Slashdot Mirror

- about 30% voter turnout

In presidential election years it is more like 58%, twice your claim. And better yet the turnout numbers have been trending up.

- Election looser becomes president (2000)

The 2000 results have been the most studied in US history, and guess what the studies have shown Bush really did win.

Here's one:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/media/media_watch/jan-june01/recount_4-3.html

- You need a billion US$ campaign funds to have a chance

So? The US is a big country. It takes a lot to get your message out. It's not some piss ant Euro country the size of one US state. It would be like electing a president of all of Europe.

- Heriditary tendencies for seats in congress/senate

Bullshit. There are few cases where these seats are inherited from family members. Currently it is 15 out of the total of 535. Three percent.

Not successfully, as yet.... The theory was that the antifreeze proteins used by the arctic flounder to resist cold damage in its rather hostile environment would produce a tomato resistant to frosts and cold storage.

Splicing the gene in worked just fine. However, the product wasn't significantly better, as a tomato, and the PR was bad.

Good old Green Fluorescent Protein, a jellyfish derivative, has been spliced into just about anything and everything somebody in a lab coat has cared to hold still for 10 minutes; but largely as a proof-of-technique or imaging agent, it has no obvious value for food crops.

Our experience to the present suggests that attempting to grab useful animal traits and shove them into plants(I, for one, welcome the tomeato with enthusiasm!) is harder than naive speculation would suggest; but that there is no magic barrier to splicing animal genes into plants, other animals, bacterial, etc.

Per PBS it's an average of 180 miles per 12 hour shift. Given that a medallian runs $1M, I doubt that having to get an extra $50k car is that much of a concern, though battery changes would probably be cheaper.

Per Shaller - average is 80-150 per shift, some 'over 200'. Now, from what I understand, most drivers have to fill up during the shift due to the lousy gas mileage they get with their driving patterns, but that might not be required.

I'll note that for true taxi service, I wouldn't go with anything but the 300 mile battery system. If we figure on a 180 miles a day, 365 days a year, that's 66k miles. At which point you're looking at under $2k for fuel cost for the EV, vs closer to $15k for the gasoline vehicle. Assuming it holds up, of course. Electric motors should have no problem, the frame should be engineered for it, same with the upholstery and such. Tires I figure are a static expense between the two. The only real question is the batteries.

Oh yeah, and NYC might kick them some money in compensation just for the lowered pollution.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

We used to believe in regulations, which is why the meat in your freezer is edible. See, it does work.

But then the neoliberals moved in, and the Republicans were overtaken with faith-based economics, and now, regulations are the bane of everything good.

Brooksley Borne was just one of many people who predicted the financial meltdown. She was shut down by people who really believed that regulations are bad.

Regulatory capture is only part of the problem.

The whole point of the Fermi paradox is that if the earth isn't special, then where the hell is the evidence of alien life? All these posts explaining how we aren't special, and how "life will find a way", just lead right back to it. Why haven't we found so much as a single piece of evidence of any kind?

Probably because the lifespan of technological civilizations isn't that long. Human civilization is about 3000 years old, but only about two centuries of that is technological civilization with enough power to do much. We've had the ability to send radio signals into space for less than a century. We're already starting to run out of natural resources. There are arguments over how many decades are left for some resources, but nobody sees many centuries of resources left. Trying to mine low-density resources requires greater energy inputs for the results obtained, and eventually that stalls out.

If our understanding of physics is roughly correct, fast interstellar travel is hopeless. Slow interstellar travel might be possible, but it currently looks like the closest interesting place is about 500 light years away. Sending a generation ship to a system with no habitable planets is pointless. Sending one to an active civilization means it gets there after they've run down.

If you plug reasonable values for extrasolar planets into the Drake equation and set the lifespan of a technological civilization to 500 years, you get 24 civilizations currently active in the Milky Way galaxy, which is about 100,000 years across.

