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it's not nothing to do with moral policing. Credit card transactions are effectively loans. In large parts of the world you have a legal right to dispute any charge on your card as a result. Adult content has a high percentage of disputes (probably from guys who's wives/girlfriends notice the charge). Even if you can prove the charge is valid it's still expensive to do so. Hence why nobody wants to be involved in it.

With corporations always, always, always follow the money. Anything bigger than a leomonade stand is completely amoral.

This is a great take.... and unfortunately it is just not correct.

This move is the direct result of Operation Choke Point.

The US Federal government began threatening banks back in 2013 that if they did business with disfavored industries, they risked being taken down by the Feds. It is often sold as being about "money laundering", but it targeted legal business that were in disfavor with the administration like firearms dealers, check cashing services and payday lenders. Along with this other groups were impacted like adult entertainers like porn actresses and producers.

These are perfectly legal businesses that the government decided they wanted to run out of business by threatening anyone who does business with them.

And that is why Patreon is even in the conversation. Because they can have trouble even getting bank accounts. So adult entertainers and others have been forcibly "unbanked". Now they have to hunt around for other ways to move money and get paid.

Even though the official program was recently ended, the effect lives on.

The last 18 years has seen a massive shift away from civil liberties in many ways (USA PATRIOT Act, warrantless wiretapping, metadata collection, etc.) and things like Operation Choke Point have changed the culture to the point where people actually see this sort of thing as acceptable. It isn't.

Dumbfucks like you are the reason we should have an IQ test for voting.

You do realize that the IQ of the average conservative is several points below that of the average liberal, don't you ?

Dumbfucks like you are the reason we should have an IQ test for voting.

You do realize that the IQ of the average conservative is several points below that of the average liberal, don't you ?

Wrong again libtard - https://reason.com/archives/20...

"Comparing strong Republicans with strong Democrats, Carl finds that Republicans have a 5.48 IQ point advantage over Democrats. Broadening party affiliation to include moderate to merely leaning respondents still results in a Republican advantage of 3.47 IQ points and 2.47 IQ points respectively."

Keep trying though, its fun to watch you flail...

That false statistic was based on a phone survey conducted by a nine year old kid.

Do you guys care about reality at all? It doesn’t seem like you do.

Thanks for posting the correction. I hadn't heard the 500 million figure being tossed around, but it is good to know that the real number is a mere 175 million/day.

For the record, I'm a bit dumbfounded that the crappy stat is widespread, but can we all agree that 175 million is still a big number?

That false statistic was based on a phone survey conducted by a nine year old kid.

Do you guys care about reality at all? It doesn’t seem like you do.

"sparked by articles in The Wall Street Journal that raised questions about the company's technology and practices."

Those articles were written by John Carreyrou who is interviewed about Theranos by Nick Gillespie in this video. The video also provides a lot of background information. I was already familiar with the story but still found the video fascinating.

Additionally, Carreyrou has a new book out about Theranos, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. Have not read that, but it gets 5/5 stars with currently 257 customer reviews at Amazon.

Illinois is a great example of this. There's no money to pay for public sector workers' pensions so they keep raising taxes. The non-public workers who are able to leave the state are doing so.

The Great Illinois Exodus Will fiscal responsibility follow? Or is it too late?

Something similar is going in Chicago, the middle-class is leaving because they're being taxed to death. The poor are staying because the government is subsidizing them. New residents are mostly wealthy people who can afford to pay the taxes.

Dissent is patriotic! Except when it was against President Obama, then it was just racism...

ICE has extremely broad authority. They can stop any vehicle in a "border zone" and search it without probable cause. Which makes sense at a border crossing, right?

But what is a "border zone"? Get ready... this one is a doozy. Everything within 100 miles of a border is a "border zone". Do you live in a border zone?

All of Florida, Almost all of Michigan, almost all of New York, most of New England and a majority of the US population lives in a border zone.

They have also asserted authority over the areas around "border crossings", not just along the border. What's that? Airports, principally. So a 100 mile radius around every airport with international flights. So that would cover pretty much everyone else.

