Slashdot Mirror

How typical. I found the article after posting. It is an interview with Katie Bouman.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/s...

The process of imaging is taking the incomplete information that we get from a couple of places on our virtual telescope, and trying to fill in all the missing information to get the picture an actual Earth-sized telescope would have produced

There’s an infinite number of possible images that could have been created from the sparse measurements that we took. The goal of imaging is to find the image that not only reconstructs and matches the data that we measured, but also is the one that is most likely.

We have to impose some information about what the image should look like in order to recover that image. Some stuff that we impose is natural and easy — we know that light is positive. You can’t have negative light.

Other things we might impose would be how smooth the image is. You wouldn’t expect an image of a black hole to look like the white noise you get when you pull a cable out of your television.

You really don’t want to accidentally tell our imaging algorithms that, for example, “Oh, what is likely is this ring shape,” because then we just recover that ring back, and we’ve learned nothing.

To avoid shared bias, we split ourselves into four different teams that had different focuses and different kinds of algorithms. We worked separately for a month, not talking to each other about anything.

Then after one month we all gathered together in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and we put all the images up on a screen at one time. I think that was the most amazing moment, because even though each of the other images had different underlying assumptions and looked different, this ring appeared in all of the images.

The ring was always the same size, and it was brighter in the south. That was huge.

That was in late July of last year. Since then, we’ve spent months trying to break our images by training our algorithms on synthetic data. [In other words, the teams tried to mislead their algorithms with fake data that portrayed a flat disk with no hole in the center. They then applied the actual information collected by the Event Horizon Telescope to those new, misled algorithms.]

Even when we then applied those algorithms to the real data, we still got the ring in the end. You would have to bend over crazy backwards to not get this ring.

In the end, what was shown today was from three different pipelines, three different methods that we trained on the synthetic data. We got an image from each of those, and we blurred and averaged them together so they were all consistent.

Pretty cool indeed!

According to a report by NPR, the U.S. Constitution applies to Hispanic illegal aliens, who are not American citizens.

So, the U.S. Constitution applies to Russian citizens, who also are not American citizens. All interference by Russian citizens in the American election involved written or spoken expression, which is protected by the First Amendment.

Furthermore, Russian disinformation is less severe than disinformation produced by the mainstream media (MSM) to support Hispanic illegal aliens. Consider the deceptive claim (by the MSM) that they commit crimes at lower rates than American natives. Get more info about this issue.

Actually, Manafort and Cohen both been convicted of cheating on their taxes in cases unconnected to Trump and his campaign.

Cohen was also convicted of violating campaign finance laws. (Hush payments to Stormy Daniels.) Cohen says he did this "for the benefit of, at the direction of, and in coordination with Individual Number 1. And for the record, Individual Number 1 is President Donald J. Trump."

The Mueller report is just the end of the beginning. Grab your popcorn, folks.

According to a report by NPR, the U.S. Constitution applies to Hispanic illegal aliens, who are not American citizens.

So, the U.S. Constitution applies to Russian citizens, who also are not American citizens. All interference by Russian citizens in the American election involved written or spoken expression, which is protected by the First Amendment.

Furthermore, Russian disinformation is less severe than disinformation used by the mainstream media to support Hispanic illegal aliens. Get more info about this issue.

Do you? Go watch this: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/... if you really think that's 2 hours of lies and bullshit and so-called 'libtards' and their 'liberal agenda' then you don't belong on slashdot or in any science or technology-based career, go to seminary and become a goddamned priest.

Great, so you know there is a problem. Now how about a science based solution...as in nuclear...anything else is just a rounding error and a feel good solution that does nothing. The first step is knowing there is a problem. But that's not the stage we are at right now. We know there is a problem, we just can't get anyone to invest in a realistic solution. Instead we get feel good solutions that do nothing to solve the core problems and likely make things worse in the long run. Until you (and your side) goes all the way to a realistic science based solution...stop using science as your sword. Because its only a sword if you use it to find a solution too. Otherwise, you are a fake using the word science to give yourself credibility while you try to amass more control of others.

