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You are **assuming** I was offended. I was not. I simply pointing out the stupidity of using meaningless, bullshit phrases like "hate sites" or "hate speech". But good luck trying to anthropomorphise speech & websites because not everyone is stupid enough to fall for it.

You either have 100% Free Speech OR you have Censorship. There is NO middle ground BY definition. Only insecure children censor, adults discuss and even laugh about "taboo" subjects. Without the ability to openly communicate and criticize there is no opportunity for learning and growth. Ignoring a problem doesn't magically make it go away. Free Speech -- and the consequence of a few trolls spamming and people being butt-hurt because they are insecure, special snowflakes -- is the LESSER of the two evils. Do you REALLY want to end up like the idiots over in China where a fucking NUMBER is censored??? If you don't like what someone is saying then use your fucking brain and ignore them. Trying to censor someone else due to Political / Religious / Moral EXCUSES else just proves you are insecure. Grow the fuck up already.

Go learn the meaning of this quote:

"I disapprove of what you say,
But I will defend to the death your right to say it."
-- misattributed to Voltaire / Francois-Marie Arouet

Your myopic no anonymity allowed ("require everyone to have a passport" **Facepalm**) won't solve the problem. It will either:

a) drive it underground, or
b) people will just blatantly ignore it.

Go study Prohibition of the 1920's since you seem to be completely clueless about history.

Iran: Russian and Chinese gov. for the last 40 years.
Saddam: American gov.
ISIS: Captured a lot from Syria and Iraq, however, bought directly from Chinese and European gov.
Mexican Drug Cartels: Various, but low-end is bought from American stores, while high-end is obtained from China, Vietnam, etc.

Hi kettle, i'm the pot?

https://www.pri.org/stories/20...

Care to count the number of times the US had been caught stealing british technology?

...we should immediately bring the full front of US Foreign Policy against the five countries that put out more than the rest of the world combined: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

China might be a bit of a realpolitik pass (or at least warning) given its economic position and (more validly) the fact that it has the highest population in the world. Everyone else? Tell them to knock it off, and then go bomb them if they don't.

Think that's too harsh, but the US needs to ban straws? That's a clear sign that you're simply not serious about the issue and are more interested in meaningless, performative wokeness than you are in a utilitarian solution.

Why are so many people trying to ban Neonics?

Look up when the patent expires on them: 2019.

What if I told you they have not been found to cause colony collapse disorder (CCD) but antifungals are that also take out the immune system leaving to the host prone to infection it could normally fend off.

It's not just the bees, this is happening to amphibians, bats, coral and in some cases man. Next time somebody tells you a gas or heat is killing corals... go look up the necropsy. No it is not, it's the damn antifungals.

http://www.plosone.org/article...
https://qz.com/107970/scientis...
http://rs79.vrx.palo-alto.ca.u...
http://www.gbr.qld.gov.au/docu... (July 2016)
http://www.gbr.qld.gov.au/docu... (May 2016)

Compare this with Cuba.

http://www.pri.org/stories/201...

... Samuel Slater of the 1700's

It's all about context. Pretty certain the author was dripping with disdain for having to go out to a "backwater" for the article. Especially given some of the other comments the author made about sleep walking train stations or some other nonsense.

Anyways, lets consider a line from this article regarding Lee Kuan Yew former PM of Singapore: Lee Kuan Yew Built Modern Singapore

But the Singaporean strongman will go down in history not only as the founding father of his nation, which he transformed from a third world backwater into a stable and prosperous first world financial hub.

So tell me, is backwater being used in a pejorative sense? I'd say yes.

Words can have multiple meanings and it is upon you the writer(or speaker) to understand how your listener might take said words. Or a non-obligatory xkcd link: Misinterpretation that might get the point across better.

To make a really long point short, the author of the article is terrible at hiding personal biases.

Parts of Europe still does loads of dumping of their garbage in the oceans.
Likewise, 5 nations are responsible for 60% of all garbage in the ocean.
It turns out that five countries are the leading contributors to this crisis. And all are in Asia. In a recent report, Ocean Conservancy claims that China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam are spewing out as much as 60 percent of the plastic waste that enters the world’s seas.
America stopped decades ago, so instead, we have had it going to China and other nations. That also needs to stop. ALL OF IT. Far better for America to recycle, bury, or burn it.

