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Bushitler wouldn't be in office forever. Hoping for a change, we finally have a real chance of electing a President, who is both technologically savvy and committed to open government!

Oh, wait...

When collecting and analyzing data is difficult, the solution is not to stop collecting data. It's to collect more data, and try harder.

Education researchers have been collecting and analyzing data since at least 1970. Most people agree that the NAEP has the best overall data. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsrepo... There are other more specialized studies.

Diane Ravitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... studied the data when she was an assistant secretary of education and a conservative writing editorials for the Wall Street Journal. She believed that standardized testing could tell you which teachers were good and bad, and she was trying to figure out how to do it. She finally gave up, and admitted she was wrong. It can't be done. The data was able to give broad, general trends among large populations, like black students vs. white students, or wealthy students vs. poor students, but it couldn't identify which schools were good or bad, and it definitely couldn't tell you which teachers were good or bad.

Ravitch (and every other education researcher) said that the main factor that predicted student test scores was family income. It wiped out everything else.

Further, I'd much rather have guesses based on some data, than guesses based on nothing.

That's not the way statistics works. If you have statistically invalid data, that's not "some data," that's noise. If you base hiring and firing decisions based on noise, you have unfair, arbitrary firings.

Here's an example:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03...
On Education
Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie
By MICHAEL WINERIP
March 6, 2011

A new New York City middle school teacher was doing a great job, in the opinion of her principal and everyone else, working 10-hour days, her students were getting good grades, and admission to the specialized science high schools. As the article explains, she was a good teacher in every way that you could judge a teacher.

Yet, according to a New York City high-stakes test algorithm, her students didn't improve enough from one year to the next, and they placed her in the bottom 7% of teachers. So the principal couldn't hire her again the following year, as she wanted to. However, the confidence interval of that 7% was 0 to 52%. So she could have been in the top half. Any statistician will tell you that this 7% is meaningless. I read medical studies all day, and if the confidence interval is that wide, you say that there's no correlation. Not some correlation. No correlation.

The problem this teacher had was that she was teaching a class of good students. Good students already have high grades, in the high 90s. Once your grades are at the top of the scale, you have nowhere to improve. So the best teachers, with the best students, were getting the worst rankings because their students didn't improve enough on the tests. Teachers all over the country were complaining about this. The test people really don't have an answer.

How would you like it if you were driving 35 mph, and a cop gave you a speeding ticket because, according to his poorly-calibrated radar gun, there was a 25% probability that you were driving 70 mph? How would you like to get fired because, according to your urine test, there was a 25% probability that you were using opioid drugs?

And lastly, if teachers only account for 1-14% of test results, that tells me that we need some dramatic improvement in teacher quality.

This is true of every education system, all over the world, free market, socialist, high stakes testing, low stakes testing, charter schools, public schools, Catholic schools, everything.

As I said before, the most important factor is the child's family income. If you wa

Very well, I'll hand the ball back to you. What metric *should* we use to judge teacher performance?

Experienced, successful teachers know how to judge other teachers. Some of those teachers go on to become principals and administrators.

One of the jobs of a principal is to sit in the classroom of a teacher and evaluate how well the teacher is doing. You can't replace that principal with a Touring machine (which is what student testing is).

Significantly, the principal doesn't evaluate the teacher to decide whether the teacher should be fired. If the teacher is doing something wrong, the principal teaches the teacher how to do it right. These high-stakes testing and anti-tenure movements keep talking about firing teachers. That reveals their hostility to teachers and unions. They're not trying to make better schools.

How would you like it if your kids weren't doing well in school, and the school dealt with it by kicking them out and telling them to prepare for a life as an unskilled worker? How would you like it if you were having problems with something at work -- perhaps because they didn't give you the resources you need to do your job -- and your employer dealt with it by firing you and getting somebody else?

Here's a story from the New York Times about how a principal rated a teacher very highly, but the student testing formula that New York City used said that she was in the lowest 7th percentile of teaching. As a result, the principal couldn't rehire the teacher next year. But her students were doing very well, and getting into the top NYC high schools, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. In addition, the testing formula had a confidence interval of 0 to 52nd percentile. Do you know what a confidence interval is? Her 7th percentile ranking was statistically meaningless. Even according to that formula, she might have been in the top half of teachers. She was a good teacher. The formula was wrong.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03...
On Education
Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie
By MICHAEL WINERIP
Published: March 6, 2011

Department of Education accountability formula ranks an apparently excellent teacher as 7th percentile, prevents her from being rehired and maybe from getting tenure. Confidence interval 0-52nd percentile.
Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies, Stacey Isaacson, teaching 7th grade English and social studies 2y. Works 7am-5:30pm.

Over 2 dozen students went to Stuyvesant High School or Bronx High.

Formula ranks Isaacson 7th percentile among her teaching peers.

