meet-a-demand-for-online-raves.html is all that's needed.

Try this link instead. I think the submitter forgot to strip the URL junk...

Exactly. Sorry. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/business/book-reviewers-for-hire-meet-a-demand-for-online-raves.html is all that's needed.

Well here's something that those tea-partiers and libertarians don't want to hear.

The "R" word. REGULATION

Unless you want to live in Somalia, you should realize that there IS an important role for government beyond just self-defense and essential services (like police, fire, waste management). MARKETS need to be REGULATED, with binding rules and penalties for the offenders.

Don't take it from me, just read up on Adam Smith who called it "The Tragedy of the Commons". (If you don't know who he is, may I suggest you take a basic class in Economics? Hint: he's not a friend of Karl Max).

Of course Mr. Smith was writing about a simpler time in the18th century; the "commons" he was referring to was that used by grazing cows. So in our MUCH more compex world, it stands to reason that we need a MUCH more sophisticated regulatory system to prevent people like Enron (remember them?) and more recently, investment banks and rating agencies (paid by the people they rate!) from gaming the system. In addition, since more of our commerce is going on-line (yay for shopping in our bathrobes!) regulation needs to follow.

Unfortunately Romney and crew (who benefit the most from the lack of regulation) are going to try to convince you otherwise. For example they really don't want to restrict the ability of billionaires to dominate elections with their money (alright I guess if you're a billionaire, I'm not. Welcome to the 1920s, age of the robber barons). Also, as slashdotters well know, they really don't want to cut down on a corporation's right to regulate Internet traffic (bye bye net neutrality).

I'd tell you how much he's personally benefitted but he doesn't seem to be disposed to releasing his financial records. Still that hasn't kept some forensic analysis of what he has released from turning up some interesting things:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/business/in-romneys-tax-return-clues-in-foreign-taxes.html?ref=politics

Try this link instead. I think the submitter forgot to strip the URL junk...

And, maybe: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/business/book-reviewers-for-hire-meet-a-demand-for-online-raves.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/business/book-reviewers-for-hire-meet-a-demand-for-online-raves.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all ?
Still searching, but figured I'd drop this one for now.

Apparently the foreman (a patent holder himself) took the jury through the process of how patents work and thus allowed them to return so quickly with a verdict without need of any instructions on how to work through all the material.

Doesn't this qualify as a mistrial? Was the material in the form of foreman's explanation vetted by the court? Is it admissible as expert testimony? As a guideline perhaps?

I agree that it is smaller creative companies like Nokia (and Palm, and Blackberry) that really suffer from copycats like Samsung. In contrast to Samsung, Nokia had some real intellectual property of its own to offer to Apple, and Apple and Nokia reached a cross-licensing settlement in Nokia's favor, with Apple making payments to Nokia. Apple and Microsoft have also reached a cross-licensing agreement, with Apple licensing some features in return for a commitment from Microsoft not to use them to "clone" Apple's products (and indeed, Microsofts phones show genuine creativity in software and hardware design). But Samsung had noting original to trade in a settlement, save some standards-essential patents that the jury found that Apple had already indirectly paid for.

It will be interesting to see whether the judges chooses to follow through and award triple damages plus attorney's fees to Apple. Based upon the jury's judgment that the patent violations were willful, she really ought to do this, but considering the large size of the settlement as it is, I suspect that she won't.