So I really doubt that using publicly available information to find illegals is going to be found unconstitutional. Not if you can make pretty much anyone in most all of the US prove their citizenship without even probable cause. I know the court loves to pick their preferred outcome and back-fill the legal logic to get there, but this one would be quite a stretch. I think it is going to take some legislative action to alter this issue.

resistant hypothesized:

The thought occurs that an inevitable explosion of fake video and audio recordings will drive the development of encrypted authentication networks that verify that a supposed recording came from a sealed, supposedly tamper-proof recording device from a manufacturer whose production lines, parts suppliers, and design teams are closely monitored by government agencies and nonprofit organizations against the possibility of firmware tampering. Recordings produced by unvetted devices will be automatically assumed by courts and other interested parties to be inherently unreliable and very likely fake in all cases of controversy.

I don't think you have a lot of experience with how courts work in actual practice - or legislatures, either.

Judges are basically free to accept or reject evidence according to their own rules. In the USA, for instance, some of them still admit latent fingerprint testimony, despite the fact that an AAAS panel of expert forensic scientists has completely debunked the science behind it. Another such AAAS panel also determined that much of the "science" behind forensic arson analysis is equally worthless. And the National Commission on Forensic Science - whose members included career prosecutors, forensics experts, and criminal defense groups - called for the establishment of a comprehensive, national set of forensic standards for evidence submitted to criminal justice courts.

And don't get me started on bite mark analysis.

(Jeff Sessions has disbanded the NCFS, and is planning to replace it with a panel composed of prosecutors and forensics "experts", because, of course he has.)

Despite all the accumulated evidence that much of forensic science is largely based on handwaving and bullshit, there are no prohibitions against its use in criminal courts, even for capital crimes.

Meanwhile, I can't speak knowledgeably about other countries' criminal justice systems (although I'm pretty sure that Commonwealth countries and a bunch of EU member states have equally screwed up standards), but here in the USA, there is little sign that either state legislatures or Congress have any trace of will to fix these problems - although, to be fair, the Texas Forensic Science Commission, of all unlikely bellwethers, has determined that bite mark analysis has no scientific basis, and recommended that it be banned from being used in state courts.

Naturally, the Texas legislature has not enacted the recommended ban, so even Texas criminal court judges are still free to admit bite mark analysis into evidence - including in capital cases.

So, your prediction seems to me to have little in the way of either fact or precedent to support it.

Not to mention the chorus of outrage that would undoubtedly follow the instant any bill is introduced to mandate the authenticity verification scheme you propose would pretty much guarantee its instant demise ...

Not that any of this will matter to you, no matter what is presented when Mueller actually reveals his findings, you'll still think he's innocent, it's a witch hunt, Trump Did No Wrong, it's all a partisan hit job, and on and on to protect your boy.

I'm actually good with believing he's innocent, until there's evidence.

I absolutely *hate* it when some police force make a flashy claim about someone - all the guns confiscated during the search, all the electronic devices taken from the home, nebulous "tip from an informant" - everything is being tried in the court of public opinion nowadays. None of that is evidence of a crime.

Let's not forget that after 9/11 someone was sending anthrax letters to people (remember those?) and Mueller - the lead investigator - ignored a tip about Bruce Edwards Ivins (the perpetrator, from one of Ivins' colleagues) and focused on Steven Hatfill. Mueller went before congress and swore under oath that Steven Hatfill was the person responsible, when in fact there was no evidence implicating Steven Hatfill whatsoever. Among other items, Steven Hatfill had no access to anthrax. The FBI didn't bother to explain this fact, and didn't seem to care.

Steven Hatfill went through several years of hell, having his life turned upside down, condemned in the media, death threats... and was eventually exonerated and sued the government for (IIRC) 5 million dollars.

That's the history of your "unimpeachable, honorable" Mueller.

Remember the indictments of 13 Russian nationals and 3 corporations recently released? It turns out one of the corporations didn't exist at the time of the purported crimes. Mueller indicted the proverbial "ham sandwich".

I like to think everyone is innocent, until proven guilty. and this thing about the court of public opinion is bollocks. Show us the evidence.

I sometimes ask a *question* about how someone appears to have broken the law. For example, Trump is widely believed to be obstructing justice for firing Comey, despite having a memo in-hand recommending it, but the Oakland mayor can warn illegal immigrants of an upcoming ICE raid... and that's not?

Or how Michael Flynn can be charged under the Hatch act for meeting with a Russian diplomat (as a member of the incoming administration, opening dialog and not specifically making claims or policy) while Kerry can negotiate with Iran and European countries to save the Iran agreement... and that's not?

I like to think everyone is innocent, until proven guilty.

Show me the evidence. What you have so far is nothing.

... this happening in the US.

Are you kidding??? It happens all the time.

