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I love how when anti-global warming types point at a big snow storm or what-have-you and say 'look, global warming can't be real!' and the pro-global warming crowd points out, rightly, 'weather isn't climate' ... but then when there is a big wind storm or what-have-you the pro-global warming types start crying 'look what global warming is doing! waaaaa!'

It's called Loading the Dice. Big snowstorms acn actually be evidence for global warming (if it's warmer but still below freezing that means more snow in wet areas and less snow in dry areas). But when we start seeing events which probably could not have occurred under previous climate conditions, those individual extreme events may be actually evidence that the baseline has shifted due to global warming. Hot days aren't evidence for global warming, but record-breaking heatwaves and droughts? They probably are.

That being said, any fantasy about humanity being at risk for significant biological hardship is ludicrous considering that we can eat almost anything, live almost anywhere, are more resistant and adaptive to toxins and pathogens than most other large animals, and we have this thing called "technology" that allows us to move anything anywhere, radically adjust our environments, etc. etc.

Actually, the list of domesticated plants and domesticated animals isn't actually that long. If we had significant reductions in the production of just a few staple crops, we could face famine at a level the modern world has never seen. For example, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, maize and wheat alone make up close to two-thirds of the world’s food energy intake. One of the long term consequences of global warming is expected to be reductions in our crop production. Which may leave us dependent on bio-engineering firms like Monsanto to provide us with newly engineered versions of our crops that are adapated to the new climate. Knowing Monsanto, that could get very expensive.

"The state government has been perceived as hostile to action on climate change;"

It's all fun and games until the insurance companies believe that climate change is a threat.

And they do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/business/insurers-stray-from-the-conservative-line-on-climate-change.html?_r=0

Even if you don't believe the scientists, you'll have to believe your insurance company, especially when you get the bill.

Perhaps the so-called "Fiscal Conservatives" of NC should be, you know, fiscal.

--
BMO

Just take a look at this article. If you see the same in the print edition then you should come off your acid trip. And it's not that it is gorgeous in its full glory - it is also implemented correctly. On the desktop it does not overload the CPU, it is absolutely enjoyable on mobile devices, hell, it renders OK also in lynx. And note the correct use of videos: you are not expected to watch it like TV, it just enhances the text.

You all stupid? Where do you think the money comes from to treat the poor in ERs? The poor? They have no money, so you still pay for them!

Except you pay in very inefficient and expensive ways - the poor queuing at ERs till they get sick enough to treat, or committing crimes to get into prison to get healthcare ( http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/02/on-purposely-getting-arrested-to-get-life-saving-surgery/273282/ http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/08/27/2535201/sick-oregon-man-robs-bank-dollar-health-care-jail/ ). You also pay if one day you need ER treatment and don't get it because too many ERs have closed down: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/health/18hospital.html

So unless you are willing to euthanize the poor and sick, "single payer public health care" is the rational self-serving route for at least the "middle/upper class". It's still expensive but it provably costs less (just look at other countries). The elite class of course live in a different world - they may have their own doctors and pay proportionately less in taxes.

It should be frigging obvious taxes and other public money are ALREADY paying for the poor. But because of the many stupid AND selfish AND greedy people in the USA, you get some monstrosity of Obamacare. No poor sick person needs 1000 different health plans to choose from. You should automatically be covered by one public plan. If you don't want the public plan (or it doesn't cover your needs) you can go with whatever private plan you can afford.

Really? The times has video And upon occasion, it's dabbled with less traditional story telling techniques

Really? The times has video And upon occasion, it's dabbled with less traditional story telling techniques

NYT Digital (the website) was a separate but wholly-owned company from 1996 until around 2007, merging with the newspaper as the new building opened. Pageviews in the mid 2000s were half a billion per month, with approximately half that going to the homepage alone.

IIRC, annual revenues for website advertising were $150 million in the late 2000s, damned good for a newspaper site. This was before NYT jumped onto the mobile and paid-digital-subscription bandwagons, which accounts for the $37 million revs. Adverts are still king, even on the website, and that combined with the homepage being half the pageviews is why you see the most expensive placements there.

While the rest of the newspaper biz has been slow to adopt, NYTD were actively educating the old-school news staff about FB, Twitter, RSS and other common or up-and-coming technologies. They have programmers assigned to the news floor, collaborating with reporters, to build topical databases, perform big data analyses, produce dynamic reporting and graphics and so forth. NYT are doing about as well as can be expected -they're a news organization, yes, but they've converted themselves into a technology firm from the inside-out.