Yes (unless you find an 80 year old lady to take care of the painting), but I was referring to a pre-digital time and pretty chaotic environment, where master tapes simply got lost. Also, if your recording studio loses digital masters, you are just as screwed as with tapes. Anyway, it was just an aside about reasons for valuable music disappearing from circulation, and isn't really on topic)

"As ‘Yuck Factor’ Subsides, Treated Wastewater Flows From Taps" -NY Times

When/if the water is treated sufficiently, there is not a problem. Orange County, California does this every single day for years now, and they produce a million gallons of drinking water a day. Where did you get your geek card from? This ain't exactly rocket science in 2012, and it is covered in the mainstream media too. We all must learn to use our precious resources more efficiently. Forget about trips to Mars already, (but relatively low-cost robotic instruments do it for me, I must admit). OK, the astronauts make a big deal about this waste purification technology (recently), but still.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/01/120131-reclaimed-wastewater-for-drinking/
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/science/earth/despite-yuck-factor-treated-wastewater-used-for-drinking.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

My thoughts exactly. I would be more intersted in a plank that promised net neutrality rather than protecting users data.

The remainder of the Repbulican plank reads like something from the 1800's.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/opinion/what-the-gop-platform-represents.html

Vaguely promising to protect your personal data, while including language that puts the police state in your bedroom isn't exactly what I would call a fair trade.

Yep, Assange's claims that the Americans are out to get him are ludicrous, and I think he knows that.

Au contraire: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

That's an important point, but you'll be interested to know that even accounting for all these factors, there is a still a legitimate pay disparity. Or at least, a recent study shows that a pay gap exists among equally qualified doctors.

The study found that, indeed, women are more likely to work fewer hours and to work in specialties that pay less. But even those woman doctors who work long hours in high paying fields are making less than men coworkers in those same fields. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/28/among-doctors-too-women-are-paid-less/

It's a surprising result, especially considering that we're talking about a community of very well educated and very competent people.

The problem with drugging in sport is that the teams with the most money hire the pharmacists and doctors (like Fuentes and Ferrari) who develop cutting edge drug regimes which are beyond the current limits of drug testing. Drug testing inevitably develops behind the science of doping - testing for some new substance can only be initiated once it becomes known that that substance is being used for doping, and inevitably there is a lag time during which a reliable and safe test is developed.

Consequently the drug tests cannot be the 'gold standard' for evaluating whether or not someone has doped. Witness testimony is what we rely on in far more serious cases, like murder for example, and it seems perfectly reasonable to assert that if enough credible people are prepared to testify on oath that they personally witnessed Armstrong doping, then he was doping, whatever the drug tests say.

There's circumstantial evidence, too. One thing which had me convinced Armstrong was doping back as early as 2004 were his rages - he was aggressive and prone to anger far outside the normal range of human behaviour. But since then we've seen so many of his team mates and ex-team mates implicated - Tyler Hamilton, Floyd Landis and several others have been convicted, while George Hincapie agreed to give evidence against Armstrong in return for not being prosecuted. It simply isn't credible that everyone on the team was doping except the strongest, fastest man in the team.

There's some good news in all this. This years leading riders were about 4% down on power output - Lance Armstrong in 2005 was outputting 6.8 watts per kilogram, whereas Bradley Wiggins, this year's winner, was capable of just 6.57. Of course, the fact that power is down - across the whole peloton, not just the leaders - doesn't prove that today's riders are not doping, but clearly something has changed, and dope is one thing that may have changed.

Of course you can argue, and some people have, that if you can't reliably test for dope then the sensible thing to do is to allow all athletes to take whatever drugs they want, because if they're all doping then that's fair. But many of these drugs are dangerous - there were a rash of deaths from heart attacks of very young cyclists in Holland and Belgium in the early 2000s associated with apparent use of EPO, for example - and many athletes are young and under great pressure to succeed. We do have to clean up cycling (and other sports, too, of course, but I'm no expert on other sports) or else we will see a lot more kids with great potential killed to no purpose. I believe that we are succeeding.

Real income dropping? Like the increase in cost of healthcare due to legislation? My company just announced that healthcare premiums are going up by 50% because of the new laws. http://www.bendbulletin.com/article/20120823/NEWS0107/208230314/
War on the thinnest of pretenses against people who did nothing to us? http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/21/world/middleeast/obama-threatens-force-against-syria.html
Greedy self serving bastards line their pockets with tax payers money while politicians blow them? http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/obama-fundraises-with-players-in-solyndra-scandal/ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/314694/bad-worse-obama-s-gm-bailout-michael-barone

I won't mention the shift in wealth or the smoking hole in the economy because you can't pin that on the 4 or 8 years of any one president much less any one party.

