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Verizon wants 100 concessions from their union employees. Even though Verizon’s top five executives received compensation of $258 million over the past four years (1), Verizon wants to freeze pensions for current employees. Also eliminate traditional pensions for future workers, while making its 401(k) plans somewhat more generous for both (2). Additional, there's demands from Verizon regarding health care premiums for union employees.

References:

• (1) CWA - http://www.cwa-union.org/news/entry/45000_workers_on_strike_at_verizon
• (2) NY Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/us/07verizon.html

Excellent answer. If it's traditional turf grass, it's not even native to the US, it requires shit tons of water and pesticides to keep looking good, and it just a plain waste of time and gas to mow.

Plant some trees for christs sake.

Better yet, plant some plants that were actually native to your area (including trees...)

If I had 6 acres, I'd love to try to restore a significant part to whatever the "original" condition for the region (Illinois prairie, California Chaparral, etc)

Make it look more like this:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/03/06/garden/06garden-600.jpg

Than this:

http://www.lawnshelp.com/wp-content/gallery/beautiful-lawns/c-lawns.jpg

You'd have 10x the native birds, butterflies, etc. It would take some work to restore it, but it's more of a hobby (if you consider "mowing the lawn" a hobby you need help).

Both good ideas, and not enough even when combined to fix the deficit problem (though halving the military budget is by far the most significant chunk). The reality is that we need to make a number of sizeable cuts almost across the board in addition to raising taxes. The Ds will never agree to meaningfully shrink social programs, and the Rs will never agree to meaningfully shrink defense programs or raise taxes.

This is a monetarily solvable problem. The NYT created a Budget Puzzle and the University of Maryland has a similar exercise. I prefer the layout of the older NYT one, as it lets you juggle the numbers all on one page, but the projected shortfall has grown by $200B since then.

The hard part is to get people to agree on what to cut. Those exercises can be a great teaching tool. The NYT one lets you share your results, too. Or at least it used to...can't seem to find the option now.

It's partisan ass-hattary like yours that got us in this mess.

That does not fit the data. The right has been completely unwilling to compromise. They essentially took your country hostage over their radical demands.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/opinion/05brooks.html?_r=2&hp

Credit rating is ideologically ignorant - it's a matter of high debt and inability to meet payments.

No, in fact it is ideologically very non-ignorant, as it has an ideology that it is trying to push on the world. c.f. Krugmans commentary on the issue.

It is also arguably irrelevant in many situations. You can compare us 10y bond yields with, I don't know, greece's 10y bond yield or a bunch of orthers. The world is not about to end on the US. It is quite possible that S&P have just made fools of themselves.

What Second Amendment cases has the ACLU intervened in? I'm curious.

There aren't many, I'm sure, but here's one from a while ago.

Read the Constitution carefully. "Right" applies to individuals, "Power" applies to governments.

That's a non sequitur. The argument regarding the ACLU isn't about governments, it's about groups of individuals vs. individuals. The ACLU mission is for individuals, not groups or families. While I suppose they may at times step beyond that, they have chosen not to do so for the 2nd amendment except for some rare cases. The unfortunate side effect of this is that many people therefore view the ACLU as "against the 2nd Amendment" (which they are not) or "left-wing liberals" (which they are not). To the best of my knowledge, they do not advocate in any direction regarding gun ownership regulations and do not fight the NRA or similar organizations.

I welcome constructive criticism on this because maybe I'm just wrong cannot understand the stances and maybe I have missed some background on the ACLU.

Until a non-Windows OS is installed on a plurality of machines, Windows will be the primary target and have the most hackers going after it. The Pwn2Own contests have shown that Macs are plenty vulnerable when people are willing to put in the effort to go after them.

The guy who won all those Pwn2Own contest says that OSX Lion's security is now better than Windows 7.

Talking of Mr. Zovi, here's what he says about Lion :

"[...] now, they are also more secure than PCs, thanks to several crucial security improvements in the operating system itself, Mac OS X 10.7 So says Dino A. Dai Zovi, an independent security consultant. Those operating system features now put Lion ahead of Windows 7, the latest version Microsoft’s operating system, whose leadership was forged from the fire of relentless attacks by hackers and malware writers, he says."