Here's an example in San Francisco of a guy wanting to build a home that complied with existing building code and existing zoning:

https://reason.com/blog/2018/0...

Annoying neighbors didn't like the idea and filed all sorts of BS paperwork & appeals to stop it. They were successful.

Have you ever read the police log of a small town? People are afraid of their own shadows.

In many cases police are afraid of their own shadows.

Seven cop cars and a helicopter respond to three black women leaving their airbnb: http://reason.com/blog/2018/05...

Lol Communists. Did one of them sap and impurify your precious bodily fluid or something?

Why, yes, they've organized a genocide, which wiped out millions of people in a country I'm from. Does that justify my subjective revulsion in your opinion, or do I need to add, that, objectively, they argue for and seek to further the most murderous school of thought known to humanity, one well ahead on that ignominious record even of the Nazis? And you do hate the Nazis, no "lol" about it, is there?

But thank you for confirming, even if implicitly, that — according to your reading of the CoC — Communists will, indeed, have to be tolerated. Why am I not surprised...

They got a huge tax break instead of an all-but-guaranteed tax hike.

Yeah, actually not. Clinton's plan contained significant cost reductions for people making under $50K/yr. Under trump, we got tax cuts for millionaires and tax bills for the middle class.

Unemployment is way down.

Not for rural whites. In fact, its still so bad for them that Michigan republicans are trying to exempt them from their draconian medicaid work requirements.
Also, those people at that Carrier plant that he "saved?" Yeah, they got fucked.

The stock market is way up.

(A) Doesn't mean squat for majority of people because they don't own stocks.
(B) Rate of growth in the stock market is slower than it was under Obama.
(C) China has stopped buying soybeans. Not just tariffs, full stop, buying em from somewhere else. China is the #2 largest market for US soy and soy is the #2 US crop export.

Denuclearization, peace, and potential reunification in Korea,

Not anything to do with trump. The sanctions only resulted in a ~20% increase in black market currency exchange, showing that it wasn't a big deal for a country that survived the great faminine of the 90s on nothing but Juche. Moon Jae-in is leading trump around by the nose. Though I guess you could say the fact that trump is so easily played by Moon is a point in trump's favor. So sure, promise that gloryhound a nobel prize if that's what it takes to keep him from screwing up everybody else's work.

Tons of sex cults and human trafficking rings have been broken up.

Ah, so now you reveal yourself as one of those RWNJ dumbasses. In fact, its the nothing of the kind. If anything, they've been cracking down on easy targets - adult sex-workers, not trafficking victims. Meanwhile Trump knowingly endorsed an actual pedophile.

Corrupt leaders and former leaders of many countries are actually being brought to justice.

Yeah. Putin. Duterte. Netanyahu MBS They've all been locked up!!! Yay!

The wall is being built.

Lol. He couldn't even get his own republican party to pay for it. Much less mexico.

Next year there will be no unconstitutional personal mandate for health insurance.

Yay! That's already working out so great for republicans.
Never mind how he totally fucked rural whites with empty promises about the opioid epidemic.

Evelyn Beatrice Hall, paraphrasing Voltaire, "I might not agree with what you have to say but I will defend, to the death, your right to say it".

You know? I've never really been part of a group where the morally right thing to do is the minority opinion. I've been in groups of assholes before, sure, but I was always an outsider. Republicans have a bunch of shitty views, but they at least have an argument about why they're good ideas. They might even be right about some of them. I hung out with some racists, but it was a small group and they had internalized that they couldn't openly talk about it. This though? There's a whole movement of... "punch the NAZIs and silence them". People here with little green dots are saying some... really bullshit crap. Slashdot, reddit, acadamia, I just kind of expected these places to be a little more... enlightened.

unlimited free speech

I'm no extreamist. We had a problem with lynch mobs and calls to violence is tantamount to organizing a murder. That's wrong and trying to do so should land you in jail. Likewise, inciting panic can do real harm. (But this bullshit about equating hurt feelings with physical harm is a joke). And I'm down with limitiations and compulsions when it comes to commercial speech. Advertisiments. If you're paid to say it, you can't blatently lie. I wish politicians would charge lobbyists with lying to them under some truth in advertising law. And there are plenty of places where people just don't want to hear it and will throw you out. Noise ordinances in residental areas, businesses kicking people out, you can't just say whatever you want at my kids birthday party.

Arguing for unlimited free speech is like arguing for free gasoline and matches for everyone

Except for the part where giving people gasoline and matches cost money while RESTRICTING free speech costs money.