Before you reply, did I say anything good about Republicans? But stop calling the kettle black if you are the pot. BOTH parties should be fired. Don't get blinded and think that only the right are corrupt assholes.

You're an idiot. We get it. Next you'll be question evolution, quantum mechanics and whether the Earth is round.

It's very well established that Americans avoid even going to doctors because they can't afford to pay for either what must come out of their pockets, whether they have insurance or not because it's that uncertain. They don't even get up to bat to be denied.

• 
  Major Medical Mystery (sic) why people avoid doctors

  Do Americans avoid going to a doctor because it will cost them money?

  Avoiding the Doctor's Office

And yes Virginia, Americans absolutely do get turned away from hospitals and doctors:

• 
  Uninsured Americans Still At Risk For Getting Turned Away By Hospitals
  Critically ill uninsured Americans still at risk of being turned away from hospitals despite law
  Ambulance Diversion

People to do manage to get care also go bankrupt primarily due to medical bills (not covered by insurance)

• 
  Medical bills prompt more than 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies

  Plaintiff challenging healthcare law went bankrupt – with unpaid medical bills

  Towering Medical Bills Leave Many Americans Bankrupt

The fact is that America has the WORST HEALTHCARE SYSTEM of ANY developed or even most developing countries. The only par countries are the lower rungs of developing countries and undeveloped countries. Other far less wealthy nations manage to deliver far better healthcare than the US. I know personally because I've lived overseas in these countries.

Your ship has sailed for specious and ignorant rhetorical tricks and debating games. The facts are clear.

BTW I don't even bother getting health care in the US any long. I have group insurance that covers international providers so my primarily care doctors are in Mexico, Thailand and Germany now. Even with airfare it's still cheaper, less stressful, better quality and more certain than getting the same in the USA now! I only carry insurance in the US for being hit by a bus - my group plan is set up to transport me overseas once I'm stable in such situations (again still cheaper than standard US insurance).

ObarmaCare is a day late and dollar short as far as I'm concerned. But the Republican alternatives are even much worse. Basically criminality of political and immorality of leadership dominates both parties completely. To regain my trust it will take decades of a clean track record and that clock has yet to even start.

No, they're also for targeted advertising, by doing statistical analysis of the purchases:

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.

âoeMy daughter got this in the mail!â he said. âoeSheâ(TM)s still in high school, and youâ(TM)re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?â

The manager didnâ(TM)t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the manâ(TM)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. âoeI had a talk with my daughter,â he said. âoeIt turns out thereâ(TM)s been some activities in my house I havenâ(TM)t been completely aware of. Sheâ(TM)s due in August. I owe you an apology.â

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=all

Ah, good 'ol loyalty cards. I prefer disloyalty cards. ;)

Anyway, it's a mix. Yes, they want to motivate you to keep coming back. But these stores also like to know crazy amounts of information about you. Aka, not just what's disappearing in a particular store, but what's being consumed by what demographics, what's bought at the same time, etc, to help determine product positioning, marketing campaigns, and so forth. Here's a crazy article on the lengths some companies go. The first paragraph, as a teaser:

Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”

Osama Bin Laden was killed.

Courtesy of US Military intelligence, lasting over eight years or more. Unless you can point to an image of Obama holding an M-16 in one hand and Bin Laden's severed head in the other, he (nor you) can't claim that one.

Going into the right country was kind of a prerequisite for getting the guy. There was plenty of US intelligence that was ignored by Dubya's administration because it didn't fit with their neo-con objective of stealing Iraq's oil. John McCain campaigned on the basis that he would not use force on Pakistani territory without the permission of the government. Obama was proved right on this one, because if he had gotten the government's permission it's a good bet that someone would have tipped Bin Laden's handlers off and he'd still be hiding somewhere. Fact is, the President made all the right calls and has as much right to take the credit for what goes right as he has to take the blame for what goes wrong.