The Fear of a Toxic Rerun
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/business/global/30rare.html?pagewanted=all

A $230 million refinery being built here in an effort to break China's global chokehold on rare earth metals is plagued by environmentally hazardous construction and design problems, according to internal memos and current and former engineers on the project.
...
But the construction and design may have serious flaws, according to the engineers, who also provided memos, e-mail messages and photos from Lynas and its contractors. The engineers said they felt a professional duty to voice their safety concerns, but insisted on anonymity to avoid the risk of becoming industry outcasts.

TFA goes into detail about all the problems that have been discovered and some of the corners that have been cut.
I sure as hell wouldn't want the future superfund site that's described in TFA to be in my State.

before, the excuse was that Chernobyl happened because the soviets were reckless and it would never happen in the west.

what's the excuse for Fukishima, which BTW was recently measured at 10+ SV/hr and i have heard unconfirmed reports that 10 was not so much a reading but the maximum that the meters can read out and so it could be any amount higher than 10

there has been fear of being exploited by China for rare-earth ores (which later happened) so there was plenty of motivation to find an alternatives to make electric motors for electric vehicles.
one option is being developed into a possible replacement, the switched reluctance motor.

it's not perfect but at least someone is thinking ahead.

there has been fear of being exploited by China for rare-earth ores (which later happened) so there was plenty of motivation to find an alternatives to make electric motors for electric vehicles.
one option is being developed into a possible replacement, the switched reluctance motor.

it's not perfect but at least someone is thinking ahead.

Not only that, the only workers affected have merely received their year's quota of radiation and can't work there for a while.

They received much more than one year's dose, which is why they raised the allowed dosage by 500%.

The reactors are still emitting fatal doses of radiation to this very day. 10 sieverts per hour was the max on the readers and it was pegged.

Here's a handy radiation dosage chart. They are well into the bottom right of the scale.

Umm. I think it's univerally acknowledged to be a paywall. In fact the New York Times itself refers to it as a paywall. <irony>Um, following that link I just gave will itself count against your NYT paywall limit</irony> What is true is that you get up to 20 articles free each month, but clicking on a link such as the one on nuclear safety counts against your 20. Where did you see the free for 7 days? My clear understanding is that it's 20 free per month (modulo some weirdness about trying to make links from social networking sites free...though the detailed rules for that aren't documented as far as I know.)

Regarding moto's point about cookies: yes, I'm aware that deleting cookies can reset your count, at least in some cases, but I presume that doing so violates the permissions provided by the NYT on use of the content. Granted, slashdot readers are more likely than others to know how to do stuff like this, and maybe or maybe not some of them consider it appropriate, but one of the bad things about the paywall is that at least for novice users or those experts who choose not to cheat, just doing something as "innocent" as clicking a link can wind up eating through your monthly quota. YMMV.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/business/energy-environment/29nuke.html?pagewanted=all

Ummm. No, I'm talking about companies set up deliberately to steal money from investors...

See:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/business/global/reverse-mergers-give-chinese-firms-a-side-door-to-wall-st.html

These are all Chinese companies pulling the reverse merger trick, using a shell company to become them, so they avoid having to file with the SEC and become publicly traded companies with essentially, no oversight.

So thinks Nobel laureate Paul Krugman as well. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/opinion/krugman-the-centrist-cop-out.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

The panel wants to keep politics out of the decision and wants the Department of Energy kept out of the process owing to the damage it has done already to the reputation of the federal government. http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/how-to-pick-a-site-for-a-nuclear-waste-dump/

In my view, it was congress that treated Nevada as a ghetto more that the DoE but there were certainly problems with faking the data under DoE management.

"I thought that if I could just bring free or very low cost t'ai chi classes to less affluent communities, it would help with some of those readily treatable diseases that were going for the most part untreated because of the expense of drugs and lack of access to health care."

Wow, that all sounds wonderful. My wife (who likes Taoism) and I tried some Tai Chi classes a long time ago and my wife liked them especially (they were a little hard for us to get to though at the time). I used to do Aikido and first had a Tai Chi class at a university, like you say. There is one local Tai Chi class not too far from where we live now, but they meet are too early in the morning for her unfortunately. She does Yoga instead though.

