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You don't pay attention to the news much:
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyli...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01...

The lowest voter turnout in 72 years chose the Republican Party to be in charge of the Senate. The last time the Republcians had the large majority in the House was before the 1929 stock market crash. Something to think about.

“Social psychologists for decades have identified a tendency to overestimate how important personality characteristics, motivation, individual values and the like tend to be relative to the importance of the structural characteristics of a situation,” http://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.c...

Somebody doesn't read.

telling their members to vote against a candidate because she's going to take their handguns and hunting rifles away, when all she said was that she'd look into restricting sales of assault weapons.

Look into the issue and you'll find that there's no real definition of "assault weapons" and it usually comes down to simple aesthetic components that have nothing to do with the lethality of the weapon. And it's usually pushed by people who openly want to ban general ownership of guns.

From this link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09...

But in the 10 years since the previous ban lapsed, even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference.... It was much the same in the early 1990s when Democrats created and then banned a category of guns they called “assault weapons.” ... This politically defined category of guns — a selection of rifles, shotguns and handguns with “military-style” features — only figured in about 2 percent of gun crimes nationwide before the ban.

The proposal of voting with Bitcoins has a flaw of trying to solve a problem that has not been posited. People who do not vote often choose not to. Most people vote for peer pressure, or by a sense of civic duty, which washes away if one doesn't need to get out of one's basement and meet the neighborhood, family and friends, to cast a vote. Voting online has already been tried in Switzerland and it did cause the turnout to decrease(http://www.nytimes.com/...).

With respect, neither wind nor solar are credible additions to the traditional power grid.

Repeating tired winger deflection doesn't make it true. Wind and solar are already cost competitive with fossil fuels, and that's ignoring the trillion a year the U.S. spends on subsidizing the oil industry.

As to the urban environment, it is too dense to credibly use renewable energy in that way.

Because power lines that transport coal power hundreds of miles couldn't work for wind or solar farms. Or something.

Here you might say "but nuclear power is bad because some power plants built in the 50s and 60s had issues after being poorly maintained and continuously running for 50 years." Think about it.

Now that's just putting on your clown shoes. Nuclear power is by far the most expensive power source ever invented by man. No power company on the planet has rolled the future costs of plant decommission and the storing of nuclear waste for thousands of years, even if they've incorporated all the costs of plant construction, maintenance, security, ore mining and refinement.

As usual, you arguments are entirely based on ideology, not science.

Actually the magazine is deeply racist. Even conservatives like David Brooks have said things like "If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds." Of course Brooks thinks the problem is that universities aren't willing to celebrate racist speech, as if everybody deserves not just freedom of speech but that others provide them a platform for it.

And if what you are really saying is that same old canard that you can't be racist against people who share a common religion, I suggest you check your dictionary because the OED defines race as "A group of people sharing the same culture, history, language, etc."

Isn't the warming, sea level rise, and melting of ice verification? If not, what evidence could posisbly convince you?

Since it is a political fight, not a science fight, nothing will convince the deniers. Denialism is stronger thn anything you can imagine. Just like the AntiVaxxer denialists who declared that vaccines caused autism because of the mercury in the preservatives in some vaccines did not change their belief after the mercury was removed, and the autism rates remained the same, and padded the epidemic of autism by incorporation of the "autism spectrum" and were really pissed when researchers removed some people from that spectrum - they have no intention of ever changing their mind, which has been made up bsed on the collaboration od a long discredited corrupt researcher and a lawyer he was working with to make a money grab.

I only bring that up because of the similarity in modus.

That's ice surface area, which tells you only how spread out the ice is, not how much there is. You need to look at the ice mass, which is declining at an accelerating rate.

Feed in past climate data and see if your climate model can predict the past or the present accurately.

And, surprise! It does. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07...

While I agree with most of your post, what you describe here is not science. That approach turns science on its head. The scientific method begins with a reasoned hypothesis, followed by a prediction based on the hypothesis, and an experiment to prove or disprove this prediction.

