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Sorry, Castro was nominated for a Nobel, not awarded http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1225478.stm

Three Afro-Cuban men were executed for "illegal departure" in 2004 http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/americas/04/11/cuba.execution

Yes Cuba does execute political dissidents http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7DC123FF931A15752C0A964958260

While Watergate was seething, Mr. Felt authorized nine illegal break-ins at the homes of friends and relatives of members of the Weather Underground, a violent left-wing splinter group. The people he chose as targets had committed no crimes. The F.B.I. had no search warrants. He later said he ordered the break-ins because national security required it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/washington/19felt.html?scp=1&sq=mark%20felt&st=cse

FYI: one study claims conventional treatment for chronic headaches is only as a good as a placebo whereas acupuncture is better.

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/health/research/16regi.html

If conventional treatment is considered acceptable at those efficacy rates, then placebo treatment should be considered acceptable as well.

After all if the placebo effect is as powerful as conventional treatment and has fewer side effects, why is it better for the patient to give them conventional treatment?

What you need is to find out which patients it works better on, and what sort of conditions placebo treatments are good for.

Personally, if placebo works on me for a particular problem, I'm fine with receiving placebo treatment - as long as it works better than other treatment that I would pay for.

A carefully crafted acquisitions regime...
...we have to find specific areas or roles where the government can add value...

Those two alone make this whole thing a joke. But wait, there's more:

...and a humane and common-sense approach to dealing with the millions of immigrants who are already in this country illegally...

Hmm, humane and common-sense. Like this, this, this, and this among others? I'm no apologist for illegal immigration, but the United States can do better than that. And, about privacy. The only reference he gave was to the Privacy Impact Assessments page which is only a vague public description of their banal, internal standard operating procedures. It says nothing about their interactions with other agencies. He lauds that the office must be top-level for the sake of interoperability with other agencies, but then behaves as if the DHS is the only one involved here. And nobody has yet answered the question: what does "homeland security" have to do with this?

It's nice to see high-ranking officials humor us by pretending that we exist and answering our questions, but they never say anything profound or useful. It's all Fluff and BS.

I had a 386 running linux as my home's main file server for a year or two. Worked great. This was a Northgate Elegance that cost >$4000 when new. It seemed like a real classic, so I still have it down in the basement, ready to fire up into an old version of slackware any time.

This is in addition to what everyone else is saying. Although the the fantasy is nice, I don't think anyone is going to have a homebrewed lauch complex any time soon.

On the other thing, I think that the moon flight was as well thought out as the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq. In probably sounded good at the frat house when everyon was wasted on trash can punch, but the next morning, no one quite knew how to handle the consequences.

The fact is we are down to three shuttles. The fact is we are likely not going to flying if we get down to two. The fact is we have wasted the past 8 years has been wasted. We have known we need to replace shuttle for 5 years. Fact is that the shuttle itself was designed over an eight year period, with the first fully functional vehicle appearing a few years later. One can't just wake up on morning and say, ooh, I want a space program. Not any more. There is too much history. If Orion is not a point where a vehicle can be built, maybe it should be killed. What we need is a reliable heavy lifter, which we have. What we need is a reliable manned spacecraft, which we can build. What we need is a space station, which we have but let politics get in the way of. Then we can have shuttle from LEO to the moon, mars, wherever. Mopst of all, we need to look at how to do this effeceiently.

The Lusitania was a Cunard liner.

In 1915 nothing on this Earth could be more British. She was torpedoed just south of Queenstown, Ireland, on May 7, 1915. The ship went down in 18 minutes. 1,195 died, including 123 Americans. The U.S. was a neutral in 1915 and her ports were open to ships of all nations. The Lost Liners - Lusitania [Robert Ballard, PBS 2000]

That Japan was about to make a move against the U.S. was known.

But where?

The Pearl Harbor attack was a hit and run raid, and, in the end, the attack bought Japan only six months of naval superiority in the Pacific. Pearl, after all, was nothing more or less than a forward naval base. It wasn't where ships were being built or men being trained. It wasn't rubber or oil or other strategic materials. Report Debunks Theory That the U.S. Heard a Coded Warning About Pearl Harbor [Dec 6, 2008]

Tonkin didn't feel like a virtual battle to those who fought in it. Anatomy of a crisis [March 2004], What Should We Tell Our Children About Vietnam? [May 1988]

There was - let us say - fair reason to be a tad suspicious about Iraq's abandonment of WMDs:

In 1995, UNSCOM's principal weapons inspector..showed Taha documents...that showed the Iraqi government had just purchased 10 tons of growth medium. Iraq's hospital consumption of growth medium was just 200 kg a year; yet in 1988, Iraq imported 39 tons of it. Shown this evidence by UNSCOM, Taha admitted to the inspectors that she had grown 19,000 litres of botulism toxin; 8,000 litres of anthrax; 2,000 litres of aflatoxins, which can cause liver failure; Clostridium perfringens, a bacterium that can cause gas gangrene; and ricin, a castor-bean derivative which can kill by impeding circulation. She also admitted conducting research into cholera, salmonella, foot and mouth disease, and camel pox, a disease that uses the same growth techniques as smallpox, but which is safer for researchers to work with. It was because of the discovery of Taha's work with camel pox that the U.S. and British intelligence services feared Saddam Hussein may have been planning to weaponize the smallpox virus. Iraq and weapons of mass destruction

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* - Spell-checking is built into Firefox and the ieSpellplug-in has been around for quite some time as well.