So, as far as the US is concerned, there is no significant problem.

Unless, of course, you actually check the details.

The fact that South America, China, and Africa are destroying their environments, destroying their farms, and experiencing overpopulation isn't our fault or our problem; those countries have chosen to become socialist shitholes and they will have to deal with that themselves or deal with the consequences themselves.

Actually, it has nothing to do with socialism, it's your corporations behind it. And churches.

Other countries do, but that's something "we" have no influence over.

Except for your massive efforts to destabilize local cultures, seize properties, and crush all opposition to your rule.

You've been doing that for over a century. Did you think nobody noticed?

That was another big story from a few years back. They blocked investigation of the charges until the last documented parliament member with ties to the sex abuse had died, because MI5 had been using 'protection' for the ring of them to get favorable financing passed through parliament.

http://yournewswire.com/britis...
https://www.express.co.uk/news...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/maga...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://listverse.com/2015/09/0...
https://www.pri.org/stories/20...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/1...

You can read and decide for yourself.

no just take what you need and end up in very easy prison.
https://www.pri.org/stories/20...

It's not been one sided. The young US did exactly the same to the technologically most advanced nation of the 18th/19th century, the UK:
E.g. https://www.pri.org/stories/20...

This. I hear this all the time, especially from young nationalist Chinese (I live in Hong Kong). There are several problems with the statement:

(1) You are drawing a moral and legal equivalence over 100 years of history. Do you have any idea of what IP law was like in the late 1800's, which is what you are referencing? By your logic, anything that was legal or acceptable then should be now as well... I can think of quite a few things that would generally be unacceptable or appalling by today's standards.

(2) The US wasn't the only developing country in the 18th/19th century, all other countries were developing together. As such, everyone was copying everyone else and simultaneously improving upon each other's inventions, too. UK's textile industry was based on copying Italian technology for instance (for some reason, everyone always remembers that the US copied, not others...). China made the mistake of closing its borders (and eventually going the Communist route) when it had a chance to progress with the reset of the World. The rest of the world shouldn't have to pay for their mistake. Further, the same rationale (the US did it 100 years ago, so we can do it...) is used by China to justify every questionable action (e.g., these islands were on our map 100 years ago, so they belong to us...). The world does not work this way, or we'd be redrawing a lot of borders and re-patriating a lot of IP.

(3) Neither the US (nor the UK) deny or were bold enough to claim the stolen inventions are their own. History books have been written and no one is denying that this took place. China, however, has the audacity to claim stolen technology as their own original invention. They then pretend to be experts and sell that technology to the world. See, for example, what happened with Japan's Kawasaki and the Shinkansen. Thankfully Japan learned a (difficult) lesson and won't license next-gen Shinkansen technology to China. Let's see how advanced China's trains are in a few years, without a cooperative source of IP...

Enough is enough...

It's not been one sided. The young US did exactly the same to the technologically most advanced nation of the 18th/19th century, the UK:
E.g. https://www.pri.org/stories/20...

A developing nation will always "steal" the knowledge about technology and manufacturing from other, more advanced, nations. This is the normal course of history, it has happened many times before and will happen in the future. Not only the US did it back then, but also Germany stole from the UK for example. In more recent times, Japan did it as well.
Just like you can't protect the latest blockbuster from getting torrented, you cannot keep tech to yourself, same unsolvable problem.

Just as the UK and the European empires themselves "stole" IP and technology from China and other Asian empires before the 19th century ...

It's not been one sided. The young US did exactly the same to the technologically most advanced nation of the 18th/19th century, the UK:
E.g. https://www.pri.org/stories/20...

A developing nation will always "steal" the knowledge about technology and manufacturing from other, more advanced, nations. This is the normal course of history, it has happened many times before and will happen in the future. Not only the US did it back then, but also Germany stole from the UK for example. In more recent times, Japan did it as well.
Just like you can't protect the latest blockbuster from getting torrented, you cannot keep tech to yourself, same unsolvable problem.