Wrong. Read this :- (PBS)
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/wiredscience/story/95-space_junkyard.html

Wrong. Read this :- http://www.pbs.org/kcet/wiredscience/story/95-space_junkyard.html

Wrong. Read this:- (PBS)
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/wiredscience/story/95-space_junkyard.html
"All this space detritus ended up here courtesy of a federal rule that required government contractors to return all their built hardware - or sell it for scrap. So Norton Sales made discarded space gear the centerpiece of its business. Their customers used to be mostly souvenir hunters and set decorators for science-fiction movies. But now, rocket scientists and engineers are calling, looking for pieces of the intricate rocket plumbing that haven't been made in four decades. These were the kind of parts that went into the mighty Saturn Five rockets that took men to the moon from the 1960s to the early 1970s. Now, as the United States gears up for a new set of missions to the moon and beyond, NASA is discovering that it has forgotten much about how those original rockets were built. Many of the engineers and contractors who developed the incredible number of pieces of machinery that went into those rockets aren't around anymore. And in many cases, the companies they worked for have changed hands or gone out of business, taking their blueprints and records with them. NASA engineers and technicians are now busily digging up old rocket parts, cleaning them up and reverse-engineering them to figure out how they worked. So the path back to the moon might just go through Norton Sales' salvage yard.."

Alcohol prohibition was never about money. It was about the moral uptight getting their way.

Perhaps, but it did serve a purpose.

Ken Burns recent documentary on Prohibition, and the reasons for the movement that eventually got the amendment passed.

The amount of Alcohol consumed in the US was utterly staggering prior to prohibition.

By 1830, the average American over 15 years old consumed nearly seven gallons of pure alcohol a year – three times as much as we drink today

Public drunkenness was rampant. We can't comprehend the amount of alcohol that flowed in that era, because people simply don't believe you can drink that much and get anything done, which, of course, was precisely the problem.

There was very little medical science and even less education available at that time to control this epidemic, and moral indignation was just about the only tool available. After the civil war, things got much worse, and the anti slavery movement turned its sights on alcohol.

Have you read anything about how stuxnet propagated?
It was "darned hard", as you say, and the attackers pulled it off.
"Air gap" means far less than it used to.
With every passing year, more and more "things" are dependent upon more and more CPU power.
You don't need to own your targets & control them, just denial of service would be enough. (e.g. suppose there was an exploit that could brick every cell phone made in the last 3 years? Or take power grids offline? Or... you know, it really is a long list of vulnerabilities; this interview gives a fair overview of the challenges).
The "hotline" thing seems like cheap insurance; why not go ahead with it?

What makes your examples not-censorship? At the core, common definitions of censorship agree that it is the restriction of speech (communications). When (if) you avoid using "Fsck" in polite conversation, you're censoring yourself.

Uh, "such as", but not actually Al Qaeda? Have you even read Bin Laden's Fatwas? He pretty clearly outlines that he's pissed off about American imperialism and Jewish re-settlement of Israel, and the (claimed) resulting poverty and economic decline of Arab nations as a result. I get weekly emails from my stoutly republican grandfather outlining Obama's character and policies in a similar light. What you wrote reads almost exactly as what's on wikipedia.
 
Some light reading: 1996 Fatwa
  1998 Fatwa.
 
No where does it mention expanding Islam and making it the "dominate" religion. If you have some primary sources you'd like to present here, I'd be interested to read them, but the primary literature Al Qaeda is based on is political, with religious undertones (as is the way with many things in that region), not the other way around.

Uh, "such as", but not actually Al Qaeda? Have you even read Bin Laden's Fatwas? He pretty clearly outlines that he's pissed off about American imperialism and Jewish re-settlement of Israel, and the (claimed) resulting poverty and economic decline of Arab nations as a result. I get weekly emails from my stoutly republican grandfather outlining Obama's character and policies in a similar light. What you wrote reads almost exactly as what's on wikipedia.
 
Some light reading: 1996 Fatwa
  1998 Fatwa.
 
No where does it mention expanding Islam and making it the "dominate" religion. If you have some primary sources you'd like to present here, I'd be interested to read them, but the primary literature Al Qaeda is based on is political, with religious undertones (as is the way with many things in that region), not the other way around.

We can however seek to *disprove* the theory - this is perfectly scientific, and thus puts the question within the realms of testability.

Not really, except in the sense it's already been disproven.

This is the statement that 'only evolution' occurs? Whether or not it has been disproven does not make it unscientific. It is a perfectly valid postulate, just like my 'all sheep are white' example.

Here's a couple cats. Can Natural Selection account for all their biological attributes? I'm not specifying yet whether or not the cats are fluorescent.

