Slashdot Mirror

Friday night "leak" from "the most transparent government ever".

No, they just need to send it to Wikileaks and tell them it's a video of waterboarding.

In all fairness I don't think parent is a troll, I think it's a weak attempt at a joke about wikileaks breaking encryption:

Somehow -- it will not say how -- WikiLeaks found the necessary computer time to decrypt a graphic video, released Monday, of a United States Army assault in Baghdad in 2007 that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the news agency Reuters.

The opposite is true. Teslas are still selling for close to retail.

There are only about 1,000 Teslas you could buy:

In the first quarter of [this] year, Tesla sold a total of 126 cars ... 9.7 cars a week.

A few qualifications: First, the company currently only sells the Tesla Roadster, which retails for $109,000. Only so many buyers for cars like that exist in the world. The company also continues to have a long waiting list. An estimated 2,200 customers have put $5,000 deposits down on the Model S, the all-electric sedan coming in 2012.
Tesla Sales Down on Eve of IPO

[June 23]

The Model S has an estimated base price around $60,000.

Tesla is regarded with some suspicion in the financial press.

The company will stop producing the vehicle it became known for, the Roadster sports car, and focus on a premium sedan called the Model-S. This car's selling point: According to Tesla, it will go up to 300 miles per charge, far further than other manufacturers claim for their electric cars. Tesla says it hasn't based its range forecast on a working prototype but chiefly on computer models. And, its IPO filing says, potential new government standards could result in a 30% cut to Tesla's advertised ranges.

The government also needs to ensure private investors don't cash out on the back of its largesse. It has tried that with Tesla, saying the loan will go into default if big shareholders, including Chief Executive Elon Musk, fail to hold at least 65% of their stock for at least a year after the Model-S project is complete. Guaranteed Risks in America's Green Loans [June 24]

Elon Musk is widely regarded as a big-time spender who always seems to be skating on the edge of disaster. Elon Musk, Head of Tesla Motors, Is Broke

Batteries are not DVDs. Batteries have been a stumbling block for EVs ever since EVs were invented in the late 1800s. It has not been for want of investment that batteries haven't managed to store more than a 50th the amount of energy that's in gasoline.

My hunch is that as oil supplies wind down we'll end up manufacturing hydrocarbons because of their energy density. Moreover, manufacturing hydrocarbons will mitigate the advantage that China has accrued in cornering the rare earth market.

Considering that property ownership means "lease until you stop paying property taxes to the City/State/Feds" or "eminent domain" Kelo v. City of New London ...

And if you "own an OEM license for an operating system" that is "non transferrable to another machine" ...

It's not surprising that the "phone you buy and own" is actually controlled by the Manufacturer and can be modified by them over the air at their discretion:

Pertinent examples:
Syrian Radar: http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/the-hunt-for-the-kill-switch/0
Kindle's Orwellian book deletion: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html
iPhone

This fits the "subscription model" that anti-virus, browser, and now operating systems all use to ensure steady cash-flow and hopefully phase out that frustrating "buy it once" legacy mentality that is also symptomatic of people who don't use credit cards.

I strongly suggest periodically researching alternatives to large corporations that ignore your rights or sense of ownership - i.e. try a different browser (firefox/opera?), a different search engine (hakia.com) , and hopefully somebody will fork Android like Centos does a wonderful job for Red Hat (and then post it on Sourceforge / slashdot).

"And here's the thing: when you get down to it, the shareholders invested in a company that was behaving unethically. It's the shareholder's investment that allows BP to function this way. When CEOs act unethically, they do it in the name of serving the shareholders. Don't the shareholders bear some responsibility? Isn't part of the problem that the "owners" of the company failed to ensure that their company was "doing the right thing?" I'm not sure that we should be seeking to punish shareholders, but I also don't see why they should take a pass. " I don't think it's clear that they behaved unethically. Our culture talks a lot about risk assessment and risk analysis, but we're actually not very good at exercising it. See this NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06fob-wwln-t.html?ref=magazine . In short, somehow the message of the "on the ground" engineers who may have been warning about issues probably got sufficiently murky by the time they reached the decision-makers that the decision they made probably seemed like a reasonable risk to take. See the second paragraph of this week's Rolling Stone article on McChrystal (2nd para on http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236?RS_show_page=4)? , and think through it in reverse. We're crappy communicators, too. I agree, however, with your assessment that there's a systemic problem. Part of that problem is that the stock market is a "next quarter forecast" beast, and we -- yes, we -- demand "performance" from our investments. Then there's our petroleum-sucking culture, in which the true cost of oil (figure in the cost of wars, the costs of political oppression, the costs of environmental damage) are allowed to be passed to future generations.