NYT offers developers REST APIs for fetching newsfeeds and the aforementioned databases. Semantic Web is an area of research, and they're on a level with Thomson-Reuters, and to a limited extent Bloomberg. NYT's R&D department (originally attached to the newspaper, not NYTD) produces tools for latent semantic analysis of news, comments, etc.

When Twitter hit its initial growth spurt there were many predictions it would eat the newspaper business. It hasn't, in fact the news business relies on Twitter for distributing headlines and links. 140 characters and photo links hasn't eliminated the need for in-depth writing, analysis and professional photography.

Sure, the transition to an all-digital revenue model is their Achilles Heel. Most of the rev comes from the newspaper, and the demographic average is male, 40s and makes > $70K per year. Getting the younger generations to pay for news is the challenge.

I'm a former NYTDer. I still admire what they've done to adapt. I don't know how they'll survive the next decade, honestly. It'll take a revolution in paid subscriptions to get the younger crowd as part of the paid demographic. HuffPo was being eyed as the primary competition, for awhile, as an advert-only web operation.

Amazon is working on it, it is just a matter of time.

The language there is interesting China is acting "aggressively" in a sea on its own border, according to (I presume) a citizen of a nation on the other side of the planet that wants to ensure its rights there. I wonder what comparable control the US imposes over, say, the Gulf of Mexico. I'm not saying this is objectively right, but complaints from nations who do (or have done) far worse are entirely hypocritical.

Bull. The islands are at: 25.744395,123.469133 Look them up. The closest islands are Japanese (Ishigakis) and Taiwan. Don't even get me started on Taiwan and the Chinese claims on them. The Chinese are claiming every islands in the ocean near them.

Check this out: They are mulling claims on Okinawa. . Why? Because they can, not because there are good historical reasons for it.

Andrew Ng didn't use random forests but a neural network to actually "learn" discriminative features *UNSUPERVISED*.
This is done by creating a Neural Network that basically projects it's input on it's output (it's like an identity function).
Lets say you have 100 input parameters, and 100 output parameters. What you want the neural network to do is compress these 100 to (for example) 10 nodes, then go back to the initial 100. In the process, this neural network will actually learn an identity function, where it will learn the important discriminative features in those 10 nodes.
This is somewhat different from how you usually use a neural network, starting with input parameters, go through a couple of hidden layers and end up with just a couple of output results.

Andrew Ng's google experiment did exactly that! It was not fed cat images. It was fed random images and through deep learning actually learned the concept of cats *UNSUPERVISED*.

and here are some references for this:
http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/google-built-machine-learns-find-cats-internet-846690
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/06/babbage-june-27th-2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of-computers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html

What's the problem with Hollywood Accounting? Do you have any actual complaint here? The way writers are paid for work is completely regular and legal, and all people outside the business ever hear are the stories, heavily promoted, of certain individuals who thought they could get a better deal by taking their case to the press.

Hollywood accounting is essentially lying about profits so that the producers don't have to pay "percent of profit" agreements. I think the best example is Forrest Gump, about a year after release it was the third-highest-grossing movie of all time, having taken in around $661 million against a $55 million cost to produce and (at that time) still sitting at a $65 million loss.

Winston Groom [writer of "Forrest Gump"] was only made whole because he had you guys over a barrel: you couldn't make the sequel without his blessing, and he had been burned by the original movie.

Producers have a well-earned reputation as predatory, greedy, grasping, and immoral. I can remember reading occasional accounts of producer behaviour starting with the Three Stooges, with occasional first-hand and investigatory reports ever since with no change in perspective. A simple Google search exposes your history for all to see. You are widely regarded as bad people.

How is Hollywood Accounting more fair than, say, the common dot-com tactic of paying an employee with stock options and then diluting them? Or the technology company policy of paying a patent filer with a flat bonus? The difference is moral opprobrium and marketing, nothing more.

I think you meant to say "less fair".

We don't support companies that screw with employees either, we're pretty consistent about the "fairness" issue.

It's not just selective breeding. Many of the varieties on offer at your local "organic" food stall are the product of radioactive mutation. There's nothing in the standards for designating food "organic" that bars using crops whose DNA has been randomly scrambled by radiation or mutagenic chemicals. So it's no surprise that many of them are.

It's a tempest in a teapot because /every/ nation spies on every other nation to the greatest extent that their technology, budget and legal system allows. It has been this way since pre-biblical times (hell even the old Testament in the Bible records nations spying on nations amongst other ancient stories). I don't know if you noticed or not but while a lot of people became upset, and certainly a number of companies became upset about the Snowden revelations almost no governments became upset.