On health, while exercise is great for improving health overall, it has mixed results for weight loss, as active exercise tends to make people hungry. But I could imagine Tai Chi is different because it is getting you more in touch with your body, and that is one key to health and eating well.

I lost about fifty pounds (and 20+ BP points) over the last year and a half through a combination of advice similar to what Dr. Joel Fuhrman suggests (eat more vegetables fruits, and beans mainly), plus 5000 IU Vitamin D3 daily. I also much earlier did some fasting (both juice and water fasts) which Dr. Fuhrman also wrote about. But fasting really involves changing your diet to be useful, although it can be useful for resensitizing taste buds (one reasons successful major religions tend to have regular periods of fasting perhaps). I also used a treadmill workstation more in front of the computer (the treadmill sadly shorted out recently though).

Here are related links about stuff that helped me:

"How to escape The Pleasure Trap"
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

"Dr. Fuhrman's Nutritarian Pyramid"
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx

"About vitamin D"
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-vitamin-d/
http://grassrootshealth.net/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-fuhrman-md/vitamin-d-recommendations_b_800468.html

While almost everyone agrees most people in the USA need more vitamin D, there is some disagreement about optimal blood levels, and whether that would differ based on ethnicity -- it's a field that needs more research. The three vitamin D links above go from high to low recommendations (all are higher than the new US RDA for adults though).

Iodine has helped my health too (eating more seaweed especially), and supplemental omega-3s, and making green smoothies, and a good multivitamin.

Unfortunately, it can be a bit more expensive to eat this way with fruits and vegetables year round (especially organic ones, but organic is not essential even if good compared to the health benefits of vegetables over refined foods). I talked with one person working at a grocery store who was about to go in for a second heart operation about eating more vegetables, but he said they were too expensive. But insurance pays big bucks for the heart operations. It's a crazy system.

Related:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/treating-the-cause-not-the-illness/
"In 1965, in an impoverished rural county in the Mississippi Delta, the pioneering physician Jack Geiger helped found one of the nationâ(TM)s first community health centers. Many of the children Geiger treated were seriously malnourished, so he began writing âoeprescriptionsâ for food â

"There is definitely some devaluing of the college degree going on," says Eric A. Hanushek, an education economist at the Hoover Institution, and that gives the master's extra signaling power. "We are going deeper into the pool of high school graduates for college attendance," making a bachelor's no longer an adequate screening measure of achievement for employers.

There are lots of people who can be productive without over-educating the entire population. This isn't elitism -- it's a fact that not every person is appropriate for school and it would be a good thing if those people could make a productive living. This is where the true elitism lays -- that if you don't get a higher education, well, fuck you, you're a stupid redneck. That's not a good situation for those people and it is very bad for America.

The HFT traders who know what they are doing are NOT doing arbitrage. Because they get a 30 millisecond advantage:

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/07/24/business/0724-webBIZ-trading.ready.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html

When the favoured companies screw up they get the trades rolled back.
When they get beaten by "normal humans", they prosecute the humans: http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/security/3244186/norwegian-traders-convicted-for-outsmarting-us-stock-broker-algorithm/
When they beat the humans, they keep the profit as "rightfully earned".

The HFT traders who know what they are doing are NOT doing arbitrage. Because they get a 30 millisecond advantage:

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/07/24/business/0724-webBIZ-trading.ready.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html

When the favoured companies screw up they get the trades rolled back.
When they get beaten by "normal humans", they prosecute the humans: http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/security/3244186/norwegian-traders-convicted-for-outsmarting-us-stock-broker-algorithm/
When they beat the humans, they keep the profit as "rightfully earned".

I agree, and more: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. (Marcia Angell)"

And: "Useless Studies, Real Harm"
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/opinion/useless-pharmaceutical-studies-real-harm.html

On alternatives:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

GWB did. Did you raise a hue and cry then?

"It takes someone who knows what they're doing and who DOES NOT HAVE AN AX TO GRIND to get it right."

I agree 100 % ... unfortunately it seems that everyone who has come to any definitive conclusion has an axe to grind.

Sorry, no.

The correct statement is "anybody who has come to any definite conclusion will be accused of having an axe to grind by institutions attempting to obfuscate the science of global warming.