I believe it also included a lot of intelligent design controversy. See here and here for example. From the NY Times article: "After facing months of protest, conservative members of the Texas Board of Education were expected Thursday night to vote to teach schoolchildren a version of American history that emphasizes the roles of capitalist enterprise, the military, Christianity and modern Republican political figures. "

The United States Post Office is self-sufficient

The National Association of Letter Carriers union wouldn't be biased, would they?

Note that the numbers they give for the self-sufficiency claim is the total revenue and expenses from 1972 through 2007. So yeah, they approximately break even if you total everything over the past thirty-five years. But this doesn't really tell us anything about how the system has been operating recently, and how the system is likely to operate in the future.

For comparison, here (PDF) is the USPS's financial statement for 2009. Note that in the last quarter, they lost about $2.4 billion on $16 billion in revenue. Over three quarters, they lost about $4.6 billion on about $52 billion in revenue.

Any private company that posted such huge losses would try to restructure, renegotiate contracts, lay off workers, etc. to stop the money from hemorrhaging. But if you think GM had problems negotiating with the UAW, you should know that the federal union contracts are even more worker-friendly. So yes, of course the NALC wants you to believe the USPS is healthy. But the Government Accountability Office disagrees--they consider it "high-risk".

In case you think I'm just spouting conservative/libertarian propaganda, here's an article from that bastion of right-wing thought, the New York Times.

I agree that the names on a petition should be made public. But when it results in death threats and other forms of harassment there needs to be vigorous law enforcement to avoid political action by intimidation (or worse).

Did you miss the first day of economics? There's always downward pressure on prices. Any increased costs may be passed on to the consumer, but not always. The business that finds ways to absorb the tax increase without passing it on is the one that will probably sell more product.

But since a quarter of large corporations - $50m in sales or $250m in assets - don't pay any income taxes at all due to loopholes and offshore sheltering schemes, you're right: if they ever started to pay taxes, prices might go up.

And if corporations had to pay taxes for the infrastructure that enables them to be in business, I don't think that would be unfair. And if a business can't afford the burden of the infrastructure, guess what: they shouldn't be in business unless they serve to lower costs of vital services for the rest of the economy. And even then, since they exist entirely at the grace of tax payers, they should have no right to any amount of privacy.

Most of that money went for putting up fences and the like around town... oh, and sprucing up a few small towns over 100 miles away that the G8-G20 people will never visit in order to boost tourism somehow. Don't forget the 2 million dollar fake lake and media center next to a real lake which will promote the beauty of the Canadian wilderness... There's the almost 100 million dollar sprucing up of Huntsville for, uh, nothing as it turns out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/world/americas/25canada.html

I for one enjoy the ~1 million spent for new sidewalks which cover half of the fire hydrants, new gazebos, landscaping and 200k Welcome rock (as in stone, not music). Nobody from the G8 or G20 will be going there by the way.
http://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/article/820390--from-fountains-to-gardens-to-buried-hydrants-it-s-a-new-world-in-the-near-north
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/markets/headline_news/article.jsp?content=b3755778

But that's ok, it's the other host nations which understate what it actually costs them to run a G8-G20 meeting. We're honest here in Canadia!

I've no problems with high frequency trading.

The problem is:

1) When some traders are allowed to see stuff before everyone else. I find it amazing that's even considered acceptable.

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

2) It seems that if some parties screw up big they roll back those transactions. They don't roll back transactions if some small guy screws up.

I've no problems with high frequency trading.

The problem is:

1) When some traders are allowed to see stuff before everyone else. I find it amazing that's even considered acceptable.

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

2) It seems that if some parties screw up big they roll back those transactions. They don't roll back transactions if some small guy screws up.

It doesn't make a market more efficient or better if a market ARTIFICIALLY gives some traders an advantage over the others.

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

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

It doesn't make a market more efficient or better if a market ARTIFICIALLY gives some traders an advantage over the others.

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

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

I like your proposal. Here is a link adding meat to your assertion that high frequency trading tilts the playing field, and how.

They can use anything they want against you and do not have to provide DNA evidence that exonerates you per a SCOTUS ruling. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/us/19scotus.html?_r=1&hp

Now we have a Federal Government actively standing in the way of states trying to prevent an ecological disaster while at the same time using the same disaster as a means to eventually forever block drilling

Citation needed!!!

In fact this admin supports off-shore drilling. Prior to the accident it proposed lifting restrictions on drilling off-shore. "On March 31, 2010, President Obama proposed to open vast expanses of American coastlines to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time".