I don't see any reason why natural selection + 6 billion years of evolution cannot produce cats. Can you give me a biological attribute that cannot be explained by natural selection? Don't say eyes - there are plenty of articles that explain how these can arise (cf. this for example). Do we have any reason to suspect that something as outlandish as a 'designer' is necessary to explain cats?

What are you proposing as your differentiator between features caused by natural selection versus those caused by design?

I guess meeting the designer would allow me to put this to rest - of course He could be lying. I may also be seeing things.

Okay, outside of the sense in which it has been disproven, what would qualify as disproof of -exclusive- causal claims?

Well, just like any scientific postulate, you would have to show that the claim is not sufficient to account for the observation. I have yet to see anyone do this for evolution. Intelligent Design of course cannot be disproved because acts of God are not reproducible.

There is no need, that I can see, to overextend claims as to what we scientifically know into what we do not, and claim as a scientific premise that we "will know it applies in all cases", presciently.

Wait! What you are describing is the very definition of science! We make an observation, postulate a theory, use the theory to make a prediction then falsify the prediction. 'Overextend[ing] claims as to what we scientifically know into what we do not' is what science is all about.

Secondly, you are equivocating "scientific" with "true" here, it seems--the two are not synonyms.

I disagree. I am equivocating 'scientific' with 'can be tested using the techniques of the scientific method'. 'Truth', well, I discussed previously how I hold that proving something is impossible.

I'm afraid I do not understand your following point regarding how 'only evolution occurs' is unscientific. Clearly it is accessible to science; one has only to find a valid (scientific) alternative theory that can account for it. Do you have one of these? Regardless, even if you do, it *is still a scientific prediction*.

Regarding your final point, I too find it irritating that people make claims of any sort with absolute certainty. This is why I have been careful with my wording not to make you think I am claiming anything with absolute certainty. I don't think I have erred.

Pollution is what's saving the planet from global warming.
See the Global Dimming article on Wikipedia. There was also a NOVA episode on the subject.

There is another side and for a legit reason. The discussion isn't about climate change.. it's about if mankind is causing it. The earth was not always this temperature. It goes through cycles of warming and cooling. You've heard of ice ages, right? Read this: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/cause-ice-age.html

NARRATOR: Steve's embrace of endurance running raises the question, are we all born to run?

Some human features seem just right for the job like the springy arch of the human foot. Hairless skin and abundant sweat glands provide exceptional cooling. We also have large muscular butts which prevent us from tipping too far forward.

Humans don't run fast. Sometimes even squirrels can outrace us. But in a warm climate, over distance, we can outrun dogs, antelope, and even horses, which will all overheat.

In our evolutionary past, that may have been a killer advantage.

DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN (Harvard University): Early humans were so good at running in the middle of the day that they were able to run animals to exhaustion and to heat stroke. And then, at that point, the animal's already dying. It takes no technology to kill that animal, so you can safely and effectively, and fairly easily, have access to meat. ...

  MALISSA WOOD (Massachusetts General Hospital): The risk for dying during exercise is one out of 50,000. So it's higher than the risk of dying when you're just standing around in a sedentary fashion.

NARRATOR: Malissa Wood is a cardiologist who studies the effects of marathoning on the heart. And she's found how well the heart fares during the race depends on how diligently the runner has trained.

MALISSA WOOD: If the individual has not trained their heart adequately, the heart really starts getting tired. In people that have trained adequately for the marathon, their hearts look fine.

NARRATOR: Most heart attacks aren't caused by just tired and stressed heart muscle, but by blocked coronary arteries, often associated with poor diet and lack of exercise.

  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/marathon-challenge.html

Plus he is missing the point that it is no different than our political system, with two groups at the top that are Coke and Pepsi and take any competition VERY nastily. In my own area neither the cable nor DSL has moved a single inch in a decade and when a friend tried to route around them by getting his boss to shell out for a T-1 and renting connections off the line the duopoly made a few calls and has his connection price raised 400%!

They told him "Just try and sue us" and his lawyer told him flat footed "Oh yeah you'll win no doubt, but it'll cost you about a mil five in fees and a decade out of your life" so they just closed up shop and moved away. those folks are STILL stuck with nothing but cellular or dialup BTW, and guess who is the only ones that offer that in that area? Why one of the duopoly of course!