SUPRESSING free speech is like compressing those explosives and wrapping them in shrapnel.

"Free speech" is just a hypocritical cover.

Yeah, I imagine all those NAZIs would support censorship, suppression, and having a bunch of brownshirts punch-up anyone trying to step out of line the moment it benefited them. Hypocrites through and through. Because they're assholes, morally corrupt, and generally evil people. And I do not agree with what they have to say. Suppressing free speech is an evil thing to do that tears apart society. It's morally bankrupt and right up their alley. Now... consider for a moment that you're acting like a NAZI....

As for the "no tax increases, never!"-attitude, that really doesn't work at all for tax revenue drops or increased costs, particularly unexpected ones (like natural disasters). The only options that leaves you with are cutting down on essential services, taking on debt or moving around money in the budget like how they move away money that's supposed to go to education into other essential services when lottery money starts coming in.

You left out the obvious option: cutting non-essential services. This is what every business and household does when revenue drops. Maybe we don't eat out as often or see movies in the theater. Maybe 500 cable channels aren't so important. We don't quit eating, but we do cut stuff that we don't need.

Education has a lot of bloat in it, but mainly at the administrative level. What we see time and again is that giving more money to "education" doesn't end up as raises for teachers. It ends up with non-essential stuff. Plenty has been written about this:

http://reason.com/archives/201...

"Since 1970, inflation-adjusted spending per pupil has doubled.... Teachers should indeed be paid better—and it’s worth asking why they haven’t gained more from the big increases in education spending over the past few decades."

Reason had a good article a few years ago showing what happened when a certain state increased education funding - it all went to lavish new offices for administrators. Not a penny went to teachers.

The same platforms that are used by "legitimate" prostitutes are also used by human traffickers. Since we can't tell them apart, all of them have to go. "If there are ten people who have been accused, and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all ten people."

Ironically, that is the antithesis of Blackstone's Formulation. Most know it as what

Benjamin Franklin stated it as,
"it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer"

The same platforms that are used by "legitimate" prostitutes are also used by human traffickers. Since we can't tell them apart, all of them have to go. "If there are ten people who have been accused, and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all ten people."

I wonder why the summary mentions Switter in passing and yet doesn't bother to mention what it is. All part of the typical "victim building" narrative. People might get the idea that some virtuous service was unfairly targeted. Switter is a Mastodon instance that was meant from the outset to facilitate the prostitution of people. The lovely irony here is that the sex traffickers feared being banned by Twitter so they set up their own service. Cloudflare, the site that banned the Daily Stormer, has now banned Switter as well.

The basic thing that the outrage machine either does not realize or is deliberately ignoring is that one of Trump's signature policies is attacking human trafficking. It gets very little press for obvious reasons: it paints him as a good person, and we all know that Trump is nothing less than Adolf Hitler. Didn't Hitler disrupt public spaces and ban things he didn't like the sound of? Oh the irony. This attack inevitably harms the "good" prostitutes right along with the evil human traffickers. The problem is, you can't tell them apart and "legitimate" prostitution platforms are used for evil means. The howl seems to be, "you're hurting all the good ones just to get a few bad apples!"

Luckily, the precedent has already been set: it's acceptable to get rid of 10 if only 2 are guilty. FOSTA is just following in the footsteps of proud people that have blazed the trail.

"If there are 10 people who have been accused, and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all 10 people. We're not talking about depriving them of life or liberty, we're talking about them being transferred to another university, for crying out loud."

Likewise this Switter prostitution service isn't being deprived of life and liberty, they're being transferred to another internet provider. It's not a big deal. What's that I hear, it is a big deal? So it's not OK to do it to an organization specifically set up to facilitate the prostitution of human beings, but it's OK to do it to humans falsely accused of rape?

And yet,
States consider bringing prescription drugs from Canada to US as costs soar

Sovaldi [a hepatitis C drug], is a good example of how prices can vary between countries. In the US, a course of Sovaldi lasts 12 weeks and costs $90,000 US retail.

American insurers typically negotiate a discount of 41%, according to a Bloomberg News analysis. That puts the cost of the drug at $17,700 a month in the US.

But in the United Kingdom, that drug costs $16,770 a month, and in Canada $14,493.

For an even more dramatic example, consider Gleevec, a leukemia drug. It costs $10,122 in the US, $2,645 in the UK, and $2,420 in Canada.

