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Why is "April 19, 2011" the third most popular search term at the NYT? http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/modern-love-walks-beside-me-modern-love-walks-on-by/

I've read pretty much everything by Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and Niven, so I've certainly read a lot of good hard sci-fi. Of your list, I've only read Mieville, and I'll agree with you that he's a very good writer. I wouldn't be surprised to find him on the 2012 BBC Book Night list. In fact, it's funny that you mention him since he gets a lot of credit with the elitist literary critics you dislike so much.

“I’m not trying to distance myself from the genre I came out of, but it makes me really happy when people who don’t read genre fiction normally say that they really like my books." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/books/24mieville.html

You read my mind.

Paper subscribers do receive a complimentary all-included digital subscription.

Now, digital advertising agencies are certainly interested in how many of those 100,000 subscribers are paid and how many came for free with paper. People who received the digital subscription for free are most likely to keep reading on paper (there's a reason why they are paying more for home delivery, after all).

Business-wise, it doesn't really matter whether subscriptions are pure digital subscriptions or paper subscriptions with a digital subscription for free: it's money coming in. With the digital subscriptions strategy they are cutting the bleed of people who gave up on paper and moved to reading the paper on-line for free.

RTFA, they say. Here' the FA is wrong -- the lectures are not owned by Microsoft, but are the personal property of Bill Gates who has made them available to Microsoft.

mass measurements relate back via water at 4 degrees celcius (water is most dense at this point)

Citation needed.

Of course, you won't find one, so allow me to provide my own citation for the TRUE origin of mass measurements, or at least, the kilogram. May I present this.

Regardless of your phone, the mobile phone carriers are storing your location history by cell towers...

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/26/179257/German-Politician-Demonstrates-Extent-of-Cellphone-Location-Tracking
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/business/media/26privacy.html

...raised by the parent article is covered in this piece:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-10-12-03-the-agri-cultural-contradictions-of-obesity.html

America being a nation of fatties isn't an accident.

Truly this is horrible. This will definitely sour the relations between the parties. What with the whole hostage thingie, the desire to wipe Israel off the face of the map, nuclear weaponry ambition. Lawyers everywhere, SUIT UP! Iran is going to court.

I hope this gets settled in record time just like SCO v IBM.

The only court I'm aware of where venue and jurisdiction for Iran to "air their innocent grievance" are just and proper is currently the one I'm sitting on.
Iran is welcome to kiss it.

E

Bzzt wrong. China is still capital-C Communist. They just released their new Five-Year Plan, for Pete's sake. The difference is that after Mao died, Deng Xiaoping hijacked the people's revolution onto the capitalist road. For those of you who didn't go to university and hence weren't exposed to Marxism, "capitalist roaders" are a heresy of Communism. They still want to achieve socialism, but by the wrong methods. According to Mao, the Soviet Union suffered this fate after Stalin died.

The Chinese government still directly controls huge swathes of the Chinese economy. Companies are owned by the state and operate for its benefit. Americans having trouble with this unfamiliar idea could perhaps think of Amtrak, or the conversion of General Motors into an arm of the federal government a few years ago. The baby milk scandals are due to a lack of enforcement mechanisms. In so many words, there are few laws and fewer inspectors. Moreover, Chinese culture places no value on people you don't know - they might as well not exist, so who cares if you poison them or not? This is how you get crowds of people standing around gawking at accident victims instead of rendering aid (first one to help has to pay the victim's hospital bills).

Unfortunately, there are those out there to whom socialism is an unassailable holy concept, and when a communist country takes the capitalist road, an attempt is made to classify the whole shebang as EEEVIL in order to make capitalism look bad. It's like old Soviet documentaries about the United States that focused on the poor and homeless, in order reinforce the conclusion that was preordained anyway.

Also, google "jury duty job loss" and get ready for a long read like this one:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/02/us/02jury.html
Call to Jury Duty Strikes Fear of Financial Ruin

Just because it's illegal to retaliate against employees doen't mean it doesn't happen, and several states do not require that employees get paid during that time. In fact, NO state requires that hourly workers get paid at all.

You have been lucky. That does not mean everyone, or even the majority, are lucky as well.

"Can we blame these events on Global Warming? Hurricanes and floods happen without a warming world, but a warming world increases the chances of such disasters happening."