If mayor and governor have their way, layoffs based on formulas, Isaacson is sure she would be laid off.
Math and English teachers get teacher data report. Isaacson’s students had prior proficiency score of 3.57. Her students predicted 3.69 based on comparable students, actually scored 3.63. Isaacson’s value added is 3.63-3.69.

Calculation based on 32 variables. Margin of error for Isaacson’s 7th percentile 0 to 52nd percentile, which would have made her eligible for tenure.

I agree, we should stick to the science. Here you go:

• The peer-reviewed Journal "Nature Climate Change" includes and references thousands of scientific papers on the subject.
• The IPCC's 1,500-page "Physical Science Basis" report cites hundreds of references and is authored by hundreds of experts. It clearly states what we know, don't know, and how we know it. It reviews its past predictions, notes where its models have errored, and takes into account an incredible wealth and scope of scientific observations over 150 years.
• The IPCC also makes all of its data and models available for review. So you can see for yourself.
• The US Government also recently updated its regularly scheduled report written by over 300 experts.
• The USGS has a Climate Model Browser that lets you try out all the different simulated predictions for Global Warming. You'll notice the specifics vary widely, but they all predict dramatic temperature rises.
• The NOAA has a National Climate Data Center where you can watch the temperature trends. Here's a visualization based on the data.
• The United States Defense department has several reports on the risks posed by Global Warming (see here, here, here, and here).
• The Center for Coastal Resources Management (CCRM) has produced some excellent reports on sea level rise due to Climate Change to inform local communities like Norfolk VA, where flooding is already a major issue, what to expect in the near future due to Global Warming.
• You can also watch the sea levels rise at the NOAA's Sea-Level Trends website.
• If you don't trust the government, then I recommend The Berkely Earth Project. It was funded by the liberal's favorite bad guys, the Koch Brothers, but its results were so compelling that the lead Climatologist, Richard A. Muller, wrote a piece for the New York Times announcing he was no longer a skeptic.
• Of course, it's always good to have a contrarian viewpoint in the mix, and for that, I recommend AGW skeptic Judith Curry, who presents valid challenges to the consensus with her strong scientific background. I don't find her convincing, but her challenges make for good food for thought.

If you dispute this science, then I recommend publishing your own peer-reviewed papers, your own models, and your own alternative hypotheses in the scientific journals. I see a lot of skeptics nit-picking the science, but not many actually taking the effort to publish in the scientific forums.

I eagerly await one of the skeptics out there to please post an equally substantive list of references to "balance" my citations, so everyone can review and compare them.

The global recession puts the lie to your notion that not doing business with banks means I'm free of their ill effects.

Nope. You are only affected as much as you were involved with the banks — being there customer or an employee, or dealing with other people, who were. But the recession was not the bank's fault — rather it is that of the politicians, who forced banks (with the threat of "discrimination" lawsuits) to give money to unqualified borrowers.

1. Forging a higher stated income onto loan documents so they could lend more money

Nope. It was not the banks doing the forging — it was the applicants. Bank-employees may have looked the other way, but the actual forgery was done by the customers.

2. Giving loans to people that they knew would not be able to afford it

Refusing to issue such a loan was to expose the firm to a discrimination lawsuit. But, once again, you are ignoring the role of the actual applicants, who lied on their applications — putting the blame solely on those, who were supposed to catch the lies.

3. Offering minorities ARM loans or loans with much higher interest rates than they would offer to white borrowers with the same credit score.

Citation needed.

Issuing repayable loans is the banks' bread-and-butter. That's, what they do. They normally have every incentive to issue as many loans to qualified borrowers as they can, while keeping the unqualified out. The bubble started, when the government messed up those incentives by, on the one hand, suspecting every rejection of being racially-motivated and, on the other, lowering the standards, under which banks could unload (sell) their loans to the government. It was this combination, that created the mortgage bubble — not some inherent evil of the "banksters".

Blaming the borrower ignores the mountains of evidence showing wildly illegal, fraudulent, and outright deceptive behavior by the loan industry

Nope. The borrower signing a fraudulent loan application is the main guilty party. Those failing — willfully or otherwise — to catch his lies may be somewhat responsible too, but the primary responsibility is with the applicant.

If you don't know this stuff, you must be willfully ignoring the facts

Yeah, yeah. And if I don't agree with you, I must be stupid and incompetent.

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepa...
This graph indicates the opposite is true.

The issue is that the US has always been an oligarchy of the rich, realistically it came into being due to a tax revolt.
Money out of politics is not only possible, if you look else where in the world with functioning democracies and functioning electoral systems you can find examples:

In Germany
http://www.theatlantic.com/int...

In Canada (with legislated limits)
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

or see Frances new laws limiting funding
http://www.loc.gov/law/help/ca...

If you believe that money is the only power then you have already been brainwashed to give up your democratic rights.

The average US Senate seat apparently costs ~ $7 million.

The entire Canadian Election spending per party ~ $21 million.

Obama spent well over $400 million for just his presidential campaign.