“Our Medicaid drug prices, particularly for specialty drugs, are way over the top,” said Lyons. “So, we’re trying to identify those drugs where the cost has escalated in the past few years, or the payment per dose is very high as compared with Canada.”

...

Americans pay on average three times more than British people for top-selling prescription drugs.

How many people have to pay the retail price?

Average foreign-to-Canadian price ratio for patented drugs as of 2016

It looks like the drug companies charge what they like because the market in the US is fixed.
Are Canadian Pharmacies the Solution to America's High Prescription Drug Prices?

This is what’s at stake if U.S. drug prices fall — and Europeans don’t pay more

Our calculations suggest that the U.S. market accounts for as much as 78% of all global drug profits. These are the profits that drive innovation, and they are coming out of American wallets.

Why does this happen? Branded prescription drugs are 20% to 40% cheaper in Europe in large part because the national health plans there drive hard bargains. The state-run buyers can impose price caps, or even refuse to allow a drug onto a national formulary if they think it is not worth the cost.

Bargaining does occur in the free-market U.S., but not nearly in such draconian terms. Medicare was expressly forbidden from bargaining when the drug benefit was added during the George W. Bush Administration. If the Food and Drug Administration approves a drug and a physician prescribes it, Medicare will almost always cover it. Private insurers and pharmacy-benefit managers can usually negotiate down from sticker prices, but they typically don’t have the European-style ability to broadly deny access, which is the big bargaining chip.

If sex trafficking on Backpage was so rampant, why was the back page founder not actually charged with sex trafficking?

What sources do you have to prove this? Yes there were a lot of ads for sex on Backpage, but how many of them were really trafficking? There are a lot of perfectly independent sex workers these days.

That's not my experience at all. I've been on the pro GMO side of this ever since I heard it was a thing, primarily out of distrust of food alarmists (there's enough bullshit about food to turn all of California, where these myths are the most prevalent, dark brown. My biggest peeve of the moment is that people actually think MSG is bad, but the opposite is actually true.)

The the worst offenders have all been Democrats. Their reasons are usually because they think GMO harms the environment (the opposite is true) they think it causes cancer, (false) they're on a crusade to make everybody eat organic (try finding an organic purist that isn't a Democrat. Vegans almost universally fall in this category as well, and try finding a vegan that isn't a Democrat.) Another reason it's usually Democrats is because of their very anti corporate stance, and/or they just hate Monsanto, not even bothering to consider that the technology itself is separate from the companies that employ it. The bill to ban GMO labeling was mostly supported by Republicans and mostly opposed by Democrats. Although Obama did sign the bill, in spite of his base labeling him as a coward for "caving to Republicans", and indeed many well known left leaning people here on slashdot were whining about their "right to know" about food's very immaterial GMO status every time that I told them the only purpose is to stigmatize it (i.e. labeling Jews.) Ironically, these guys want to know that more than they want information about material facts that manufacturers aren't required to put on labels, like the arsenic content of apple sauce.

But, if that doesn't satisfy you, then this should help:

https://www.isidewith.com/poli...
https://newrepublic.com/articl...
http://www.weeklystandard.com/...
https://reason.com/blog/2016/0...

Oh, and if you support Bernie for 2020:

https://geneticliteracyproject...
https://www.politico.com/story...

It's all but guaranteed that if Bernie gets elected, and Democrats have a supermajority in Congress, (the later if which could likely happen, given the shit coming out of Republicans lately, especially with net neutrality) you can bet your ass that GMO would end up banned, which would be a huge setback for the United States.

Or, they could be Libertarians: https://reason.com/archives/20...

Show of hands.... how many people can live on $2800 a month ? Hell, my mortgage and property taxes are $2350

The scumbag's explicit reference to guillotine shows, the French terror is what he wants for this country. He may be too stupid to do very much to advance this goal, but he is still a scumbag — just the kind to stand out there masked and shouting "Communism will win".

Adherents of the vilest and deadliest school of thought known to humanity, responsible for millions of deaths and economic devastation of entire countries, these people somehow remain acceptable for the polite society — and even find sympathetic moderators to upvote their murderous rhetoric. All the while, for example, the stupid schmucks of the (relatively) harmless KKK are hunted and persecuted as if they were Satan incarnates.

The Reason Foundation has published an article about the bridge was funded by a federal program that has come under repeated fire for awarding money based on politics rather than merit:

Collapsed FIU Bridge Was Funded by Federal Grant Program Criticized for Shoddy, Politicized Review Process - The TIGER grant program has come under fire for putting politics ahead of technical concerns.