I think they maybe still economically feasible in many regards because if there is one technology that the public and therefore the government is going to be willing to get behind its alternative fuel. The main question is are biofuels still environmentally viable? Currently the answer is no. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/science/earth/08wbiofuels.html

that there are web restrictions while the laptops are in the building. This includes web sites like Facebook or MySpace. You can do this centrally with WebSense or some other proxy/web content filtering software. It's not a waste of time thing its more of a liability issue with the school. Teachers must have time for instruction and if Johnny is in class checking out porn and cyber bullying some kid, education is not happening and someone might get hurt. Take a look at NJ education law. A student sued that they had graduated and could not read. They won and it changed the entire state of education for 20 years plus. Personally I would not have a purchase program. Its cost way too much in the long end. Take a look at this http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/education/04laptop.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin/ NY Times article from a year ago. Most schools are dropping it because of cost and the fact that standardized test grades have not improved. Place laptops in kid's hands that will use it for class such as a computer science class. Also, get it into the hands of kids with learning disabilities. I have seen it do wonders there. Instead of letting them purchase these machines in four years (obsolete by then) have it leased out for a year. You will have much more control in case something needs to be changed.

Almost 10 million tickets totaling $624 million in parking fines alone last year.

Incidentally, that's more than it costs the city to run the Department of Transportation.

[...] include 137 new or increased taxes and fees, loosened restrictions on gambling and $9 billion worth of spending cuts.

And the state is $15.4 Bln in deficit.

Here's the NYTimes link if anyone cares.

The moderates usually have no authority over the extremists, so how should they police them?

Leave the group.

If the organization or group you are in is being lead in a direction you are opposed to and you have no say in that course, then you should leave. To stay is to explicitly condone the actions of the leadership. The best contemporary example of this in the context of religious groups is in fact the "Mormon" Church of Latter Day Saints, which has seen many followers leave because of the way in which it conducted itself during the Proposition 8 vote.

Here was a church leadership which injected its organization voluminously and inappropriately into a contemporary political issue. They turned an institution of private religious belief into public political party. Their church is now feeling the backlash from this, and attempting to take off their political cap as quickly as they put it on is simply not possible.

By staying in their church, Mormons explicitly endorse their churches actions and stances. Ostensibly on the issue of gay marriage, but more importantly on the long term decision that the LDS church can and will inject itself and its considerable demographic and monetary clout directly and voluminously into any political debate that takes its fancy. Many european states, learning from experience, outrightly ban such behavior, but in the US, obviously things are different.

You can stay and support the actions of your church leaders, or you can leave. There are other sects, and other interpretations. The same goes for Muslims, particularly those in western countries, who frequent mosques with radical imams. Protestants break off and form new churches all the time. Even catholics can pick other pulpits if they take exception to their current priest. Staying to avoid social difficulty, or pretending that your presence is not being used to support your church leader's views and actions, are not valid excuses. Staying to "change from within" is only valid if you are actively doing so, otherwise it too is an excuse.

People can and should leave a church if that church's actions or beliefs go against their own principles. To stay is to abandon those principles.

Aren't the rules of the game covered by copyright?

Yup. And that's basically what Hasbro was alleging in the copyright portion of their complaint, that there are no rules to Scrabulous, that "a user not already familiar with the rules of the SCRABBLE crossword game would not know how to play "Scrabulous," and "until earlier this year, defendants included on their website hyperlinks to official SCRABBLE webpages, resources such as the official SCRABBLE rules, and also other websites offering unauthorized and infringing versions of SCRABBLE."

Hasbro was claiming that the creators of Scrabulous infringed their copyrights on the official rulebook and game dictionary.

That said, grandparent post does contain a modicum of Bullshit too. Consult with your local Ph.D. economist, not zanies on the Internet.

Postscript. Congress is complicit. That goes for both Republican Congress and Democrat Congress. And the Presidents. Extra for Obama, who is the second-biggest recipient of Fannie Mae campaign contributions ever.

I agree that the Roth IRA stuff is a little tangential, but I've now bothered to look up the numbers, and there were only $77B in Roth IRAs in 2000. Even taxed at the highest rate (40%) and with nobody contributing to new Roth accounts but only doing a one-time rollover, and with the remaining trillions in non-Roth IRAs never being converted, the income to the government was at most $50B or so spread over the previous two years--a factor, perhaps, but a modest one at best given the differences in deficits (>$200B over several years).

Actually, that $127B number is a bit misleading. The total value was the reported values as of tax year 2000. We have the Dot com bubble bust and a lot of money fall from the markets which most likely deflated that a little. The article even mentions on the first page about a decline in market value of $177 Billion. So the conversion rates could have been a lot larger.

But we are also talking about capitol gains Cuts too. If you look to the very last graph, you'll notice that they underestimated the impact of capitol gains by 84 billion dollars over the first three years (97,98,99). Now, we can't take a direct inference of the total amount benefit from the capitol gains cuts because they already estimated for an increase. If we look at Table one on this page, you will notice that it took 15 years for the capitol gains realizations to move 100 billion dollars (1980-1995) but between 1997 and 200, it moved almost 300 billion. Of course the capitol gains reduction was effective in may of 1997. So when you start adding them all together, you start seeing numbers equal to most of the so called surplus.

I had noticed that the "surplus" didn't actually decrease the debt (easy enough to do, if you look at the debt graph), but I appreciate the article pointing out why. Of course, that wasn't unique to Clinton, and it didn't matter for my point (or yours, as far as I know) that Clinton actually ran a surplus--the point, which remains true when one avoids accounting gimmicks, is that Clinton reduced the level of deficit spending over quite a number of years.

Lol.. I think you missed the entire point of the articles. You see, it wasn't that Clinton did anything special or spent the money on something other then paying the debt. As was noted in the link I provided, which was created by the same author you cited in your second link as well as that article being additional support for the one I posted.... Anyways, I lost myself for a second. The point is that the article you pointed to was in support of the first article I used which stated that the surplus was only because they counted debt as income due to public trust fund laws. The example they gave was "If in a given year you earn $30,000 and a friend loans you $5,000, and you spend $32,000, is that a surplus? While you can claim "I received $35,000 and only spent $32,000, thus I have a surplus," that's a pretty weak argument when you know that $2,000 of the money you spent was actually borrowed and has to be paid back later. That's pretty much what happened in 2000."