Think about what could be done with $379 million to address real problems in the US like education, healthcare etc....

The reason the rich are willing to waste their money is because they have too much of it (mainly because of tax law changes).
The average CEO salary in the US is now $10 million per year! Yet they pay less than 20% in taxes!

Even Warren Buffet thinks its time to tax the rich.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11...

If you did that the money that might otherwise be spent on political campaigns might actually do some good like funding education or public healthcare etc...

But then according to your brainwashing program the only power is money and any country that tries to democratically regulate the market (an artificial construct that only exists because of the enforcement of property laws) must a communist country (Canada) how else can we have publicly funded healthcare...
keep drinking the kool-aid, in the mean time we'll outlive you. Yes life expectancy is higher here, as is quality of life.

Really???? His hyperloop idea is just bolloks. It would work, if that highway didn't make any turns. However, it does so the passengers would get really damaged at those proposed speeds.

How can I say this? None of your assertions have any factual support.

When you say "the most dangerous cities to live in today, are precisely those cities with the strictest gun control" you are making things up.

How can I make this assertion? N.R.A. Stymies Firearms Research, Scientists Say

The amount of money available today for studying the impact of firearms is a fraction of what it was in the mid-1990s, and the number of scientists toiling in the field has dwindled to just a handful as a result, researchers say.

The dearth of money can be traced in large measure to a clash between public health scientists and the N.R.A. in the mid-1990s. At the time, Dr. Rosenberg and others at the C.D.C. were becoming increasingly assertive about the importance of studying gun-related injuries and deaths as a public health phenomenon, financing studies that found, for example, having a gun in the house, rather than conferring protection, significantly increased the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.

Alarmed, the N.R.A. and its allies on Capitol Hill fought back. The injury center was guilty of “putting out papers that were really political opinion masquerading as medical science,” said Mr. Cox, who also worked on this issue for the N.R.A. more than a decade ago.

Initially, pro-gun lawmakers sought to eliminate the injury center completely, arguing that its work was “redundant” and reflected a political agenda. When that failed, they turned to the appropriations process. In 1996, Representative Jay Dickey, Republican of Arkansas, succeeded in pushing through an amendment that stripped $2.6 million from the disease control centers’ budget, the very amount it had spent on firearms-related research the year before.

“It’s really simple with me,” Mr. Dickey, 71 and now retired, said in a telephone interview. “We have the right to bear arms because of the threat of government taking over the freedoms that we have.”

The Senate later restored the money but designated it for research on traumatic brain injury. Language was also inserted into the centers’ appropriations bill that remains in place today: “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”

The prohibition is striking, firearms researchers say, because there are already regulations that bar the use of C.D.C. money for lobbying for or against legislation. No other field of inquiry is singled out in this way.

In the end, researchers said, even though it is murky what exactly is allowed under this provision and what is not, the upshot is clear inside the centers: the agency should tread in this area only at its own peril.

“They had a near-death experience,” said Dr. Arthur Kellermann, whose study on the risks versus the benefits of having guns in the home became a focal point of attack by the N.R.A.

In the years since, the C.D.C. has been exceedingly wary of financing research focused on firearms. In its annual requests for proposals, for example, firearms research has been notably absent. Gail Hayes, spokeswoman for the centers, confirmed that since 1996, while the agency has issued requests for proposals that include the study of violence, which may include gun violence, it had not sent out any specifically on firearms.

So over here in the real world there are no facts about gun violence because the N.R.A. and their toadies in the Republican establishment hate facts. It's just like denying climate science on global warming: facts are the enemy.

Instead of engaging in rational debate and making knowledge based policy

Yes, it is. It's called exercise. And after completely destroying physical education, to protect fat kids from being heckled, it's the last bit of exercise kids get nowadays.

I knew when I wrote that line that it would bring at least one of you guys out to comment.

Look -- I completely and utterly agree with you that kids don't get enough exercise. There are all sorts of causes for this.

But the solution is not to force them to lug a large mass of stuff around in an unergonomic way while their bodies are still growing. There are all sorts of problems with this. (And sure, it is possible for kids to get reasonably designed backpacks that distribute the weight well, but even if they have them, many kids do stupid things carrying them. I know I did when I was a kid.)

I'm all for having mandatory physical education or mandatory sports or whatever for kids -- something that would be a healthy way to exercise their bodies. This isn't a good one.

first Visa and MC both require merchants not to charge extra fro using their card. Thus there's no reason for consumers not to use the most widely accepted cards.

Nope. Not anymore.

Briefly (if you don't want to read the link), as a result of a major 2012 settlement with Visa and Mastercard, merchants ARE now allowed to charge fees for credit cards. (There are still restrictions on how exactly this is done; a good summary is here.)

Some states have restricted this practice significantly, most commonly requiring that POSTED prices for goods be the higher price, and thus only allowing a "cash discount" rather than an extra "fee" for using credit cards.