Do you? Go watch this: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/... if you really think that's 2 hours of lies and bullshit and so-called 'libtards' and their 'liberal agenda' then you don't belong on slashdot or in any science or technology-based career, go to seminary and become a goddamned priest.

Go watch this: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/... then go ahead and tell us all about how global climate change and the human role in it is just bullshit. Rhetorical on my part of course you Dominionist types are practically begging for the End Of The World anyway, and anything you can do to hurry that along is all to the good so far as you're concerned.

The top 10% are hardly "working class," those are people making clean into the 6-digits. It's also cherry-picking to suggest that everyone who got a smaller refund paid less overall:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/p...

This unfortunate fellow uncovered a failure mode of a technology. Pitot tubes icing over (Air France Flight 447 had iced over pitot tubes); faulty sensors and an aggressive safety system (The Lion Air 737 crash); the recent Wells Fargo outage reportedly due to a data center issue highlighted some issues with a cashless econonomy.

Very unfortunate but safety rules are written in blood (and money).

people are far less racist than they used to be

Yeah, about that:

https://www.independent.co.uk/...

From the time I was born until I finished grad school, neo-Nazis were in the news at most once or twice. Once when they marched in Skokie, Illinois, and maybe when George Lincoln Rockwell died. Today, white nationalists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other "third way" types are in the news every single day. And not just for some ridiculous display or meaningless statements, but for killing people, rioting and getting elected President.

So no, I'm not sure how you can say people are less racist than they used to be.

Here is a sitting Republican from Iowa asking publicly how "white supremacist" ever got to be seen as a bad thing.

https://thehill.com/homenews/h...

And here is an article about the rise of white supremacists in local police departments:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/n...

The IFR ran fine for a year before it got defunded. Thirty years ago.

Indeed, a burner reactor with integrated fuel reprocessing. An awesome concept. A problem with adequate materials technology as sodium cooling a reactor has issues when it starts to leak and air gets in.

Funny that Mr. "I Have a Slideshow" led the effort to kill the IFR and has since made a billion dollars on global-warming fear mongering.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages...

Well Mr "Wartimepresident" finished it of by funding its complete destruction in the 2005 US Energy Policy act, SEC. 625 if I recall correctly.

The Chinese will build these and then take all of our nuclear "waste" off our hands for billions to trillions of dollars since the West is killing itself with anxiety.

Not a chance. The lobbying effort on the part of the oil and coal industry was who was calling for its complete destruction. There is no way they are going to *ever* let IFR go any further.

The IFR ran fine for a year before it got defunded. Thirty years ago.

Funny that Mr. "I Have a Slideshow" led the effort to kill the IFR and has since made a billion dollars on global-warming fear mongering.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages...

The Chinese will build these and then take all of our nuclear "waste" off our hands for billions to trillions of dollars since the West is killing itself with anxiety.

The best part about the Trump administration is that the overall effect has been to drain the swamp. The Muller Probe guilty pleas, the White House turnover, exposing corruption and collusion which threatens the United States itself - this is all great for our country.

Well, no. All of the corruption being removed now was installed by the Trump administration, so the overall effect is zero. And he's appointing new corrupt folks as quick as we're removing them, and now we don't have time to deal with the pre-existing corruption, so the overall corruption is increasing rapidly.

Although Ajit Pai was first installed by Obama, Tom Wheeler did a much better job. This has nothing to do with draining the swamp.

The best part about the Trump administration is that the overall effect has been to drain the swamp. The Muller Probe guilty pleas, the White House turnover, exposing corruption and collusion which threatens the United States itself - this is all great for our country.

Nobody wants surgery to remove a tumor. It is a painful process, being cut open, having flesh removed, and installing a stint to drain the pus. However, it is often necessary to save the patient. Hang in there USA, it gets better.

This is the Progressive future, as assumed and envisioned by Conservatives who hate any form of change and demonize it where ever possible.

My utopia is your dystopia and all of that.

Down with democracy

No real progressive would say or support that. That's fear mongering by your own leadership.