Let me guess, you are referring to a young amercia, which was once the worlds scumbags in terms of IP theft?

https://www.pri.org/stories/20...

The US was built on rampant IP theft. Book theft, trade secret theft..

Hi Pot, i'm the kettle..

I almost hate picking a link at google at random, but this appears legit. retraining It also agrees with what I remembered. Basically she wanted to retrain people into current skills. It wasn't as ambitious as Bernie's plan, but it probably had a higher chance of getting through.

The thing about manufacturing jobs, such as the Foxconn deal, well they might bring some back, but I'm betting on the robots for the work for the most part.

Bats, purple martins and other insectivores get a vanishingly small amount of their calories from mosquitoes - less than 1% of the stomach contents of bats. Mosquitoes are quite small and therefore not very calorically rich. Unlike midges and gnats, they don’t really swarm in a way that would allow insectivores to get a whole bunch in one swoop, so generally mosquitoes are providing fewer calories than the expense required to fly at them. Bats, martins and the like mostly end up eating moths and midges. Some species of dragonfly are mosquitovores but, again, not as a large percentage of their caloric intake.

There are a handful of species that target mosquito larvae, which bunch up enough to be worth it. The aptly named mosquitofish is one such creature.

But the saving grace even among mosquitofish is that they don’t care what species of mosquito larva they eat - getting rid of the handful that target humans will leave space for the hundreds of other species that exist in the US (let alone the thousands worldwide). There are approximately 3,500 species of mosquito and only about 40 that target humans. Most of the human targeting mosquitoes are invasive species in nearly all of their range, brought by humans. (Aedes aegypti and the Asian Tiger mosquito, for instance, shouldn't be found in the Americas...)

Contrast that with the enormous chemical inputs we put into our lakes, streams and rivers in order to just control mosquitoes - we are surely inadvertently killing off other species of insects just trying to control mosquitoes. And when we drain a wetland because of mosquitoes, we impact far, far more species than even the worst case scenario of mosquito extinction.

There have been a number of discussions among ecologists and the consensus is that wiping out human-targeting mosquito species is fine. Even E.O. Wilson, the famed biologist and campaigner for biodiversity, wants to kill them all. (He’s actually slightly more cautious, but basically wouldn’t spill any tears over eradicating human-feeding insects.)

So you are saying you prefer cryptocurrency.

I'm not sure where you get your info from but you should find a new source. Funding for gun related research at the CDC absolutely was removed. Federal research dollars cannot study the topic anymore. That leaves private research groups to do it, they always have an agenda one way or another so their data is much more suspect than the CDC which never advocated any agenda about guns.

When you look at statistics and conclude someone is advocating one way or another you are blinding yourself. They are just statistics, the CDC has never played politics. They do real serious work.

I disagree with you about the CDC, but I don't want to get into that argument here. I will, however, provide this link just for your edification.

As for my "sources" of information, it's not some organization with an agenda, I just read the bill. Here is the relevant text:

“None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”

I fail to see how that "silences" the CDC, other than telling them they cannot advocate for or against gun control. If they want to do a study and simply report facts, they are completely free to do so. But that's not what they want to do.

I'm not sure where you get your info from but you should find a new source. Funding for gun related research at the CDC absolutely was removed. Federal research dollars cannot study the topic anymore. That leaves private research groups to do it, they always have an agenda one way or another so their data is much more suspect than the CDC which never advocated any agenda about guns.

When you look at statistics and conclude someone is advocating one way or another you are blinding yourself. They are just statistics, the CDC has never played politics. They do real serious work.

You need to get a firmer grip on reality. Equifax's net income last year was $488M. There were 143M people compromised. So even $3 per person per year would likely bankrupt them.

But giving one executive $90M won't?

No, the real solution is to treat white collar criminals the same way that Vietnam does.

Reminds me of an excellent post from an Iranian blogger who was put in prison for six years, from 2008 until an unexpected pardon in 2015. It's worth a read, especially for the younger folks who weren't paying much attention to information theory or internet philosophy prior to the Rise of Social Media.