And contrary to the lies spewing out of Fox News who were appalled by Bin Laden's death, Obama gave plenty of credit to the intelligence community and the personnel involved. If he wanted to take all the credit he could have done something really outlandish and obnoxious, like, say... I don't know ... dressing up in some sort of flight suit and getting a Navy pilot to land him on the deck of an aircraft carrier before making a triumphant speech about it? Nah, that'd be crazy.

The recession is over.

Even the New York Times isn't letting that bit of propaganda slip by unchallenged: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/us/recession-officially-over-us-incomes-kept-falling.html

Educate yourself. A recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth. We're no longer in negative growth. This is not "propaganda". This is fact. (I know that conservatives have a hard time with facts but I'll try my best to use them on you in the vain hope that they'll sink in eventually.)

General Motors and Chrysler, and the industrial heartland of the country, were saved from a catastrophe that would make the dust bowl look like nothing.

They were 'saved' by a loan that was given them when TARP was passed... in 2008. Signed into law by that guy you likely loathe to the core of your soul.

Maybe you missed the bit where Romney said he'd let Detroit go bust. He was opposed to saving the motor industry, Obama was for it. Fact.

An end has come to the era of people being condemned to death by for-profit insurance companies using the excuse of "pre-existing conditions" to deny people their basic human right to health care coverage.

So Medicare and Medicaid didn't exist before 2009 then?

Oh, so if you can't afford health insurance then you automatically qualify for Medicaid? So we do have universal health care after all?

Colonel Gadaffi was ousted from power without a single American soldier being deployed on the ground, and without adding countless billions to the deficit.

...thanks to the "Arab Spring", certainly. Same with Egypt, Tunisia, and hopefully Syria. Contrary to popular belief, the rest of the world is perfectly capable of fixing itself on occasion without a US president or military helping out.

The Libyan rebels were taking a pounding until NATO came in with air strikes to back them up. They could not have taken Gadaffi out by force without outside support. Fact.

That god-awful war in Iraq, the biggest foreign policy blunder since Napoleon invaded Russia, has ended.

...on schedule, no less. A schedule that was set years before Obama took of

Osama Bin Laden was killed.

Courtesy of US Military intelligence, lasting over eight years or more. Unless you can point to an image of Obama holding an M-16 in one hand and Bin Laden's severed head in the other, he (nor you) can't claim that one.

The recession is over.

Even the New York Times isn't letting that bit of propaganda slip by unchallenged: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/us/recession-officially-over-us-incomes-kept-falling.html

General Motors and Chrysler, and the industrial heartland of the country, were saved from a catastrophe that would make the dust bowl look like nothing.

They were 'saved' by a loan that was given them when TARP was passed... in 2008. Signed into law by that guy you likely loathe to the core of your soul.

An end has come to the era of people being condemned to death by for-profit insurance companies using the excuse of "pre-existing conditions" to deny people their basic human right to health care coverage.

So Medicare and Medicaid didn't exist before 2009 then?

Colonel Gadaffi was ousted from power without a single American soldier being deployed on the ground, and without adding countless billions to the deficit.

...thanks to the "Arab Spring", certainly. Same with Egypt, Tunisia, and hopefully Syria. Contrary to popular belief, the rest of the world is perfectly capable of fixing itself on occasion without a US president or military helping out.

That god-awful war in Iraq, the biggest foreign policy blunder since Napoleon invaded Russia, has ended.

...on schedule, no less. A schedule that was set years before Obama took office.

Since Obama took office, oil imports have dropped by an average of 1.1 million barrels per day and in 2010 domestic crude oil production reached its highest level since 2003.