Falcon

That paper has been ripped to pieces by Nobel Prize winner economist Paul Krugman:

Paul Krugman's Blog.

He basically says that economic policy 'inverts' if interest rates are up against the zero bound - i.e. right now, with a close to 0% Federal Funds Rate in the US.

The Hardward paper you cite does not consider that scenario of deflation at all. If the US government's actions are so inlationary as they claim then why are interest rates so low and why has the US dollar strengthened [deflated] by 30% in the last year?

The reason is that we are in the 'zero bound' zone, which is a special boundary condition under which expansionary monetary policy (i.e. making jobs by government spending - think Hoover Dam) is the best possible course of action, by a large margin.

'Austerity' is a code word for 'let the rich keep their riches and make their money more valuable via deflation, while 90% of the population suffers from various effects of very high, 10%+ unemployment'.

Japan went through such a crippling period of deflation in the 90's - called the 'lost decade'.

'Austerity' is basically a clever rip-off (makes the rich richer and makes the poor poorer) _and_ it is also political suicide because those unemployed will vote the current government out of power during the next elections.

Guess why the GOP and the far-right is advocating it so ferociously?

The economy is bankrupting the UK. Fark puts it succinctly: "Facing a massive budget deficit, the UK to cut welfare, increase the VAT to 20 percent, and impose a new tax on anyone who brings one of those damn vuvuzelas back from the World Cup". Chancellor George Osborne is doing what all countries should do in that situation but are afraid to do, due to the unlikelihood of reelection. The country is damn near bankruptcy, the whole European continent is over-leveraged on debt and Britain is doing their best to make an example by balancing their budget. Tax handouts to the entertainment industry don't help balance the budget. Insert snarky comment about US legislators growing some balls and balancing our budget here...

Here's some more info on the subject:

from the NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/world/europe/23britain.html?hpw
Britain Unveils Emergency Budget
LONDON -- Setting the scene for years of potential strife with the powerful public-sector unions and their allies in the Labour Party, Britain's new coalition government on Tuesday unveiled the most severe package of spending cuts and tax increases since the early days of Margaret Thatcher's era.

George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, held the budget box as he left 11 Downing Street for Parliament on Tuesday.
After only six weeks in office, the government of Prime Minister David Cameron took what his coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats acknowledged was a historic gamble: that austerity measures will help balance the government's books without pitching the country into a double-dip recession.

The cuts and tax increases, including average budget reductions of 25 percent for almost all government departments over the next five years, will make Britain a leader among European countries, including Ireland, Greece and Spain, competing to show they can slash spending and appease investors worried about surging debt. But the sharp reductions defy conventional economic wisdom, which holds that governments should increase spending to stimulate growth when the private sector is weak.

The steps outlined to the House of Commons by George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, would cut the annual government deficit by nearly $180 billion over the next five years, shrinking Britain's public sector and instituting tough reductions in public housing benefits, disability allowances and other previously sacrosanct aspects of the country's $285 billion welfare budget.

Only health and international aid spending would be protected from the 25 percent cuts for government departments by 2015, the steepest fiscal spending reductions since the 1930s. Mr. Osborne also announced a two-year wage freeze for all but the lowest paid among Britain's six million public servants and a three-year freeze on benefits paid to parents for rearing children, in addition to new medical screening for people claiming disability benefits, part of a bid to cut $16 billion from the annual welfare budget.

Mr. Osborne also announced a raft of tax increases, though he was at pains to say that the government's plan to sharply reduce the country's $1.4 trillion national debt would rest on making roughly four pounds in spending cuts for every pound in tax increases, a point of considerable political weight in a country that is already among the highest-taxed in Europe.

The new taxes include an increase next year to 20 percent from 17.5 percent in the value-added tax on most goods and services, and an increase in the capital gains tax, to a new high of 28 percent, to curb what Mr. Osborne described as rich people in Britain "paying less tax than the people who clean for them." At the same time, changes in income tax will remove nearly 900,000 of Britain's poorest people from the income tax system altogether, and corporate taxes will also be reduced over a five-year period, to 24 percent from 28 percent.

>>The environmentally minded want us off coal and onto nuclear or renewable power as fast as possible.

"Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation in Congress on Monday to protect a million acres of the Mojave Desert in California by scuttling some 13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for the region."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/business/energy-environment/22solar.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1261504841-TLNmsaEvUp/AYjwht40LoQ

You raise an issue worthy of further consideration. It was first posed succinctly by the fictional character from Austin Powers - International Man of Mystery. Dr. Evil: "Why must I be surrounded by frickin' idiots?" (Similarly, Scott Adams states this as the Dilbert Principle, we are all stupid, about most things, most of the time.) With the rise of civilization and technology has come increased complexity. Unfortunately, we seem, on average, to be ill equipped to cope with it. It's amazing we can get things done at all, really, when you think about the difficulty we have making what ought to be simple decisions.