But, anyway, back to the question of whether Bush did anything to impact whether the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. First, the point that the poor got a larger fractional tax cut than the rich is not the right number to look at--it's the *fraction of income* not the *fraction of tax* that leads to a flattening or accentuation of wealth differences. From http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/washington/08tax.html in 2004, the net wealth increase from the tax cuts was about 2% for middle-income people and about 4.5% for the top income bracket. At the same time, it is true that

Dude, we could very easily have hung out in the same arcade as kids, except for that animated keyboard machine, ("Thayer's Quest", according to another poster). --Which I do indeed remember marveling at once, although it was in another arcade downtown.

I didn't spend any money on those games when I was young either. AND I was pretty terrible at them, but an arcade in the 80's was a magical mystery tour, to be certain. It always inspired the same kind of feelings as that weird, "Heavy Metal" movie, (which South Park somehow portrayed more accurately than the original). --The smell of pot hanging in the air and the spooky look of some of the patrons, I always felt like there was a reasonable chance of never coming out alive from some of those halls, but that didn't stop me. The games were just too unbelievably wonderful to stay away from.

Have you read this article?

Nostalgia for 30-something geeks!

-FL

Did you forget about the Iraq war already? The case for an Iraq-Al Qaeda link was made based on evidence obtained on torture. That evidence, of course, was fabricated.

Here's the deal : burning hydrocarbon products causes measurable economic damage to other people besides the entity burning them. I.E. : if you burn a gallon of gas, you create air pollution. Also, your country may have to fight a war to make sure that gas is available.

Well, I'm not going to argue the so called economic damage from burning a gallon of gasoline or the completely preposterous was for oil bit. All of the later is made up fiction and the previous is within acceptable ranges. Regardless of those even hinting of existing, the point I made is still valid, the economic problem won't be fixed any time soon because of those issues I discussed. You might want to justify holding people captive with your make believe ideas but it doesn't change that fact.

Economists call these things "negative externalities". The correct approach to fixing negative externalities is to charge a tax on the activities that cause a negative externality to other people.

You realize that those are buzzwords designed to bring you on board right? The simple fact is that externalities are offset but price advantage which is especially true in the situation I laid out. Taxing the hell out of people for made up expenses and inferred damages that aren't real does nothing but cause the situations I laid out. Again, you can justify it all you want but it isn't going to change the problem I laid out. Personally, I think it is selfish of you and people like you to put so many poor people into such a difficult position because you learned a few buzz words.

This would have the net effect of making alternative energy relatively cheaper, stimulating more investment in it, and eventually replacing the use of hydrocarbons for energy altogether.

Lol.. Smoke and mirrors is your answer? Let's see, if we artificially raise this and cause those people to suffer, we can make that look more attractive. You may not want to believe that is what your doing but that is it. You mentioned some mythological war for gas that has never happened and rely heavily on concocted damages that don't exist in order to justify the expense. Well, here is the point. I don't really care how you can justify your pet projects or practice your religion, the points I made still stand. The people will continue to be disadvantaged because of your pet policies and the economy will not recover until that disadvantage is removed.

Now find a way to do both and we will have a good solution. But selfishly insisting on your way only means that the economy will not recover any time soon, eventually the normal people will see it, and anything you can get accomplished will be torn away to stop the real damage to people.

BTW, your buzzwords and externalities and such came about as justification of the original intent of the Kyoto protocol which contrary to the pushed purpose wasn't about stopping global warming, it was about alleviating the third world debt which is why out of the 150 some off countries that signed on, only 37 have limits on their production of GHGs with the ability to purchase credits from nations that pollute more then they do. Read this article and try to find out as much as you can about LEAD. Most of it has been pulled from the web but they disappeared and stopped asking for the first world to forgive the third world debt at the same time that Kyoto was being negotiated.

In other words, your being fed a political lie designed to redistribute wealth. Now note that this doesn't mean that global warming isn't real, it means that it is being used for ulterior purposes and you swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. If you would just read and study the Kyoto accords, You would see that

No, we do have a pretty good idea what happened

No, we don't. Last I checked there was only on-the-record sources for that story. So no, we don't have a good idea of what happened at all.

and we know that Bush was deeply involved

Again, no, we don't know that. We only know one person implied that.

It was certainly illegal, at least according to James Comey

Yes, based on details he won't share.

But more importantly, the plan Ashcroft was supposedly ready to resign over was, from all appearances, not the one that was actually implemented.

Wrong again. See above. The program was already running, and they were trying to reauthorize it.

Who said it was a mere reauthorization? The reporter. Did Comey say that? Not that I see. And even if he did, all we know is that there was an order -- we don't know what it said, or whether it was significantly different from a previous one -- and that he wouldn't sign it and that changes were made.

You're right. The original program was obviously much worse.

Since you have a habit of saying you know things you obviously don't, I am unsurprised you'd make such an assertion. Obviously, Ashcroft and Comey thought the one in the original authorization that wasn't signed was worse, but we know nothing more than that.

>Not much, first, since I don't even believe those stories entirely. Usually stories like that are way overblown. We don't know what happened with Ashcroft.

No, we do have a pretty good idea what happened, and we know that Bush was deeply involved. It was certainly illegal, at least according to James Comey:

"Mr. Comey, the former No. 2 official in the Justice Department, said the crisis began when he refused to sign a presidential order reauthorizing the program, which allowed monitoring of international telephone calls and e-mail of people inside the United States who were suspected of having terrorist ties. He said he made his decision after the department's Office of Legal Counsel, based on an extensive review, concluded that the program did not comply with the law."

>But more importantly, the plan Ashcroft was supposedly ready to resign over was, from all appearances, not the one that was actually implemented.

Wrong again. See above. The program was already running, and they were trying to reauthorize it.

>because what the "hero" leaked to the press was NOT what made them "freak out like that."

You're right. The original program was obviously much worse.