...recent massive spikes in fuel costs had a lot more to do with it than any US governmental policy. Unless of course you can point us to one. You can do that, right?

How you got an "insightful" mod I do not know.

...because he actually used a bit of logic in his post, instead of blindly praising some politician for things that he obviously had little-to-no (mostly "no") hand in shaping.

GOP is the christian conservative party. Bush said that he was on a mission from god. When it comes to religion, there is no debate or compromise. Only way politics works is with compromise, so what do we get, a non working government.

You don't get debates from liberals because you make stuff up. Dems only had a supermajority in the senate for four months, most of which were in recess. The republicans have used the filibuster (or threatened to fillabuster) nearly every bill, basically negating the majority. http://washingtonindependent.com/74033/the-four-month-supermajority Federal spending rose at anywhere between 3.2-5%, a rate below average, and if you start measuring the rate from October 2009, spending has been the slowest in 60 years http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/us/politics/fact-checking-obama-and-romney.html?pagewanted=all Oil drilling and fraking has been approved at a faster rate under obama than Bush II. (fraking due to technology). http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/03/obama-oil-drilling-up-on-my-watch/1

...we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic that started around the early 1980's, and that this was coincident with the rise of the low-fat dogma. (Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, also rose significantly through this period.) They say that low-fat weight-loss diets have proved in clinical trials and real life to be dismal failures, and that on top of it all, the percentage of fat in the American diet has been decreasing for two decades. Our cholesterol levels have been declining, and we have been smoking less, and yet the incidence of heart disease has not declined as would be expected.

Saddam Hussein didn't seem to have a problem with that. Gun ownership in Hussein's Iraq was pretty high.

Contemporary source: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/12/world/threats-responses-iraq-sandbags-already-streets-baghdad-city-waiting.html?pagewanted=2&src=pm

One gauge of that fear is the trade at gun shops. Most Iraqi households own at least one gun, so there has been no particular run on armaments. But some gun shop owners report as much as a 50 percent jump in ammunition sales.

''I came in to buy a hunting gun, but I'm also thinking about how to protect my house and the neighborhood streets,'' said Yasser Abu Bilal, looking at a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun at the Trigger gun shop in the upscale Mansour neighborhood.

It would help to know your geographic region. I'll give you Denmark and theUnited States. I specifically chose normal news sites, rather than eco- or cycling-specific news sources, but there's a lot more out there on similar sorts of movements in many municipalities across several nations, including moves to create pedestrian and cyclist only downtown regions.

I continue to disagree with you on defense spending. It's ridiculously, absurdly high.

As I posted in another thread, we've actually been reducing defense spending for the past 60 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Defense_Spending_-_percent_to_Outlays.png

20% of the budget is historically quite low, particularly for a primary constitutional function of the federal government.

The fallacy in thinking it's too high is by comparing it to other countries. All of our budgetary items are "higher than multiple countries combined" because we just have an assload of money/GDP. Whereas I also believe there's some fat to be trimmed from defense still, there really is not that much more slack left (at least not enough to significantly alter the debt). If you're okay with reducing our "global police" presence (Ron Paul style), we could trim a bit more -- but as long as we want to maintain a worldwide military presence in all major sectors of the world, it's going to be an expensive undertaking.

I'll have to think on the state issue-- because people are very mobile over their lifetime and already they move to the most "retiree" friendly state. I.e., high income tax but low sales and property taxes unless they have a really high income- in which case it's a low income tax state.

I believe that's an artifact of the current centralized way of doing things. Basically you have a bunch of productive states and a bunch of freeloader states. They get away with this because the productive states effectively subsidize the freeloaders via the federal benefits system. It certainly does not seem like the most efficient way to run a country, to me at least.

Plus states can fall on hard times just as their retirees reach retirement age. Several are talking about not paying promised retirement benefits. Hence- federal solutions.