Down with the moral teachings of all major world religions

A good number of progressives don't like religion because it specifically runs against it's own moral teachings when convenient. Case in point: The Bible says to care for the poor and downtrodden, to welcome travelers and immigrants, and to live lives free from material attachments. Guess what the official rhetoric of the self-proclaimed defenders of Christianity is? The poor deserve it, damn everyone who is not one of us, and Greed is good.

We love the morals, but we hate the contradictions. You don't need a religion to teach or uphold morals and ethics, but you do have to teach and uphold them.

Down with happy healthy childhood

More demonizing.

Long live financial oligarchy!

That is not true in the slightest. We have, as a platform, removing money from politics. It's a fundamental requirement to be against money in politics to be able to call yourself a progressive in the US.

Brendan Eich was forced out as CEO of Mozilla for the horrible crime of expressing a political opinion shared by the overwhelming majority of the American populace and considered obviously-correct for all of history until the last five years.

Just because it was considered "tradition" does not make it immune to re-evaluation. Further same-sex relationships are present in all species not just humans, your view of history is wrong, and so is your view of the present.

However, I will agree that forcing him out via mass Twitter posting for his personal beliefs was wrong. It's not democratic in the slightest to have a random group of unrelated third parties dictating who can and cannot be employed in a given business. If it were a big enough issue, let them file a complaint, but they should not be dishing out personal attacks like that nor should any person or group give in to pressure to comply with such lynch mobs.

Long live sodomy! Long live emotionally damaged children!

Governor Matt Bevin, is that you?

Too bad - it's going to be forced on you literally at gunpoint

The only ones who have been pointing guns around here are insane sociopaths, and people frothing at the mouth over the idea of starting a civil war to purge the other. In other words, people who believe in dictatorships and absolute authority over the will of the people. As stated already, no real progressive supports such a position.

dumping 1M bodies a year into the pool is depressing wages

This is simply not true. Economists are very clear on the fact that "the benefits that immigration brings to society far outweigh their costs". It is our poor immigration policies and lack of economic assistance to displaced and otherwise low income workers in the US which is suppressing wages, not immigrants. It is true that most economic benefit of immigrants is going to the wealthy, but that is only because of our government policies which do not redistribute that wealth at an appropriate level (what is appropriate is up for debate, but there is no honest debate of whether wealth inequality is rising at an unhealthy rate: it is).

I do have serious issues with this idea that our government has that the child of an illegal is somehow legal. I've read the constitution and that's not how I interpret it. I can't think of a single other country that would declare the child, of someone who has snuck in, to be a full citizen. It's asinine.

This practice made its way into our laws from English common law. Known as jus soli (Latin for "right of the soil"), birthright citizenship is guaranteed in about 30 other countries. Some countries do put limits, such as France requiring an additional 5 year residency condition (a pretty light restriction). It should always be remembered that no matter what law the parents may have broken, the child has done absolutely nothing wrong. That child has done nothing different than any child born to native parents.

Nevertheless, while illegal immigration might be declining (I'll take your word for it) we are still at around 10% illegal out of the entire population of the US. That's CRAZY. One out of every 10 people you see (statistically) is here illegally. (based on estimates of 30M illegal people in the US out of 300 million total population). I highly doubt that any other western nation even comes close to those numbers.

The United States, as the most prosperous nation in the world, is certainly a primary destination for legal and illegal immigrants. In addition to our high level of prosperity, we are also considered a nation of immigrants and that image helps us attract more immigrants than most nations. But we don't have the highest total number of illegal immigrants (India) or highest percentage of illegal immigrants by population (Russia). It makes sense that two Asian nations have the highest levels of illegal immigration since Asia has by far the highest total population of any continent.