Instead, there was the web, and on the web, there were blogs: the best place to find alternative thoughts, news and analysis. They were my life.
It had all started with 9/11. I was in Toronto, and my father had just arrived from Tehran for a visit. We were having breakfast when the second plane hit the World Trade Center. I was puzzled and confused and, looking for insights and explanations, I came across blogs. Once I read a few, I thought: This is it, I should start one, and encourage all Iranians to start blogging as well. So, using Notepad on Windows, I started experimenting. Soon I ended up writing on hoder.com, using Blogger’s publishing platform before Google bought it.

- https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426

See also: https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-01-04/after-six-years-prison-iranian-blogger-sees-very-different-internet and http://www.businessinsider.com/iranian-blogger-hossein-derakshan-internet-changes-6-years-filter-bubble-2015-7

Sanctions and blockades will simply harm the NK people, as Kim will simply squeeze them more and blame the U.S. for their worsening condition. The notion of the U.S. as the "enemy" is fully inculcated in their utterly media-controlled society, and such pressure simply strengthens Kim's ideological hand.

I fully believe that this dictator, like Hitler, will "ride it for all it's worth", and when it's over, in his mind, dying in a nuclear conflagration where he can cement his place in the history books by nuking a U.S. city before he takes his countrymen down in flames with him, will suit his ego just fine.

Your approaches presume a rational adversary. As rational political and economic pressure has never worked in the past, I suggest that is granting too much.

Here's some further explication of that.

Sorry to blow your mind, but the USA is BEHIND Japan on penis size:
https://www.pri.org/stories/20...

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ra...
http://investingnews.com/daily...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Despite their name, rare earth elements are â" with the exception of the radioactive promethium â" relatively plentiful in Earth's crust, with cerium being the 25th most abundant element at 68 parts per million, or as abundant as copper."

And batteries can be recycled...

If production processes pollute, that is a matter for regulations and subsidies or taxes to adjust for externalities.

Fossil fuels, for example, should have a huge tax on them to account for all the environmental and health problems they cause (including mercury pollution) and risks (like the need for a big military to defend long supply lines) with the tax money redistributed as a basic income. You just pay those costs in health insurance premiums, lower productivity from health issues, higher taxes for the military, groundwater pollution cleanup tax costs, and so on -- instead of at the pump or wall outlet -- and thus distorting market forces.
https://www.pri.org/stories/20...
http://www.environmentamerica....

Maybe the companies just decided that the extortionist was probably going to leak the videos anyway. Once the ransom is paid, there is absolutely nothing preventing him from releasing it. It's not like he has any morals whatsoever that might prevent him from double-crossing them. So it's just better to keep the money and not give an incentive for the next pirate hacker to try it too.

Well, if the hackers are bright (and they usually are), they would delete the pirated contract after they receive the money unless they want to scare potential future victims.

Terrorist abducting in the world are a good example of this. If they killed their victim after receiveing a ransom, there won't be a second time (yeah we aren't supposed to negociate with terrorism, but the reality is that it happens : https://www.pri.org/stories/20...)

Decades of saltwater intrusion, subsidence and rising sea levels

No, that's not why the delta's disappearing. Here are the reasons why:

1) Levees and flood protections prevent silt from the Mississippi from depositing into the delta to maintain it, and
2) Oil drilling required dredging up the delta to permit pipelines and shipping lanes, destroying wetlands that help capture and build-up the silt.

Things like getting married, starting a family, or even moving out from underneath Mom and Dads roof; all of these life events will likely cost more than the average "interesting" salary.

Many Chinese men will never have the opportunity without plural marriage. There's 27 million more men than women in China right now. By 2020, it's expected to be 35 million more men than women. As the linked article points out, that's the entire population of Canada. A country worth of young men will not be able to marry and start a family. It's 15% of their age cohort. Fifteen percent! That's insane. And they're already an economic force to be reckoned with. Singles Day sales in China dwarfs Black Friday sales in the US.

Gigging is one reaction to that massive demographic disparity. There's no need to look for the stability and independence that goes with a family because for tens of millions of Chinese men, there will be no family. The consequences of China's One Child policy are going to be with them (and possibly with us, the rest of the world) for the rest of the century, and no one really understands all of the ramifications. This has never happened before, in all of human history. The closest analog is perhaps the American West during the colonial period, but that gender disparity neither lasted as long as this one must nor involved anything like the sheer scale of the one in China. Gigging may be the least of the distortions that are coming.