I agree that the Roth IRA stuff is a little tangential, but I've now bothered to look up the numbers, and there were only $77B in Roth IRAs in 2000. Even taxed at the highest rate (40%) and with nobody contributing to new Roth accounts but only doing a one-time rollover, and with the remaining trillions in non-Roth IRAs never being converted, the income to the government was at most $50B or so spread over the previous two years--a factor, perhaps, but a modest one at best given the differences in deficits (>$200B over several years).

Roth IRA data: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2893/is_4_23/ai_n6171206
Honest deficit data: http://www.craigsteiner.us/articles/32

I had noticed that the "surplus" didn't actually decrease the debt (easy enough to do, if you look at the debt graph), but I appreciate the article pointing out why. Of course, that wasn't unique to Clinton, and it didn't matter for my point (or yours, as far as I know) that Clinton actually ran a surplus--the point, which remains true when one avoids accounting gimmicks, is that Clinton reduced the level of deficit spending over quite a number of years.

But, anyway, back to the question of whether Bush did anything to impact whether the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. First, the point that the poor got a larger fractional tax cut than the rich is not the right number to look at--it's the *fraction of income* not the *fraction of tax* that leads to a flattening or accentuation of wealth differences. From http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/washington/08tax.html in 2004, the net wealth increase from the tax cuts was about 2% for middle-income people and about 4.5% for the top income bracket. At the same time, it is true that the tax code was more "progressive" afterwards than before when looking at the rates of taxation; it's just that we already barely tax middle-to-lower income folks so that we're out of room to make income more progressive (as opposed to tax levels) while still lowering taxes.

I don't think we actually disagree about debt all that much. People at all income levels go into debt to buy nonessential items, and that always makes it harder to build long-term wealth. To some extent, these are errors in judgment--and to some extent, therefore, saying that if you make these errors you will be in bad shape is a fair way to discourage these sorts of errors. But it is still of concern that people *do* make these sorts of errors and do so on a sufficiently large scale to hobble the entire economy.

The whole economic system is a human construct. People create a certain quantity of goods and services, and they also are entitled (via their income) to some fraction of those goods and services. Surely you are not saying that one cannot distribute the fraction unequally (perhaps "fairly" but unequally), and then from that starting point make it even more unequal. Of course one can do that! The key question is does that *actually* happen, and if so is the decrease in the fraction more than offset by an inexorably linked increase in the total created goods and services (inexorably because the increase comes from the incentive to increase one's own fraction).

Here's an example of such a policy: the minimum wage. The evidence that I can find: http://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/IBR/2008/fall/article1.html suggests that modest increases in the minimum wage do not influence employment numbers. Thus, within modest limits at least, altering the minimum wage is a way to influence the fraction of economic output given to various groups. Republicans blocked minimum wage increases until the Democrats had too great of control over Congress. See http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/anth

And for all the grief McCain receives about not being IT-savvy, the reason is he is unable to type, due to the injuries he suffered while being tortured by the Vietnamese.

Oh, really? There are photos here that show him using what appear to be Blackberrys and cel phones (some while behind the wheel!) and he told the New York Times "I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don't expect to be a great communicator, I don't expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need - including going to my daughter's blog first, before anything else."

He sounds sort of like my dad, really. He's a man in his mid 70s doing his best to make sense out of all of this technology that has become so important recently. Blackberrys, Blogs, Twitter etc. either weren't around or weren't all that relevant when he ran for president eight years ago and he's doing best to catch up. He'll still prefer to read a news paper, or talk on the phone with a friend. He'll dutifully visit his daughter's blog.

His war wounds no doubt cause him pain and discomfort in every thing he does in his day-to-day life, but he manages other things and it doesn't sound to me like they pose enough of a problem to prevent him from doing the best he can. Besides, he really doesn't strike me as the sort of person who would let his injuries prevent him from doing something if he really desired to do it.

Re those "splitinfinitive" taggers: Split infinitives are perfectly legal in English. Yes, in American English as well. And if they are used to change the emphasis in a phrase, they often are very useful too. They can even allow for improved clarity. So just stop to stupidly impose latin grammar rules and conventions on another language. By the way: Ending sentences with prepositions is generally OK as well.

We can thank the niggers and their contributions to the English language for all of the above. In every country in which they are found and with every language they speak, they never speak the language correctly (with the possible exception of Swahili). It's always some kind of pidgin form, and that's despite multiple generations born and raised within that country. If you put one rotten apple in an entire basket full of good apples, the good apples do not transform the rotten apple; rather, the single rotten apple corrupts all of the good apples. This is the niggers' contribution to the English language and has resulted in the lowering of standards everywhere, because after all, we'd hate to offend anyone.

There are people who are idiots and don't think things through. That's why they think someone would say what I just said out of hatred. I can desire that we stop lowering the fucking standards and I can be honest about why they were lowered without hating anyone. Just because you can't fathom that doesn't make it automatically false. So why do I use the word "niggers?" To distinguish the people I am talking about from the black people who give a shit, at least enough not to allow this to happen to them. The problem is the media doesn't have an obsession with fine, upstanding, law-abiding people who happen to be black. It has a love affair with fifth-street gangsta thug-wannabe niggers who abuse women and kill each other for money so they can buy crack, because that's just so cool, right?

Re those "splitinfinitive" taggers: Split infinitives are perfectly legal in English.
Yes, in American English as well.

And if they are used to change the emphasis in a phrase, they often are very useful too. They can even allow for improved clarity.
So just stop to stupidly impose latin grammar rules and conventions on another language.

By the way: Ending sentences with prepositions is generally OK as well.

That's the value of digital. Copies are perfect. Make lots.

This is similar to the answer that a lot of people interested in data preservation have come to over the years, including archivists and Kevin Kelly, one of the people behind the Long Now Foundation.

However, one thing that people might not think of from your advice is to keep things hot, to keep them moving. You can't tell when a bunch of burned DVDs start to go bad. Knowing whether your data is good requires constant integrity checks, to make sure that you can still get your data back.

Personally, the way I handle this is by running two hot servers in different locations with all of my critical data on both, with rsync updating nightly. With continuous checksumming turned on, that forces reads, so I know all the data is still safe.