The only way things are ever gonna change is if the lines are opened up to competition. We even have precedent as we gave them 200 billion to run us nationwide broadband more than a decade ago and all they gave us was a low res Goatse while their CxOs used the cash for big boobed hookers and blow. If they want a monopoly? We'll give them 15 years for any area they run FTTH, we'll give them 25 if that area had never been served. oh and it doesn't count unless EVERY house can receive it, otherwise they'll run it to a single house and count the whole area, like they do on that lame .gov broadband list that shows my mom has SIX different ones to choose from when all she has is a single badly run WISP that is frankly not much better than cellular.

Personally I think with so many out of work it is time to bring back the WPA and have those that are hurting for work run us nationwide fiber that We, The People will own. any carrier can then compete and give us plenty to choose from. Otherwise all we are gonna get thanks to our corporate overlords is the short bus to the information superhighway while even Romania kicks our ass on speed!

"I'm also struggling to comprehend how the case could have "fallen apart", because they found classified information in his house and his unclassified computer" - (A) The material they found was classified as 'restricted', not 'secret'. Having worked in multiple government laborities, I can tell you that restricted in this sense means confidential but not classified (in the same sense that social security numbers and other personal information are not to be made public) (B) Another LANL physicist, John Ricther, testified that "99 percent" of what they found in Lee's house was already in the public domain.

OK, so Obama (just to pick an example) pushed to end military discrimination against homosexuals, and that didn't impress you, but now that comcast can't charge you a little extra to view google, THAT impresses you? Come on, man...get your priorities straight. Are you only impressed when there's something in it for you?

Yeah, I will get modded down for saying that, but there are good reasons why we should not want homosexuals in the military.

Posting anonymously as I'm moderating on this thread...

No, I won't mod you down for being a fucking asshole. You just keep trying to pass off your hate filled crap. And remember that your homophobia may well stem from your own latent homosexuality, no really.

And just to clarify, I am heterosexual and *not* a homophobe. I hold what seems to be a minority belief these days, that we are all humans and we should all be treated with a modicum of respect as human beings. Your small-minded and hateful attitudes make me want to hurl. Is this better than modding you down, jerk?

They are only theoretical designs and not expected to be ready for construction until at least 2030.

No, there was a running Integral Fast Reactor operating in the early 90's. Clinton's team defunded it immediately and shut it down in subsequent years.

It solves the nuclear waste cleanup problem as well as the energy source problem. In my opinion, leaving massive quantities of nuclear waste for future generations to deal with is irresponsible.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

That was Radioactive Wolves. I had to watch it just for the title, even before I found out it was about the Exclusion Zone.

For-profit schools. Shut them down. Period.

The average annual tuition for for-profit schools this year is about $14,000. Public four-year colleges charge, on average, $7,605 per year in tuition and fees for in-state students. What's worse is this: The default rate on student loans from for-profit institutions is 15%, while the default rate at public universities is only 7.2 percent (same source).

For-profit schools are milking the American taxpayer for money. Just walk into any one of these schools, tell them you want to be a nurse / chef / accountant / whatever, and they'll lay down a student loan form for you to sign before you could even say "Herbie Hancock." Because, at least with the present law, once a for-profit school gets their money from Uncle Sam, it's theirs, no strings attached. I'd almost call it fraud, except those students who enroll in a for-profit school actually do get something in return, even if it is a sorry-excuse of a half-ass education. (PBS did an excellent documentary a year back on for-profit schools, particularly exposing the "value" of a diploma one gets from these crooks. You can watch it here.)

What's sad is that there's a really simple solution to all this: require a for-profit school to assume some of the risk. If we required a for-profit school to pay back even just 50% of the loan that was defaulted on, you'd see the default rate decrease overnight.

ONLY 7.2%! while the for profit is higher the state school default rate is pretty high. For all the hype of big this big that the demonizers seem to skip Big Education. Check the rate of tuition inflation over the last 30 years, but be setting down before you do.

For-profit schools. Shut them down. Period.

The average annual tuition for for-profit schools this year is about $14,000. Public four-year colleges charge, on average, $7,605 per year in tuition and fees for in-state students. What's worse is this: The default rate on student loans from for-profit institutions is 15%, while the default rate at public universities is only 7.2 percent (same source).