There is some good news, though. Apparently Exxon Mobil has decreased the amount of funding they have been giving to groups trying to cast doubt on the science of global warming-- from five million dollars a year in 2005, down to less than $800,000 per year in 2010. (They'd said that they would stop financing them entirely, but I guess for a trillion dollar corporation, dropping by a factor of 6 is pretty impressive.)

I don't have maniacs in my family, and don't consider idiots my friends.

Seventy-two percent support raising taxes on income above $250,000

What you have seen with your own eyes is called "anecdotal evidence", and is not probative. That the Tea Party includes people who believe they created it is their own cognitive dissonance. The facts are clear. It's paid for by people who would sell you for cattle feed.

Google+ isn't the problem. Google's use of "crowdsourcing" in search results is the problem.

Google values links, reviews, and now "likes". All can be, and are, be spammed using anonymous accounts on social networks and blogs. This is why there are so many spam posts on blogs, phony reviews, and phony accounts on social networks. Those aren't there for humans - they're there to feed Google's ranking system.

This was a nagging problem for years, but didn't get much attention outside the "search engine optimization" community. It went over the top in Q4 2010, when Google Places was merged into Google web search, and the payoff for social spam increased. Now there are articles in the New York Times about it. 40% of the jobs on Amazon's Mechanical Turk are for spamming.

Now the trend is toward requiring a login from some non-anonymous social network to post on blogs and forums. That reduces spam targeted at Google. None of this has anything to do with human readers.

You mean most Americans are too stupid to realize they're getting groped over the internet.

And yet apparently most people on Slashdot are too ignorant to know that they may have passed through someone's crosshairs despite the fact that the arrests and convictions keep coming week, after week, after week. Bomb plots, shooting plots, poison plots. Well, it didn't stop Duke Nukem from shipping, so it must not be important. Besides, everyone watches the Daily Show, right? What more would you need to form opinions about important questions?

Fort Hood Suspect Mentions al Qaeda Cleric Believed to Have Inspired Previous Attack, Official Says

Reservist Charged in '10 Building Shootings

Minneapolis Man Pleads Guilty to Terrorism Offense - July 18, 2011

Pennsylvania Man Indicted for Soliciting Jihadists to Kill Americans - July 14, 2011

Accused al Shabaab Leader Charged with Providing Material Support to al Shabaab and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula - July 5, 2011

Two Men Charged in Plot to Attack Seattle Military Processing Center - June 23, 2011

Chicago Businessman Tahawwur Hussain Rana Guilty of Providing Material Support to Terror Group and Supporting Role in Denmark Terrorism Conspiracy - June 9, 2011

North Carolina Man Pleads Guilty to Terrorism Charge - June 7, 2011

FBI Announces Identity of Transitional Federal Government Checkpoint Suicide Bomber - June 9, 2011

Two Iraqi Nationals Indicted on Federal Terrorism Charges in Kentucky - May 31, 2011

Seeing as warrantless wiretapping is clearly unconstitutional, it's thoroughly inappropriate to be doing it at all.

Warrantless wiretapping for national security purposes has been found Constitutional by courts repeatedly. You don't know what you are talking about.

Intelligence Court Releases Ruling in Favor of Warrantless Wiretapping

A special federal appeals court yesterday released a rare declassified opinion that backed the government's authority to intercept international phone conversations and e-mails from U.S. soil without a judicial warrant, even those involving Americans, if a significant purpose is to collect foreign intelligence.

Why We Endorsed Warrantless Wiretaps

the special FISA appeals court, which in a 2002 sealed case upholding the constitutionality of the Patriot Act held that "the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information." The court said it took the president's power "for granted," observing that "FISA could not encroach on the President's constitutional power."

For your viewing pleasure, some of the more recent developments regarding would be "Jihadis" in the US:

Yet again: Fort Hood Suspect Mentions al Qaeda Cleric Believed to Have Inspired Previous Attack, Official Says

A U.S. serviceman is in custody after he allegedly admitted he was planning an attack on his fellow servicemen at the U.S. Army base at Fort Hood, Texas, the same base where 13 people were killed in a 2009 terror attack.