Actually, one of the large reason many states are falling on hard times is because the federal government is giving them less money: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/us/02states.html?_r=1

They came to rely on that expected federal income. Then, once it was taken away, they were left with an expensive program and no funding. Reducing that reliance from the start would have given the states far more budgetary control over their situations.

I remember reading years ago about Matt Blaze, a security researcher at AT&T Labs-Research who discovered how to create a master key from a key and a lock which is opened by it. His method was a trade secret used by many locksmiths, which pissed them off when he publicised it.

http://it.slashdot.org/story/03/01/23/0359230/att-identifies-widespread-security-hole---in-locks

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/23/business/many-locks-all-too-easy-to-get-past.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/technology/19screen.html

The 2-year old article I linked also explains that all Google content reviewers are on one-year contract because of the nature of the work and have access to counseling. From TFA it seems many of these reviewers got the false impression that they would be hired fulltime after completing the one year. Considering that Google seem to have pretty tough hiring process, I'm not surprised that very few of these reviewers get hired fulltime. Their managers must be filthy liars though.

Not getting hired full time would probably piss me off more than anything else. If I had to sacrifice doing a job like that and got duped then I would be pissed.
I guess that means I have empathy for the employees.

Here is a 2010 New York Times article on the same subject. Seems like not much has changed. Apparently a bunch of it is outsourced, which in addition to the nature of the work, leads to questions about content privacy, especially when some of the images being reviewed are non-public (e.g. stuff you've sent through Facebook messages).

I'm sure the guy who works at the morgue or the guy who shovels shit for a living cares about these complaining Facebook employees. Or what about the millions if not billions of unemployed? If the job is so tough then psychologically profile the people you hire so you don't hire psychologically unstable softies prone to having nightmares about some pictures or content they saw on the internet.

I've been on the internet now for almost 20 years, I've seen a lot of obscene shit, eventually you grow a thick skin. Be a moderator for a chatroom, or web forum, or website, you will see obscene shit all the time. It might affect you at first, but it's not real life. And if seeing obscene content keeps you from having to see that shit in real life due to living in some slum then you've got nothing to lose. Do what you gotta do as long as it's a legit living, put your game face on and do your job.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/technology/19screen.html

The 2-year old article I linked also explains that all Google content reviewers are on one-year contract because of the nature of the work and have access to counseling. From TFA it seems many of these reviewers got the false impression that they would be hired fulltime after completing the one year. Considering that Google seem to have pretty tough hiring process, I'm not surprised that very few of these reviewers get hired fulltime. Their managers must be filthy liars though.

Here is a 2010 New York Times article on the same subject. Seems like not much has changed. Apparently a bunch of it is outsourced, which in addition to the nature of the work, leads to questions about content privacy, especially when some of the images being reviewed are non-public (e.g. stuff you've sent through Facebook messages).

In the civilised world, we view people who refuse to help the sick and injured as evil scum. In your country you may be happy with people dying, untreated, on the streets. YMMV.

The same civilized world which in many places don't have the right to free speech? You might not be aware of the fact that people here DO get treatment. If you look at any of the border states especially you'll see the Hospitals filled with people. At one point in Los Angeles 60% of the patients aren't even citizens. How about Hospitals faltering because of massive influx of non citizens.

If the fetus has a right to life, than all women who miscarriage need to be investigated to determine if they should be charged with some variation of manslaughter/murder over the death of their fetus (after all a miscarriage due to negligence is just as bad as letting a toddler drown in the bathtub isn't it?)

Or you know, we could call birth the point at which you count as being "alive" and then not need to worry about all the edge cases like rape.

I hate to break it to you, but this is already happening in Mississippi and elsewhere.

Note that the in places where this type of prosecution is going on, the anti-science, bible-thumping morons are running things. Why am I not surprised?