You have a valid viewpoint of there being too much illegal immigrants in the US. I assume we have very different viewpoints on how to fix this, and objectively there is no absolutely correct way to handle immigration so I cannot just say you are wrong. To me the illegal immigration problem is primarily caused by our country not having an appropriate policy to handle the number of immigrants willing to come to the US, and handle the number of jobs in our economy which require their labor. Nations with high levels of incoming migration will be best suited to deal with the world's aging population, and we are very lucky to have tens of millions of migrants in our country contributing to our economy. According to the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, second generation immigrants are among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the US, contributing 30% more to our economy per person than native citizens. First generation immigrants do contribute less, but without them we couldn't get the prime drivers of our economy (their children).

That's 10% of the population with a fake SSN or who don't have a SSN and are paid under the table. Either way someon

You meant to write that Schumer backed off after he got heat from the extreme left wing of his party, right? It wasn't Trump who backed off - it was Schumer. Or is PBS now a conservative mouthpiece of the Trump Administration?

You're both wrong: Schumer offered $25 billion but then rescinded the offer because he caved to the progressive wing of the Democratic party, which wouldn't support a wall. It turned out that he had made an offer that he would never be able to deliver, so he had to back out.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/schumer-pulls-back-offer-of-25-billion-for-trumps-wall-as-immigration-fight-continuse

Trump could force Schumer back to negotiating the wall again by targeting DACA recipients for deportation. Deport, say, a thousand of them a day, and the Democrats will be back at the table quickly. DACA is the tip of the progressive wing's "open borders" spear: let them stay, and then they'll demand their parents and finally all illegals get to stay. Really, DACA recipients should always have been the first to be deported, but now is a chance to use that strategy to achieve negotiating leverage.

Finally, the wall is helpful but not sufficient: we also need mandatory e-verify for all employment. Any insufficiencies in the rural labor force should be made up from the ever-growing numbers of the urban homeless and impoverished: reclaim the cities for decent people by sending the vagrants and bums into the countryside to pick crops; house them in rural villages and bus them out to the fields. Clean out the slums, the hoods, the section 8 housing, and put all the schizos, the "anything helps" freeloaders, and the drugged up ex-hippie scum to work.

It's been a bit of a problem in their community since a sizable chunk of their leadership's been forced out by it.

Who has been forced out? Do you have a citation?

According to PBS, alt-right groups do not cast out people with "non-white" DNA. They instead question the validity of the results, and there are conspiracy theories that the DNA labs are telling many people that their DNA is "mixed" to push their liberal agenda that "we are all the same".

Also, they may not be as bigoted as you think. The founder of the Aryan Brotherhood is a Jew.

Disclaimer: I am white, but my wife and kids are not.

See online: The Facebook Dilemma That's an excellent documentary, especially Part 2. The Facebook system is seriously flawed, Part 2 says. In several countries people have died because of Facebook posts by destructive people.

As is explained in the documentary, people are accepting social media as news. But social media has no editor, in many cases. So, often people, especially those with little education, are accepting fake news stories on social media as true.

Problem: Most Slashdot readers are more logical than the average person in the world. Slashdot readers are much more likely to have developed methods of avoiding fake or unreliable news. But, apparently Slashdot readers are unlikely to realize how often it is that other people are not logical.

Social media managers, especially the Facebook managers interviewed for that Frontline documentary, say they have no responsibility.

"News" without an editor is a social problem that existed far less before the Internet became available because it was too expensive to distribute fake news.

Facebook abuse: Look at the 2nd part of the documentary starting at 43:11. Zeynep Tufekci of UNC Chapel Hill (University of North Carolina), Associate Professor, UNC School of Information and Library Science; Adjunct Professor, Department of Sociology says this about deaths as a result of people accepting a Facebook post as news:

"years and years of people begging the company [Facebook] ... and basically being ignored."

She indicates that Facebook cannot be trusted.

As is explained in the documentary, people are accepting social media as news. But social media has no editor, in many cases. So, often people, especially those with little education, are accepting fake news stories on social media as true.

Social media managers, especially the Facebook managers interviewed for the linked PBX Frontline documentary, say they have no responsibility.

"News" without an editor is a social problem that existed far less before the Internet became available because it was too expensive to distribute.