I've bought items at two places just in the past couple days that have dual pricing: a gas station and a liquor store. In one case, the advantage of cash pricing far outweighs any credit card bonus point advantage I could get.

There can be more than one cause for an increase in payouts. So, you have made a mistake there as well. Further, considering hurricanes only and not other cause of flooding is a mistake. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05...

In other columns and particularly his blog, which usually has much more data (and visualizations of the data etc) http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c... Krugman is well aware that the US must act before the rest just because we are one of the biggest offenders here with much more CO2 use per capita than others.

...are bulk carbon credits manufactured?

China of course! From his own crappy newspaper .

gee you think Krugman or someone on his staff doesn't know this?

or hey, maybe one of the editors in the NYT newsroom might have remembered something they ran last week?

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

look at the carbon emission trajectories. it is not pretty for China.

http://www.nature.com/nclimate...

(old link, 2013 version is even worse for them)

Its like many ideas presented to top US intelligence students.
Just enough history on todays enemy, the tech to do the work needed and the correct collection of happy short tech stories from the past.
Thanks to the work of whistleblowers the world now understands:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...
Different govs, the US, UK have total mastery of the 'net' via local shared facilities and people.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... (3 Jun 2014) http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04... (APRIL 23, 2014) The standard crypto offered is junk.
Entire generations have to rethink what the 'net' really is: predictive and trackable:
"US Secret Service wants sarcasm-detection tool for Twitter" (05 Jun 2014)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tec...
People read the headline but a bit further down is the fun part: "real-time" and the ability to identify 'influencers'.
Tech that was once at a budget level of a few nations agencies is now more wide spread at a federal level with a domestic role.

Eventually... http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03...

No, I think GP is referring to the $1.2 billion settlement for concealing safety defects.

To the AC supporting the DOJ :-

While your explanation sounds plausible at first blush, other commenter smarter than I here have pointed out various flaws in your explanation you would do well to address.

The fundamental problem with your explanation is that no one really knows how the system works except for the NSA. And given that the Director of National Intelligence himself was caught telling untruths to Congress while under oath, and deliberately refused to correct the error when he had a chance to do so, you should understand why it is difficult to grant any benefit of doubt to the NSA when they give out their explanations.

To put it bluntly, the gut instinct of anyone who catches a liar is to disbelieve everything he says unless backed by solid evidence.

More info on the above: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04...

Great article but this part isn't correct:

"Nowadays, that means nearly everything besides face-to-face communication, or paper shipped through the world's postal systems."

As shown here - every single piece of 1st class mail in the U.S. is photographed (and probably handed over to the FBI or NSA or whomever started this stupid program up in the first place to get the Post Office to do that):

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07...

Short of radical political reform, which seems a long shot in the U.S. in the near term - technical solutions coming from open software will be the few ways we can restore some privacy to communications.

actually you chose the wrong place for the argument. Walmart allows overnight sleeping in its parking lots http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes....

If you meet anybody from India ask him "What Is Your Caste?" If he answers it, then you're doomed. Because he has already injected Cancer into your Country. Caste is like Cancer. Caste cannot be Cured. Caste has to be Cut-Off. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06...

Not only this, but two successive White House administrations went to extraordinary lengths to put domestic wiretapping in place in secrecy and keep it in place, without approval or oversight from Congress, much less public opinion.

When seeking authorization for domestic wiretapping in 2004 using convoluted legalese and twisted definitions, Bush White House lawyers Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzales couldn't get approval from the acting Attorney General, James Comey, who cited a DOJ opinion that the program lacked oversight and doubt that the Executive branch had the authority to issue such an order. He later stated (I'm paraphrasing) if the American people learned of the extent of this program they'd be appalled. And so Card and Gonzales visited John Ashcroft in the hospital to go over Comey's head, knowing he was in intensive care, under heavy sedation. Comey managed to arrive in time to make his side of the argument and delay the approval. (Cite)

We're talking about John Ashcroft here, USA Patriot Act cheerleader. Even he wouldn't approve it. And now we know why.

But it was only a delay. The Bush-Cheney White House went ahead and implemented the program. There's no public information on whether or when the Ashcroft DOJ approved this, only that some oversight was added (ineffective as it was in retrospect), and by 2005 Ashcroft had been replaced by Gonzales as Attorney General, the very guy who tried to go over Comey's head. It's quite apparent now that the NSA had carte blanche from then on.

And the succeeding Administration comes in with a record of avoiding any sort of investigation or oversight of the program, granting immunity to civilian corporate participants, and goes on to aggressively prosecute ethically-motivated whistleblowers to the degree of fabricating evidence to incarcerate them.

In this kind of environment, do you think a new "you must report" order is going to improve the constitutionality of this kind of spying?

All it's going to do is weed out anyone who's not fully on board with the program, or has any ethical qualms about it, and permit even more crackdown on people who try to effect change, legally and by the books, from the inside.

Keep your nose clean, citizen.