Consider this week the news is full of European countries enacting substantial budget cuts. We know that's the wrong thing to do. It times of economic prosperity, we should run balanced budgets or pay down national debt. When faced with a recession so enormous that people invoke the Great Depression as an analog, though we have only about 20% unemployment, rather than 30% or more, this situation is dire. We know that we must run deficits, large ones, in order to create a demand stimulus large enough to moderate this trough of the economic cycle. Nonetheless, we have politicians trying to score political points by railing against deficit spending -- which didn't bother them for the past 8 years when they were in charge.

The problem is profound, widespread ignorance, but not merely ignorance as in the mere unawareness of relevant facts. It's ignorance that makes one blind to the limits of one's own ability to asses one's own capability. Smearing lemon juice on your face doesn't make you invisible to security cameras. If you think it does, then you're not qualified to be a bank robber, but you're also not qualified to assess many, many other issues -- foremost among them, you're not qualified to assess your sills as a bank robber, and are likely to be utterly ignorant as to the possibility that you might not be able to assess those skills without outside assistance. Presented with relevant facts, these people remain impervious to rational assessment of a situation. They are so poorly equipped that they can't evaluate their own ignorance.

The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is (Part 1)

After the first disaster which destroyed a Space Shuttle and killed all the astronauts aboard, a presidential commission was appointed to investigate, by President Reagan. Its members included the nobel prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman. Feynman wrote his own appendix to the official report of the committee. It's one of the most fascinating documents, and should be required reading for any engineer, politician, manager, or judge . It ranks up there with The Selfish Gene, Goedel Escher, Bach, and The Mythical Man Month.

Richard Feynman, the Challenger Disaster, and Software Engineering

Feynman's Appendix to the Rogers Commission Report on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident

The lesson of the Challenger disaster directly applies to the Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout disaster. Simply because we haven't had a disaster yet does not in any way imply that we are not doing things, lots of things, which are likely to lead to a disaster.

This problem applies to big problems, like managing national budgets, building and flying reusable spacecraft, drilling a mile under the ocean surface for oil -- and to small problems, like using mod points on Slashdot.

Give all the info, and let people actually make some self-judgements rather than expecting us to just swallow the spoon fed self-loathing of the far left.

Like the no-bid oil contracts that everyone wanted to keep quiet? I don't argue that the Taliban and Saddam Hussein have done horrible things. I do, however, argue that the United States' reasoning for being in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is not as virtuous as you would like people to believe. The U.S. is there to profit from the war. The fact that occassionally positive side effects will come from it allows for the PR position that you take.

Fine, have more links:

Bright Source Reduces the plant foot print, and they're still not happy

Though honestly, I don't know what is wrong with the other swath of land Sierra is proposing, but it hasn't helped that there has been a multitude of other resistance efforts.

Fine, have more links:

Bright Source Reduces the plant foot print, and they're still not happy

Though honestly, I don't know what is wrong with the other swath of land Sierra is proposing, but it hasn't helped that there has been a multitude of other resistance efforts.

Fine, have more links:

Bright Source Reduces the plant foot print, and they're still not happy

Though honestly, I don't know what is wrong with the other swath of land Sierra is proposing, but it hasn't helped that there has been a multitude of other resistance efforts.

Fine, have more links:

Bright Source Reduces the plant foot print, and they're still not happy

Though honestly, I don't know what is wrong with the other swath of land Sierra is proposing, but it hasn't helped that there has been a multitude of other resistance efforts.

I'm guessing the GP was referring to: This article but it may have been this one
--
JimFive

One well known contributor to what people call "eye strain" is a bright room environment (a sunlit room) contrasted with a dimmer display. The contrast ratio of the device itself contributes to reduced eyestrain, if black and white are more distinct from one another.

Anyone that up-modded you should read this: The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 1) because they are too stupid to wield mod points.

Owing more on your house than it's worth has a negative impact on your credit rating, whether you're current on your payments or not. So any employer who does what you say ("checks credit ratings") will view you negatively.

Rental prices are down compared to last year. Also, it's been 2 years now that landlords have taken tenants who have gone through the foreclosure route. You've been living in la-la land if you haven't noticed it. Landlords are settling for a lot less than they used to.

As for the rest, it's all been in the news for the last year. Just look for it. Or don't you know how to search?