Look at this in the 2nd part of the documentary, The Facebook Dilemma, starting at 43:11. Zeynep Tufekci of UNC Chapel Hill (University of North Carolina), Associate Professor, UNC School of Information and Library Science; Adjunct Professor, Department of Sociology says this about deaths as a result of people accepting a Facebook post as news:

"years and years of people begging the company [Facebook] ... and basically being ignored."

The Facebook Dilemma

That's an excellent documentary, especially Part 2. The Facebook system is seriously flawed, Part 2 says. In several countries people have died because of Facebook posts by destructive people.

The Facebook Dilemma

That's an excellent documentary, especially Part 2. The Facebook system is seriously flawed. In several countries people have died because of Facebook posts by destructive people.

The Obama administration said Friday it will allow some companies to kill or injure bald and golden eagles for up to 30 years without penalty, an effort to spur development and investment in green energy while balancing its environmental consequences. - Dec 6, 2013

Get rid of that kind of shit too.

Commercial nuclear in France is a basket case, reliant on government support just to survive and keep the lights on. Too big to fail, continually writing off assets and downgrading valuations.

This is the first I've heard of this. There's a lot of talk in the US about how France is the model for a successful nuclear energy program.

Ironically, almost certainly due to the increase in fertiliser run off into the gulf of Mexico from widespread agriculture, many Caribbean nations have been struggling with tourism with increasing frequency due to sargassum seaweed blooms, so the extent that it's making some resorts unbearable with patches of seaweed sufficiently large that they're trivially visible from the air, and with it washing up into piles multiple metres high on shore.

Given these nations that are dependent on tourism don't know what to do with it, it seems there's an easy option here - give it back to the very nations and states that are causing the bloom in the first place to feed to their cattle.

Of course, I suspect the cattle farmers don't want to pay for sea weed that's blooming due to crop farmers, the crop farmers won't want to pay for a problem they've caused and will whinge about how hard they have it despite the vast majority of them being millionaires, and the Caribbean states aren't wealthy enough to collect it all and ship it back for free.

So ultimately the biggest problem here would seem to be not where we get it, but as usual who pays.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature...

OTOH if everyone's dirty laundry were plainly out for anyone to see, people might stop criticizing others for things they have plainly also done. Less hypocrisy is good. This goes double for anything considered even slightly deviant related to sexuality.

Tell that to alcoholics and drugs addicts -especially those poor people caught up in the opioid epidemic. And when a poor girl is made an addict by her own doctors and then shamed by another doctor that's clueless, we got a real problem in this country.

People love to throw stones when they live in glass houses.

New name: DisgraceBook

See the excellent documentary, The Facebook Dilemma: A Two-Night Special Event. All the Facebook officials answered questions by avoiding details of any depth. They only pretended to answer.

Because of the many interesting details, I think this book may be helpful: Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President Facebook was used to manipulate voters.

The 2 night Frontline documentary covers many of the issues with Facebook:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/front...

It's clear that Facebook is everyone's enemy. So why would anyone use them just so they can manipulate you for their own purposes or just rent that manipulation information about you for profit?

Think of the creepiest entity ever watching and listening in on everything you do on their platform then using all the info you provide against you for profit. That is what Facebook is!

Mother nature. Evolution. She's wiped out far more species than man has. Over 99.9% of species that have ever existed have gone extinct since life evolved on this planet.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolu...

So while man is inevitably wiping out some species due to our expansion and applied technologies, and at a more rapid rate, we are nonetheless far from the only threat to species' survival.

You can actually see what sunscreen does from a UV camera...

Part 1...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...


Part 2...
https://www.pbs.org/video/suns...

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/ameri...

Throughout the 18th century, France faced a mounting economic crisis. A rapidly growing population had outpaced the food supply. A severe winter in 1788 resulted in famine and widespread starvation in the countryside

No it isn't. Congressman do it EVERY DAY.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/p...

No. That is about settling on-the-job complaints, it isn't about campaign contributions.

If you engage in sexual harassment on the job while a congressperson, and you get sued right away in the normal course of things, then that fund might help. Those are people who worked in Congress, getting paid for violations of their rights while at work.