But for those who aren't quite that geeky, then I think a service like Amazon's S3 is the way to go. You keep one local drive hot, and one set of data in the cloud. And you regularly verify that all the data you want is still there. Yes, this costs more money than another local disk. But S3 data sits in at least two spots in a secure data center on an infrastructure designed by people who really get reliability.

Look a little longer. There's (at least) hints if not outright anger at the backlash.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C03E0DF143BF932A25757C0A9659C8B63

Robbins, who said he supports the troops, noted other recent attempts to squelch free speech after criticism of the war. ''One was when my wife, who was supposed to be the guest speaker at a United Way fund-raiser in Tampa, was cancelled because of her political views.'' Another, he said, is pressure from some viewers who have threatened to boycott ABC if the network goes ahead with plans to air a situation comedy starring Janeane Garofalo, another antiwar activist.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0501/p03s01-ussc.html

Still, many entertainers known for liberalism have kept silent on the war, buttressing Mr. Robbins's notion that "a chill wind is blowing." In a speech at the National Press Club, he contended: "A message is being sent through the White House and its allies in talk radio and Clear Channel and Cooperstown: 'If you oppose this administration, there ... will be ramifications.'"

As for the Dixie Chicks - I have to admit that I'm coming up short with quotes from them showing dismay over the business side. There's certainly some negative reaction. But anything that touches on business tends to be along the lines of a sort of brush-off that said fan base wasn't important. They even begin to change their music style. And in the end, the business side really doesn't seem to suffer that much.

Having said that - show business is often trading on stardom. I still find it hard to believe that seeing one's popularity take a hit isn't damaging to someone who's careers are impacted by that popularity.

Oh please. The drought is due to lack of rain, plain and simple. How on earth do "water use policies" affect rainfall frequency and volume?

They reduce local moisture content which means less rain. Do that over all of subsahara Africa and you'll see a big drop in rainfall. The dwindling lakes are a key clue. They started before the current bout of global warming, but not before the agricultural revolution hit Africa.

Given how African's have managed to "adapt" in the last couple decades, I'd say your claim is clearly false.

And even if it were correct, many will still suffer in the meantime. Which brings me back to my original point: the current climate is optimal.

So how much responsibility should I have for people who refuse to adapt? To be blunt, I think that's the problem with Africa. Everyone else in the world with minor exceptions like North Korea are getting on with the program. Africa needs law abiding, low corruption government. It needs public health infrastructure. It needs legal systems that allow businesses to function. It needs an education system.

I think it'd be a disaster to attempt to fix Earth's climate in a particular regime.

Did I say we should? No. Nice strawman, though. In fact, I never addressed that idea at all.

You repeatedly mention "optimal" climate with respect to the current climate. I term a group of related physical states of the global climate a "regime". I just said that I think there are more important things than to maintain the "optimal" climate.

But now that you bring it up, I think it's clear through my comments that the problem is rapidity of climate change, not climate change in and of itself. And given global warming is accelerating, rapidity of climate change is only becoming more and more of a problem.

This is a reasonable concern. But I don't see a good case being made for rapid climate change. Accelerating a very slow rate of change does not mean rapid climate change. And there are upper limits to how much CO2 and other greenhouse gasses can heat up the Earth.

Agreed. Problem: if a large fraction of the world's arable land becomes unusable because of drought or flooding due to climate change, how can you raise the living standard of these people?

Answer: move them to a location that isn't so screwed up. Keep in mind that a lot of the world's unarable land in the far north is going to become arable.

Hint: raising living standards does not necessarily require "modest [amounts] of global warming".

Well, I've been seeing numerous proposals to halt or even reduce carbon dioxide emissions. For example, US President-elect Barack Obama has proposed that global carbon emissions be reduced by 80% by 2050 (in this speech, for example). No discussion of how this will affect the global economy. Which means to me that Obama doesn't know and probably doesn't care either. That sort of willful ignorance in turn strikes me as a massive harm to peoples' wealth and living standards everywhere. The weaning off from fossil fuels should be natural. It should cost more (due to scarcity and proven externalities) than the options and in that way cause a massive shift to a more sustainable infrastructure. Modifying human activity in such a massive way without a valid pretext is just going to introduce economic inefficiencies into the global economy.

Dr. Miller's data reveal some yawning gaps in basic knowledge. American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. Only about 10 percent know what radiation is. One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century.

How? You keep talking about risk and how investors didn't assess risk properly. Well, that is what interest rates are!

No, that's not true at all. A *part* of the interest rate is a risk premium. If risk goes to zero, interest rates don't go to zero.

I don't know how you can say that fixing interest rates outside of market valuation won't cause malinvestment.

I think that the more fundamental question is why it necessarily follows that they do. It seems to be based on the assumption that real interest rates don't reassert themselves over time or that the market interest rate at any given time will somehow produce the most successful investments.

Think of the individual business decision. Should I invest in widgets? It will cost me $1 billion over the lifetime of the loan, and I will reap $900 million from it. I should not make the investment. The market is indicating that it is too risky. Let's now rewind and assume the Fed, in efforts to increase spending levels higher than they otherwise would be, depressed interest rates such that it will only cost me $850 million over the lifetime of the loan. I would now decide to make the investment, even though absolutely nothing about how the market would accept the investment has changed.

Exactly how was this a malinvestment? You invested $850M and got $900M back. It would only be a malinvestment if it turned out to return less than you expected it to. The market wasn't necessarily indicating that it was too risky. In fact, there was no risk premium implicit in your description.

Relatively predictable based on... our understanding of the personality and economic philosophy of the regulator in charge? Or relatively predictable based on our understanding of market fundamentals?

Relatively predictable based on historical norms. A savy investor should be able to look at long term yield curves and decide on an investment that minimizes exposure to interest rate risk.

Actually, I only meant to point to the historical rate chart to point out that it's not very predictable. I'm not trying to suggest that page explains the housing bubble.

Well, the article purports to. But I agree with you that it doesn't.