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Mortgage-Defaults-May-Be-cnbc-1964280202.html?x=0
Mortgage Defaults May Be Driving Consumer Spending

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/business/01nopay.html
Owners Stop Paying Mortgages, and Stop Fretting

You haven't tried to get a job in finance or with the government, have you? Money problems are a HUGE red flag to US employers, especially in industries where financial responsibility is part of the organization's reputation.

The person who walks away, does a short soale, forecloses, whatever - is less of a risk. They've taken their medicine, whether it was a short sale, foreclosure, deed in lieu, or a bankruptcy. They won't be tempted to take a bribe to hold onto their underwater house. Your thinking is naive.

Why would I want to bite you? You've shown you're stupid, and it might be contagious. http://www.mybudget360.com/mortgages-non-payment-10-billion-dollars-month-free-thanks-bailouts/
$10 Billion a Month Freed up Each Month from People not paying their Mortgage. $1.9 Billion of That is in California so People can continue Leasing their SUV Mercedes and Getting Tans. Thanks Bailouts!

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-04-22/honey-i-lost-the-house-now-it-s-time-to-party-caroline-baum.html
Honey, I Lost the House. Let's Party

that the us healthcare system is extremely broken and needs an overhaul is plainly and painfully obvious to anyone with half a brain

there does however seem to be a large inflamed population of completely propagandized idiots that oppose the overhaul, but so what? there's also a bunch of morons who support creationism who think evolution is controversial too, and that simply teaching evolution is "activism"

i guess simple common sense is "activism" to a moron

but really, when it comes to the healthcare system in the usa, there's no controversy: its horribly broken, and it needs to resemble the way it is in other, saner countries in the world

and that is a simple obvious fact unless you are a hysterical propagandized twit

heck, there are desperately poor countries with saner healthcare policies than the usa:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/health/policy/15rwanda.html

Rwanda has had national health insurance for 11 years now; 92 percent of the nation is covered, and the premiums are $2 a year.

Sunny Ntayomba, an editorial writer for The New Times, a newspaper based in the capital, Kigali, is aware of the paradox: his nation, one of the world's poorest, insures more of its citizens than the world's richest does.

He met an American college student passing through last year, and found it "absurd, ridiculous, that I have health insurance and she didn't," he said, adding: "And if she got sick, her parents might go bankrupt. The saddest thing was the way she shrugged her shoulders and just hoped not to fall sick."

you really wonder exactly what the hell motivates people to oppose universal healthcare. you look at the idea of it, your mind examines all of the pros and cons of universal healthcare, compare it to the current system the usa has, or some libertarian social darwinistic fantasy of people unable to treat broken arms because they don't have $100,000 in their bank account, and it is such a NO BRAINER OBVIOUSLY SUPERIOR APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM OF HEALTHCARE

you really have to wonder exactly what motivates those to oppose a system of care which is in their own selfish interest to accept! do these people believe they are immortal? that they are immune to a sudden accident they can't afford? or that if you can't afford insurance, or are too stupid to realize you need to buy it, that the rest of us can just go "well sucks to be you" and watch you die on the street? is that it?: do you have to be a sociopath not to accept universal healthcare?

what exactly are these morons who oppose universal healthcare thinking?

Not only are we stupid, We don't even know how stupid we are!

Sorry, but I couldn't let this pass because it's just entirely wrong. Successful companies are the ones who get tax breaks when deciding where to move or stay. They are the ones that grease the wheels in government to make sure they don't pay taxes, while less successful companies often still have to.

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/20/business/study-finds-that-many-large-companies-pay-no-taxes.html

http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=712ae8a2-20d2-4334-abef-3191dd63fb59

http://www.actwv.org/press/Firms_Avoid_Tax.mx

brings the trolls out

it's not just iphones. it's ALL PHONES FROM ATT.

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/another-iphone-mystery-explained/

Fortunately, this one has a happy ending. AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel tells me:

“What your readers are seeing is a routine update of the daily data activity on their devices—whether the iPhone or other handsets—to ensure billing accuracy. Customers are not charged for any data usage as part of this routine update

I read that the Falcon cost about 700 million to develop, the government was having to put out one billion just to cancel the Constellation program.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/science/space/11nasa.html?hpw

An article linked from the article is quoting $2.5 billion to cancel the Constellation program:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/27/AR2010032702810_2.html

I read that the Falcon cost about 700 million to develop, the government was having to put out one billion just to cancel the Constellation program.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/science/space/11nasa.html?hpw

True. But most all the states are scrambling to make up budget shortfalls because the recession has hit them hard. Of course, less state government spending hurts local businesses and hurts the economy still more. A few states have a rainy day fund, but they're generally too small to amount to much in the face of the current economy.