Was Backpage actually running an underage prostitution ring or were third parties running underage prostitution rings and using Backpage as a place to post ads? The rhetoric around "sex trafficking" is full of logical fallacies, anecdotal evidence, and opinions-as-facts appeal-to-emotion presentations by law enforcement officials and politicians. It is difficult to trust that what is presented is actually truthful, especially when the facts run counter to the prevailing narrative.

https://reason.com/blog/2017/0...

Partial quote: "Both law enforcement and nonprofits such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) routinely use sites like Backpage to search for teenagers reported missing. The cross-country nature of the site allows authorities to track potential victims who may move around a lot, and provides tangible evidence for prosecutors to use against their exploiters. Police also use Backpage extensively when conducting sting operations ostensibly targeting the recovery of minors. Backpage itself has, at least historically, reported suspicious ads (such as those featuring pictures of people who look underage) to NCMEC or local law enforcement."

I'm not saying that Backpage is a company run by angels, but I am definitely saying that there's so much propaganda and lies by omission out there about the Backpage prostitution situation that facts are hard to come by without scooping through truckloads of bullshit and ignoring the moralistic crusaders screaming in your ears that they're right. In any case, the people posting underage prostitution ads are the ones committing the heinous act and going after Backpage won't do a damn thing but shovel a bunch more of the prostitution ad volume onto Tor and I2P. Driving the information further underground and further from the legal reach of law enforcement will only make matters worse.

This should be an easy issue. Libertarian publications like Reason https://reason.com/archives/2018/01/19/barber-cops-bust-high-school-dropouts, and center-left publications like The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/trump-obama-occupational-licensing/536619/ agree that this is a problem. Heck as The Atlantic article points out, this is even an issue where Donald Trump and Obama seem to agree. Unfortunately, as long as lobbying can occur by licensing groups and professional association at state capitals, they'll do an effective job of protecting themselves from the sort of serious reform that is needed.

of course, that the Democrats tend to put forth foreign policy much more friendly to the rest of the world

Bullshit. Prove it.

The New York Times Accurately Portrays Hillary Clinton as an Unrepentant Warmonger
Why the election of Hillary Clinton promises a more dangerous world
Good Riddance to Warmonger Hillary Clinton

According to David Harsanyi at Reason, our "crumbling infrastructure" is a myth.

One of the great myths of American politics, no matter who is president and no matter who runs Congress, is that our infrastructure is "crumbling." Former President Barack Obama repeatedly warned us about our "crumbling infrastructure." President Donald Trump now tells us that our infrastructure is "crumbling." The next president is going to hatch a giant plan to fix our crumbling infrastructure as well, because most voters want to believe infrastructure is crumbling.

The infrastructure is not crumbling. ...

You'll fucking love these then:
http://reason.com/blog/2017/04...
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...

Brady lost. Trump lost.

While Brady and the Pats lost (and Brady is a friend of Trump), New England is solidly in the Hillary camp, while Pennsylvania is in the Trump camp.

So Trump fans won and Hillary fans lost.

But frankly, the taxpayers lost, due to the enormous corporate welfare subsidies given to the billionaire team owners: http://reason.com/archives/201...

Civil rights lost as well: http://reason.com/blog/2018/02...

Brady lost. Trump lost.

While Brady and the Pats lost (and Brady is a friend of Trump), New England is solidly in the Hillary camp, while Pennsylvania is in the Trump camp.

So Trump fans won and Hillary fans lost.

But frankly, the taxpayers lost, due to the enormous corporate welfare subsidies given to the billionaire team owners: http://reason.com/archives/201...

Civil rights lost as well: http://reason.com/blog/2018/02...

Also, California now has a $6.1 billion SURPLUS

http://reason.com/blog/2017/09...

https://californiapolicycenter...

http://www.sacbee.com/news/pol...

Tell us again about that $6.1 billion surplus.

Both parties are the same way.

That statement is simply not true.

Both parties suck at many things, but the democrats have always treated state's rights more seriously than republicans, who only pay attention to it when it hampers their business interests.

They sure are and not just on federalism. State's rights are normally associated with the right but the left pushes them just as much when they serve their purpose. They have the same policies on executive power; it is great when their own party has it. Also known as the "it's not evil when we do it" rationalization.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://reason.com/archives/201...