Reservist Charged in '10 Building Shootings

WASHINGTON â" The Marine Corps reservist arrested in Arlington National Cemetery last week with suspicious materials in his backpack was charged Thursday with firing shots last year at five military buildings in the Washington area, including the Pentagon.

Investigators said they linked the reservist, Yonathan Melaku, to the shootings by determining that the bullet fragments recovered at those scenes came from the same gun as the spent shell casings found in his backpack last week.

Minneapolis Man Pleads Guilty to Terrorism Offense - July 18, 2011

Pennsylvania Man Indicted for Soliciting Jihadists to Kill Americans - July 14, 2011

Accused al Shabaab Leader Charged with Providing Material Support to al Shabaab and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula - July 5, 2011

Two Men Charged in Plot to Attack Seattle Military Processing Center - June 23, 2011

Chicago Businessman Tahawwur Hussain Rana Guilty of Providing Material Support to Terror Group and Supporting Role in Denmark Terrorism Conspiracy - June 9, 2011

No

I use Google Reader to gather data from any rss feed of interest and also download weekly about 60 podcasts from various sources each week using the Feedreader aggregator. I have to plug, in particular, podcasts (or videocasts) from This Week in Virology, This Week in Parasitism, and This Week in Microbiology, all available via a starting point of www.twiv.tv . (If you think Parasitism is not interesting, listen to TWIP 22.) The Naked Scientist based in Britain offers a nice weekly collection of news gathered from that area. The Australian Broadcasting Network at www.abc.net.au/radio/ offers podcasts about technology oriented towards that part of the world. The Canadian Broadcasting Corp and the BBC also offer podcasts which include new developments in all areas, but don't allow you to specialize in one area, such as medicine or computers. Futures in Biotech ( http://twit.tv/FIB ) has produced some terrific interviews in that area and Leo Laporte and his This Week in Technology does a few podcasts that offer more than his usual troubleshooting genre. http://www.podnutz.com/ is strictly computers, but three podcasts in particular are of interest as trendsetting. They are 274, 302 and 316. They deal with the development and growth of Lisa Hendrickson's career. She's a female computer troubleshooter who is rapidly building a large business that repairs computers remotely and worth watching and learning from as an example of how to grow a new business in the US. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute produces podcasts and videocasts about advancing technology Do a search for NIH Videocasts for presentations by this organization. Econtalk may not be strictly technical, but has outstanding interviews about developments and history that disproves that idea that economics are dry and boring. I've been saving a list of Best Podcasts for over a year and they number now about 90, but amount to over 2GB, so are not readily posted. I also have the addresses of podcasts that are plugged into the Feedreader aggregator that I'll try to add here in case that's of interest if the moderator agrees to include them. Several of these were worth noting, too, like NY Times Tech Talk and RadioLab: http://rss.conversationsnetwork.org/ppq/56641.xml http://podcast.seti.org/index.xml http://www.rtve.es/podcast/radio-5/asunto-del-dia-en-r5/SASUNTO.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/booksandideaspodcast http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/clickon/rss.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/Cyberspeak http://feeds.feedburner.com/diffusionradio http://www.econlib.org/library/EconTalk.xml http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510030 http://feeds.feedburner.com/GlobalChallenges http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/healthc/rss.xml http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/HHMI_Lectures.xml http://podcast.thelancet.com/laneur.xml http://www.materialstoday.com/rss/podcasts/ http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/podcasts/techtalk.xml http://dow

You are being played for a sucker.

"It turns out that the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects. In particular, a key role is being played by FreedomWorks, an organization run by Richard Armey, the former House majority leader, and supported by the usual group of right-wing billionaires. And the parties are, of course, being promoted heavily by Fox News."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/opinion/13krugman.html

That's just one link with facts showing the "grass-roots" nature of the TP to be a fraud. The Internet is full of them.

If you want to affect this nation positively, try building it up, instead of supporting people who want to crash it to the ground so they can sell it for parts.

Yup, the cheap vodka doesn't stand up next to the expensive stuff.

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

Good for them. While the Dems held Congress, Obama spent his entire presidency running up a gigantic debt while ignoring the Republicans and telling them to "ride in the back" -- and now suddenly he wants to play compromise? Fuck that. Running up a tab and then using it as an ultimatum to raise the debt ceiling (or taxes) is complete bullshit and just as disgusting as what you blame the Republicans for. It's like telling a habitual spender to "just get another job" instead of addressing the root cause.