Paul Krugman described the situation as "Fifty Herbert Hoovers."

Actually, there's this interesting little detail about the "virgins":

One scholar at the Notre Dame conference, who uses the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg for safety, has raised eyebrows and hackles by suggesting that the "houri" promised to martyrs when they reach Heaven doesn't actually mean "virgin" after all. He argues that instead it means "grapes," and since conceptions of paradise involved bounteous fruit, that might make sense. But suicide bombers presumably would be in for a disappointment if they reached the pearly gates and were presented 72 grapes.

... just saying. It's all even more ridiculous than we ever thought.

where they have a monarch and the military has staged a number of coups regardless?

your words do match reality, friend

i think nepal has the best idea:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/world/asia/03nepal.html

monarchies are simply expensive useless national follies. like a favorite national breed of lap dog or a famous national landmark. except, unlike a landmark or a pet, the maintenance costs for a monarchy are rather high. prohibitively high, in my view

but if the dutch want to keep footing a bill for an expensive useless national pasttime, who am i to judge? tulips, dikes, windmills, wooden clogs... and some old ditzy broad in a castle. whatever. ridiculous

just don't make believe a monarchy in today's day and age affords the "protections" you listed above. it simply doesn't. it doesn't play out the way you imagine

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/business/economy/21pension.html

In Yonkers, more than 100 retired police officers and firefighters are collecting pensions greater than their pay when they were working. One of the youngest, Hugo Tassone, retired at 44 with a base pay of about $74,000 a year. His pension is now $101,333 a year.

now you tell me: do i have valid grounds to find this unacceptable?

you introduce a false conflict: that if i stand against the union stooge, that i must by some inference be supporting the ceo making 7 figures while his company crashes and burns

why can't i hate both?

why can't i hate the coddled union stooge AND the coddled ceo, at the same time?

and, most importantly, i reject the notion we should all make the same amount. please tell me we don't need to go into a remedial education about why communism fails

i support capitalism with socialist safety nets. or socialism with capitalist engines. whatever. i simply am complaining about these union stooges obviously getting away with murder. just as much murder as the ceo scumbags with the golden parachutes from the companies they helped destroy

If so, then why are you giving them parole in the first place?

Because CA is under a court order to release 40-50K prisoners, although the Supreme Court might modify it when they get around to hearing it.

Given that CA already doesn't jail non-violent drug offenders, I find it hard to believe that they can release 1/4 of the prisoners without releasing some seriously violent criminals. Parole, even with fancy GPS monitoring, costs a small fraction of incarceration and might actually work if implemented right.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/us/10prison.html
http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_15293678?nclick_check=1

... you might get in trouble as well... I don't remember the whole story but Giampaolo Giuliani predicted the quake and got in trouble for it http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/earthquake-warning-was-removed-from-internet/

at one time, when gilded age corporatist assholes employed pinkerton's thugs to kneecap guys just trying to earn enough to feed his children, unions were heroic and noble

in today's day and age, a union is nothing more than a lottery ticket for lazy assholes to earn way way more than middle class salaries, for doing far less, and be accountable and responsible for nothing

additionally, no one can afford to manufacture anything here anymore because of union mandated salary levels, so everything is now done in chinese sweatshops. a committed anti-corporatist would respond it is the corporatists who drive jobs out of the country, not the unions. to which i would respond that that is easy to say, until you actually have to buy the goods with the sticker shock attached to them just so a union member can have lavish benefits and upper middle class salaries well beyond yours

the unions help drive jobs out of the country by demanding far too much for workers. the irony being, in china, people are now unionizing, get this, against the communist government's wishes (that extra twist of historical irony practically makes my head explode)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/business/global/11strike.html

is it possible in this world to have the balance of power between the unions and the corportatists simply give workers a decent wage and keep jobs domestic and keep goods and services affordable?

and can GOVERNMENT unions simply be mandated out of existence, please?

the founder has gobs of cash:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/business/media/24limewire.html

Mark Gorton is a confident guy. He's confident about his ideas. He's confident about his enthusiasms. And he's confident that his successes -- like making money on Wall Street and promoting alternative transportation in New York -- provide a record that backs him up.

But that confidence faces a new test. Two weeks ago, a federal judge ruled that he and the popular file-sharing service he created, LimeWire, were liable for copyright infringement and could be forced to pay up to $450 million in damages.

Mr. Gorton, 43, says he did not think it would come to this point. He thought that the record industry, sometime since the lawsuit was filed in 2006, would come to appreciate his vision for the future of LimeWire -- a paid subscription service providing unlimited downloads of licensed songs -- and want to join forces instead of continuing litigation.