Unfortunately this will hit teenagers the most. Contrary to what the supports of the home cherry pick, those who earn minimum wage have the least amount of experience. In other words, young people.

No.

Already been done: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02...

Spying on people like Angie Merkel is the entire reason we instructed our Congress to spend $30-$40 per person on an NSA. Period. End of story. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Same goes for most of the other NSA revelations (spying on Brazil's government, helping the Aussies spy on Indonesia, etc.).

[Citation Needed]
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wh-us-not-monitoring-german-chancellor-angela-merkels-phone/

Merkel complained to President Barack Obama on Wednesday after learning that U.S. intelligence may have targeted her mobile phone, saying that would be "a serious breach of trust" if confirmed. The two leaders spoke by phone, Carney said.

"The president assured the chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of the chancellor," said Carney. "The United States greatly values our close cooperation with Germany on a broad range of shared security challenges."

Why did Obama promise not to spy on Merkel if that's what "we instructed our Congress to" do?
(Who's "we" by the way? I sure as hell didn't instruct anyone do to that.)

7 months later and Merkel is still pissed off about it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/03/world/europe/merkel-says-gaps-with-us-over-surveillance-remain.html

Ms. Merkel, who last fall declared that âoespying between friends is simply unacceptableâ and that the United States had opened a breach of trust that would have to be repaired, said at the news conference that âoewe have a few difficulties yet to overcome.â One remaining issue, she said, was the âoeproportionalityâ of the surveillance.

Mmm... a critique by a self-professed promoters of the Austrian School of Economics. See this article for Paul Krugman's evaluation on the Austrian School: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...

BTW, the Austrian School is very close to the Chicago School (AKA, neo-liberal capitalism as most people understand it today) in that both of them are based on assumptions and lack of supporting evidence or examples that show their predictions in action in the real world. Remember that infamous retraction by Milton Friedman after the 2008 crash, "I was wrong."?

You mean urbanites like ex-VP Dick Cheney?

In a rumination about his family tree, he said that his wife, Lynne, had discovered that there were people named “Cheney” in both his maternal and paternal lines.

“So we had Cheneys on both sides of the family — and we don’t even live in West Virginia,” he said.

It's on the internet, so it must be true!

Here's the rest of the story of "clear shipping bags." http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/...

Unser was charged with a misdemeanor and fined $75, so... not a felony. Oh, the humanity!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"Honest Services" -- Oops, no example of "honest services" fraud. But it could happen! But it hasn't. (Note: I agree that we should be vigilant against potential abuses, but let's concern ourselves more with real abuses.)

Espionage Act -- Another "didn't happen."

Obstruction of Justice -- the lawyer admitted to a lapse in judgment by helping the church cover up the crime. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12...

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act -- DID happen. My sympathies are with Bret McDanel. Notably, however, the Justice Department admitted error, his conviction was overturned, and a precedent has been set against future misapplication of the law.

Wire Fraud -- Misattribution. Lori Drew was prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, though the conviction was overturned in this case as well. I think we all agree that the woman was knowingly malicious, however, and she did not "accidentally" commit a felony. It was important that the law not be used outside of the scope of its intended use though, which is why I'm glad the EFF filed an amicus brief in support of the defendant, even though what she did was horrible.

Providing Material Support for Terrorism -- Another "no example," of misapplication, but one to watch out for. Though I think we all understand how laws are created and tested at this point.

Making a False Statement to a Federal Official -- Terrible example. This guy was clearly trying to skirt the law and provide material support to militant jihadists. http://www.telegram.com/articl...

Look, if you're a luddite and have chosen to not be vaccinated against infectious diseases, you are a public health risk.

To who? If you take care of yourself and your own then certainly not to you since you are vaccinated.

If you are un-immunized, you really have no business going into places like hospitals where you will put the lives of others at risk.

I would imagine that at some point EVERY UNvaccinated person goes into a hospital. That is were the vaccinations usually happen, right?

You want to be a plague carrier? Fine, but you can't go into public.

They recently found a couple cases of MERS in the USA. In the hospital's bureaucratic brilliance, they sent all the workers who had contact with the patient to their HOMES! Stupid is as bureaucracy does I suppose.

Diseases which had been mostly eradicated which are suddenly making a resurgence are entirely due to idiots who think the vaccine is going to give them another disease. You're entitled to your stupid beliefs, but you are not entitled to spread disease.

Overheated rhetoric. Mutant strains of many serious diseases exit because of failed application of medical science by the medical establishment itself. Greed, over use, incomplete use, substandard application, class stratification, lack of education AND, as it turns out, governmental subversion of vaccination drives for political purposes (as recently revealed that the CIA was using vaccinations as a ruse in its hunt for Bin Laden) have all conspired to render a noble idea increasingly useless.
Sure, we can put everyone in a database (yet again for yet another silly reason). And what will that serve? Nothing more than to make you a guinea pig to be injected with maybe a useful vaccine or maybe something else {see military vaccinations of soldiers, the Tuskegee experiment]. But of course, today the government would never do something so unscrupulous with its newly acquired power, right?
So, in other words, worry about yourself. If vaccinations are important to you, get them for yourself and your family but don't force your choices on others in some misguided attempt to buy yourself a little more false security.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04... http://www.scientificamerican....