When it didn't happen at work, 1) make sure to get it paid off when it is not an election cycle. Don't wait until right before the election when people are threatening to go public to show your true colors; it isn't legal to spend secret money during the campaign to hide your true colors! That's what it is really all about; if it is during the campaign, you're supposed to tell people you spent the money.

It isn't about spending the money, it is about spending the money secretly during a campaign. That is totally different than when your employer spends money to settle a claim that arose during normal work.

No it isn't. Congressman do it EVERY DAY.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/p...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/n...

A news format with a 15 minute repeat cycle (all the 24 hours in 'news mode' vs 'editorial', not that there is much diff) is supposed to make us 'understand'?

No, but news reporting with insightful analysis is.

Something like you see every night for an hour on PBS -

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/

Time to fire the TSA! ;)

Alright, tell that to the relatives of the people who just watched a bridge collapse and kill a swack of people. Certainly the TSA has problems but the real problem is that it is completely necessary to stop corporations and so called "free enterprise" from running amok and killing people. Leave population control with the production of unsafe devices to the military industrial complex they are above "civilian" control. Today if you are afraid of government just take yourself off to the sticks and wear tin foil, but don't preach deregulation of transportation devices unless you intent to move to the sticks and live off the grid without highways and airports! The more we become accustomed to not being able to get away with carrying guns and explosives on mass transportation devices the less need to have the fucking things around in the first place. GO HOME and cry to your gun under your pillow and put on some sun screen, your redneck is showing.

The real problem with the TSA is that the departmentalization is wonky and very much like the FBI, CIA, and NSA the competition and backstabbing that goes on within the framework leads to gaps in security. The lack of cooperation and innovations in all these essential branches of government is what lead to 911. GOD bless John O'Neil may his spirit find peace. PEOPLE LIKE YOU ARE AN INSULT TO HIS MEMORY!

Yea Forcing Diversity in to things at the expense of people that could be more qualified

Where does it say the token woman has to be (or is likely to be) less qualified? There is an oversupply of highly qualified women ready to take the place of less qualified men who currently sit on boards. Companies, being forced to appoint a woman to a board, would likely appoint one of those highly qualified women in preference to a less qualified woman.

Were to think about this dispassionately --which admittedly is difficult for men to do when they feel so threatened -- you'd realise that the rarity of female board members, along with a legislative requirement which demands only a single female board member, should (all other things being equal) result in the situation where female board members were more qualified on average than their male colleagues.

Plus it's always handy to have a woman around to appoint as Chairperson just as the company starts heading towards bankruptcy.

Well, since you haven't said what you believe the primary cause of the increased extinction rate is, I don't know what it would take to convince you. But for all the causes we have been talking about, they are either self-limiting or saturating.

Your claim: extinctions will slow down and stop on their own regardless of our action. My claim: the extinction rate is high and accelerating, with no evidence of it slowing down in the future. Another citation: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/s...

You could convince me with any evidence at all to suggest that extinctions are self-limiting - your claim directly contradicts the observed trend, and data overrules any pet theories you personally hold.

The kW/h figures don't actually tell you how costly that energy is.

What the hell else would you use? Those are the EXACT figures for how costly the energy is, which account for resource extraction, transport, generation and maintenance, land cost, and anything else that needs to be accounted for. If you suggest an alternate mechanism for gauging power plant cost, explain it and provide evidence for it.

Things that are massively harmful for society can be very profitable for an individual company.

I agree: they can be. In the case of climate change, I believe that's not the case; it certainly has never been demonstrated.

I form my opinions based on the best available scientific evidence. What are you using? What evidence would you accept as sufficient?

Yes, you keep saying that. It turns out to be economically wrong (you can't really "account" for externalities through taxes).

Just completely wrong. This is economics 101, literally: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez...

And even if you could do all that, it would still be a lousy choice: spending $1 trillion today to save $10 trillion (PPP) in 80 years would be irrational, and IPCC estimates of costs/benefits are substantially lower than that. You are impoverishing the world for no rational reason.