"Perhaps I was naïve," Mr. Gorton said in an interview last week at LimeWire's office near Chinatown in Manhattan. "If I knew when the lawsuit started what I know now about the music industry, maybe we would have done something different."

first wall street trader i ever felt sorry for. his other passion is alternative transportation: he rides his bike to work every day. not your average wall street sleazeball

and he idealistically thought that an honest p2p play was a good idea, downplaying the shortsighted sociopathology of the music publishing industry. bad bet

now if limewire were some open source project with nothing but pseudoanonymous college students behind it, it would still be sued into oblivion, but there would be no follow up lawsuit seeking to drain the defendants of all their worth. this guy, on the other hand, is going to made destitute, simply for the crime of thinking positively about the real future of media. unfortunately, the zombie legal past of media has marked him for death

music industry: the next limewire won't be fronted by anyone, and there will be no way to block it, and no one to sue. the internet has permanently changed the legal status quo of media. you have a bunch of laws from the days of vinyl records, that are simply unenforceable in the age of the internet. your job now is shut up and die, blood sucking assholes

YOU'RE NOT NEEDED ANYMORE. YOU AND YOUR UNENFORCEABLE LAWS ARE A HISTORICAL ANACHRONISM. JUST FUCKING DIE ALREADY

I would think anyone who understands how to design experiments would see the need for a proper control group.

We've already seen that no one who understands how to design experiments has anything to do with the study of weather or climate.

Actually, just the study of weather, I haven't seen any climatologists chiming in yet.

BTW, I suspect that you're making a veiled criticism of climate change predictions. If so, then you're taking aim at your allies: researchers at George Mason University and the University of Texas at Austin found that only about half of the 571 television weathercasters surveyed believed that global warming was occurring and fewer than a third believed that climate change was “caused mostly by human activities.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/science/earth/30warming.html

might be because of brain damage?

http://www.nytimes.com/info/concussions-in-football/

A 2000 study surveyed 1,090 former N.F.L. players and found more than 60 percent had suffered at least one concussion in their careers and 26 percent had had three or more. Those who had had concussions reported more problems with memory, concentration, speech impediments, headaches and other neurological problems than those who had not, the survey found.

When 300+lbs guys are charging at one another, pads are appropriate.

Now imagine a snowy rural highway with a 90 degree curve to the right. It's a fairly broad curve, and banked a bit so you can maintain 55 through it. You hit an icy patch and start to slide. Yes, your car will be pointed too far to the right, but since you were going 55 mph this time your rear wheels aren't just going to rotate around the front. Your vehicle is going to slide up into the opposite lane. As you see yourself moving into the wrong lane, the natural reaction is to steer to the right even more to get back into the right lane. It can be pretty damn hard to do the correct thing and steer left, especially if the shoulder is coming up at you quickly.

I think the problem is that it is often presented as, "don't do what your instinct tells you to do". By happenstance, knowledge, or training, some of us have an instinct to make the right correction. This makes the advice unproductive.

See the pdf from 1914 (!) on the subject: "It is instict to turn the wheels in the opposite direction. Really? Says who? Where is the study? Maybe among people who drove a horse, this is what you did when the hooves skid or something. Now a days, discussing "instinct" and driving is just foolish. We will have different "instincts" to this most unnatural situation (not being on a horse).

to say you are out of touch with a kindergartener's ability at compare and contrast and devoid of a firm grasp of reality is putting it mildly

Fair enough, this is the Internet, generic insults are admissible substitutes for an argument.

here, read this: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/asia/10koreans.html

Well, I did, and it follows the model of every on-the-streets pro-capitalism article published about any centrally planned economy since the US first started declaring the USSR its sworn enemy. The model goes like this:

(1) Take half a dozen willing emigrants and start the ball rolling by mentioning random irrelevant luxuries which they enjoy now, such as strawberries in springtime or the ability to watch a different set of propaganda on TV;

(2) Advance to the meat of your story: the centrally planned economy is so corrupt that no-one gets compensation for their work and everyone would starve if they followed the official methods;

(3) Ask them for stories about how they implemented petty capitalism to survive, because you cannot survive without capitalism;

(4) Add emotive rather than descriptive language to illustrate just how hard even fairly routine actions were - e.g. fishing is always in "treacherous waters". A staple is that goods are always carried one hundred miles across a mine-filled swamp on a unicycle;

(5) Once you've built empathy with these heroes of the American dream, describe how crackdowns on and confiscations of their justly earnt property make petty capitalism impossible;

(6) Round off with one party official making a delicious quote describing how great the system is and insisting that crackdowns on capitalism are moral for added "OMG the humanity!".