The short answer is "no", we can't confidently blame these events on global warming, but that's due to a fundamental problem: events like these have always happened in the Earth's history and had sometimes dire human effects. To understand whether there is a long term change requires a long sample time, and we haven't really had that yet. We won't know for a long time whether this collection of events reflects an increasing trend, or just the vagaries of normal climatic variation year-to-year. It's more than a little frustrating, especially when we DO know that dramatic changes have occurred over long timeframes. For example, there are wide areas of Nebraska that consist of desert sand dunes that are grassed over -- a little drier climate, and it will go back to an arid, unfarmable landscape.

Also, you've left out another big recent example: the severe drought that is occurring in parts of China currently, apparently the worst in ~60 years, and which has had a dramatic effect on global food prices. There was also the heat wave in Russia and the droughts in Australia in the last year.

Normal variation? Part of a trend? Let's hope it's the former. But I think we can agree that most of the media presentation of the issue is awful, and that's a big problem.

Nope. You're just stupid. US measures inflation just like the rest of the world, using core inflation and headline inflation.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/inflation-here-and-there-wonkish/

"Tell me why I should buy a 10 year note at 3.4% per year in a currency that is shedding value like never before on foreign exchange markets and whose government is denying inflation while at the same time conducting policy that is leading to a very real risk of hyperinflation?"

There can be NO hyperinflation in the US in the next two years. Want to bet a $1000 (in gold or any other currency, if you want) on that? I'll gladly take this bet.

Well, for the matter you could also have firefighters turn into firestarters for profit, but I believe most firefighters aren't assholes, and these sort are statistical outliers.

My understanding is that the wrote J++ with the specific intent to not allow JVM compatibility, but only with their own JVM implementation. That's a fair bit more than just adding language extensions, y'know? From the EU's research on this stuff

“[W]e should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take more
advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java
apps.”
  —Microsoft’s Thomas Reardon

And from the NYTimes article on this:

Microsoft also licensed Java from Sun in 1996, but later began adding modifications to the code. The resulting Microsoft version of Java is tailored to run only on Windows, which negates the cross-platform purpose of Java. Sun has a civil suit pending against Microsoft on this issue, charging contract violation and unfair business practices.

Search for "kill" in this document. The previous poster probably meant J++ and not J#, which was obviously hopeless and died a quick death. It still stands, however, as a descendent of Microsoft's most prominent effort to kill Java.

Not sure if you've heard, but for the last ten years, Commanders-in-Chief from both of the major political parties have been busy stacking that judicial branch with their poster boys/girls (Roberts, Thomas, and Alito courtesy of GWB, and Sotomayer and Kagan courtesy of Obama) while doing everything they can to gut and/or reinterpret the Constitution . I'm not holding out a whole lot of hope that the courts are going to do a whole lot to help out...if you even manage to get to the courts before being dragged off to Gitmo for providing "material aid or support" to "terrorist organizations".

And this is just the @#$!!! we have heard about. Somehow I suspect, no matter how bad you think it is...it's actually much, much worse.

In France you are not innocent until being proven guilty. If you are suspect, you are arrested, jailed, and investigated, in that order.

From the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" :

"9. As all persons are held innocent until they shall have been declared guilty, if arrest shall be deemed indispensable, all harshness not essential to the securing of the prisoner's person shall be severely repressed by law."

And wikipedia tells us : "According to the preamble of the Constitution of the French Fifth Republic (adopted on 4 October 1958, and the current constitution), the principles set forth in the Declaration have constitutional value. Many laws and regulations have been canceled because they did not comply with those principles as interpreted by the Conseil Constitutionnel ("Constitutional Council of France") or by the Conseil d'État ("Council of State")."

See also "French Law Presumes Accused Innocent", letter to the editor of the New York Times by Michael H. Davies Prof. of Law, Cleveland State U. Cleveland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms

On a basic income:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee
"In 1968, James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith and another 1,200 economists signed a document calling for the US Congress to introduce in that year a system of income guarantees and supplements.[28]"

Something towards a basic income was approved by one of the two parts of Congress under Nixon (extreme liberals though it was not enough, and extreme conservatives did not like it, so together they torpedoed it in I think the Senate but it passed the House, pushed by Moynihan).
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/04/specials/moynihan-income.html
"What went wrong? Most of Moynihan's eloquent, polemical book is devoted to an exhaustively researched attack on the liberal opposition. To be sure, he does not spare the right (and is impressively blunt in recounting Nixon's own self-defeating partisanship in 1970--the year of Carswell, Cambodia, Scammon and Wattenberg). But the intriguing question--for the reader as for Moynihan--is why the left helped kill the guaranteed income. "

Instead we eventually got the psychological/sociological disaster that is "needs-based" welfare.