Really, because I've heard that argument before, have never bought it, and now seems to be a bit moot: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/business/10fannie.html?ref=business [nytimes.com]

I'm not suggesting that the GSEs didn't invest in risky securities. I'm pointing out that attempting to scapegoat them for the bubble is quantitatively wrong. There are a few problems with the theory that the GSEs drove the bubble, the two most obvious being that their portfolios didn't underperform the national average and that they were losing market share through the worst excesses of the market. It's blaming the canary for the mine explosion.

I didn't say volatility didn't exist. I said the Fed creates unnatural volatility. Volatility in interest rates is a natural part of the market changing its willingness to lend money when risk changes. You can't separate interest rates from risk and then wonder why interest rates are no longer regulating risk.

Suggesting that volatility has increased since the Federal Reserve system came into effect is somewhat historically tone deaf. But more importantly, you're not drawing the distinction between the risk premium portion of an interest rate and the interest rate as a whole. If the "risk free" interest rate (let's say, good quality US government debt) drops, other interest rates will drop with it, but their spreads will still reflect the relative risk. Nothing about the change of the "risk free" rate should change those s

> That's not totally out of left field, but most economists are talking
> about a general increase in price levels when they use the word.

Price "inflation" is not very interesting. It's like saying global warming is the increase in average temperature. That's true, but it's just a measure of the underlying phenomenon.

> Because you can't talk about manipulating interest rates and their
> effect on asset prices (local or global) and not talk about inflation.
> The subjects are inherently intertwined.

??? This is only true if you're saying that "inflation" is any increase in price. But again that isn't a meaningful statement.

> it assumes that low interest rates will necessarily cause those
> malinvestments. That's what I'm quibbling with.

How? You keep talking about risk and how investors didn't assess risk properly. Well, that is what interest rates are! Interest rates index risk. I will lend you $x for your investment in Y, and I will charge you z% because I believe your investment has a w% chance of failure, which will impact my ability to get paid.

I don't know how you can say that fixing interest rates outside of market valuation won't cause malinvestment. Think of the individual business decision. Should I invest in widgets? It will cost me $1 billion over the lifetime of the loan, and I will reap $900 million from it. I should not make the investment. The market is indicating that it is too risky. Let's now rewind and assume the Fed, in efforts to increase spending levels higher than they otherwise would be, depressed interest rates such that it will only cost me $850 million over the lifetime of the loan. I would now decide to make the investment, even though absolutely nothing about how the market would accept the investment has changed.

> A consistent monetary policy is one that produces relatively predictable
> price inflation.

Relatively predictable based on... our understanding of the personality and economic philosophy of the regulator in charge? Or relatively predictable based on our understanding of market fundamentals?

> Let me pretend to be surprised that the link is from mises.org

Actually, I only meant to point to the historical rate chart to point out that it's not very predictable. I'm not trying to suggest that page explains the housing bubble.

> I'd argue against FM/FM being a major player in the low grade debt bubble

Really, because I've heard that argument before, have never bought it, and now seems to be a bit moot: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/business/10fannie.html?ref=business

> You seem to be under the impression that this cycle of volatility didn't
> exist before the Federal Reserve. I'm not sure why.

I didn't say volatility didn't exist. I said the Fed creates unnatural volatility. Volatility in interest rates is a natural part of the market changing its willingness to lend money when risk changes. You can't separate interest rates from risk and then wonder why interest rates are no longer regulating risk.

If there was no risk in an investment, the cost of capital would be zero.

> The cost of capital has always fluctuated.

Not the point!

> One thing that has never made sense to me about the Austrians' business cycle
> theory is that they attribute deep wisdom to investors when dealing with new
> information unless that new information is Fed policy. Gold price shock? No
> problem. The Fed made a relatively predictable change in the interest rate?
> Total meltdown.

The point is that interest rates are a key indicator and provide extremely valuable insight into the worthiness of an investment. The Fed's manipulation divorces interest rates from their cause, so they are no longer a valid measure.

> > The Fed manipulations alter cost-benefit analysis and result in businesses
> > inves

End result being that, no, you don't automatically fall under Geneva Convention or constitutional coverages.

The term has been around a lot longer than that, but the 'special' status where an unlawful combatant is granted no rights at all either as a POW under the Geneva Convention nor Constitutional rights is new.

I'm guessing you're referring to Quirin. However, that case was considerably different in that the detainees were granted their right to council and a trial. In addition, rather than being swept up in a combat zone, they actively entered the U.S. itself with the intention of sabotage (that is, they acted as spys).

Also, Quirin took place before the 1949 Geneva Convention (which the U.S. signed).

So the use of the term 'unlawful combatant' as a 'special' all rights removed status and the crazy sophistry to pretend it doesn't violate the Constitution or the Geneva Convention is new.

It's notable that the Supreme Court Struck Down the portions of the MCA that denied habeas to detainees, so yes, you do automatically fall under the protection of one or the other (perhaps both).

The resale of used items has to be absolute, it's all or nothing. Books, cars, CDs, games, houses, computers and so forth.

By BOB TEDESCHI
Published: July 12, 2004

  IS Amazon.com becoming the Napster of the book business?

The analogy may not be far off, say some observers of the used-book industry. Publishers, particularly textbook publishers, have long countered used-book sales by churning out new editions every couple of years. But the Web, particularly sites like Amazon and eBay, have given millions of consumers an easy way to find cheap books -- often for under $1 -- without paying royalty fees to publishers or authors.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9803E4DB113BF931A25754C0A9629C8B63

I remember reading a piece back when I was in college -- in the late eighties -- about publishers trying to find a way to outlaw sales of used books. Of course, there wasn't any way to do that. At least not back then.