The inevitable conclusion from such articles is: everyone bar Party officials who hasn't already escaped from the regime must now be dying or dead, which is an obvious nonsense. Thus the article must be exaggerating or non-representative.

But at least the article givs a hint of the elephant in the room: sanctions and US military opposition. No country on this earth exists well when it is faced with those two hurdles.

Next, we can move on to how many democracies or tolerable governments (from the PoV of the people) the US overthrows for something much worse - Kim could never dream about holding more than his own countrymen under his thumb. We can talk about currency devaluation in the West - both jumps in specific countries and the imaginary currency by fiat of most Western nations which is devalued in a constant trickle. We can then move on to how collusion between US government and corporation has destroyed the savings of US workers.

By the template of this article, you are the successful Party official, achieving comfort through a combination of intelligence and conformance, proclaiming the greatness of your government while it craps on the majority of the world's people.

The shortage of fossil fuels is a myth. Even if BP didn't plan to just burn off upwards of 20,000 bpd in the gulf because they can't get ships to haul the stuff away in time, it's just not true. Apparently all the world's oceans are coated dozens of meters deep with something called "clathrates", which is fossil methane that can be converted to clean-burning propane. There's not enough oxygen in the atmosphere to burn all that stuff. We haven't even begun to tap the arctic and antarctic reserves - and the antarctic is likely to be a bigger source of oil than Saudi Arabia. Fossil fuel shortages are the least of our problems.

Nuclear fuel shortages? Also a myth. The problem with nuclear fuels is that if you use nuclear enough you wind up with too much nuclear fuel. The more you use it the more you get. It's like the trouble with tribbles. Just like mining technologies turn the discarded tailings of silver mines into the greatest repositories of gold ore, reprocessing technolgies will one day turn the wasteland that is the Hanford superfund cleanup site into a critical national resource - and a source of beautiful nuclear age glass in colors never seen before.

You want a real problem? There are more of us than we need there to be. We can sustain our culture and promote scientific progress we need to take humanity to the next level - interstellar exploration - with certainly 300 million of us, likely 30 million, possibly 3 million. 95% to 99.95% of us are "extra". Do you want to be the one to explain to 19 of 20 humans (or 1999 of 2000) that they're redundant? I don't think they'll take the news very well. We may have passed the point where we can solve this problem. The next ice age will straighten this out by pruning us back to a few hundred thousand. We will of course go feral and lose our history and culture again just like we did the last ten times. After 100,000 years of ice maybe we'll get the next evolution of men, who may discover our long forgotten rovers on the moon and take it for the warning that it is: that men came here before and died out and were forgotten. Maybe they will learn. It's probably too late for us, but evolution will try and try again until it achieves galactic domination or eventually our sun will cleanse all traces of it from the rocks in its orbit as it expands into red giant phase. Fortunately this experiment is redundant - it's being tried throughout the universe around billions of suns with varying levels of success.

We've achieved what must be a universally rare level: the choice. We can choose to live. It's within our power to make our genome persistent beyond the loss of the ecology that supports our science and culture. We can choose to make an offsite backup of mankind. We can go out amongst the stars and claim the universe as our own. The prize is simply "all there is". It's a rare choice because if that choice were common we could see them from here - they might have settled this rock before we did, but for certain we could see them from here. We probably won't choose life. One might suppose that millions of cultures had risen up within the range of our telescopes and not chosen life and so been lost - but we can choose life. Will we be the rare one to surmount this bar? It seems unlikely. All those asteroids will probably be still waiting for men to mine starships out of them 90,000 years from now. It's cold out there, and dark. Lots of creepy things might be out there. The road is long and hard - fraught with peril, and the first step is the hardest step of all. To take the first step you have to steel yourself to venturing from the fire, abandoning all you've ever known, to letting go of returning. It's best we stay home here by the fire and let others go if they dare. It's warm here, and here we have Cable.

Screw it. What's on Fox?

I figured out not too long ago that to convert the world to solar power, using generous assumptions...

So what about solar AND wind AND tidal AND etc., all the diverse environmentally-sound energy production methods, not to mention conservation? Did you calculate all that? Or did you just "generously assume" that only one method of energy production will exist in the future? I'd like to see the cocktail napkin on which these "figures" and "assumptions" are written out.

Here's some nuclear for you:
Leaks spotlight aging nuclear plants
New Wave of Nuclear Plants Faces High Costs
An Old Nuclear Problem Creeps Back