Correct. The hypothesis dates back to Arrhenius 1896 http://www.lenntech.com/greenh... The numerical calculation of greenhouse warming due to carbon dioxide was first accurately done using measured value for infrared absorption and numerical integration of the profile was done in 1967 by Manabe and Wetherald-- it's summarized in any reasonable book about atmospheric science (such as the one on my desk at the moment, An Introduction to Atmospheric Radiation, by Liou (1980), p. 188). Calculating the greenhouse effect alone (that is, assuming no change in cloudiness, and constant relative humidity), Manabe and Wetherald showed "a ten percent increase in CO2 concentration (from 300 to 330 ppm) would lead to a warming of 0.3 K." It's a logarithmic response function (Arrhenius calculated that much back in 1895, although he didn't have the data to do the complete numerical integration), so it's easy to extrapolate this to the current carbon dioxide of about 400 ppm. It comes to about 0.8 K increase by their model.
Comparing it to the data, from 1967 on... looks like the experimental result matches the prediction.

Climate "science" on the other hand does exactly what you describe here. It looks at past data and attempts to fit it to a hypothesis.

Nope. The hypothesis dates back to Arrhenius. The detailed calculation dates to Manabe and Wetherald.

In any case, while the measured temperatures are a nice validation that the models are in the right ballpark, there's plenty of other data. You seem to be unaware that there is is a lot of measurements of the atmosphere.

That's not science at all. That's little more than a statistical model. These guys believe they have their answer and are trying to fit all observations to it.

That's a description of deniers. That's not the way climate science is done.

The reason we believe that the model is more or less accurate is that there are terabytes of data confirming it. The reason we don't believe that alternative models are accurate is that there aren't any. All of the alternative models proposed so far fail when compared against the evidence.

When there's an alternative model that fits the data, believe me, people will pay attention. Many people have looked very hard to come up with an alternative model. So far, no success.

You don't seem to know much about the subject, but this is not one or two scientists doing questionable work and then everybody else saying "oh, they must be right". There are thousands of scientists working on it; supercomputer models built on five different continents; ground, balloon, and satellite measurements, terabytes of data.

Isn't the warming, sea level rise, and melting of ice verification? If not, what evidence could posisbly convince you?

Actually, there _were_ WMD's (chemical weapons) in Iraq: left over from pre Gulf War I/Desert Storm. However, it's been covered up (even to our troops) since it doesn't match the narrative http://www.nytimes.com/interac...

And this is a real and serious problem.

There is one local character with a personality disorder who carefully hides online and constantly, for years, weekly attacks and smears taunts and insults local people just going about their online and offline business.

If it were fair and open criticism, so what.

If it were a national site, so what.

If they were attacking CEOs or politicians or bureaucrats... good!

But for local communities it's a real problem when people with serious asocial problems use all of their efforts, for YEARS, on a weekly basis, to simply do their best to degrade any and all online and even offline interaction and assassinate people's character out of simple avarice. They have a serious problem, and they make us part of it.

Such people always existed. There are people with profound social problems in this world who derive pleasure from hurting others in petty ways. But when you are talking about small communities, and easy carefully protected anonymity, and prolonged sustained effort fueled by a psychological disorder, you have a new phenomenon.

Not even just for the local community. It's not healthy psychologically and socially for the sick person to indulge their bad behavior rather than get help.

This article isn't my location, but here's a good write up from a few years back similar to what I and others in my small city have to deal with:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09...

And in Dee’s Place, people are not happy. A waitress, Pheobe Best, said that the site had provoked fights and caused divorces. The diner’s owner, Jim Deverell, called Topix a “cesspool of character assassination.” And hearing the conversation, Shane James, the cook, wandered out of the kitchen tense with anger.

His wife, Jennifer, had been the target in a post titled “freak,” he said, which described the mother of two as, among other things, “a methed-out, doped-out whore with AIDS.” Not a word was true, Mr. and Ms. James said, but the consequences were real enough.