A quick search online turned up an article explaining what was discovered long after the parties were all dead.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9801EED7123DE433A2575AC1A9649C94649ED7CF

According to the article, the younger brother had been a favorite, until he abandoned his wife and came to America to live in sin with another woman. Everyone assumed they were married, but in truth they were not, because he was still married to his first wife. The older brother gave up all contact with him out of disgust but never defended himself against the accusations that he had mistreated his brother by airing his family's dirty laundry in public. Charles kept supporting his sister in law for the rest of his life. Doesn't exactly sound like Scrooge now does it?

and what inheritance? from what I gather all the money was Charles.

You got pretty angry and defensive in your reply. I'm not the one claiming that there's causation here. I'm saying that proponents of anti-child porn legislation make that claim.

There have been studies linking child porn and sexual assault of children. Politicians use these links to garner support for the bill, even if there's no official document stating that this is the reason for the bill. It doesn't work for official reasons because correlation does not equal causation, but it's a good way to get people on your side because (and here's the great part) you can pretty easily say, "Prove it doesn't." That doesn't make sense--you can't prove a negative, but in the worlds that politicians and your average bloke live in, that silly detail doesn't matter.

But hell, here's a page which mentions DAs using the link between child porn and molestation to allow for stiffer penalties for what we assume (based upon a complete reading of the article and its thesis) child pornography charges.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/19/us/19sex.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1

There are other examples of people discussing the link, and whether or not there's any causation. All you gotta do is learn how to use Google.

Link that actually works.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04EEDA1E39F930A35750C0A960958260/

Not sure if it really prevents recognition..

If bountyquest couldn't get enough high quality prior art submissions by offering 10k, what makes IBM think they'll get better submissions without offering anything? Bountyquest's failure to bust the 1-click patent was quite telling of its patent-busting power. Salon.com's postmortem explained "BountyQuest tried to overcome the inability to build momentum [from a few big patent busts] by cold-calling patent lawyers and trying to sell them on the idea of running a contest for one of their cases [b]ut few have proved willing to bite." "There just didn't appear to be a market for its service." O'Reilly (one of the sponsors of the project) said in his postmortem of the project, "the patent mess is a thorny thicket that doesn't lend itself well to penetration by amateurs."

Apart from paying less to hunters and charging less to clients, how is IBM addressing these problems?

Citation needed.

My google-fu is apparently weak today. I'm having trouble coming up with sources on the matter that aren't obviously biased one way or the other. The ones that seem to give the question a fair treatment tend to put the addictiveness of the two drugs at similar levels. The NY Times article is fairly comprehensive; despite the headline claim that nicotine is more addictive, the body of the article suggests that the two are fairly comparable. Exactly what constitutes "more addictive" is so hard to pin down (and so variable person to person) that a definitive answer seems unlikely and not very meaningful; suffice it to say, the two are comparable.

The overhead of private health insurers averages 35%. The overhead of Medicare is 3%.

If Medicare provided the services that private health insurers do, it's overhear would comparable, probably even larger. Then again, you seem to be making that same argument. I wouldn't push the "efficiency" argument. The absence of the profit motive means government typically is less efficient than an equivalent private bureaucracy.

TheMeuge (645043) writes:

There, now they can wiretap our phones and internet, and jail us at will. I just feel that this was much more efficient than going through the motions for the next 10 years just to arrive at the same point.

Welcome to six years ago.

The Hoover Dam was first proposed, by Hoover, granted, in 1922. His predecessor as President, Calvin Coolidge, signed the bill authorizing it in 1928; it was never a depression recovery project per se, the money had already been allocated before there was a Depression.

Contra Amity "You're all a bunch of whiners" Shlaes, who's work has been effectively discredited by anyone who cared to think about it for five minutes.

The Hoover Dam was first proposed, by Hoover, granted, in 1922. His predecessor as President, Calvin Coolidge, signed the bill authorizing it in 1928; it was never a depression recovery project per se, the money had already been allocated before there was a Depression.

Contra Amity "You're all a bunch of whiners" Shlaes, who's work has been effectively discredited by anyone who cared to think about it for five minutes.

And where are we getting the money for this, again?

Given that the Iraq war has cost a bit over six hundred billion dollars so far, and is estimated to top out at over 1.2 trillion dollars, "from stopping the Iraq war" is a good start to answering the question where the money will come from. You know, you could do a lot with four hundred million dollars a day.

Anybody here old enough to remember the candidates talking about what they were going to do with the budget surplus, back in 2000? Or is that just some forgotten ancient history? Surplus... what a concept!

Then FDR came along. FDR didn't give a damn about the Constitution

Horseshit.

FDR threatened to pack the court

If you gave a damn about the Constitution, you might know that it doesn't limit the Supreme Court to 9 justices. There's been as few as six and as many as ten sitting justices, and FDR's plan was not only perfectly Constitutional, it had precedent. Ah, consistency: the enemy of all wingnut arguments.

Otherwise all this New Deal stuff (wage controls, price controls, etc.) would (and did) fail the Constitutionality test.

Wrong again. Promote the General Welfare. It's in the Constitution. Twice. If you're response to that is the canned "promote, not provide", Article I, Section 8 uses the word "provide." And if your response to that is that General Welfare is limited to the specific list in Section 8, then Common Defense is also similarly listed, since it's not only in the same section, but the same sentence as General Welfare.

In other words, if Social Security is unconstitutional because it's not specifically spelled out as a Congressional power, then so is the Air Force, as Congress only has the power to fund an army or a navy. As well as the CIA, the NSA, and any other intelligence agency not attached to the Army or the Navy. Ditto for our spy satellites, border patrol, and large parts of the FBI.

But I've bet you've never heard a wingnut bitch about the unconstitutionality of the New Deal and the Air Force. It's almost like their standards and ethics depend entirely on the situation, like they were partisan hacks or something. Huh, interesting.

So, I would assume the issue is what Democrats like to call the "Living Constitution" meaning that the Constitution doesn't mean what it meant when it was written/ratified, but what 5 Justices think it means today (president be damned). Like Lewis Carroll's Humpty-Dumpty, words mean only what he says they mean. Conservatives refer to these people as "Activist Judges", and in stead believe that the way to change the Constitution is via Amendments (last one passed during Clinton). In short, the Constitution is a social contract and means what it meant when written/ratified.