Wrong. We wouldn't have had to run up most of the debt we have in the last couple of years if it hadn't been for the economic crash which happened on Bush's watch, and it wouldn't be nearly as bad as it is if Bush hadn't run up so much debt already by not paying for the wars, the tax cuts, the drug bill, etc. Republicans had control of Congress for like 10 of the 12 years before the Dems took it over again in 2008. What did they do all that time? Spend like crazy on the national credit card, not paying for much of anything. STFU until you can at least be consistent in your bitching.

As for the whole "ride in the back" thing, you'd probably do that too if the people you had to deal with had a habit of comparing you to Hitler and Marx. Hell, Obama has alienated a lot of his base by being so right-leaning. He's continued a lot of Bush policies. It's retarded to call him anything but a centrist. The Republicans are so ridiculously far-right now though, they'd call Reagan a fucking commie if he were in politics today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/world/asia/26china.html?_r=3

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-25/ge-healthcare-moves-x-ray-base-to-china-no-job-cuts-planned.html

http://blogs.forbes.com/raykwong/2011/07/25/friends-dont-let-friends-become-chinese-billionaires/

I have to blink a little to clear the blind rage at your willful ignorance and reckless, arrogant selfishness. It isn't worth my time to rebut all of your Reagan-era talking-point bullshit. You live in a country whose ideals you spit on with your "reduce the surplus population" attitude. Fucking over the poor and padding the accounts of the mega-wealthy makes for great quarterly reports but it is tearing this nation apart.

If the only number that matters to you is Number One, go find a nice bunker somewhere and let the rest of us care for our countrymen.

For people interested in actually learning about these issues, I strongly recommend Paul Krugman's blog. He is a brilliant macroeconomist with a remarkably prescient track record. You could also spend some time reading his older articles and compare them to the present day situation. It's pretty eye-opening when things unfold in such a precisely-predicted manner.

Interesting comparison, but the big difference is that the time for the US government to debate taxes and spending is when the government passes a budget, not when bills come in.

Congress has already approved this spending, if they want to change it, change the next budget.

What is happening now is pure extortion. Cut our previously agreed to budget (a legal document for the executive branch must follow) or we will destroy the countries credit rating.

Also, Passing a balanced budget amendments would not prevent our current debt.

Since W became president, almost all of our debt is from the following:
1. Reduced tax income from the mortgage crisis recession (unregulated corporate corruption)
2. War spending that was never offset in budgets and intentionally kept separate from the budget process by the Bush Administration.
3. The Bush "Temporary Tax Cuts". These tax cuts were temporary solely to avoid having to pay for them through budget spending cuts.

See the breakdown here: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24editorial_graph2.html?ref=sunday

Each of the items above would be excluded from a balanced budget amendment.

War spending has been excluded from all balanced budget amendments.
Extent of revenue losses during economic downturns also cannot be accurately predicted and will cause deficits.
Lastly, Republicans have always excluded paying for tax cuts through spending cuts, (they prefer to give you the tax cut now and starve the system after you are hooked, kind of like drug dealers the first one is free)

The 14th amendment may not mean what you think it means. The reason to hang some of the current issue on the President is that he has publicly said he would not sign any of the proposals currently before the house. He put in an ultimatum that the debt ceiling had to be raised enough to push the issue past the next national election. Budgets have to initiate in the house, but the senate and president have to agree for them to pass. That does mean congress has more responsibility to produce something than the president, but they did manage to get something that house democrats would agree to, but that Obama would not.

Financial Impact of Actual Policy Changes

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/25/business/bing-becomes-a-costly-distraction-for-microsoft-breakingviews.html

I don't know how anyone could possibly suggest anyone would ever dream of wanting to buy Microsoft's failed search engine.

This is why "crowdsourcing" consistently fails as a method of business ranking. It's too easy to spam. Google was burned by this late last year when they were counting reviews on Citysearch and Yelp. That backfired badly. Local search results were polluted with junk entries. Google got a lot of bad press over this. Since then, they've stopped counting "likes" on competing sites, but they still count their own.