Friends and relatives stopped speaking to them. Trips to the grocery store brought a crushing barrage of knowing glances. She wept constantly and even considered suicide. Now, the couple has resolved to move.

“I’ll never come back to this town again,” Ms. James said in an interview at the diner. “I just want to get the hell away from here.”

In rural America, where an older, poorer and more remote population has lagged the rest of the country in embracing the Internet, the growing use of social media is raising familiar concerns about bullying and privacy. But in small towns there are complications.

The same Web sites created as places for candid talk about local news and politics are also hubs of unsubstantiated gossip, stirring widespread resentment in communities where ties run deep, memories run long and anonymity is something of a novel concept.

a weak, poor country can be defeated in myriad ways

china doesn't have to militarily invade siberia. it can just corrupt officials, pay russian legislators to make laws friendly to it, own all of the companies operating in siberia, flood the area with immigrants, etc

such that the map may say russia, but for all intents and purposes, it will be china's siberia

russia showed us how to unilaterally take another country's sovereign territory with crimea

flood the area with your own citizens. then they simply announce what country they really are a part of after some political turmoil in the country's capital. which, weak as russia is, should be easy for a rich china to corrupt

bloodless

http://abcnews.go.com/Internat...

sure, texas being snatched form mexico wasn't bloodless, but by the time the mexicans put up a fight, it was too late: the immigrant population had already tipped allegiances

the change will be slow and inevitable. nobody will nuke anyone because it won't be an overnight military invasion. just immigration leading to gradual social and political realignment, helped along by corrupting influence

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfor...

you'll never see a republican suggest free school (unless its a 'jesus is god' school, of course).

Tennessee Governor Urges 2 Free Years of Community College and Technical School

Looks to me like Obama stole a Republican's idea.

this is one of the first good ideas obama has shown, and one that is much more linked with the democratic party.

If it was his, I would agree, but alas, looks like even 6 years in, he has not had one single good idea.

Have you seen the cartoons? They aren't much more than being assholes for the sake of being assholes. Like neo-nazis marching in a jewish neighborhood. So it is pretty fucked up that we have to side with one group of assholes against a group of even bigger assholes. At least "The Interview" had entertainment value that didn't cater to racism.

That said, the only option in the short term is to suck it up because the cartoons aren't just racist cartoons anymore, they are now also symbols of civilization over depravity. So when the AP decided to censor them it was messed up. It gets even worse now that the AP has decided to censor other blasphemous photos like Serrano's Piss Christ. It would be kind of like Universal Pictures pulling the Last Temptation of Christ from circulation because Sony pulled The Interview, despite the fact that nobody considered censoring it back when one theater showing it was burnt to the ground, injuring 12, audiences in others got tear gassed and Scorsese got death threats.

Interesting thing about the US. We really do force the construction trades to be licensed, bonded, insured.

In much of the USA it is common to drop by Home Depot and pickup Hispanic day laborers for your construction project. Some articles about it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/10/national/10depot.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/1v3n6x/day_laborers_in_homedepot_parking_lot/

"How many times has this administration embraced a petition and moved forward with it?"

How many times has this administration helped make the U.S. government better for its citizens in any way?

The U.S. government has been arranging that the rich get richer, allowing the violent to be more violent, and helping those who want to make money by killing people.

For example, the "Affordable Care Act" is, in my opinion, in the direction of other recent changes in government. Instead of 2 organizations between you and a health care provider, there now are 3 or 4. The ACA gathers money from those like myself who never get sick. See, for example, Oregon Health Care Cost Increases under the Affordable Care Act.

The ACA was announced and pretended to be in operation before the software was ready: How Obamacare's epic fail exposed our government's biggest tech problem. Whoever is at the top of the U.S. government was obviously completely incompetent. (Often a U.S. president merely pretends to be in charge, hiding what is actually happening, and who is arranging it.)