Think about it, why did almost no government become upset? Why did almost no government condemn the spying unless it was a small government that simply lacked the resources to do any level of spying at all? Use Occam's razor and give me an answer, any answer that doesn't come down to this:

Every nation spies on every other nation to the greatest extent that their technology, budget and legal system allows.

There are no innocent parties, and to be frank if there were they would be incompetent and in need of replacement for endangering their citizens. Unfortunately history has a habit of supplying example upon example of this occurring through less than peaceful means. You might recall a time and a quote "gentlemen do not read each others mail". It was spoken by a Mr Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of State in 1929 right before Japan started their half of WW2 and used to justify cutting off funding of US Cryptographic efforts for breaking other countries communications. Similar examples from other nations that were caught and surprised with an invasion abound through history.

Tempest in a teapot? This tempest in a teapot has been brewing for thousands of years, only the names have changed. Those nations that have taken this teapot off the stove have paid the price time and again...

I see you believe it is only democrats that play such games.

No, I said "machine Democrats and incumbents generally." It's easier to steal an election by stuffing the ballot box when there's a large electoral bureaucracy/party machine in place, which tends to be in big cities. Residents of big cities tend to vote for Democrats, which leads to Democrats being in power and staffing the electoral bureaucracy, so ballot box stuffing specifically is a technique usually associated with Democrats. However, electoral fraud generally helps ALL incumbents, not just Democrats. Try reading what I actually typed.

The 'alternative' 'for free' IDs you speak of are not quite as convenient as a drivers license for someone who doesn't drive.

Given that someone doesn't drive, alternative forms of ID are absolutely more convenient than drivers licenses. Why would you need a drivers' license if you can't drive? Except for the part where they test you on your driving skills, the process for obtaining these IDs is usually exactly the same as the process for obtaining a drivers' license. You need some form of government issued ID to buy booze, get on a plane, enter a government building or open a bank account. Only driving requires an actual drivers' license.

I'm unsure how 'Necro-americans' are going to use an old ID anyway since they will no longer look at all like their picture.

Of course they can't. Requiring voter ID is a mitigation for the attack where Guy A, who is alive, casts his ballot. Then Guy A casts Guy B's ballot as well. Guy B isn't allowed to cast a ballot at all if he's dead. It's harder for Guy A to claim to be Guy B if he has to prevent valid ID to do so.

Surely voter registration is checked against death certificates.

Don't call me Shirley.

The Democrat Party has an unfortunate history of playing games with ID, poll taxes, and various tests to deny citizens their vote. In recent years it has even included false robo-calls telling people the wrong date or location.

My original point was that Voter ID laws seem to work well pretty much everywhere else that we consider a democratic government, and the only reason we don't have them here is that Democrats are too quick to call people racists. On cue, some Democrat neanderthal called me a racist and we were off to the races, so to speak.
You haven't been able to provide an objection to a specific voter ID law. All that you've brought to this conversation is lies about history and lies about theoretical laws, rather than the real laws that are on the books, or real proposals being debated. Your posts make it obvious you're barely reading what I'm writing. You're only in this thread to subtly imply that I'm a racist. Slashdot would be better off with less trolls like you.

Places like farms and hospitals - 80% of antibiotic use is agricultural.

The comment was done as humor, but the cow's diet is a large variable in the equation. Some farmers are feeding their cows a diet that reduces the generation of methane. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/us/05cows.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

And yes, it's the belching.

In Australia they have developed an inoculation against some of the most active methanogenic gut bacteria found in sheep. From memory it reduced the sheep's' generation of methane by about 30% and allowed an extra 1.5% to 2% of their feed to go toward actually producing meat.

Eve Online is the only MMO that has been able to keep me interested in playing for more than a few months at a time. It doesn't have any elves or dragons. It's not built around a film franchise or a beloved series of books. It is unique in that the content created by the game developers plays second fiddle to the content created by the players themselves. It has vibrant player corporations (guilds) based around third-party websites like Something Awful and Reddit (see also: Fweddit and Brave Newbies); which leads to in-game drama aka content creation. It offers high-stakes PvP, in that when you die; your ship explodes and the winning player loots your wreck (corpse) taking whatever valuables survived the explosions. It also allows you to scam your fellow players; which is fairly unique among games. It regularly makes mainstream news for it's large fleet fights and huge losses. And, you're allowed to use your money to buy in-game currency if you are so inclined. I should note that your characters do not level and you don't earn XP or experience points for killing stuff in-game. Instead, your characters earn points that apply to in-game skills in real-time whether you are logged in or not. Eve Online, because spaceships.