For-profit schools are milking the American taxpayer for money. Just walk into any one of these schools, tell them you want to be a nurse / chef / accountant / whatever, and they'll lay down a student loan form for you to sign before you could even say "Herbie Hancock." Because, at least with the present law, once a for-profit school gets their money from Uncle Sam, it's theirs, no strings attached. I'd almost call it fraud, except those students who enroll in a for-profit school actually do get something in return, even if it is a sorry-excuse of a half-ass education. (PBS did an excellent documentary a year back on for-profit schools, particularly exposing the "value" of a diploma one gets from these crooks. You can watch it here.)

What's sad is that there's a really simple solution to all this: require a for-profit school to assume some of the risk. If we required a for-profit school to pay back even just 50% of the loan that was defaulted on, you'd see the default rate decrease overnight.

"[I]n genetic terms, evolution can be defined as any change in the frequency of alleles in populations of organisms from generation to generation." IOW, selection is evolution, by definition.

Yea right, those evil union people. Management would never tell the employees during a bankruptcy that if they take bigger pay cuts, they can keep their pensions. And then promptly renege by terminating the pensions after acquiring the concessions. Watch Mr. Sprayregen say so himself: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/retirement/ Who needs to punch you in the nose with power like that.

I don't know about his sitch but I actually tried that with my mom. She is exactly TWO BLOCKS from the end of their connections on both DSL and cable and NEITHER would run it. So I contacted a friend that was a lineman at the time, had him come out and figure up the cost of the line (about $2300 including the time for him and the bucket truck) and ran the line in my mom's place to the road and contacted the cableco. I was told they would need $35,000 PLUS at least a dozen homes PLUS a guarantee that each home would take the max package PLUS another 35% surcharge on TOP of all that!

Finally in a level of sheer POed I cornered the PHB at the cableco and said WTF did he think he was doing and was told it is SOP to not run a single inch where they can't guarantee at LEAST 100% profit above the cost of the run IMMEDIATELY along with a similar profit for at least two years, but that was only for large jobs with big payoffs, for small jobs try ten times or more for their "effort". This is why they haven't run a single inch except to some condos that signed a crazy exclusive agreement in damned near 20 years, nobody will do shit in this country anymore unless insane profits are handed to them the instant they do it.

Frankly is it any wonder why we get the short bus to the info superhighway folks? Frankly we ought to nationalize the lines since they have ALREADY stolen $200 billion from We, The PEOPLE for nationwide broadband and all we got was the finger and an autographed pic of the CxOs snorting coke off their $1000 hookers with the "free' bonuses we gave them. Well after dealing with them for over 20 damned years trying to get them to run a lousy two fucking blocks I say, to quote Mr garrison "You go to hell! You go to hell and you die!" We need to nationalize and FORCE competition if we are ever to get anywhere. If they want a monopoly? That's fiber to door in return for 15 years. If its a place that currently isn't being served (REALLY served, not the horseshit like that .gov self reporting site which says my mom has 6 choices not counting sat when even in the middle of town i only have two and she has none) we'll give them 25. if they fall down on the job and stop hooking people in the neighborhood up, or trying claiming a single house on the edge of the area means the whole area is served? then bye bye monopoly, the lines are opened and its a free for all.

Just look at how opening up the POTS gave us all this new tech and new devices. If we could take the lines away from the cartels (who should be banned from having both lines and media as a conflict of interest) we could see a similar explosion of new ideas in broadband. but as it is its just the 1%ers at the top bleeding the country dry and giving back ever shittier service in return.

Sounds about right. One of the assumptions for decades, even centuries, is that a collective of irrational actors evens out on the large scale to "appear" rational. This still persists publicly, I don't know if modern economists still believe that. See also, "the invisible hand".

Nova's Mind Over Money certainly covers this thinking, showing it's really a fantasy assumption:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/mind-over-money.html

Cheating:

- Governmental currency manipulation which is pretty much a certainty.

- "Product Dumping", e.g. selling a product at below production cost (either by simply eating the loss or cutting corners and dumping an inferior, unsafe product) so as to drive competitors out of the market and then price-gouge once you're the only supplier (already seen in some markets where China did, in fact, run US companies out of business)

- Rampant theft of intellectual property - we're not just talking Napster-grade "file sharing" here, we are talking about rampant spying and thievery of patented products and designs. As the last article I link shows, it's not just the US getting burned by the Chinese - this is a major point of concern in the EU as well.

Are you getting some form of a clue now?