1) Don't be so eager to downplay conservative social attitudes—after all, there are lots of countries where something is legal, but so shameful that no one would ever get caught doing it for fear of being disowned by their families. Unfortunately this even happens in the United States. A state-encouraged culture of conservatism constitutes a form of repression itself; the United States became much more conservative after World War II in part because the government wanted to show a strong face to Russia. And lo and behold: two women were executed for being 'tinged with capitalism' because they had sex with each other and had been to Japan.

2) The Carter comment comes from a BBC story. This Guardian article, also cited on the page, says that the World Food Programme estimates that six million (out of 23 million total) are short of food.

3) Here's a bit more on the educational situation. I do agree that university tuition is a scandal in a lot of Western countries, but (in Canada and the US, anyway) that tuition is just a matter of acquiring a loan, usually from the government, which you can reasonably expect to pay back, especially if you finish your degree. Regardless of how university is in North Korea, many never get through basic school, and much of the curriculum is political indoctrination.

3 again, let's call it 4) If you read the articles on each of the four parties' pages, it appears they exist now only to give the illusion of choice. While they had political agendas early on, all of them are allied with the ruling party, and none exist except as a formality. It's slightly more elaborate than the CPSU, but it does not appear to be any more free. In the United States the two parties aren't truly political causes, but really more sets of rich people, who at least actually oppose each other. There are many political movements (ranging from the Tea Party, to the Libertarians, to the Green Party, to the Neocons, to Occupy Wall Street) which are allowed to express their views publicly, and have influenced the policies of their corresponding political parties.

4, bumped to 5) Have you seen this? I think it might be useful. You are wrong to say North Koreans are free to be homosexual (which you called "totally ok"); the statement that women have suffrage is meaningless because no democratic elections occur; there are numerous sources stating that North Korea has a serious and continual food problem; and for many North Koreans, public school education is very different from the equivalent in other countries, consisting largely of indoctrination.

5, bumped to 6) Like it or not, the government of Taiwan still claims mainland China. The official 'Taiwan' got stuck to it largely because other countries wanted to open up dealings with the PRC, and not offend the PRC when they did so. The legislature is still the Republic of China's legislature all the way back—you might as well say that Constantine's empire wasn't the Roman Empire just because it didn't possess Rome.

6, bumped to 7) Colonialism in the past doesn't affect a country's participation in the free world in the present. The UK does have a lot of problems, but it is still essentially a free country.

As for Greeks: no, it's more about your English. :) The person I knew was actually very conservative and admired the social order and relative lack of corruption in the US.

. . . about a year and a half ago, and while it's not all bad, it's not quite as glowing as TFA.

“You have people signed up on paper, but there are no doctors, no medicine, no hospital beds,” said Miguel Pulido, the executive director of Fundar, a Mexican watchdog group that has studied the poor southern states of Guerrero and Chiapas.

The result is that how Mexicans are treated is very much a function of where they live. Lucila Rivera Díaz, 36, comes from one of the poorest regions in Guerrero. She said doctors there told her to take her mother, who they suspected had liver cancer, for tests in the neighboring state of Morelos.

Sounds like the problems the opponents to universal health care in the States are always worried about.

As opposed to people living in the US 2 hours away from any major city? Guess what, those people need to travel to get important or complicated procedures done too. Or do you think that every hospital and clinic can perform every medical procedure possible.

. . . about a year and a half ago, and while it's not all bad, it's not quite as glowing as TFA.

“You have people signed up on paper, but there are no doctors, no medicine, no hospital beds,” said Miguel Pulido, the executive director of Fundar, a Mexican watchdog group that has studied the poor southern states of Guerrero and Chiapas.

The result is that how Mexicans are treated is very much a function of where they live. Lucila Rivera Díaz, 36, comes from one of the poorest regions in Guerrero. She said doctors there told her to take her mother, who they suspected had liver cancer, for tests in the neighboring state of Morelos.

Sounds like the problems the opponents to universal health care in the States are always worried about.