The ACA helped technology companies take advantage of state officials who are completely ignorant about technology development. For example, Oregon sues Oracle over failed Obamacare website.

Quoting: Oregon's suit, filed Friday in state court, alleges that Oracle, the largest tech contractor working on the website, made falsely convinced officials to buy "hundreds of millions of dollars of Oracle products and services that failed to perform as promised." It is seeking $200 million in damages.

If you love the U.S. like I do, help deal with the immense problems and lack of good leadership.

How about a non-Islam run country? The United States doesn't exactly have clean hands in this regard.

No, it really is kind of a big deal. WebMD is for-profit and largely funded by advertisers such as pharmaceutical companies. The site uses clickbait-style headlines to drive page views and actively preys on fear.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02...
http://www.washingtontimes.com...

(I replied to the wrong post above, sorry for the dupe)

No, it really is kind of a big deal. WebMD is for-profit and largely funded by advertisers such as pharmaceutical companies. The site uses clickbait-style headlines to drive page views and actively preys on fear.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02...
http://www.washingtontimes.com...

I paid $100 for a 512MB compact flash card in late 2004, or $200 per GB. I just ordered a 32GB USB 3.0 flash drive for $13, or $0.41 per GB. A 500-fold decrease in cost in just 10 years.

Moore's Law does not apply to jet engines.

The affordability also hinges on income (productivity per person), which has more than doubled since the 1940s

Nominal income hasn't significantly changed in the US since 2000, and has only improved 20% since 1980 (that's less than 3% per year). Productivity has gone up but all the gains have accrued to the highest income percentiles. So you're right, somebody will be able to buy flights on the aerospike liner, but it's not going to be something that "people" do, it'll be for the rich.

They didn't publish a retort from a respected scientist after publishing a some complete woo by a charlatan.

It's considered good journalistic practice to publish responses or apologies when you fuck up - not that I'm implying that WSJ deserves such high expectations.

Some of the best essays I've read were letters of rebuttal in the WSJ editorial page.

The WSJ is a useful catalog of right-wing stupidity. When they were good, they published both sides of the argument. (Once in a rare while, they were actually right.)

I used to read them religiously every day, back in the days of paper, but I stopped after Murdoch bought them. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12... It was the greatest tragedy that journalism has ever suffered.

Remember all the fans adoring Candidate, President-elect, and even President Obama for his use of Blackberry? While mocking McCain for his inability to even use keyboard (because his hands were repeatedly broken by the People's Torturers in North Vietnam)?

In all likelihood, Megan J. Smith was one of the fans... Possibly, even with a special female twist to it...

Well, maybe, the job of running the Executive government's bureaucracy is just too difficult? TFA certainly suggests that... But that's exactly the job, Obama was hired for, darn it. There were people pointing out his shortage of executive experience — he never ran things (other than a failed charity — once), but this was countered, incredibly, by how he ran his election campaign...

Well, here we go — either he was never as advanced technologically as he and supporters portrayed him, or he has no ability to execute — to run things... Certainly not enough of it to affect the oft-promised change. Management is hard, let's go golfing.

Supreme Court Ruling Allows Strip Searches for Any Arrest.

The percentage of the U.S. population in prison is higher than any other nation in the world.

Secret U.S. government agencies give very profitable secret contracts to what is called the Beltway Bandits. U.S. taxpayers pay, both in money and in the resulting inflation.

The Bush family makes money by getting taxpayers to pay for war: The Bush-Saudi Connection. There is an entire book about that: House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties.

Interesting. No global warming in 17 years... what a funny number, 17. It's a prime number. Why not 10 years, 20, or even 100? Why are "skeptics" always so hung up on 1997 as the baseline for all global warming trends? Does it have anything to do with the fact that the 1997-1998 El Nino event generated a record year for high temperatures? I was just getting interested in the science of global warming when this phenomenon hit, and I remember NASA scientists warning everyone that we could not blame rising carbon dioxide levels for the anomalously hot temperatures of those two years.