When you add up the cost of public school and the cost of social security and disability (ignoring medicare), the USA already spends US$800 or so a month per person. Why not just spread it out evenly as a basic income, and let parents pay for their own kids private education or homeschool? That would be US$3200 a month as a basic income for a family of four. And the US government already pays more per citizen for medical care than other industrialized countries that have better health outcomes overall. So, the US government is already paying enough out for both a basic income and universal health coverage. It is just ideology in the way of distributing that differently without conditions. In the USA, aid from the government is for the destitute (or the connected wealthy), whereas in Europe the model is more that everyone is entitled to certain basics as a citizen (like free or cheap college, access to basic health care, and, more and more, access to the internet).

As more and more gets enclosed and privatized in this world, and people can no longer hunt and gather, and where more and more work is automated or redesigned out of existence or done by volunteers, access to the fruits of the industrial commons whether you work or not is more and more a human need and a human right.

So, with a basic income, people would have the time and funds to run a printing press or the virtual equivalent.

Someone liberal who opposes the basic income as something that just props up capitalism:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g

And why incentive-based labor is problematical in the information age:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Actually, this is not just the article singling out time travel. According to The New York Times, the original government report does single out TV dramas that involve characters traveling back in time.

And you are completely ignoring the cost of a meltdown. Just how much would it cost to compensate all the people displaced if Indian Point ( http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/indian_point_nuclear_power_plant_ny/index.html ) contaminated NY City? Until the Nuclear Industry can demonstrate the capability to personally recompense all those it harms in a meltdown situation, they shouldn't be allowed to build them. Seriously, you can't drive a car without insurance -- why should you be able to build a nuclear plant if your company can't handle the consequences?

I have no patience for people crying about largely ephemeral bird impacts from wind or solar power, but aren't bothered at all by the much bigger and well documented bird killer: cars.

Change one letter and you get an even worse threat: cats. From the New York Times, quoting the relevant section because of the paywall:

The American Bird Conservancy estimates that up to 500 million birds are killed each year by cats — about half by pets and half by feral felines. ... By contrast, 440,000 birds are killed by wind turbines each year, according to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, although that number is expected to exceed one million by 2030 as the number of wind farms grows to meet increased demand.

So, if you're opposed to solar and wind power because of your concern over birds, you'd better not be someone who lets your cat go outside.

America isn't doing too well on 3, 5, 6, and 7.

To bolster your point, check out what John Thompson has to say in his editorial in the NY Times. He just lost a case in the supreme court - so he can't sue the people who put him on death row, literally hours away from execution, by hiding evidence that he was innocent. No shit. Not only that, but even though they hid the evidence that he didn't do it and worked hard to make sure he'd be executed, nobody is ever going to be disciplined in any way - not even a letter of reprimand in their file. Nope, apparently nobody did anything wrong - at least as far as the state is concerned.

no US taxes

Fixed that for you.
Please stop being mislead by media organizations. 60 minutes actually did a good investigation into the whole 0 % tax story. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/25/60minutes/main20046867.shtml The real reason for all tax "loop holes" is the US has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world 35%. Did you know this tax rate is higher than even China and Russia, Britain .... it keeps going http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_around_the_world .

Just few points of information about US corporate taxes.

• The US based companies didn't record a profit, there parent foreign owned companies did , they pay some taxes around 18-20% usually.
• There is a concept of a loss. If you house burnt down, and wouldn't is suck if Uncle Sam said pay me, and the State did too?
• The 35% tax rate encourages the companies to find loop holes or just plain move their entire operations overseas.
• Once the money gets sent overseas they can NEVER bring back the money into the US. So billions of dollars is stuck overseas, of which the companies reinvests into overseas operations. Cisco has 40 billion stuck overseas , that is billion with a B. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2382703,00.asp