NotTheOnion is all true news stories. The general gist is that the headline/premise is so ludicrous that one's first thought is "It must be The Onion", but then it's not. In reference to GP's headlines, I've heard at least 4 of them, but the Venezuela one threw me for loop. Here's the article, if anyone is interested: https://www.pri.org/stories/20...

You won't have to worry about that soon. India is a shithole with enough people without even an outdoor toilet that they could stand in line from here to the moon, and there is no way to get from that to everyone having indoor plumbing, because there are just not enough consumers (individual and business) outside the country to fully address the problem. So the "solution" will be war with Pakistan, probably with nukes at some point. Most countries with cultures that keep much of the population in permanent poverty end up doing so.

Even the general population treats much of the country as one large shit hole - the majority go out early in the morning to look for a place where they won't be seen and take a dump.

> I'm only one person, I don't have time to debunk all this nonsense you keep posting.

Feel free to stop.

You don't know it, because you're actually the conspiracy theorist kook on this site, but most of the fake news comes from you. Like, you know, when you tried to argue the PizzaGate scandal was real and so on, so you'll actually be solving the goal you profess to solve which is good.

What you're really saying is that you're getting worn out being the only guy willing to prop up fake news and conspiracy theories. That's really not a loss to most of us if you stop that though you know?

The only people that have killed off the tech angle are people like you that are more interested in implying political opponents are paedophiles than actually having a decent rational discussion. If it upsets you that the site isn't what it used to be then all you have to do is stop being one of the key causes of that.

We really really don't want you to keep defending fake news and the fact you call this widespread issue a conspiracy theory is astounding. What, you really think all those Moldovan and Macedonian kids who admitted they make a fortune peddling it are CGI or paid to say that or something? If they were then that would in itself mean it was fake news, hence destroying your argument of it being a mere conspiracy theory anyway:

https://www.ft.com/content/333...

http://www.b92.net/eng/news/wo...

http://en.publika.md/moldova-s...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

http://www.pri.org/stories/201...

http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11...

It doesn't matter what media left, or right, or what part of the world you look in - Serb or British, Macedonian or American, the problem is real. The fact you want to pretend fake news isn't real says all that needs to be said about you.

If you don't have time to keep trying to debunk the truth then you may want to consider that that's because the truth can't be debunked. You're fighting a battle you can't win, because you're fighting a battle against reality purely because you can't accept that you spent the last 6 months of your life riding Slashdot's ass to defend countless fake news stories and peddle them as fact. You were duped by a 16 year old Macedonian kid, so accept it and get the fuck on with your life if you can't cope with the pressure of trying to mask your own failings.

if you account for externalities like pollution, risk, defense, and so on. See Amory Lovins' research. That has been an economic tragedy from market failure of the last few decades. Markets don't work well when people don't pay the true price up front but can instead privatize benefits for themselves and socialize costs to other people. For example, some companies in the Midwest got cheaper electricity from coal, but I can't eat fish around where I live because they are contaminated with mercury from Midwestern coal pollution.

More evidence: http://www.pri.org/stories/201...
"A new report from the International Monetary Fund says global use of fossil fuels costs taxpayers and consumers $5.3 trillion year. Thatâ(TM)s trillion â" with a T. "
http://loe.org/shows/segments....
"The report's co-author, IMF economist David Coady tells host Steve Curwood how they calculated fossil fuels subsidies worldwide annually cost taxpayers and consumers $5.3 trillion."

The cost in human lives from wars in the Middle East over oil profits is another enormous part of this as is the consequences to geopolitics. How do you factor in the risk of (ironic) nuclear war over oil profits into the cost of oil? See also:
http://www.iags.org/costofoil.... (lowball)
http://www.energyandcapital.co... (highball)

Some interesting news related to the Earth's axial tilt:

The moon’s orbit, in particular, presented a major problem. Today, the moon is tilted 5 degrees, but Stewart says the original theory couldn’t explain why this was the case. “In the standard model [the giant impact model for the creation of the Moon], the moon should have no tilt compared to the orbit of all the planets,” she explains.