Ironic that 17 years later, the 1997-1998 El Nino event is now the holy grail baseline year to which all skeptics cling like a polar bear to a melting iceberg. In 2008 the skeptics were using this baseline to claim that global cooling was taking place. Then, as yearly record high temperatures kept happening, they used this baseline to claim that global warming had flatlined. Now, just eight years later, the trend from 1997 is on an incline, but the skeptic story is that temperatures aren't warming as fast as predicted. Keep clinging to 1997, you are just one El Nino event away from looking really really silly.

As for the WattsUpWithThat blog, I used to respect it until Anthony Watts pulled a 180 on accepting the findings of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project. Originally he said he would accept the findings whatever they may be because it was funded by the Koch Brother's, but when the independent research led by a prominent skeptic further confirmed Global Warming was real, Watt's rejected it. The man has zero credibility at this point.

Even assuming that we do invent those magic baseload batteries soon, your all-renewable energy system is a wavery network (requiring a "smart grid", to be built from scratch at the cost of teradollar or so) of fluctuating sources requiring vast amounts of mechanical maintenance. I would rather have a few AP-1000s chugging away in secluded valleys while we work on getting thorium up to commercial speed.

Cautionary tale: Germany is now in the throes of building out its smart grid. The flat-earth lobby, now that it no longer has anything nuclear yo protest, has turned its attention to stopping the new transmission lines needed to bring renewable power to market:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12...

Yup, a fully stocked, sealed bomb shelter in the Brooklyn Bridge, NYTimes link here

The Dow gained 64.73 points to 18,024.17 That's up 0.4 percent from its previous high, on Monday. The latest close is the Dow's second 1,000-point milestone this year after closing above 17,000 for the first time in July. The S.&P. 500 rose 3.63 points to 2,082.17. That's a gain of 0.2 percent from its previous high, a day earlier. The Nasdaq composite fell 16 points, or 0.3 percent, to 4,765.42.

Sure. Take Snow White for example. Nobody owns a character from a fairy tale.

My thought, exactly. However, it will be difficult to do when we have a voter turnout of 36.3%.

When the polling places are empty, and the line is several blocks long at the 'Pawn Stars' store, we are seriously fucked. This picture was taken on election day, 2012, a presidential election. It was posted by Ross Miller, the Nevada candidate for attorney general.

Kirribati Islands. The water supply is already compromised by sea water, they are in the process of moving the population to Fiji. http://www.nytimes.com/interac...

Whoa. The articles says that the babies are bundled up, so I'm sure that they're warm. But regardless of the babies state of dress and temperature, *they leave them outside*??? In the U.S., that would get you arrested for child neglect.

Yes, that happens: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/05...

Let go though, because there is no neglect involved. We are just not living in constant fear of things that are mostly imaginary.

Authors will not longer be paid based on content. Write a bad book, but find a way to get people to download your book, and you make money, even if most readers stop at page 10. We will see more and more bad books because money can be made with them, those bad books will take profit away from authors who make great books.

Personally $10 is too much since I would not even finish 2 books in that time. that is why I never bothered spending $80+ on a ereader. My cousin on the other hand would read 40 books in that time. There is now less of a reason to switch to e-books if book quality goes down.

And with hardcover meat-world books? People buy those and don't read them.

Hell, reviewers don't seem to read them.

How many reviews of Lena Dunham's book Not That Kind of Girl mentioned the fact Dunham bragged about sexually assaulting her little sister?

Ms. Dunham’s smart, funny new book, “Not That Kind of Girl,” is a kind of memoir disguised as an advice book, or a how-to-book (as in how to navigate the perilous waters of girlhood) in the guise of a series of personal essays.

THIS is a how-to book:

One day, as I sat in our driveway in Long Island playing with blocks and buckets, my curiosity got the best of me. Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina.

Yeah, that reviewer READ that book, THEN called it a "how-to" manual.