Wrong once more. Externalities lead to LESS market efficiency, and LESS prosperity for all involved. And there are two ways of accounting for externalities: regulation, or taxation. Taxation is more optimal. The basics are spelled out in the same ECON101 slide deck I linked.

Elon Musk is using the economics of sneakers for his cash flow. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/t...

Average lifetime for a mammalian species is 1 million years. A few mammalian species last as long as 10 million years.

About 300 million years from now the brightening of the sun will indeed mean "we" will have to do something, but the term "we" in that phrase means "some different future species that is related to us about as closely as we are related to the very first reptiloids that would, in the future, evolve into dinosaurs."

We spend 2.5 times more per capita on healthcare than the Brits do https://www.pbs.org/newshour/h...

I sure as hell hope our wait times are less than their's.

Considering how much more we spend than any other country on healthcare we really don't get that much back in return.

Idiot AC. Forty two percent support impeachment; but then 47% say they will not support anyone who votes for impeachment. So more people will punish politicians who support impeachment as compared to people who support impeachment. Not a winning hand - but you go ahead and run on that!

Turing had automated the testing of over 15 billion possible passwords each day

Whoah, thats actually incredibly fast for the 1940s. I need to learn about his architecture a bit. Hadn't realized how ahead of his time it was as well.

He was a gay man that wasn't that in closet - being gay back then was actually illegal.
He didn’t keep his sexuality a secret among friends.

I just people would stop and think, "Is this person's values and actions behind closed doors really harming me or society?"

Just because they don't fit into one's own value system, doesn't make them wrong or evil. And maybe people should stop and think about their own values sometimes. Maybe you're wrong. In some cultures, educating girls is against society values.

And let's also remember that some of our values were created by illiterate goat herders who decided to worship their war god, Yahweh, when they decided to be monotheistic. An evil pathetic god who thought that murdering children was justified.

I did fucking swimmingly on my standardized tests, probably helped get me into the school I attended. That doesn't make it accurate.

You could try googling too, or reading the fucking article but you wont so I'll leave a link here just for you

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/e...

Nope, Henry Ford incorporated in 1903 and made a profit in 1903. Tesla has been around for 15 years and still making no profit.

Surely you know you are lying by telling only half the truth, right? I mean, if you knew he started in 1899 and nearly went bankrupt with a low-quality, over-priced car, and then re-incoroprated in 1903, you also know that he didn't start shipping the Model-T until 1908. Before that he was selling a custom, low-volume, high-end roadster, the model 999. You might have heard, Tesla also started out selling a low-volume, high-end roadster.

Interesting, good to know.

But I will give you this, Musk is a thin-skinned narcissistic ayn-randian asshole, but at least he's not a god damn nazi.

And what make you think so? I heard interviews with him, and he seems quite a humble person, extremely humble comparing to some other CEOs.

Nope, Henry Ford incorporated in 1903 and made a profit in 1903. Tesla has been around for 15 years and still making no profit.

Surely you know you are lying by telling only half the truth, right? I mean, if you knew he started in 1899 and nearly went bankrupt with a low-quality, over-priced car, and then re-incoroprated in 1903, you also know that he didn't start shipping the Model-T until 1908. Before that he was selling a custom, low-volume, high-end roadster, the model 999. You might have heard, Tesla also started out selling a low-volume, high-end roadster.

But one way Musk is not like Ford - Ford didn't have to compete with an already entrenched global industry. So, that might have slowed Ford down just a little bit. But I will give you this, Musk is a thin-skinned narcissistic ayn-randian asshole, but at least he's not a god damn nazi.

People can be against fascism and still be assholes.

It's disturbing how, when there are protests between wannabe Nazis and basically anyone else, some people leap to condemn the "anyone else". Whatever ever happened to not being huge fans of the Nazis?

The "Nazis" aren't a threat. Your "anyone else actually is.

Yes, people standing up against Nazis and protesting police brutality and not standing for the pledge of allegiance are a threat. A dangerous threat. CRUSH THEM!

Whereas the people who commit multiple acts of terrorism and crime aren't.