Why shouldn't we call it overthrowing democracy? If you're going to be that pedantic about the definition of democracy, don't call the US a democracy at all, because it's also a representative republic. Does it matter that much whether the phrase you accept is "overthrowing democracy" or "overthrowing the legitimate government"?

Communism is both much deadlier and more socially-accepted than any other kind of hateful school of thought today.

Anything "fighting evil" that ignores images of Che Guevara and like symbols is simply partisan b.s.

It really surprises me that the kind of people who have enough money to build a monorail weren't smart enough to think of this.

Who says they weren't smart enough? You're assuming the decisions on where the monorail will/won't go to were driven by logic and economics. This being a public works project, that's highly unlikely. it's far more likely the monorail's service locations were determined by who greased the local politicians to win the construction, labor, and supply contracts. That and also who paid/coerced the planning group the most to not disrupt local transport monopolies who stood to lose out on a captive market (i.e. taxis, etc.).

When a lot of tax money gets spent in a seemingly-stupid fashion, follow the money. You'll discover it wasn't the least bit stupid from the perspective of who made a killing on building the damned stuff or who would've lost business had the project been successful. Here in Atlanta (Democrat mayor) we spent $200 million on a stupid trolley. Who rides it? Almost nobody. But the company that built it made a handsome profit. Nevermind the taxpayers are left footing the bill for running a money-losing trolley service. They keep voting the same lackeys into office year after year no matter what so it's not like the politicians are ever held accountable.

DC (Democrat mayor) spent $200 million on a similarly-failing streetcar service. Projects in Cincinnati (Democrat mayor), Dallas (Democrat mayor), Detroit (Democrat mayor) and Honolulu (Democrat mayor) are dealing with similar problems: construction cost overruns, small ridership and no discernible evidence of economic benefits vs. costs. Not saying Republicans are immune to such shenanigans (see Bridge to Nowhere) but Democrats in particular seem to love spending tax money on stuff that never works as advertised. This is why I'm a Libertarian.

Armed man sets up ambush outside man's house, waits for him to open the door, yells incomprehensible instructions while blind the man then shoots him dead a quarter of a second later.

Sounds like murder to me.

There is no requirement to issue any instructions.

http://reason.com/blog/2012/07...
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

If someone is pounding on my door at night there is a very good chance of my being armed when checking the door.

That would be too bad for you if the police lack a warrant, lack probably cause, lack reasonable suspicion, show up in the middle of the night, do not bother to identify themselves, and do not issue any lawful orders. The lesson to be learned is to shoot first with something like a Garand since they are going to murder you anyway.

http://reason.com/blog/2012/07...
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

What happened to Andrew Scott is not even the only example.

Here's a story about prosecutors throwing people in jail for talking about prostitution by intimidating them with trumped up charges to get them to plea. Many got fired from their jobs. Others lost their friends and family and one man committed suicide. It's like how some cities resort to public shaming Johns which is such a horrific practice that even 18th century America stopped doing it. http://reason.com/archives/201...

All of these anti-trafficking organizations use Superbowl TV commercials of women and/or child being sold as slaves (which is extremely rare) but if you read what their true goal is, they want to stop all prostitution. They even consider 100% voluntary prostitution as trafficking. Amnesty International has the right solution which is to legalize prostitution so that women aren't forced into the underground where they are victimized by their Pimps and by the Police.

It may sound trite but "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Or, as the Economist put it in 1848:
"Suffering and evil are natureâ(TM)s admonitionsâ"they cannot be got rid of; and the impatient attempts of benevolence to banish them from the world by legislation, before benevolence has learned their object and their end, have always been more productive of evil than good."

Communists have been trying to make the world better too, that's left 94 million dead in the 20th century alone. http://reason.com/blog/2013/03...

Not to Godwin this already, but by THEIR logic, Nazis were certainly trying to make the world better too. Coll with that?

And not to impose a Naturalistic fallacy but - Man, if you don't recognize the moral quagmire you step into the moment you say "I'm going to FIX things according to what I think will be better!!" you're frankly not paying enough attention to be fucking with ANYTHING.

Sorry, but in sum it appears to be true, ... at least under the immigration policies of the recent past.

Nope. You're just reciting the same flawed arguments from the same flawed sources, that's either ignorance, or apparently you didn't think anybody noticed that you were building on a broken base. But they did back when it was first published.

Sorry, but the Moonies are not helping you here, they get lost in their own agenda and tend to produce lies.

Besides, recent past?

I'm sorry, but your criteria is again:

Most immigrants end up costing the government more a lot more in services than they ever pay in taxes.