To account for the moon’s strange modern inclination, Stewart’s team took another look at the collision that formed the moon. In their calculations, they ultimately tweaked some key details about the event.

“Instead of having a Mars-sized body, we ask for the impact to deliver a lot of energy, enough energy to mostly vaporize the Earth,” Stewart says. “In addition, we want the impact to give the Earth more spin, so that it would spin about twice as quickly just after the moon formed, compared to the original theory.”

And finally, the researchers reassessed what happened to Earth’s tilt when it was smacked by the assaulting planet. “We start with the Earth tilted way over, so that its tilt from the orbit of all the planets is somewhere between 60 and 80 degrees, instead of the 23 degrees that we see today,” Stewart says.

Tangiers Island is in the Chesapeake Bay, on the Virginia side, nowhere near the Mississippi Delta.

http://www.pri.org/stories/201...

On Isle de Jean Charles on the Louisiana Gulf coast,

You might have read up on this if anything that contradicted your position didn't send you into convulsions trigglypuff.

Here's some more East Coast Underwater for you to claim you don't believe is happening:

http://www.pri.org/stories/201...

Due to rising sea levels.

more food in a world where billions of people don't have enough

"More food" isn't the issue - we have a food surplus but it's typically politics which prevent delivery.

Importing a third world country that holds that exact opposite ideologies as your own is fucking suicide

Yeah, it sure destroyed the USA.

There are numerous Islamic countries that are very well off that aren't 'lifting a finger' to help their fellow Muslims.

That's completely wrong.

Turkey is taking responsibility for fully HALF of Syrian refugees, at great expense. Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt are home to nearly all the rest. The number going to Europe is miniscule by comparison:

"In three days in September 2014, Turkey received some 130,000 refugees from Syria â" more than the entire European Union had in the past three years"
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/11/20/amnesty-international-85-percent-syrian-refugees-in-turkey-living-outside.html

Successful Muslim (Gulf) countries like Saudi Arabia are JUST AS DISTANT from Syria as the EU is. Those same distant Muslim countries ARE now contributing significant amounts of money to support the current crop of Syrian refugees (though it certainly took them quite a while, and they could reasonably be doing more). They have some peculiar issues with taking in more refugees, which seem quite strange to someone in a western country:

"these countries are already overloaded with foreigners. For example, 88 percent of the population of the United Arab Emirates are foreigners. For Qatar, it's 85 and Kuwait 70 percent." http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-09-03/what-are-gulf-countries-doing-help-syrian-refugee-crisis

Lots more useful information is available here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugees_of_the_Syrian_Civil_War

I used to think that paternalistic conservatism is very weak in America. Then I've seen what Trump voters say, and I now firmly believe that to be a myth.

The ultra-religious conservatives are the minority - they turned out for Cruz, by and large, and lost.

At the same time, I have considerable personal interaction with ultra-conservative Tea Party types (I happen to have some intersecting hobbies, such as a collection of "assault weapons"). And I have found that their patriotism is rooted neither in individualism nor in freedom. Oh, they want both for themselves, and other people like them, but they emphatically deny it to anyone who thinks differently. They believe in the freedom to worship the flag and Jesus, and not much else.

Of course, it's not necessary for "them or their immediate family" to be violated, either. Authoritarianism does not necessary trample everyone's freedom's equally - indeed, that is largely how Putin still has pretty insane approval ratings. Trump voters are making a conscious decision that they want authoritarianism that operates in their interest, by repressing the "others" whom they believe to be the source of their plight.

Not coincidentally, authoritarian thinking is the strongest single predictor of whether one is supporting Trump or not.

This. There is no fucking AI. I'm sick of hearing news about it every god damned day when it doesn't even exist.

So Amazon and Google have a huge team of employees listening to my voice waiting for me to say "Alexa" or "OK Google" and then transcribing my messages? Does Facebook has a team of people setting up the feed of every user manually? Because if not there is real AI doing this.

AI can be as simple as a simple finite state machine or a complicated deep learning neural network. Just as natural intelligence can range from plants secreting defensive chemicals when hearing a caterpillar eating to someone figuring out how to drive a car.