Google's ad customers have been complaining local spam for years,, and Google hasn't been able to fix it. It's become worse since Google combined local results with web search results, and the value of local spam went up.

I'll get modded down for this, but I have to point out that Apple isn't the only company suing over patents in the mobile space... not by a long shot.

See http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/an-explosion-of-mobile-patent-lawsuits/

The second-hand source seems to be this New York Times article:

MACHINE POLITICS IN THE DIGITAL AGE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/business/yourmoney/09vote.htm

But, like you, I cannot find a copy of the alleged letter *anywhere*. Strange.

- aj

The issue in the 2000 election was the fluid, ever-changing, inconsistent standards being used to count votes in Florida.

In a per curiam decision, the Court ruled that the Florida Supreme Court's method for recounting ballots was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court also ruled that no alternative method could be established within the time limits set by the State of Florida. Three concurring justices also asserted that the Florida Supreme Court had violated Article II, 1, cl. 2 of the Constitution, by misinterpreting Florida election law that had been enacted by the Florida Legislature.

Source: Wikipedia

A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year's presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward.

Contrary to what many partisans of former Vice President Al Gore have charged, the United States Supreme Court did not award an election to Mr. Bush that otherwise would have been won by Mr. Gore. A close examination of the ballots found that Mr. Bush would have retained a slender margin over Mr. Gore if the Florida court's order to recount more than 43,000 ballots had not been reversed by the United States Supreme Court.

Even under the strategy that Mr. Gore pursued at the beginning of the Florida standoff -- filing suit to force hand recounts in four predominantly Democratic counties -- Mr. Bush would have kept his lead, according to the ballot review conducted for a consortium of news organizations.

But the consortium, looking at a broader group of rejected ballots than those covered in the court decisions, 175,010 in all, found that Mr. Gore might have won if the courts had ordered a full statewide recount of all the rejected ballots. This also assumes that county canvassing boards would have reached the same conclusions about the disputed ballots that the consortium's independent observers did. The findings indicate that Mr. Gore might have eked out a victory if he had pursued in court a course like the one he publicly advocated when he called on the state to ''count all the votes.'' [emphasis added]

Source: NYTimes.com

Just a few of the folks that might disagree with your unfounded assumption:

http://unemployedlawyer.wordpress.com/

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/unemployed-and-struggling-lawyers-seek-solace/

http://temporaryattorney.blogspot.com/

David Carr at the NY Times sums up the reason why I think Murdoch deserves what he gets from the outfall of this media cycle. He's established a poor culture within his media subsidiaries, now he's reaping what he's sown.

They get out voted by the legion of dimwits bred by these creationists. It is already happening.

Here's a depressing thought: not if the "dimwits" are running things. The original poster was right; political conservatives are trying to set up their own parallel institutions to give "backing" to their own opinions.

There was an article in the Boston Globe that the Bush Administration had hired some 150 graduates of Regent law school (which was founded by Pat Robinson), which proclaims its purpose is to "provide [rightwing] Christian leadership to change the world,"

...Regent has had no better friend than the Bush administration. Graduates of the law school have been among the most influential of the more than 150 Regent University alumni hired to federal government positions since President Bush took office in 2001

It's only a matter of time before conservatives start setting up their own politically conservative science departments to match.

But it doesn't even have to wait that long. Next time we get a Republican president, we can look forward to political conservatives making scientific policy there as well. Back in 2005, a Bush administration aide (with no scientific credentials), made edits to government reports on climate change. From the New York Times article:

...In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports. The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties," tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust. ... A lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics, [Mr. Cooney] has no scientific training.

So, this victory is important, but the war against science isn't won or even over.

Here's the cahched version for those who can't get in for some reason.

Wake me up when /. posts a non-NYT ad prompting me to log in.

I don't know if it's a function of my NoScript or ABP, but I never get prompted for a login to NYT as long as I go in the "front door", so to speak.

http://www.nytimes.com/
"A Third Way" is the title, and it's on the right of the page.

Perhaps we should encourage this trend. In China there are already 32 million more boys than girls due to the preference for boys. "Love dolls", especially if not considered a social stigma, would be a better solution than social upheaval and violence that may eventually result.