Sorry, but you have to consider all of the living immigrants, and I believe it's somewhere around 20 million people in total that you'd have to cover, and that's not even raising the question of what a "Lot more" happens to be.

'It costs less to the consumer because it is highly subsidized by the government'.

In the US unsubsidized wind and solar are now the cheaper than natural gas and its natural gas, not green energy, that killed all the coal plants. Also solar+storage is cheaper than nukes.

Fail

For the Panel's Third Assessment Report, paragraph 14.2.2.2 page 774 it says in my translation: "In research and modeling of the climate, we should be aware that we are dealing with a chaotic, nonlinear coupled system, and that long-term predictions of future climate states is not possible. "

More Fail

Of course warrants should be mandated. Without monitoring and checks, the victims of police have little or no protection or legal recourse. To prevent abuse the police should be monitored and checked constantly in every way feasible while on the job. Here are just a few of the recent examples of police corruption and abuse.

- In Denver, the police are stealing cars.

- In New York, police handcuffed and raped a teenager. Then over a dozen other cops threatened the victim to prevent her from reporting the crime.

- Police steal more than criminals.

- In Utah a cop who assaulted and arrested a nurse for objecting to his inappropriate demands to draw blood from a suspect.

- In Los Angeles a cop was caught by his own body cam planting drugs on a suspect.

FTC already said when they take over regulation from the FCC, they will keep net neutrality.

The difference is the switch from title-2 to title-1 reclassification, and the Information providers control, which would also regulate Facebook/Google, etc.

Lots of fud going around has people worked up and worried, just read what FCC Chairman has been saying and google ftc net neutrality.

Way overreaction from media getting people upset.

Okay and which ones would those be.

Umm, many? "All models are wrong" is a very common thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The biggest one I remember is when the models overlooked the ocean as a gigantic heatsink, leading to a massive gap in "missing heat": http://www.sciencemag.org/news...

Most recently, the most recent models have been shown to vastly overstate the warming case: http://reason.com/blog/2017/09...

Just one quote: "Here's where it gets interesting. The average global temperature now stands at about 0.9 C above the pre-industrial baseline, which implies that global temperature would have to increase by 0.6 C between now and 2021 if the IPCC carbon budget calculations were right. This is highly implausible since such an increase would be about 10 times faster than than what has actually heretofore been observed"

"Scientists pull random theories out of their butts and decades later pick and choose the ones that were correct" isn't how science actually works.

And yet that appears to be almost exactly what they're doing...you basically shotgun a bunch of models based on "best understanding" of a very complex ecosystem. After observing end results (hindcasting), the ones that best fit you keep, the others you throw out. Which is a perfectly fine method of science long-term, with the exception that you aren't allowed to make a bunch of claims of certainty of the end of humanity when you're far from having it figured out. You know all those people that claims 90+% scientific consensus that we're on a path to global catastrophe? Right down to exact "tipping point" climate timelines which were pretty much used to craft the guidelines in the Paris accord.

Those of us who oppose it are usually castigated as "alt-right" haters who "cling to our guns and religion"...

Your president has expanded civil forfeiture.

http://www.wtsp.com/news/polit...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/s...

https://reason.com/blog/2017/0...

Going way off topic here but:

When a safer (but not perfect) alternative in vaping is being blocked by the FDA?

The funny thing is, if "under the terms of that law, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would have the authority to approve or deny any new tobacco products introduced after February 15, 2007" is essentially the whole of the law (barring the legalese) then it doesn't apply to 'electronic cigarettes', only to (some of) the liquids used in them, after all there's no tobacco and no nicotine in an 'e-cig', or in many of the liquids used in them. As long as at least one manufacturer of the nicotine liquids applies for, and is granted, regulatory approval there will be refills available for all makes and models of device, whether that be an existing device or one introduced in the future.

Having said that, I am, largely, playing Devil's Advocate, I haven't read the full law, and I can see numerous problems inherent in 'simplifying' to the letter of the law as I have.

China National Tobacco Corporation, AKA the Chinese government itself, is "the world's largest manufacturer of tobacco products".

Explain to me again how tobacco companies have some special tie to free market capitalism, when the largest one in the world is 100% government owned? When in the U.S. governments make almost as much as the tobacco companies do from selling cigarettes. When a safer (but not perfect) alternative in vaping is being blocked by the FDA?

Your story about "free market capitalism" doesn't match the facts back in reality.