Perhaps the problem is that your knowledge of this issue lacks scope. The only thing I can suggest is that you do a little research on your own, an effort that includes, but also scales outside, the confines of a women's studies curriculum and/or mainstream media. As far as feminism vs geek culture goes, the status quo on that is only a search away. Start with 'anita sarkeesian' and 'jessica watson'. If you do enough research, you'll start seeing the bad statistics they use. Here, I'll give you the first one on me:

http://www.rainn.org/get-infor...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12...

Articles like Chu's are nothing new. These 'social justice warriors' are charlatanesque professional victims and people like Chu are their male white knight brigade, always charging in to the rescue (despite their hatred of the damsel-in-distress trope, go figure). I don't know his real intentions, but the fact he (badly) attempts to equate us as slightly less vile versions of elliot rodger is a perfect example of the rhetoric filled fallacies typically used to shame men who don't accept the feminist party line. Whether it's "grow up" from the left, or "man up" from the neocons, it's all just shaming language.

Chu's whole article is a diatribe against geek/nerd culture, thus he's targeting ALL the individuals within it, equating their sense of morals as a mishmash of silly stereotypes found in video games and geek social faux pas. I thought generalizing like this was something feminists eschew? I guess only when it happens to women. How 'progressive.'

This article seems to be a reaction to Elliot Roger's autobiography and rant. The autobiography is not that of a "nerd". This guy had no tech skills. He played World of Warcraft too much; that's about it.

What seems to have driven him nuts is growing up in Malibu and UCSB, two of the greatest concentrations of hot women on the planet, and not getting any.

I haven't posted on Slashdot in years, but the response to this story made me want to come out of the woodwork.

So far In the comments I've seen:
--He isn't really a nerd! NOFP!
--Nerds don't hit on girls, so NOFP!
--He's using a stereotype! I'm not that guy, so NMFP!

I'm a woman working in a technical field and I've been at this game since 1996. In my current company, the men here outnumber me 9-1. When you add in a love of geeky pursuits (at one convention, I remember counting 3 women in a group of 500 men), I've spent a lot of time being one of the guys.

In the beginning, it was exciting -- thrilling!-- to be the only woman in a meeting. I was the exception! I was going to make it! I was better than those girly-girls with their silly pursuits. But, not only do I realize that was a stupid-ass position that reinforced the perceptions of women's interests being lesser than men, I'm just tired of it. Tired of little backhanded bullshit comments. Tired of having to laugh at stupid sexist shit to be one of the boys. And especially tired of being told there's no problem. And this is not just me. Again, it's necessarily a small data pool (see % above), but I've never met a woman who didn't have at least 3 stories about bullshit at work. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04...

Again, it's not that I can't hack it. I can. This isn't a poor me, come and save me post. At this point, my hide is tempered steel -- fucking bring it, world. It's that I shouldn't have to, and as I said above, it's fucking exhausting.

And it's more than just eating shit at work: We live in a world where literally yesterday a woman was stoned to death by her family for failing to live her life they way they wanted. (http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/28/world/asia/pakistan-pregnant-woman-killed/) . Our culture shames a woman for accepting sexual advances and blames her if she rejects them (http://nypost.com/cover/#covers-1401159702). There is literally no way to win as a woman.

Look, guys. Even if you've done a ton of soul searching, and you genuinely believe you're not part of the problem, go to the next step. The women around you are hurting. They're exhausted. They're being gaslighted (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting) left, right and center. So if you genuinely think you're not making things works, figure out how to make it better. Find a woman to mentor. If you're in a meeting, and a woman's voice isn't getting heard, help her (although, please avoid mansplaining (i.e. "What Jane really means to say is...."). If someone say some bullshit about women in your workplace, call them out on it.

Sorry for this long cri de coeur, but you guys are my peeps and the responses broke my heart. You're my guys, my people, my tribe. Can't you back us up?

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

Here, we use a large representative study in the Philippines (n = 624) to show that among single nonfathers at baseline (2005) (21.5 ± 0.3 y), men with high waking T were more likely to become partnered fathers by the time of follow-up 4.5 y later (P < 0.05). Men who became partnered fathers then experienced large declines in waking (median: â'26%) and evening (median: â'34%) T, which were significantly greater than declines in single nonfathers (P < 0.001). Consistent with the hypothesis that child interaction suppresses T, fathers reporting 3 h or more of daily childcare had lower T at follow-up compared with fathers not involved in care (P < 0.05).

http://www.pnas.org/content/10...

Why not bring back hanging? Simple and effective and used in the US for many years.