That is just at the Federal level, the shit states pull on corporations is horrible. Many of the states owe companies tax refunds, are NOT allowing them to carry forward to the next year as a deduction, even though the state owes a company money. "Yeah I know we owe you money here is an IOU, but you cannot deduct it from taxable income. You have to still pay us; will get you that return someday. No you cannot amend your return either to deduct it". One state that is doing this is Illinois, and the shit Texas pulled about use tax is utter bullshit. In my wifes company Texas sent them a >100k bill , even though they had NO direct sales to end user, just vendors, of which the vendor is suppose to file the "use tax" return. Yeah her company just paid it because the threshold for challenging the amount was too low, just not worth the legal fees . Don't even get her started on the 1099 mess http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/1099-repeal-passes-senate-heads-to-white-house/ .
BTW my wife is corporate tax accountant for large company here in the US. She is in charge of all the state returns for every single state, all 50 of them( more than one company.

To quote her as an CPA Corporate Tax Accountant, "An absolute nightmare. "

Only good thing is she will always have a job, she is hot and she married me. I don't know why on that last one.

Every year they're won by the same predictable chart-toppers (indies need not apply)

Yeah, the timing of this move is extra suspicious, last year many indie artists were represented and nominated, including the huge surprise of Esperanza Spalding beating Justin Beiber for Best New Artist! (even if you hate him, everybody's heard of him, how many people have heard of her? not many is my guess).

Even if the Grammy's are diluted, they can help launch careers, just by exposing people to artists they might not be exposed to otherwise, another case in point, Nora Jones, a few years ago.

Whether or not you like these artists, I think it's clear that they represent 'musicians' and not just 'entertainers' and to me, more exemplify what a music award should be about. This comment makes a good point.

>>Not just a little more, immensely more, astronomically more, and that absolutely and unequivocally IS socially toxic to society.

No, it's not. Besides socialists like yourself, most people in America (70%, according to the Economist today) believe in the Free Market system. Free Market Capitalism intrinsically means that some people will make more money than others. My wife was thinking about become a doctor, but realized the stress of medical school would be bad for her health. So she went into pharmacy school instead, and *absolutely does not begrudge the fact that doctors make more money than her*. I went to school in the ghetto, and never once heard someone complain that doctors make too much money, or that NBA players make more than their "fair" share. In fact, it was quite the opposite. The poor are glad those opportunities exist, and know that even if they can't make it themselves (especially in the case of immigrants), they can raise their kids to the next level.

America has higher social mobility rates than socialists can wrap their tiny brains around. There's a pretty nice interactive data browser you can view here: http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/class/index.html

Contrast it with social mobility in the Soviet Union some time.

>>And you keep defending the rich by saying it's not personal income it's corporate income.

No, I'm saying that "income inequality" is one of the stupidest statistical measures ever invented, and that anyone using it is automatically discounted from being a member of intelligent society. It's an apples to oranges comparison. As I said, it's like saying that middle schoolers are shorter now than ever before because NBA players have gotten taller.

>>You're close to arguing that rich people don't exist, only wealthy corporations, which would be absurd.

For one thing, rich and wealthy are two different things. Rich is generally defined these days as making $250k or over a year. Wealthy is generally defined as having over $1M in assets. (Pick whichever benchmarks you'd like, though.)

And I am indeed arguing that very few people become rich or wealthy without drawing on corporate income, and that when you discount 1120 income and just look at W-2 income, a lot of your imagined income inequality vanishes.

>>Inequality is a huge problem and it's getting worse, fortunately the solutions are well known, tested and proven in many other countries, and could be implemented tomorrow if the political will was there.

Yes, it is called "becoming like France", and the cure would be worse than the problem.

PS: the reason I went so ga-ga over this new was because of a much sobering ruling I saw yesterday - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/opinion/10thompson.html but I digress..

PS2: Since Winklevosses claim to have had the original idea and design, they should have known how much $$ worth was their site. So, how did they got duped by Zuck? Glad judges saw through it..

Actually, it only skews conservative outside the urban areas and the valley....

http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/states/texas.html

Mistakes, incompetence and mis-applied prosecutorial incentives are just a few of the reasons that this development should be viewed with prejudiced outrage.

The recent case of an innocent man, narrowly escaping capital execution on the basis of deliberate prosecution dishonesty and evidence manipulation should be enough to dissuade anyone who is burdened wit the notion that this "evidence" is just another publicly disclosed fact, that will be judiciously examined on objective merits.

In fact, the US Supreme Court overturned the judgement in favour of the Defendant in this case - effectively saying that collateral damage is an expected outcome in the Executive pursuit of law enforcement.