Damn, imagine if Dunham were a UVa frat boy or Duke lacrosse player...

You are poorly informed.

About?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09...

Certificate Authority:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Old news virtually everyone here knows well.

Loss of Trust:
Information provided by Edward Snowden

Trust? What the fuck are you smoking???... The prior US administration LIED and started a goddamn war under completely false pretenses leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands displacing millions over the course of a decade...not a little privacy invasion or reading love letters...but grand fucking high crimes against humanity. A *DECADE* ago we found out about NSA collection of *ALL* domestic phone records.... As much as I love Ed Snowden there was no trust remaining to lose when he spoke out.

I trust the Internet was insecure and all kinds of TLA's and assorted bad actors were exploiting to the hilt from the very start. Security is our responsibility...nobody else's.

Those are singular examples to the issues I spoke of, there are many, many more.
In addition, only a small percentage of data has been released to the public from the "Snowden Cache", if it was all released maybe people like you would finally STFU

The only thing you have enumerated was bullshit about SSL and HSTS which were factually incorrect and demonstrate your lack of knowledge of underlying technology. It shows you can read technical articles without having a firm grasp of fundamentals. The rest is just bloviating about enumeration of unspecified this and that's ...you have nothing specific to say.

If anything what Snowden told us is that the systems we *know* are secure really are a PITA even for the NSA to crack...Snowden himself said as much during a hearing he remotely participated in from Russia and in several televised interviews with reporters earlier in the year.

The underlying point remains running around yelling "How can you trust anything" ... is not helpful in any way... It spreads FUD and makes no positive contribution.

You are poorly informed.
Encryption:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09...

Certificate Authority:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Loss of Trust:
Information provided by Edward Snowden

Those are singular examples to the issues I spoke of, there are many, many more.
In addition, only a small percentage of data has been released to the public from the "Snowden Cache", if it was all released maybe people like you would finally STFU.

#10? White House Hosts Next Generation' Young and Rich: "The daylong conference was organized by Thomas Kalil, a deputy director for technology and innovation in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, with the help of Nexus, a youth organization based in Washington that seeks to "catalyze" the next generation of billionaire philanthropists and other stakeholders.."

Let's reduce the percentage of women STEM even more.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03...

Actually there were WMD's in Iraq
http://www.nytimes.com/interac...

And America should have nuked whichever country supplied them to Saddam, zero tolerance and such.

Correct, Michael Brown's initial offense was that he walking on the street instead of the sidewalk.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11...

"But for some experts, the shooting and the events that preceded it raised broader policy questions, particularly about how officers engage with communities they patrol. In his initial encounter with Mr. Brown and his friend in the street, Officer Wilson never exited his vehicle, voicing commands through the window of his cruiser instead.

âoeThe notion of riding through neighborhoods yelling, âGet up on the curbâ(TM) or âGet out of the street,â(TM) is not where you want your officers to be,â Mr. Bealefeld said. âoeYou want them out of their cars, engaging the public and explaining to people what it is you are trying to do. Drive-by policing is not good for any community.â

Basically the officer drew his gun when Brown wouldn't get off the street.

Nancy Grace (pretty darn conservative and an ex prosecutor) found the officer's story rehearsed and not credible. Basically his testimony was a lie.

A CAMERA would have negated all the ambiguity and saved hundreds of thousands in property damage and perhaps even saved lives.

Cameras protect the public AND cameras protect the police.

The legality of it depends on the copyright laws of the country you live in... I'll let the ethicist from NYTimes magazine answer the matter of whether or not you have the moral authority to pirate an ebook if you own the paperback.

Believe it or not, at one point, someone tried to get Bridge qualified as an Olympic "sport".

Luckily, they failed.

Better to have cameras than not; maybee...... juries can be played by selective use of cams, excluding other cam footage, and plain old laying a trap for the unwary citizen.