Lots of botched hangings. Think of human beings hanging by their necks doing the funky chicken for 20 minutes before expiring. In fact, most of the hangings of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg were badly botched.

If not that, how about the guillotine?

No can do. Execution methods that involve mutilating the body constitute cruel and unusual punishment. That's why the electric chair isn't used anymore.

did she have sex? could the guy tell she hadn't showered?

There are several before-during-after photos in this this blog article at the NYT. You decide.

I know a lot of guys who'd give her a go, regardless of how she smelled (or, ftfa, like "fresh-cut onions and pungent marijuana," maybe because of it).

Personally, I find other things far more of a deterrent than greasy hair and kronik BO: she looks too much like my sister... and the laptop's fisheye lens and that deathly pallor from the LED display aren't helping her prospects, either.

The last thing i would want if i was dying would be people praying for me. "And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03... N

See http://www.nature.com/news/201... - this article discusses using brain scans to communicate with patients originally thought to be "vegetative". http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04... is a more recent article on this topic.

Meh.

because one of their biggest financial pillars is the trial lawyers (the type of lawyers who sue other people or defend people being sued). If you properly reform the patent system, you reduce the number of cases in the courts that need trial lawyers (on BOTH sides of every fight), you reduce the total number of "billable hours", and thus reduce campaign contributions to the Democrats. Incidentally, as Howard Dean (former DNC chairman) admitted this is the same reason why "Obamacare" included NO "tort reform" (reform of malpractice lawsuits) which would have reduced insane medical malpractice insurance rates, reduced unnecessary "defensive medicine" procedures, and would have driven down the costs of healthcare. Obamacare does not attack the costs of healcare so much as it attempts to drive down the cost of insurance to pay for that care, and because there's a big limit on that without tort reform, it tries to shift the money around to subsidize insurance for many people to pretend that it has lowered costs. At this point, somebody opposed to tort reform usually points to states that have done limited tort reform and says "it didn't lower costs THERE!" - but of course state-level reform cannot truly lower the potential payouts for malpractice policies (thereby making premium payments for such policies lower) as long as there are multi-state medical businesses and no national tort reform.

This is not some partisan trolling; Expecting laws that hit trial lawyers directly in the pocketbook under Democrats is about on par with expecting liberalization of abortion laws under Republicans - in each case you are expecting something that is nearly toxic to an important segment of the base of a party and therefore to that party's ability to raise funds. It's simply a FACT that trial lawyers give WAY more money to Democrats.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014... http://m.washingtonpost.com/lo... http://www.thetruthaboutguns.c... http://m.csmonitor.com/USA/201... http://m.washingtontimes.com/n...

Nice federal income tax revenue from California you have there, United States. Would be a shame if something were to happen to it.

This is a game that can be played both ways.

Its actually worse than that. If you remove CA from the US economy, what do you think the jobs/GDP/other national growth metrics for the rest of the US look like over the last 30 years? Can you say perpetual depression? Removing CA from the US would be disastrous, for the other 49 states. Don't kid yourself about the size of the CA economy, its large and growing, unlike the most of the rest of the US. Oh, and we actually pay off our debts. You really think politicians from other states would want to have to explain those numbers to the voters?

I should've been way more verbose about what I believe in. But honestly, I saw the headline and I blew my goddamned stack, and I should've been way more clear here because I think it's really fucking ridiculous.

No, I don't believe the average gun owner is a raging gun fondling nut bar. In fact, the evidence shows way otherwise.

However, There's a CLEAR case that there are a LOT of unhinged gun enthusiasts out there.

And they are armed. And they have funny ideas about what freedom means. And they are also paranoid! Oh and they're pandered to by a major political party.

None of this is disconnected from reality, although I did say that rape threats were involved when in fact, it was really just general harassment and death threats. Sorry, I'm just so used to rape threats being part of the rage-o-sphere's response(MRA/MRMs, gun nuts, Philly's fans) to well, everything.

Still, I didn't mean to necessarily lump everyone who owns or likes guns in with the Cliven Bundy crowd but the fact of the matter is is that the Cliven Bundy crowd are more likely to harass and threaten someone like Belinda Padilla than the average gun enthusiast.

4,000 or so people in the US die every year because they're accidentally shot by children, ranging from toddlers to pre-teens.

Youtube is full of examples of the idiocy - many videos of "awww look, he's playing with...*BANG* OH GOD OH GOD"

  Smart guns may not be perfect, but would they lead to 4,000 situations a year where someone's life was in danger and a gun owner couldn't activate it? Probably not, given that there are only about 230 justifiable homicides a year, and 60,000 cases where the gun is presented but not actually used: http://takingnote.blogs.nytime...

So, gun owners: either start being more responsible with killing devices, or face increasing regulation of said killing devices. You want to have your own kids shoot you, that's fine, and I welcome your genes coming out of the pool. The problem comes when my kid comes over to play at your house, you lied or didn't tell me you had a gun in the house, and your kid shoots my kid in the face.