As other comments have pointed out, it doesn't seem to be a myth. I'm not sure how something that obscure can become urban or myth, honestly.
http://www.pbs.org/speak/ahead/technology/voiceinterface/

The truly foolish thing is believing that people DON'T have bias and prejudice. Regardless of their culture, people are people. Germany just happens to have a lot of men that take their pride in driving incredibly seriously, so it's an easy example to cite. But all the jokes I see on TV about Men-Getting-Lost and Women-Using-Maps are American men. Dating back to All In The Family.

um, i just googled "bmw recall female voice" and got this: http://www.pbs.org/speak/ahead/technology/voiceinterface/

It doesn't appear to be mythical.

Ron Paul says: "And why should we have this Department of Agriculture, just to subsidize farmers? You take money from the taxpayers; you subsidize farmers; then, the taxpayers pay for higher prices in the grocery store."

First off mercenaries (the more politically correct term being "Security Contractors") are more expensive than real soldiers. And he doesn't address the Military Intelligence Complex, even scarier than then Military Industrial Complex since their budget are a "black box", another word for "black hole". See "Frontline" and NPR for an analysis.
Some references:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/paul-plan-would-eliminate-cabinet-departments-to-cut-1-trillion/
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/06/140056904/the-top-secret-america-created-after-9-11
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/view/

And doesn't Apple already have some exclusive deals? iTunes accounted for 28% of all US Music sales May 2010, more than Walmart, and that number is likely higher now.

Walmart use to weld significant influence over the music industry, telling them to lower prices and even forcing artists to change lyrics that Walmart found "objectionable" and that was when Walmart sold only 20% of the nation's music. With iTunes at 28% they have even more power, and I imagine if Apple said "do not put your music on Google's music store" how can you say no to the company responsible for 28% of your income? If Apple was smart they would have put in their TOS long ago something that says if you sell your music on iTunes you can not sell it by any other digital distribution method.

This works very well for the Russians, who can just park whatever they want on top of a disposable rocket.

Not necessarily.

I tend to agree, though. Part of the issue with the Shuttle was that NASA was doing an accounting trick. The idea was that lots of companies want to put up satellites, so NASA would take them up for cheap and drop them off while we're up there. Since the Shuttle is going up anyway, if they can charge some money to defer the cost, that makes manned spaceflight cheaper.

He practiced alchemy, as well as other things. There was a Nova a few years ago about it:
http://video.pbs.org/video/2042275819

Still, I would say I "worship" Newton far more than a nonexistent invisible man in the sky.

A price I didn't like? Are you fucking stoned? they wanted 50 times the line costs in profits PLUS 40% monthly on top of that? And can you not fucking read? maybe you need me to spell it out... we paid 200 billion already and all we got was the finger.

So sincerely, from the bottom of my heart....fuck your corporate ass kissing free market horseshit. THERE IS NO FREE MARKET as its just one government granted monopoly after another. We the American people PAID 200 BILLION for nationwide and didn't get shit but the finger from the CEOs as they cashed another bonus check.

So don't give us that "waaaah, you want me to pay for your stuff waaah!" Republitard bullshit because WE ALL PAID ALREADY and got nothing but a 56k Goatse.

BULLSHIT. Complete and utter bullshit. I found out from a lineman how much it would actually cost to run the cable the TWO block to my mom's house, it was $1600. I offered them $3500 to run the line just so my mom could something better than sat or dialup. you know what I was told? I would have to come up with $50,000 and a guaranteed 10 year contract (at 40% over what everyone else was paying) or it would be "too risky" to run a line TWO BLOCKS.

Moral of the story? THE SYSTEM IS BROKEN. There is NO competition and the duopolies have NO intention of running shit, it called cherry picking, look it up. We should NATIONALIZE THE LINES and we even have a legal reason...fraud. they took 200 billion from the American people for nationwide broadband and ALL we got was the finger. They pay it back with 20% compounded since 1996 in 90 days, or we take the lines, simple.

so quit with the free market bullshit because in natural monopolies it DOES NOT WORK. the ONLY way to get nationwide broadband, which we seriously need to help grow the economy, is to nationalize.