He was up against Hillary Clinton. It's not as if the voters had an honest, decent alternative.

Not buying it. Sure Hillary wasn't as squeaky clean as Obama, but she was fine. She was competent, and you would have got the same incremental improvement that Obama got.

With Trump you got a bombastic monkey who thinks throwing feces is a new inventive form of negotiating tactic. Seriously, we put someone who has been bankrupt how many times in charge? Its insanity. If you can't avoid going bankrupt when you start with a crap ton of money, then you shouldn't be leading the free world.

I suppose to an extent you could partly blame millennial for Trump. Electing him is, sadly, the same kind of mindset which states if I purchased a hundred lottery tickets and none of them won, the next is sure to win. Sure Trump got lots of quite unethical and possibly illegal outside help, but part of a person's civic duty is to be able to spot this crap.

His judges alone will fuck up this country for what thirty or 40 years? They are likely to be just the kind of people that buy the arguments of the corporate attorneys. You'll be lucky if one of them doesn't permit some company to bring back the really nasty chemicals. Maybe we can have another Times Beach.

And his attorney general, is, I kid you not now splitting up kids from families, 1500 or so of which they can't find. link

When a normal human kidnaps children from their parents it is a crime, but when the government does it its policy? WTF? I just pray all the kids are okay and not, heaven forbid sold to the highest bidder.

There are a variety of policy and market reasons for the transfer of wealth from young to old.
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* One reason for the age-based increasing income increasing inequality is the transfer of wealth and purchasing power from the society at-large to existing asset holders, who are typically older. And this is done via monetary policy.

Monetary policy is about trying to bring about prosperity via manipulation of the money supply. The net result of monetary policy is the transfer of purchasing power from one group to another. For example, inflation doesn't involve a transfer of money, but it makes a saver poorer and a debtor less poor by changing the purchasing power each one has, by changing the value of the currency. One uses monetary policy to stoke or reduce inflation. Or QE - Quantitative Easing. It was printing money to buy bonds (government debt and mortgage debt). The printing of money has some side effect - it is not consequence-free. The recipients of that money firehose were made wealthier. And the asset bubbles which resulted also made existing asset holders (physical (e.g. real estate) and financial - stock market went from 11K (2011) to 25K (2017) in six years) wealthier.

Governments through the ages have always wanted easy, controllable, predictable prosperity, but in reality achieving prosperity is much trickier and chaotic. It requires first the correct intelligence, temperament and values of the population. Then the population interacts with the natural world and creates legal and physical and security infrastructure. Then, more chaotic, is the creation of items that people value (not merely to satisfy speculative demand (which is quite volatile), like items to gamble on, but things that will satisfy consumption demand (which is more persistent) - demand to consume those items, both goods and services and perhaps non-speculative financial products). And then the march of technology to continue to improve social welfare and the standard of living. And then through some luck, that value and purchasing power must be distributed in some semi-equitable way to the population so that it can consume those things they value.

That's complicated and volatile and not guaranteed. Manipulating the money supply is much simpler. Prosperity through the stroke of a pen. Unfortunately, if it were possible, Haiti or Sierra Leone could become prosperous in short order. Obviously, that will not happen. But manipulating the money supply and the value of the currency to bring about prosperity has been a siren song for policy makers and leaders over the millennia. And the side effect today has been the transfer of wealth from young to older.
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* Also, straight up preying on the young by using them as pass through entities for government money firehosed to the education sector. The young get stuck with the debt, and education costs escalate because they're being paid by our rich Uncle Sam. Yet we all see the reports on how much wealthier those with degrees are versus those without.
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* Next medical costs and insurance. There are both policy and market-based reasons for this.
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* Then, offshoring of manufacturing and intellectual property - offshoring of the production of value. Again both policy and market-based reasons for this.
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* Finally, we're on the dawn of a new industrial revolution, with software automation. The effect is the same as what happened with the industrial revolution - one person could create a much larger amount of product because of technology. To summarize, it was the "consolidation of the production of value."
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So - the net result of all of these factors? Young people are f-cked.