I am again reminded of the case of Harry Buttle, in the movie Brazil.

Well, this is now content creators agreeing with them.

Not really.

Well, this is them doing half of that.

Sure, if by "doing half of that" you mean "locking down content even more and abridging fair use by not allowing timeshifting or spaceshifting." Oh, wait that's exactly /against/ fair use principles.

This is in opposition to the "imaginary property" advocates that maintain that all content should be free-as-in-beer because it doesn't cost any money to duplicate, damned be the (sometimes significant) creation costs.

This is so wrong, I'm not even sure I'm being trolled or not. Try to understand people's arguments before you put up strawmen of them.

Guess what? You're also screwing the content creator, whose work you apparently want enough to pirate.

No, the content creator was screwed when they signed a contract with the big publishers; anyone who doesn't realize this probably isn't a creator who's had to deal with the big publishers. The Internet has largely made big publishers moot, but unfortunately this cloud thing (which is a fad) is again threatening not just fair use, but the very basis of our culture. What are you going to do when (*NOT* if) they disappear part of your culture?

And before you label me as just another pirate, let me just cut you short by letting you know I pay for my media, usually directly to the artist, and I get a permanent copy (permanent meaning no one can restrict my access to it, either by DRM or "losing" it in the cloud). If it's not avaible in CD or FLAC, I don't buy. F*ck the cloud.

Have you seen any terrorism around those cameras?

Yes

This is the most recent comment on the article's page:

March 31, 2011 8:01 pm
Well, I guess my comment on the ads is that life continues to be not much more than a crapshoot, no matter how hard you work. My child applied to seven schools, got denied from six so far, even her safety school, and she was a national merit commended student with very good grades, 17 college credits, several foreign languages, extracurriculuars. Nada. She got in nowhere.

What now? She feels completely demoralized. It’s hard to know what to do. Even if she takes a gap year and reaplies to schools next year, what does she do differently? Hard to know, since there’s no way to know why she wasn’t accepted anywhere. And I’ve never been through this process before, because I didn’t go to college after high school, so don’t know what guidance to give her. It feels like the death of her youthful dreams. On to real life I gues. Get a job or something. I feel completely at fault. I misled her to think she could go to a good school, if she just worked hard. It’s what I was always told. I feel horrible.
--Stressed

Lets take the benefit of the doubt, and assume the college applicant had no obvious show-stopping flaw (to everyone but the poster and their 6/7 rejected daughter). It's much tougher to get by when everyone in the USA is expected to have a college education for most desk jobs, even if not required. A masters degree is slowly becoming more necessary to increase candidate differentiation when so many unemployed candidates already over-supply college degrees even where none are needed (most non-managers in IT.) In 1869 the article claims that higher-ed was rare enough to require stooping low enough to need paper ads, until WWII somehow allowed colleges to become selective.

At that point a buyer's market similar to today's job market materialized for some strata. Regardless, the poster may not realize that state-funded universities require nearly no proficiency (IIRC.) Selective schools like Harvard have zero ESL assistance (just like MENSA would never allow mentally retarded members.) In contrast, huge numbers of freshly immigrant low-english proficiency students get highschool-equivalency or even diplomas that inflate the numbers when they would never qualify elsewhere language-wise and educationally.

Hey look, unicorns!!!

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/paul-ryans-multiple-unicorns/

All of the speculative "we should slash x" or "entirely cut y" could be simplified if we just submitted our answers via the NYTimes Budget Puzzle.

Want to balance the budget? Sure. Go ahead and cut what you want (or don't).

No doubt the parent is using somebody's calculation of total tax burden. Estimates vary. This estimate claims poor people pay about 20%, working its way up to 30% for everybody with average income or above.

The 2011 Federal budget is $3.83 trillion. The cuts just made to pass it are $38 billion. It doesn't get much easier to do the math and realize that the cuts are just about exactly 1%, not 0.025%.

Interest on the debt in the 2011 budget is $240 billion. That's 6.3% of the $3.83 trillion budget. But the projected receipts are only $2.627 trillion. The average effective tax rate of Americans in 2010 was 26.9%. The percentage of the average American's income spent on taxes paying debt interest was about 1.7%.

You should see an exorcist to get Glenn Beck's voices out of your head. Or just shut off the TV and do some research for yourself.