I found the Secrecy Kills podcast very timely having just watched the piece on Frontline interviewing Ali Soufan. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/iraq-war-on-terror/the-interrogator/inside-the-interrogation-room-ali-soufans-tactics/

AC, read this http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/fbi-terrorist-informants
Its the old skill set of "preemption," "prevention," and "disruption"
A massive informant network (rakers) spots "a" lone wolf and an undercover operative is sent in to see what can be done.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/foreign-affairs-defense/ap-documents-expansion-of-nypd-into-domestic-cia/
The operative will propose a plot, provide explosives and then solve the crime :)

OP here, replying AC. To be honest, I'm not totally sure (also my plan was to give them away; something I now see might also be a bad idea for tangible goods). I think the basic explanation I would give is that living in the dark isn't that big an annoyance to them. I am wary of generalizing here, so I want to be clear that I am speaking only for my own experiences, in a portion of (southwest) Ghana. This is like saying Californians wouldn't want X; it may or may not hold true for those in Arizona, and especially for those in, say, Texas. So there may be plenty of places in sub-Saharan Africa or other poor countries where solar lights make sense and are highly valued by the folks living there ... but in Ghana I didn't find that to be the case.

Basically people in the area I was living do have electricity in proximity to their home, if not in their own exact home. So at night, between the occasional streetlamp or other home with lights on, plus a lot of outdoor vendor stalls (which are basically flimsy wooden tables people sell stuff off of, and at night they have oil lamps on them), you can more or less see where you're walking well enough.

Again, oil lamps are bad, the fuel costs money. The disease burden from breathing cooking smoke and oil lamp smoke is a big deal. But it's a big deal to me [Western-educated guy with interest in global health], not necessarily to some people in Ghana. So my overall sense is that people are happy with their oil lamps, and if offered the chance to buy a solar lamp to replace it, most wouldn't. If given a solar lamp, they would probably take it, but if it was made out of a jar, I'd say there's half a chance a month later you'd find them using the jar for something else, and the lamp guts repurposed or given to a kid/neighbor/whatever.

Also, 99.9% of their electronics are cheap Chinese crap that put the cheap-Chinese-crap Americans get to shame, as far as flimsiness. I cannot convey how crappy the Chinese-made products there are. So when *I* think about a solar lamp, I think a rugged REI-type product; when a Ghanaian thinks about one, they probably picture a flimsy plastic thing that will break in a week or two.

I had a Coleman-brand LED lantern, and the family I spent most of my time living with did, at one point, remark that it was pretty cool. The kids were always enamored with it, as they would be with any gadget, but the mother did actually say the equivalent of "you should mail us one of those for Christmas." But it was said in passing, as a sort of 'hey this probably only costs $5 and I guess we might use it' comment (was my sense) ... had they really thought it was awesome, I think they would have told me so much earlier, and much more definitively. Again, maybe her perception of Chinese crap colored her beliefs about my lantern (which actually cost me like $85).

So in conclusion, I think it's a combination of crappy Chinese products coloring their view of all electronics, their own perception of who does and doesn't use these sort of products (fancy solar gadgets are for Obruni [white people]), and a lack of dissatisfaction with existing technologies and methods (however dissatisfied I may be on their behalf means little!).

When I look at a project like Bogolight (linked above), I think "cool!" But, honestly, I have no idea if the average Haitian even wants a Bogolight. I would think yes, but my experience in Ghana tells me not to trust my American-calibrated barometer, that you need to know how Ghanaians, or Haitians, or Angolans think, before you can understand if this is something they will want and ultimately benefit from, regardless of how it may look from a straight up s

The writers created a competition, asking students, architects and businesses to compete to design the best prototype for a $300 house (their original sketch was of a one-room prefabricated shed, equipped with solar panels, water filters and a tablet computer). The winner will be announced this month. But one expert has been left out of the competition, even though her input would have saved much time and effort for those involved in conceiving the house: the person who is supposed to live in it [in Mumbai] We recently showed around a group of Dartmouth students involved in the project who are hoping to get a better grasp of their market. They had imagined a ready-made constituency of slum-dwellers eager to buy a cheap house that would necessarily be better than the shacks they’d built themselves. But the students found that the reality here is far more complex than their business plan suggested. To start with, space is scarce. There is almost no room for new construction or ready-made houses. Most residents are renters, paying $20 to $100 a month for small apartments. Those who own houses have far more equity in them than $300 — a typical home is worth at least $3,000. Many families have owned their houses for two or three generations, upgrading them as their incomes increase. With additions, these homes become what we call “tool houses,” acting as workshops, manufacturing units, warehouses and shops. They facilitate trade and production, and allow homeowners to improve their living standards over time. None of this would be possible with a $300 house, which would have to be as standardized as possible to keep costs low. No number of add-ons would be able to match the flexibility of need-based construction. In addition, construction is an important industry in neighborhoods like Dharavi. Much of the economy consists of hardware shops, carpenters, plumbers, concrete makers, masons, even real-estate agents. Importing pre-fabricated homes would put many people out of business, undercutting the very population the $300 house is intended to help. Worst of all, companies involved in producing the house may end up supporting the clearance and demolition of well-established neighborhoods to make room for it. The resulting resettlement colonies, which are multiplying at the edges of cities like Delhi and Bangalore, may at first glance look like ideal markets for the new houses, but the dislocation destroys businesses and communities.