Eve Online is the only MMO that has been able to keep me interested in playing for more than a few months at a time. It doesn't have any elves or dragons. It's not built around a film franchise or a beloved series of books. It is unique in that the content created by the game developers plays second fiddle to the content created by the players themselves. It has vibrant player corporations (guilds) based around third-party websites like Something Awful and Reddit (see also: Fweddit and Brave Newbies); which leads to in-game drama aka content creation. It offers high-stakes PvP, in that when you die; your ship explodes and the winning player loots your wreck (corpse) taking whatever valuables survived the explosions. It also allows you to scam your fellow players; which is fairly unique among games. It regularly makes mainstream news for it's large fleet fights and huge losses. And, you're allowed to use your money to buy in-game currency if you are so inclined. I should note that your characters do not level and you don't earn XP or experience points for killing stuff in-game. Instead, your characters earn points that apply to in-game skills in real-time whether you are logged in or not. Eve Online, because spaceships.

The problem with subsidizing Solar manufacturing is that you can't ever compete with China. Effectively, companies like Solyndra feed off the funding and quickly fold leaving an empty husk in the process. This is the "choosing winers and losers" that Republicans don't like. It simply isn't fair.

Last year, the US Department of Commerce slapped tariffs on Chinese solar panels after the WTO agreed that the Chinese were dumping (too late for Solyndra).
Solyndra is suing 3 Chinese solar companies under the Sherman anti-trust act for driving the company out of business

China was dumping solar panels onto the world market.
Not fair indeed.

Now subsidizing Solar ENERGY, now that I can get onboard with

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "subsidizing Solar ENERGY,"
Do you think it's more cost efficient to subsidize the purchase price of expensive solar panels,
or more effective to subsidize research into better & cheaper solar panels?

Personally, I'd choose to fund R&D.

I will say there are far too many cyclists who take a cavalier stance on road rules, but there is mounting evidence that even in cases where the car is absolutely at fault there are often no criminal repercussions. So that might not be the best leg to build a case that the cyclists are the root of the issue.

What is it with the livestock, that would do nothing to solve the problem, doctors give out antibiotics like there f'in candy to anyone and everyone.

It would do something to solve the largest part of the problem

Amount of antibiotics sold by manufacturers for use by food-producing animals: 13.1 million kilograms
Sold for use by people: 3.3 million kilograms

80 percent of antibiotics sold in the US go to increasing meat production from farm animals.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/opinion/antibiotics-and-the-meat-we-eat.html
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/15/louise-slaughter/rep-louise-slaughter-says-80-antibiotics-are-fed-l/
http://www.rodalenews.com/antibiotics

Just because you are a vegan doesn't mean you should peddle some false information.

Just because you are an Anonymous Coward doesn't mean you should peddle some false information. There, fixed it for you.

> What news are you reading? Obacamare will not fail because of a bad website. It will fail because it is a bad law and people don't want it.

This. Even if that Website is fixed in time for people to sign up en masse before the end of the year, there's another problem: sticker shock. It will eventually dawn on the Millennials(tm) who voted for Hope And Change(tm) that, in fact, the ACA is a way to "tax" the living CRAP out of them to pay for health insurance for the poor and elderly.

The reason why the government wants to run the whole shebang is so that they can get their hands on this money. It's simply a way to tax the young and the middle class without calling it a "tax."

Look at the comments after this New York Times editorial:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/opinion/edsall-the-obamacare-crisis.html?_r=0

One of the commenters notes that he WAS able to sign up in California, and that everything worked beautifully -- but he is now paying $800 more and with a much, much higher deductible. He doesn't qualify for subsidies, either, even though he's the only breadwinner and ain't exactly rich.

You Obamacare supporters who are hoping that a fixed Website will suddenly make the law beloved are living in a delusional la-la land. Once people see how much more Utopian Universal Healthcare actually costs, then it's REALLY going to hit the fan.

Watch and see.

You may hate your mom when you reach 70 or so, chickenpox is a lifelong latent infection that can reactivate in older individuals, causing shingles and postherpetic neuralgia, or PHN.