Just take a look at the list of 'riders' on the bill and it will become clear who they represent:

http://www.ombwatch.org/files/budget/OMB_Watch-HR1_Policy_Riders.pdf

It's pretty clear they're not interested in balancing the budget. The republicans are only interested in gutting those agencies responsible for enforcing pesky regulations like wetland preservation, emissions/dumping of hazardous material, the clean water act, etc., defunding institutions like NOAA and anyone else doing any sort of climate studies and generally gutting a wide range of social services provided to low income and middle class Americans, while simultaneously providing criminally large tax breaks for corporations:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1,
http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=67562604-8280-4d56-8af4-a27f59d70de5

That isn't to say the democrats are much (if at all) better, but it should be absolutely clear exactly who the republicans represent.

Yes, noone has ever been tried for harrassing a normal person over the internet, much less threatening them.

Their increased interest in the tools may be related to a DDoS attack on Russian President Dmitri Medvedev's own LiveJournal account, which he termed 'revolting and illegal.'"

This is very much oversimplifying the part of Medvedev in this story (as well as the story in general).

This whole mess started when an FSB official (head of their department of information and telecommunication security), in the course of an official meeting, brought up GMail, Hotmail and Skype as an example of a "security problem" due to impossibility of wiretaps (as servers are outside the country, and HTTPS ensures secure connection to them from within), and suggested a ban (neither TFS nor TFA mention this!).

Shortly after, an official from president Medvedev's administration stated that the ban - and, more broadly, the whole idea that foreign-hosted services are a "security issue" - is a personal opinion of that particular FSB person, and does not represent the official position of that organization nor government as a whole.

Shortly after that, prime minister Putin's press secretary stated that this is incorrect, and the position is the official position of FSB, that it is well-argued and reasonable, and that Putin takes it with all due consideration.

So basically it's more of the same thing that we've seen before. Whether it's a genuine power struggle between president and prime minister (the elections are less than a year away), or whether they're playing out a scripted "good cop / bad cop" in preparation for the same, is yet to be seen.

quality of education is the issue, asshole

but of course, a free market fundamentalist like yourself will be happy to segregate the poor into an online-only education ghetto, while the rich can afford real world education. class structure, not meritocracy: the end result of your thinking, whether you realize that or not. try to look beyond the precepts of your cult's beliefs and see logic and reason for what it is someday, thaaanks

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/education/06online.html

The U.S. government wants the exact same thing. I'm pretty sure that almost every government at this point wants *at least* a way to bypass encryption, a "kill switch" for the internet in their country, and some form of email monitoring (all these without any pesky warrants, of course). If your country is an exception, count yourself lucky.

More likely it'll be

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/11/08/arts/09count600.jpg

Workers are pumping nitrogen into one of the reactors at Japan's damaged nuclear plant in an attempt to prevent an explosion caused by dangerously overheated fuel rods.

Officials at TEPCO, which operates the Fukushima plant, said a dangerous hydrogen buildup is taking place at its number-one reactor. Japan's NHK television quoted officials saying hydrogen is accumulating inside the reactor's containment vessel - an indication that the reactor's core has been damaged.

Crisis at Japan Nuclear Plant Shifts to New Blast Risk

Chemistry 201: Why Is Fukushima So Gassy?

But there are reasons...that Fukushima is particularly vulnerable.

One is its recent use of seawater to cool the reactors's fuel rods and cores. In addition to the oxygen in water molecules, cold seawater can hold a great deal of dissolved oxygen gas. But warm water cannot; so as the seawater was heated in the reactor, the dissolved oxygen emerged and gathered in the empty space above the water.

(Ordinary reactor cooling water has had the oxygen removed from it by plant operators to reduce the possibility of rust.)

In addition, gamma radiation from the nuclear fuel in the reactor would continuously produce small amounts of hydrogen and oxygen by breaking up water molecules --- and the normal method of recombining these elements into water at such plants in a controlled fashion is no longer available.

Plants of the Fukushima variety usually have catalytic converters that accomplish that at the point where steam has run through the turbine and is condensed back into water for another trip through the reactor. But that path has been closed since the plant lost power at the moment of the March 11 earthquake.

Hydrogen can also emerge from the zirconium metal used as fuel cladding. One of the lessons of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 near Harrisburg, Pa., is that when the cladding comes into contact with steam rather than water, it goes through a reaction that is akin to rusting; it picks up oxygen from the water molecule and gives off hydrogen.