You asked: I read the news. Google for you:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ka...
"But it goes both ways; video – or the lack of it – can also damn officers. Two on the Daytona Beach force lost their jobs after a video mysteriously blanked out in the middle of an encounter with a woman who allegedly hid a bag of cocaine in her mouth; she said the officers knocked her down, shoved a flashlight between her lips and kicked her in the head, but that part of the encounter wasn’t caught on film thanks to one officer failing to turn his camera on and a “malfunction” with the other officer’s camera midway through the arrest. A forensic analysis of the cam showed that the “malfunction” was caused by the officer shutting it down. Chief Chitwood has said the policy there is, “If you turn it off, you’re done.”"

That's Daytona. In Oakland. Mysteriously Shut Off Camera Syndrome doesn't hurt and officer much:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
"OAKLAND, Calif.—Over the last two years, the Oakland Police Department (OPD) has disciplined police officers on 24 occasions for disabling or failing to activate body-worn cameras, newly released public records show. The City of Oakland did not provide any records prior to 2013, and the OPD did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/...
"Hargraves was found to have violated policy by taping over his nametag, and Wong was found to have acted improperly by failing to report the incident to internal affairs and also turning off Hargraves' lapel camera"

http://crooksandliars.com/susi...
"However, the above video, which shows several officers with their body-mounted cameras turned off – a departmental violation - is just the latest example of Oakland police officers not wanting any accountability.The video is also a clear demonstration of just how high tensions are between Oakland police and citizens."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12...
"In other cases it was the absence of video that got the officer in trouble. An officer in Daytona Beach, Fla., was forced to resign after he was caught turning off his camera at critical moments. An Albuquerque officer who shot and killed a woman in April — and whose camera was off at the time — was fired on Monday after being investigated for not complying with department orders that required officers to record all interactions with civilians.

But even when video does exist, it is often not decisive. In the case of Mr. Garner, the Staten Island man who died in July after a police officer put him in a chokehold, a video of the encounter taken with a bystander’s cellphone and viewed millions of times was enough to stir visceral outrage — but not to secure an indictment."

The records show that on November 8, 2013 one officer was terminated after failing to activate his camera. Less than two weeks later, another resigned for improperly removing the camera from his or her uniform. However, most officers received minor discipline in comparison."

Antenna removal:
http://www.latimes.com/local/l...
"os Angele

It stays strong because if anyone with the ability to actually do something about it is stupid enough to speak out against it, we make them regret it.

FTFY

I never have understood the world's fetish with the US dollar.

It stays strong because if anyone is stupid enough to speak out against it, we make them regret it.

Don't fuck with the U.S. Dollar.

Yeah, but in the past those lawsuits cast the Feds as the bad guys (which they are of course) but in this lawsuit, the Feds are the putative good guys (LOL). Considering how rotten and corrupt the system is, top to bottom, I would be surprised if they dismissed this case on standing grounds. They'll wiggle around that in some way because in the American court system of today, getting to a specific predetermined result by any twisted means is what counts.

For example, when justice Roberts commented on the recent case in which it was determined that ignorance of the law is no excuse, unless you are a cop, he supported that opinion with this:

Chief Justice Roberts conceded that the court's decision at first blush ran afoul of the maxim that "ignorance of the law is no excuse."

On reflection, he said, the maxim holds the government and its citizens to the same standard where it counts.

"Just as an individual generally cannot escape criminal liability based on a mistaken understanding of the law," Chief Justice Roberts wrote, "so too the government cannot impose criminal liability based on a mistaken understanding of the law."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12...

They aren't even trying to pretend they are making sense any longer. They just talk horseshit and expect us to eat it.

*That particular" machine would charge less because they wanted to promote that beverage.

However, Coke was also looking at machines that would charge more when it was hot out. See http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10... for one example.

Maybe your clues are wrong.