And especially pays off for anyone who can get it out...especially if they can do it while leaving someone else (or many other people) holding the (empty) bag(s). I still laugh about this one:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/nyregion/eight-charged-in-45-million-global-cyber-bank-thefts.html?_r=0

two precision operations that involved people in more than two dozen countries acting in close coordination and with surgical precision, thieves stole $45 million from thousands of A.T.M.'s in a matter of hours.

You wrote: "Not a single person was laid off..."

But the unstated part is "...in your company".

If demand grows slower than supply (like due to limited money supply in the real economy, a law of diminishing returns of more consumer goods, increasing burden from negative externalities, structural unemployment, etc.) then other companies that are less productive may go out of business due to your improvements, taking jobs (and also ultimately customers) with them. We're about to see that rapidly accelerate with increasing use of robotics, AI, and other advanced automation.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/08/1530233/digital-revolution-will-kill-jobs-inflame-social-unrest-says-gartner?sdsrc=popbyskid

Here is a list I put together of about 50 things one can do about that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

A "basic income" (monthly social security payments for all from birth) is the simplest and probably most effective one of those for a democratic capitalistic society:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/11/17/american_basic_income_an_end_to_poverty.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/magazine/switzerlands-proposal-to-pay-people-for-being-alive.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opinion/krugman-sympathy-for-the-luddites.html

The opposite position though:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/04/1222228/the-luddites-are-almost-always-wrong-why-tech-doesnt-kill-jobs

You wrote: "Not a single person was laid off..."

But the unstated part is "...in your company".

If demand grows slower than supply (like due to limited money supply in the real economy, a law of diminishing returns of more consumer goods, increasing burden from negative externalities, structural unemployment, etc.) then other companies that are less productive may go out of business due to your improvements, taking jobs (and also ultimately customers) with them. We're about to see that rapidly accelerate with increasing use of robotics, AI, and other advanced automation.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/08/1530233/digital-revolution-will-kill-jobs-inflame-social-unrest-says-gartner?sdsrc=popbyskid

Here is a list I put together of about 50 things one can do about that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

A "basic income" (monthly social security payments for all from birth) is the simplest and probably most effective one of those for a democratic capitalistic society:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/11/17/american_basic_income_an_end_to_poverty.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/magazine/switzerlands-proposal-to-pay-people-for-being-alive.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opinion/krugman-sympathy-for-the-luddites.html

The opposite position though:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/04/1222228/the-luddites-are-almost-always-wrong-why-tech-doesnt-kill-jobs

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/12/01/us/government-incentives.html?_r=0

"This is why 'Stop and Frisk' was outlawed in New York (after way too long of it being done as the court case dragged on)."

As delightful as it would be for that to be the case, Stop and Frisk was NOT outlawed in New York.

In August a federal judge demanded that monitoring of the practice be put in place. Then in October that was overturned on appeal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/nyregion/court-blocks-stop-and-frisk-changes-for-new-york-police.html

This is why "Stop and Frisk" was outlawed in New York (after way too long of it being done as the court case dragged on).

Stop and Frisk is certainly NOT outlawed in NYC:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/nyregion/court-blocks-stop-and-frisk-changes-for-new-york-police.html?_r=0

What about other EVs? Nissan has about 4 times as many Leafs on the road worldwide (~80k vs ~20k), and the only reference I can find to a fire was one that was destroyed in a forest fire in Colorado. Interestingly, while the car itself was burnt to a crisp, the battery pack supposedly remained "structurally intact." What is Tesla doing worse than Nissan? Is it just the relative size/capacity of the battery packs? Different chemistry? Structural protection? Not enough data points to be statistically significant yet?

http://insideevs.com/a-seriously-burned-out-nissan-leaf/
http://www.torquenews.com/1083/why-does-tesla-model-s-catch-fire-crashes-not-chevy-volt-and-nissan-leaf
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/business/tsunami-reveals-durability-of-nissans-leaf.html?_r=0

After that, someone forgot to tell our political leaders that you don't secure a city street corner with a tank, it is the wrong tool for the job.

I don't think anyone "forgot" to tell. Note that General Shineki in the above link was set to retire in six months when he gave the relevant testimony (in 2003) to a congressional hearing. That wasn't a warning from a loose cannon, but a warning given by the member of the DoD leadership with the least to lose.

All kinds of cars catch fire.

He's basically history's most "successful" rapist.

I wonder if that means there are 16million people who are genetically predisposed to rape?

Khan has a unique genetic marker that could be identified in a DNA test: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/11/science/a-prolific-genghis-khan-it-seems-helped-people-the-world.html

That would at least narrow him down to his family, if found.