But hey, keep on showing up at restaurant chains loaded for the apocalypse, freaking out people, and helping us pass more gun regulations!

One of the most severely affected plants is Turkey Point, yet Florida just approved and expansions. http://www.pennenergy.com/arti... Why new power would be needed when the customer base is eroding hard to fathom. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05...

If you're interested in the science of Anthropogenic Global Warming, I suggest you read the science, not blog posts. I've read both WattsUp and SkepticalScience, and they are both very poorly written and lack rigorousness. If you are reading these two blogs, you are reading the work of bias amateurs.

Here's what you should be reading:

• the peer-reviewed Journal "Nature Climate Change," which includes and references thousands of scientific papers on the subject.
• he IPCC's 1,500-page "Physical Science Basis" report, clearly states what we know, don't know, and how we know it. It reviews its past predictions, notes where its models have errored, and takes into account an incredible wealth and scope of scientific observations over 150 years. I highly recommend downloading this 0.5 GIG report and at least skimming it. I consider it the model of good science.
• The IPCC also makes all of its data and models available for review. So you can see for yourself. Take this data and give it to a machine-learning algorithm. The science of AGW is actually shockingly simple.
• The US Government also recently updated it regularly scheduled report written by over 300 experts.
• If you don't trust the government, then I recommend The Berkely Earth Project. It was funded by the liberal's favorite bad guys, the Koch Brothers, but its results were so compelling that the lead Climatologist, Richard A. Muller, wrote a piece for the New York Times announcing he no longer a skeptic.
• Of course, it's always good to have a contrarian viewpoint in the mix, and for that, I recommend AGW skeptic Judith Curry, who presents valid challenges to the consensus with her strong scientific background. I don't find her convincing, but her challenges make for good food for thought.

Science, published peer-reviewed science, not blogs, is where we should keep this discussion.

>> CO2 is not totally destroying the environment :) Neither is a small increase in global average temperature

Wow You REALLY need to check your facts. Here are just a few of the many sources that contraidct you:

http://www.skepticalscience.co...

http://www.skepticalscience.co...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05...

http://www.nature.org/ouriniti...

http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...

http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...

http://www.ifpri.org/publicati...

When RICO was used against political protesters, it was not used by prosecutors or police. It was used by their political opponents in a civil suit, and the penalties were not accessed against the protesters (who broke the law), but against the organizations the protestors were assumed to be representing, many of which did not condone the law breaking. This was not at all an attempt to punish lawbreaking, but was a clear attempt to silence dissent. In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against this particular abuse of racketeering laws.

http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

Not because my kid is a dummy (far from it), but because I know becoming and staying an "owner" in the 1% is like winning the lottery. And societies with big rich/poor divides are less happy to live in -- even for the 1%.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08...
"Stiglitz and his allies argue that a free and competitive market is highly beneficial to society at large, but that it needs government regulation and oversight to remain functional. Without constraint, dominant interests use their leverage to make gains at the expense of the majority. Concentration of power in private hands, Stiglitz believes, can be just as damaging to the functioning of markets as excessive regulation and political control. "

See also on how aspiring millionaires are used to keep everyone down:
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
"But here's something I'll bet the dittoheads haven't thought of. Maybe they're the chumps. Maybe they've been sold a bogus "American dream" that never existed. Maybe "the rules" they play by were written by the people who have "made it" -- not by the people who haven't. And maybe -- just maybe-- the people who have "made it" wrote those rules to keep the wannabes chasing a dream that's a mirage."

I wrote an essay on why even rich people should support a basic income:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...

The fact is, most paid jobs are going away as robots and AIs become cheaper to employ than humans for more and more jobs -- even "creative" ones, like I discuss here
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyo...

Preparing your kid to win the 20th century economic rat race leaves him or her a rat on a sinking economic ship in a 21st century economy...

That said, independence when needed, cooperation when needed, hard work, prudence, saving, frugality, investing in the future -- in broad sense, these are all good things to learn however a kid applies them later in life.

On code, the free code and content I write now and in the past like our free garden simulator and other tools has helped (a teeny tiny bit, I hope) to help bring about a 21st century transformation to a bigger gift economy, to better planning, to a more informed and enlightened and empowered citizenry. For example, this freely usable software someone else lets me reformat my slashdot posts to remove smart quotes from quotations in the above that display wrong:
http://dan.hersam.com/tools/sm...

So, free code and free content can make a difference in the world by making the world a better place in various ways. And then, such a society can hopefully do a better job of taking care of old farts like I will be soon enough -- if I am not already. :-) As well as doing a better job of taking care of the next generation which is much more important than taking care of the previous generation -- although you would not know that looking at who gets "Social Security" and Medicare in the USA -- the old, not the young). As Daniel Moynihan said, "the young don't vote, and it shows".

Kids grow so fast. Enjoy them while you can! See also:
http://www.katsandogz.com/onch...
----
On Children
Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.