North Korea faces famine: 'Tell the world we are starving'

More than a decade after North Korea was struck by a famine that killed up to a million people, the country's poorest are once again facing starvation, reports Peter Foster in Yanji

Pyongyang’s Hunger Games

... during the great famine of the 1990s, between 600,000 and 2.5 million people died of hunger. According to the commission’s report, the North Korean regime, then headed by Kim Jong-il, obstructed the delivery of aid to the hungriest regions until 1997, and punished those who tried to earn, buy, steal or smuggle in enough food to survive. The regime was “well aware of the country’s deteriorating food situation” as it stocked airfields, reactors and palaces, rather than food stores.

According to one expert witness testimonial before the commission, the North Korean regime, at the height of the famine, could have closed its food gap by importing between $100 and $200 million worth of food each year, which is just 1 to 2 percent of its national income. Yet rather than using foreign food aid to supplement its own commercial food imports, the commission found that Kim Jong-il used aid “as a substitute for” them, cutting back on commercial food imports when more aid arrived. By contrast, the State Department estimates that in 1997, at the peak of the famine, North Korea’s annual military budget was $6 billion.

If automation enables a human to do the work of ten people, and of demand is limited (a key point), then the need for 90% of jobs in that area goes away. Automation does not have to be 100% to have a have big effect on employment.

The Japanese are working hard on health care robots for their aging populations. Again, a robot that could do 90% of tasks, or let one real person support ten people via indirect means like tele-operation will change the employment dynamics of that field. Even just a doubling of effectiveness could make a huge difference -- even just by removing travel time or data logging for, say, a visiting nurse.

Other ways automation can change health aid employment is if people had more free and then could care for elderly relatives directly. Humans still provide the care, but it is outside formal employment. Also, even without more free time, a telepresence robot could let distant relatives care for an elderly relative, perhaps even doing physical tasks like the laundry if the robot manipulators had haptic feedback through the internet.

By the way, for stuff like showers, there are already machines for that for nursing homes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03...
"With an electronic whir, the machine released a dollop of "peach body shampoo," a kind of body wash. Then, as the cleansing bubbling action kicked in, Toshiko Shibahara, 89, settled back to enjoy the wash and soak cycle of her nursing home's new human washing machine."

Also, on robot lawyers:
http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/2...
"The law profession is being reshaped by new automation technologies that allow law firms to complete legal work in a fraction of the time and with far less manpower. Think IBM's "Jeopardy!"-winning computer Watson -- practicing law. "Watson the lawyer is coming," said Ralph Losey, a legal technology expert at the law firm Jackson Lewis. "He won't come up with the creative solutions, but when it comes to the regular games that lawyers play, he'll kill them." That means potentially huge cost savings for clients, though it's not so promising for law school graduates looking for work. The good news for lawyers is that no one thinks the profession can be automated entirely. But lots of legal work is already being computerized by some firms, including the drafting of simple contracts and the search for evidence in reams of documents."

There, stuff you said would never happen has already happened to some extent -- enough to make a difference to employment outlooks! And that is often the case in such discussions, as much as it is also possible to overestimate the difficulty of replacing humans in some tasks. As I mention in a previous post, what often happens with automation is that the task itself gets redesigned to be easier to automate (probably what happened with the bath). Or as in factories, the environment gets systematically structured so robots can navigate it within their limitations. Also, automation can often take the low-hanging fruit from a job (like legal search) which may eliminate 90% of the billable hours from some task while also removing the ladder by which an apprentice provides value to learn a trade and move up the employment ladder.

Of course, the good news is this means consumer prices will drop. But someone unemployed with zero income can't afford legal services or health services even if they are 1/10th the cost.... At least not without some form of "income" from the government or charity. Or, alternatively, some sort of gift of capital of personal robots to be used for local subsistence production or perhaps selling robot-produced products and services for exchange credits (sort of like renting your PC's idle time to bigger number crunching projects).

Also, since when do services have to be entirely *better* to compete? If I told you, you can hire a human health aid for US$4000 a month for e

.
Looks like the state Attorneys General are the newest benefactor of policital contributions in the ongoing purchasing of our government by special interests.