I always thought, though, that Genghis chose a "true" Mongol's burial: dragged on a pallet up a mountain, left where his body slid off the pallet and then fair game for all the critters of the wild to pick clean...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/nyregion/judge-invalidates-bloombergs-soda-ban.html

Perhaps the next advancement in "body cavity" bombs is goatse-ing the victim?

As for myself? I would like to see falsifiable predictions.

How moderate and scientific of you to say, well spoken. But that would completely upset the most popular 'canard' (great word) of devastating sea rise that is being sold and re-told. It's the most effective way to terrify small children who are instinctively afraid of being drowned.

The data is there but gets lost in the noise. Sea level rise is 4-8 in/century, no evidence of acceleration but some land subsidence (land height changes) accounting for regional difference.

Now there is a gentleman in the Philippines who is on hunger strike because he is convinced that we -- the carbon emitting 'others' -- have sent them this killer typhoon.

This is our doing. James Hansen (I am so glad he left NASA) was chided by weather forecasting professionals and climate scientists alike for putting out his own view that hurricanes (from Katrina onwards) have this statistically significant blame factor. In our time, right now. This increasingly pissed off NASA because not only was he out on a scientific limb, but his hurricane musings were far out-pacing any news coverage of NASA's other endeavors. Talk about mission creep.

To those seeking carbon taxation and treaties, There is no time even to wait for even short-term falsifiable hypotheses. We must skip directly to the conclusions to achieve maximum panic right now.

So far Krugman has been wrong in his predictions about bitcoin. I know the guy joked about staging an alien invasion to improve the economy, but if his economic model was accurate then that actually would be a good way to improve the economy. His model isn't accurate though, and therefore it's not. He doesn't pay attention to the broken window fallacy, just assuming that so long as somebody is paid to do something -- even if the results of their labor aren't actually useful -- it builds the economy, nevermind that no capital was gained or wealth was created. This is part of why every decade, something happens in the economy that Keynesians say shouldn't happen, the biggest blunder being stagflation in the 80's which Keynesian theory ruled out entirely saying it was impossible, yet it happened anyways.

So, you think that austerity is a good thing, because it conserves the resources of the society, right? Savings is good. Debt is bad. How is that working out for Europe now, or Japan for the last 15 years?

Krugman is more or less just a propagandist writer - he's more or less just there to reassure people that they'll be fine so long as vote for politicians who also adopt the Keynesian model (democrat or republican alike.) I think there are other Keynesians who make more sound arguments than he does. Pretty much the only major things he and I agree on is the idea that tariffs are bad and so is minimum wage (Maynard Keynes would disagree though.)

Actually, there are more and more economists who are publicly 'coming around' to his point of view. Many have been on his side from the beginning, but have been constrained by screaming austrians to be somewhat more contrite (/cough bernanke). However, see the recent speech given by Sommers at IMF, which appears quite similar to a blog post of Krugman from September. Also, Krugman has a Nobel memorial prize in Economics. Fama also has one, so the distinction is dubious at best. However, Krugman was a sole recipient, unlike Fama.

Personally I thought the idea of bitcoins wasn't a sound one (the idea of a community of people you don't even know or trust keeping records of what you own seemed like an odd one,) but I started mining them just as an experiment, and when I found out I could actually buy stuff I wanted with them I've started using them. I've mined about $1,000 worth of bitcoins over the last 8 months at an electricity cost of $5 a month using just GPU's I've obtained for the sole purpose of gaming, so it's not bad. I've actually heavily padded my steam games library with humble bundle using bitcoins - imagine that, my GPU's aren't just playing the games, they're working for them too.

The volatility concerns me a bit (the value going up to $400 I don't have faith in, so I won't sell anything for bitcoins myself at the moment, but I'll buy - such is the nature of the beast of deflation) but with the way our government's current fiscal and monetary policy is setup, I actually have less faith in the dollar (a government can't borrow in perpetuity forever, and there's no sign of a balanced budget coming any time soon.)

Ah, bitcoins. Love em. Gotta have em. Better than tulips! I started a thread at reddit, asking whether I should sell my house and buy bitcoins. Everybody says I should do it. The winklevoss twins like em, so they must be OK, right?

If they pick the wrong career, paying back a student loan is the least of their worries. And the typical teenager has parents to help them make decisions.