A recent (PBS-affilliated POV) film, Good Fortune , expands further on the damage that can be done via good intentions when it comes to rehousing folks.

Many economists, journalists, physicians, and so forth have written extensively about the aid industry, and the White/Educated/Western/Elite-knows-best mentality. I certainly am no exception — I moved to Ghana with notions of making solar lights in my spare time, so that persons without grid-access could see at night, only to come to understand that this was a product that most people in the place I was living would have little interest in. It didn't matter that I'd spent months figuring out how to cram solar panels and LEDs into wire-bale jars, media blast them with garnet to diffuse the light better, and so on ... it wasn't something they would have wanted. I helped vaccinate kids, which was something they wanted, and everyone won.

For some more literature on this sort of thing, I'd recommend William Easterly's

So I repeat my question. Name an economist who says that if you increases taxes, taxes will go down because rich people will avoid them.

You've heard of tax shelters, right? Offshore accounts? Trusts, foundations, personal corporations? It doesn't take an economist to see that without an income tax or a death tax these are unnecessary.

If you insist on hearing it from an economist, I bet there are some on here.

"Which Central and South American death squads might you be indicating actually performed this scenario?"

Columbia, for a start. A number of what ended up as right wing "militias" started out as vigilante groups, but were perverted into actually protecting cartels.

See: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/latin_america/colombia/players_auc.html

And would you really have us believe that Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian Circles (mostly thugs rather than always outright assasins) are corruption free and only do their master's bidding?

And what about Mexico's Zetas themselves? They're largely former military who went over to the dark side as it was massively more profitable.

That's just a few. There've been many instances worldwide where extralegal anticrime groups have become the criminals or protectors of the criminals themselves.

Another example: Much of the Russian and other former Soviet state's mafias are former KGB operatives. The skills they learned for supporting the Soviet government translated directly into the skills needed to help themselves to a share of ill gotten gains.

What, you expected me to trot out a string of anecdotes about CIA funded drug dealing or some politically charged thing from Truthout or Mother Jones?

No need. There are too many documented examples on all sides of the political spectrum where extra-legal government and vigilante justice groups have gone bad throughout history.

At least for chimps: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/ape-genius.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/astrospies.html

I highly recommend it. The Soviets actually got a manned space satellite to work. Which is probably where they learned so much about extended space missions.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/carter-crisis/
"We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure. All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem."

Too bad we have spend the last thirty years going down that wrong path, and in more ways than energy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/opinion/sunday/jobs-will-follow-a-strengthening-of-the-middle-class.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

But it is not too late to go back... And it is even easier now:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/4818

http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/defensemap2.html"/a>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP

If you look at this number and compare it to other states, it appears defense spending is fairly proportional to state GDP (notice California). So, in other words, no, the Texas economy is not being propped up via defense spending... Virginia gets much more defense money (33% more), but has a GDP 1/5th of Texas. Alabama also seems to get a lot.

"This will mean more and more hydrocarbons will have to be used to sustain the German economy."

The neighbors can alleviate that problem:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html

On August 31, flood levels started to subside. The water level in the city had reached that of Lake Pontchartrain, and as the lake started to drain back into the Gulf, some water in the city started to flow into the lake via the same levee breeches they had entered through. In 19th century lake floods, the water soon flowed back into the lake as there were no levees on that side.

as humans, what makes us special is not just our ability to adapt, but to adapt the environment around us. If we never lived anywhere there was a threat of disaster, I am not sure where you could live(definitely not Texas, or a few other places. And those maps don't even include floods (the most common natural disaster), for that threats see this map of flood hazards for the US.