Just look at the results: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/aug-18-obama-leads-big-among-those-least-likely-to-vote/

Ever think that might have something to do with demographics? Like the large number of elderly Republicans vs large number of young Democrats? Old people never miss a chance to vote.

The Republicans are playing a two sided game - to their base, they promise the world. To the others, they work actively on discouraging them to vote, by proliferating the attitude that the Democrats are failures

lol, if you see this as a one-sided tactic, you truly have blinders on. "Promising the world?" Remember the "Change we can believe in" rhetoric? Remember the extensive laundry list of promises Democrats ate up that year? And proliferating the other side as failures? One word: "Bush" -- helllooooo? It's been 3 years and the Dems are STILL trying to use Bush to sum up the entire other side as failures.

If Apple stops pumping iPods, iPhones and iPads tomorrow, what's the worst that will happen?

If the battery in my iPod dies, I won't be able to buy another iPod to replace it! And I won't be able to listen to music on my way to work, which will make me cranky. Thousands of Foxconn workers in China will be forced out of their corporate dormitories and, with no jobs or food, will swarm Beijing and overthrow the Communist party, and then overrun Japan (thousands in China were demonstrating in the streets yesterday, carrying banners with slogans like "Even if China is covered with graves, we must kill all Japanese." Sure, it's party-generated vitriol designed to distract from their national political scandals, but they've got the people worked up in a frenzy and if they weren't there to restrain them now, the people would act on their propaganda).

If Exxon-Mobil stops pumping out oil and refining gas, diesel and jet fuel, what's the worst that will happen?

If my car runs out of gas, I'll have to ride my bicycle to work, but at least I can still listen to my music on the way with my trusty iPod. And as an added bonus, no war between China and Japan.

When you put it that way, Apple really is more valuable to me than ExxonMobil.

Because if the police were to stop him with deadly or non-deadly force,

Point #1: The police will arrive too late to save you. Also, as the SCOTUS decided, protecting you is not their job, anyway.

the risk of me getting sued or going to jail is close to nil.

If I were to do it, the risk is considerably higher.

Point #2: Dead men tell no tales; get a gun (and, of course, learn how to use it).

I would love to see some sources on this that would confirm M$ helped SCO out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/22/business/technology-investor-s-pullout-stirs-doubts-about-sco-group.html

http://catb.org/esr/halloween/halloween10.html

http://catb.org/esr/halloween/halloween9.html

Probably not unfortunately. What generally happens is you just lose the lawsuit. The courts rarely punish perjury (or in Clinton's case the weaker lying under oath) in civil trials which has had a nasty effect on our civil system.

That's a bit misleading. It is another mem from the clinton sex era that turned out to be incorrect. It appears that perjury is prosecuted quite often in addition to losing the case.

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/18/opinion/the-perjury-loophole.html

In any case the issue was Congress in the analogy not Clinton.

The issue is with the entire analogy. Congress has a legitimate and constitutional role in overseeing the conduct of the office of president as well as offices of the government. This is fact that cannot be disputed unless you ignore something or imagine things not real.

I suspect your assertion about this never being about some rape charge/situation employs a lot of this imagination. The US simply is not involved with the extradition, the charges in Sweden, nor do they have an active warrant for Assange's arrest. The statement released wasn't even about Assange except that a reporter asked about Ecuador's membership in the OAS and diplomatic asylum. Even if the US did sign the treaty, it wouldn't matter as it only gives safe passage to people given political asylum from some place inside the country to the destination country and Assange isn't even in the US.

I'm starting to think this entire issue is manufactured by Assange in order to take advantage of useful idiots. I mean seriously, a reporter asks a question, the state department answers it, Assange jumps to a balcony talking about secrete warrants (which is why no one else can find them) and a witch hunt involving an elaborate scheme that in reality isn't even necessary in order to get custody of him. But because of it, asylum by a South American country is necessary despite the fact that the CIA has a long history of covert operations there and is probably more dangerous for Assange if the US actually did want him.