You mean liberal activist judges like Antonin Scalia?

The idea that liberal judges are advocates and partisans while judges like Justice Scalia are not is being touted everywhere these days, and it is pure myth. Justice Scalia has been more than willing to ignore the Constitution's plain language, and he has a knack for coming out on the conservative side in cases with an ideological bent. The conservative partisans leading the war on activist judges are just as inconsistent: they like judicial activism just fine when it advances their own agendas.

Justice Scalia's views on federalism - which now generally command a majority on the Supreme Court - are perhaps the clearest example of the problem with the conservative attack on judicial activism. When conservatives complain about activist judges, they talk about gay marriage and defendants' rights. But they do not mention the 11th Amendment, which has been twisted beyond its own plain words into a states' rights weapon to throw minorities, women and the disabled out of federal court.

The 11th Amendment says federal courts cannot hear lawsuits against a state brought by "Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State." But it's been interpreted to block suits by a state's own citizens - something it clearly does not say. How to get around the Constitution's express words? In a 1991 decision, Justice Scalia wrote that "despite the narrowness of its terms," the 11th Amendment h

"because when the earth's magnetic field reached zero temporily (it doesn't actually reached zero, it becomes chaotic, but let's assume), it stops shielding us from solar radiations, meaning cancers, mutations, and general baking of higher level lifeforms on the planet."

I've got news for you. Every time you take a flight in a plane over the pole, you're probably being "baked" to a greater degree, because the "shielding" effects of the magnetic field are much reduced in that area. The radiation dosage is indeed measurably higher by a few times, but, strangely enough, passengers aren't roasted, and while people have speculated on whether the long-term exposure experienced by pilots and crew in hundreds of such flights a year amounts to a significant lifetime increase in cancer risk, and standards have been proposed to make sure dosage isn't too much higher over the long term, it isn't enough for people to re-route or stop flying there at all.

Such an effect is arguably insignificant compared to the radiation exposure already received from the potassium, C-14, and other radioactive elements in your body and the rest of the natural environment.

And it's in a plane, above some of the shielding. There are kilometres of atmosphere to shield us from "solar radiations". On the ground you wouldn't notice a difference unless you used instruments. Loss of the magnetic field will also increase cosmic radiation dosage (which is not from the Sun), but, again, there's a thick atmosphere that has a much greater shielding effect than the magnetic field, and the effect at ground level would be very small (10% max). You'd probably get a greater radiation increase from living in an area with granite bedrock (plenty of K and U), or eating way too many bananas (which have plenty of K).

There is simply no correlation between magnetic reversals and extinctions, whether "higher life" or single-celled. The most profound effect of magnetic reversals would be on technology and navigation, not biology. Please get a clue.

Apparently they got in a bit of trouble over this - not for instituting the checklists, but for having the gall to track results to see how effective they were. Because of that, it basically becomes an experiment and you have to get all sorts of permissions.

A bit more detail in this NYTimes editorial

And some commentary from the University of Houston Law Center: here

Note that all of this is actually a bit dated - the original New Yorker article was from December, 2007 and the followups that I saw were from January, 2008. I don't know what's happened with it since then; I suspect that checklists have been implemented in some hospitals but that nobody is sharing results.

I'm sorry, but heroin is not on the same level as oral opium or even smoking opium and to make the comparison is being disingenuous.

And the statement that Benjamin Franklin was a recreational opium user seems to be unfounded, as I could not find anything on the internet stating such.

Regarding the subject, this is what I found:
Franklin using opium to manage pain
"I am so interrupted by extreme pain, which obliges me to have recourse to opium, that between the effects of both, I have but little time in which I can write anything"

A new york times book review complaining about a lack of a source

The point of the matter is, I think our drug prohibition system is horribly broken in many extreme ways down to the core. But making disingenuous arguments isn't going to get it fixed.

My guess is that Obama does not know what kind of music player he is using, does not load it and has no idea what software is involved. The difference between him and you geeks is that he has a personal assistant who has that job. Read on:

"Obama's 'body man' on his game: Ex-Duke athlete and 'good people person' Reggie Love helps keep senator fit, fed and hydrated on trail" by John Mccormick and Tribune Staff Reporter in the Chicago Tribune on November 15, 2007:

Reggie Love makes sure the water bottle is always full, the PowerBars are stocked and that the boss gets out of bed on time for his daily exercise regimen. The former football and basketball player at Duke University is what presidential campaigns call a "body man." Every major candidate has one. Love, 25, has walked - literally - in Sen.Barack Obama's shadow since February, acting as something of a traveling valetto make sure the Illinois Democrat's personal needs are met.

He snaps photos when supporters ask that their picture be taken with thecandidate, makes sure there is always a Sharpie marker at the ready forautographs and keeps the candidate's favorite music loaded on the iPod. ...

More here with pictures: "On the Court and on the Trail, One Aide Looms Over Obama" by Ashley Parker in the NYTimes on May 27, 2008.

From 1986 to 1996, Microsoft's stock soared more than a hundredfold as the company's Windows operating system and Office applications dominated the PC industry.

That explosive climb made millionaires of employees who had accepted options as a substantial part of their compensation for 60-hour workweeks fueled by a diet of Twinkies, Coca-Cola and marshmallow Peeps. The sudden riches led many to refer to themselves as "lottery winners.

"While the exact number is not known, it is reasonable to assume that there were approximately 10,000 Microsoft millionaires created by the year 2000," said Richard S. Conway Jr., a Seattle economist whom Microsoft hired to study its impact on Washington State. "The wealth that has come to this area is staggering."

The Microsoft Millionaires Come Of Age [May 29, 2005]

_____

Not everyone draws the winning hand, of course - some simply come into the game too late.

The Few, the Tech-Savvy Few: Option Millionaires [Feb 11, 2007]

For comparison's sake, Microsoft currently employs about 90,000 world-wide.

In 1990, around 6,000.