Well, let's look at the facts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/education/poor-students-struggle-as-class-plays-a-greater-role-in-success.html
For Poor Strivers, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall
By JASON DePARLE
Published: December 22, 2012
3 students from Galveston, TX, graduated 2008 at top of their class in low-ranked Ball High, were in Upward Bound, a college-prep program for low-income teenagers. All 3 got into college, but 4 years later, none has a 4 year degree. “Their story seems less like a tribute to upward mobility than a study of obstacles in an age of soaring economic inequality.”
"Each showed the ability to do college work, even excel at it. But the need to earn money brought one set of strains, campus alienation brought others, and ties to boyfriends not in school added complications. With little guidance from family or school officials, college became a leap that they braved without a safety net."
  Angela Gonzales went to Emory, but her financial aid got screwed up. She dropped out after 3 years with $61,000 debt. She’s working in her boyfriend’s furniture store for $8.50 an hour.
  Melissa O'Neal went to Texas State University. Her high-school boyfriend ran up $4,000 on her credit card and never got a job. Melissa got depressed, skipped classes, and failed some, but is now a 5th-year senior with an engineering student boyfriend and $44,000 in loans.
  Bianca Gonzales enrolled in community college to be near her boyfriend and dying grandfather. She finished her associate degree, and now works as a beach-bar cashier and spa receptionist.
Education is not an equalizer. It doesn't promote social mobility. The gaps between high- and low-income kids are widening. The role of class is growing. Growing incomes at the top, single-parent households, segregated neighborhoods, lower-quality neighborhood schools, and increasing college costs are responsible. So only the prosperous get educated. “It’s becoming increasingly unlikely that a low-income student, no matter how intrinsically bright, moves up the socioeconomic ladder,” said Sean Reardon,

I've been to the Post Office, they do a great job.
 
A strange way to describe an organization for which a $5 billion/year loss is considered an achievement worth celebrating. A private company goes out of business when it can't at least break even (recent bailouts for a handful of large corporations notwithstanding). A government organization makes taxpayer write a bigger check.

There are environmentalists advocating ethanol fuel from corn?

It was sold to the public as "clean energy." Some of the most culpable are apologizing for their advocacy.

If it was all a front for Big Corn or whomever — the otherwise noble green agenda co-opted to serve narrow interests — one must wonder which parts of our contemporary `green' agenda are also misplaced.

Or not. When the policies prove a mistake the enviro-statists will assign blame to someone else while advocating the next bad idea.

There are environmentalists advocating ethanol fuel from corn?

It was sold to the public as "clean energy." Some of the most culpable are apologizing for their advocacy.

If it was all a front for Big Corn or whomever — the otherwise noble green agenda co-opted to serve narrow interests — one must wonder which parts of our contemporary `green' agenda are also misplaced.

Or not. When the policies prove a mistake the enviro-statists will assign blame to someone else while advocating the next bad idea.

SHOW ME THE PROOF

Ok...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130909/11430124454/john-gilmore-how-nsa-sabotaged-key-security-standard.shtml
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html?hp&_r=0

I think you're just failing to understand the scope of what they've done. The NSA planted people in standards bodies to deliberately weaken those standards. Not only do we have eye whiteness's from those standards committees that have complained about this for years, but we've got leaked documents from the NSA bragging about doing it. One of their primary goals seems to have been to dissuade broadening the use of encryption in general. By making the standards complicated, hard to understand, a lot of people just gave up and didn't implement them. In other cases they tried to block standards from using encryption by default. All of this leads to a less secure network. Without a doubt those actions of made crime and identity theft much easier. Can we find some guy and say that his identity was stolen because of the NSA? No... but what we can say is that without the NSA's interference, there would be more, and better encryption... and more and better encryption would have definitely reduced the numbers of identity thefts in the world.

Gold is a physical good that they can confiscate though. Bitcoins are more or less just an idea, and ideas are bulletproof.

Actually, they can confiscate your bitcoins when they get your hard drive. They are physical, and exist on physical media. The idea behind gold (and bitcoins) is the same. You dig something up, and for whatever reason, somebody wants to buy it for real services/money. You are right that it isn't the THING, it is the IDEA that they will do that which has value. However, you need the THING to get the money, and the thing is a real bit pattern on some device.

The fact that so many people are spending so much money to dig up these stupid things, which have no inherent value in and of themselves (even gold can be used in jewelry or electronics components), is a huge waste of resources. Currency is a debt, a promise, that we all make to each other. There is no reason to spend resources on something we can do with a simple note.