This only happens at high temperatures, but uncertainty reigns at the moment about temperatures in the Fukushima reactor cores. With some cooling channels blocked, they are likely to have hot spots.

By design, boiling water reactors like these have far more zirconium metal in them than pressurized water reactors do. They boil water directly in the core, covering the fuel assemblies with a water/steam mixture rather than keeping them immersed in water. The water has to be directed to each individual fuel assembly and therefore each sits in its own zirconium box.

All of that zirconium is available for an oxidation reaction with steam in which the metal absorbs oxygen from water and turns to a powdery rust, releasing hydrogen.

Look! We fixed one of the any problems! Suceess!

"United States government engineers sent to help with the crisis in Japan are warning that the troubled nuclear plant there is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely, and that in some cases are expected to increase as a result of the very measures being taken to keep the plant stable, according to a confidential assessment prepared by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission."

The EPA does have the authority to regulate carbon emmisions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/world/americas/03iht-scotus.1.5124385.html

Quoting relevant passage:

"In one of its most important environmental decisions in years, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 on Monday that the agency has the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases in automobile emissions.

The court further ruled that the agency could not sidestep its authority to regulate the greenhouse gases that contribute to global climate change unless it could provide a scientific basis for its refusal."

The EPA does have the authority to regulate carbon emmisions. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/world/americas/03iht-scotus.1.5124385.html

You still haven't provided another solution

You don't either - you seem to support the tragedy as it currently exists. In other words, you are part of the problem.

Translation: Those life sucking unemployed parasites, err, people are living high on the hog with the free benefits we give them.

Translation:

I'm an idiot, so I'm going to use inflammatory hyperbole to dismiss every argument that doesn't fit my ideology as evil

You are really part of the problem.

You seem to think that unemployment payments even come close to covering the average families expenses

I don't know why you're bringing up unemployment - but you're completely wrong about the entire system. It's not "unemployment payments" - it's unemployment insurance - it's designed to get you by (barely) while you search for another job. We here that work to administer the system call them "Employment agencies" or "Employment Security agencies" - not "Unemployment offices". And even with the low payments (so you can eat while you look for work), there are still plenty that don't make any real effort until their benefits end..

what happens when the economy tanks and there are no jobs available? Pretty soon you have the people who do still have jobs losing revenue because the unemployed stopped spending altogether. Then those people lose their jobs. Rinse repeat. It's called cascading economic effects.

I see you've bought into the Nancy Pelosi "you can create wine from water" theory of economic that claims unemployment benefits create jobs. They do not. See, when the unemployment increases, we impose higher UI taxes on businesses. That's money they can't use to hire more people with, and when they aren't confident that they won't need to layoff workers, they are not going to risk it when they know it means their taxes will go up even more.

In this case, last I've seen a study based on data from an actual health insurance company, it turned out that smokers and the obese actually cost LESS. Summary, for example, here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.9748884.html

Which refers to a dutch study.

In case you need it spelled out for you, health care systems and their cost structures are radically different between countries. You cannot take a Dutch study and apply it to America, or vice versa..

So we have a source:

July 13 2010
U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan
"The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe. "

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html

My guess is that we knew about these before we went in but just now 'discovered' them.

I haven't been there, but apparently some geologists (or whoever does this work) have: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html

"The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials."

It was even covered on /.: http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/06/14/0652217/1-Trillion-In-Minerals-Found-In-Afghanistan?from=rss

First, mod parent up.

Next, to back up this point:

Also, the BMI is fucking ridiculous. I've got friend who did/do body building, and they'll tell you that they're actually obese, based on the BMI that is. It's at this point that people say "but but but there's other measures you use in combination", the looser the legal policy is, the more useless this bill is (in fact, it will just add administrative overhead). The tighter it is, the more you're going to be victimizing these other people.

Remember our last president? The one who jogged so much his knees were shot and had to start riding bikes? The one where the secret service had to train up just so they could keep up with him?

Remember him? He was overweight by government standards.

Yes, the president of the United States, known for his robust good health, is officially overweight, according to the standards of the National Institutes of Health. At 6 feet and 194 pounds, his body mass index, or B.M.I., a measurement of height relative to weight, is 26.4, and 25 or above is officially overweight for both sexes.