It doesn't have to be Skynet to be considered AI.

Everyone can be a billionaire!

Like this guy?

But why stop at only a billion?

All this talk about how a given solar panel's output being cheaper than coal always avoids the extra infrastructure needed to bridge that cloud-period gap.

Always? Nope. There's plenty of discussion of grid management, but then you'd know that if you bothered to be part of any discussions of say, Solar Thermal power generation, that it can operate as a heat bank itself.

Of course, as anybody with a hospital or medical refrigeration system knows, or running a water company, you have to have backups anyway, because SOMETIMES the local plant goes offline. Even the grid itself has to compensate. Sometimes it does it poorly, as folks who suffered the Northeast Blackout found out.

And if you're a nuclear plant, if you don't have a place to dump power, you're likely going to emergency shut down.

But hey, maybe next time you can back off the hyperbole? Always is a high bar, and easy to disprove. They don't avoid it. It's faced head-on.

I know you'd like to believe otherwise, because then you can just smirk and walk off in some sense of superiority, but it's really just empty arrogance.

..and that's why Switzerland has such an incredibly high murder rate, right?

Which has nothing to do with gun ownership. Every time people claim the folks in Switzerland, or even Israel, have guns coming out their ears which is why they have low murder rates shows their true lack of understanding those country's gun laws.

While this article is not the one I was looking for, you will note the heavy regulation of guns in Switzerland including how much ammunition one can buy and mandatory registration with the government, both of which the NRA howls over any time either subject is brought up.

Second, as the person in the story relates, the people of Switzerland own guns to protect their country as part of the militia, the exact same thing our Founding Fathers said in the Constitution. That people deny this prima facia fact is the result of deliberate twisting by certain groups, not the least of which the NRA who originally held to the Constitutional writing (to use a Scalia-ism).

Also, as to Israel, which some people bring up, this article explains one must have a reason to own a gun. Not that you want one, a valid reason AND you have go back every six months to justify you continuing to keep your gun.

If you want to point to Switzerland you had better tell the whole story. It's not as neat and simple as you and others make out. The government has a heavy hand in regulating firearms in the country, something which people like you fight against every time the subject is brought up.

In closing, I have no problem with anyone owning a gun. I've shot them in the past and have considered owning one but can't justify the cost even though I can easily afford one. Maybe some day.

But this nonsense that using Switzerland or Israel as examples of the notion "more guns = less crime" is shown to be false because of how their respective governments control guns. One might as well use Somalia where nearly everyone owns a gun yet there is crime in abundance.

Yeah, the US making a big deal about how ISIS gets all those Toyota trucks when it turns out that the US was the one supplying them. Ooops. Let's pretend for an instant that the funding of terrorist groups by the US is strictly limited to pickup trucks. After all, cash and weapons only goes to "moderate" beheaders not terrorist beheaders...

Not even the first American flower as Don Pettit grew sunflowers, zucchini and broccoli. You can see photos of them here - http://www.pri.org/stories/201...

Properly worded so it makes actual sense - "started" - the USSR wouldn't be at the top of the list

The USSR did start the WW2 — by entering into the secret Pact with Hitler, and then collaborating with same in dividing up Poland. Fail.

So neither the annexation of the Sudetenland by Germany nor the invasion in China by the Japanese count as the start of WW2? Or the first two weeks where Germany alone invaded Poland? Wow, that definition of when WW2 started is even odder than the "Pear Harbor, because that's when the US got involved" one.

Here is the best analysis of the best data I've seen...

http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...

If only someone with more official access could study this in detail ( http://www.pri.org/stories/201... ) maybe we wouldn't have to guess

Properly worded so it makes actual sense - "started" - the USSR wouldn't be at the top of the list

The USSR did start the WW2 — by entering into the secret Pact with Hitler, and then collaborating with same in dividing up Poland. Fail.

I can. It's actually pretty interesting, IMO.

http://www.pri.org/stories/201...

Ah yes, Howard Hughes Glomar Explorer.

The latest hypothesis is that beta-amyloid (and the plaques) is a result of Alzheimer's, rather than a cause.
http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-04-30/do-we-all-have-alzhemers-completely-wrong-man-says-yes/