Here is what Adam Smith thought of bitcons (well, of gold and silver)

The gold and silver money which circulates in any country, and by means of which, the produce of its land and labour is annually circulated and distributed to the proper consumers, is, in the same manner as the ready money of the dealer, all dead stock. It is a very valuable part of the capital of the country, which produces nothing to the country. The judicious operations of banking, by substituting paper in the room of a great part of this gold and silver, enable the country to convert a great part of this dead stock into active and productive stock; into stock which produces something to the country. The gold and silver money which circulates in any country may very properly be compared to a highway, which, while it circulates and carries to market all the grass and corn of the country, produces itself not a single pile of either. The judicious operations of banking, by providing, if I may be allowed so violent a metaphor, a sort of waggon-way through the air, enable the country to convert, as it were, a great part of its highways into good pastures, and corn fields, and thereby to increase, very considerably, the annual produce of its land and labour.

Krugman dug this quote up.

The USA has treated their allies worse than most of Europe would treat their enemies and still nothing came of this.

That is why the US has had to help rescue Europe from its enemies. Western Europe is damn lucky it didn't end up in Soviet hands after falling into Nazi hands. There is another problem brewing in Europe - many European nations are being colonized by people hostile to European values. Europe invites them in due to the plunging birth rates of native Europeans. This is going to start being a problem within 30-50 years unless trends change. It is unclear if the US will either be interested to able to help Eurabia at that point.

Will these Data-centers defraud their customers like the auto-centers did?

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/23/business/sears-auto-centers-halt-commissions-after-flap.html

Sears has been dead to me for at least 15 years, and it's not due to their irrelevancy. They have destroyed the public's trust in them with very long series of scams and deceptions. Remember the craftsman lifetime unlimited warranty on tools? Try getting them to fulfill that now... they just tell you they don't make that part anymore and offer you a coupon for a new wrench. Fuck sears, they should have died in the 80s.

1) The 'who' and 'when' of the data exchanges is still being watched, and you might be surprised how much of that can be used as justification under the slippery legal concept of "probable cause". Yes, you may well be innocent anyway, but that doesn't prevent them from using the system over and over again to harass you.

2) They've already established a trend of admitting evidence that would normally require a warrant.

3) P2P carries more than just entertainment or files broadcast as available to everyone, and people should have a right to use it. I2P uses P2P modes of transmission to create connections that are private and secure. Does advertising to everyone that you have bandwidth to add to the network make the contents of your system open to investigation? Legalistic definitions of IT methods often go awry (...and usually against the public interest, I might add).

But that should not be happening in a country with a highly marketable commodity (oil). The nationalization of the oil industry has not been able to maintain previous levels after US and Dutch oil techs were driven out of the country, and production has fallen off by a quarter, and exports fallen off by half since Chavez came to power.

Nationalization has been a major fiasco.

And those (nationalized) refineries aren't going to be fixed by Big Oil. Fool them once. They have a long memory.

Off by over 30 years, pal. The Venezuelan oil industry was nationalized in 1976, and it ran pretty well long after "US and Dutch oil techs were driven out of the country". The decline started in 2003, after Chavez fired en-masse those not loyal to his party. Chavez, not nationalization, ruined the oil industry.

Yes and as stupid as it sounds. This will work for a short while. Every person of means is probably desperately trying to leave. Once the "bargains" are gone, there will be no more product. Price controls drive growth into the ground and set the stage to inflation when they are released. Next comes wage control, then shortages, rise in crime (fueled by black markets), persecution of the wealthy, then hollowing out the middle class, and finally riots and needless death.

But that should not be happening in a country with a highly marketable commodity (oil). The nationalization of the oil industry has not been able to maintain previous levels after US and Dutch oil techs were driven out of the country, and production has fallen off by a quarter, and exports fallen off by half since Chavez came to power.

Nationalization has been a major fiasco.

Venezuela depends on the United States to buy 40 percent of its exports because US Gulf of Mexico refineries were designed to process low-quality Venezuelan and Mexican crudes that most refineries around the world cannot easily handle. But in recent years, the United States has been replacing its imports of Latin American crudes with oil from Canadian oil sands fields, which is similarly heavy.

American imports of Venezuelan oil have declined to just under a million barrels a day, from 1.7 million barrels a day in 1997, according to the Energy Department. And while Venezuelan exports of oil are in decline, its dependency on American refineries for refined petroleum products has grown to nearly 200,000 barrels a day because of several recent Venezuelan refinery accidents.

And those (nationalized) refineries aren't going to be fixed by Big Oil. Fool them once. They have a long memory.

People just loved the Flickr redesign.