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Tesla: NY Post article accusing Elon Musk of fraud is a total fraud

That article has been ridiculed so many times. Want more examples? Let me know when you're done with that one.

But golly gee, you're right about him being our God! Why, it's the ONE TRUE RELIGION! We have far more proof of our savior than any other religion, you know! (/snark)

Workers aren't always correct. Unions often become corrupt and bloated. Undocumented workers hurt citizens.

Points taken.

What, specifically, has Kavanaugh done that is bad? Being anti-union isn't inherently bad. I say that as someone who is supportive of people's right to collectively bargain.

Well... The article Brett Kavanaugh Ruled Against Workers When No One Else Did cites several cases where Kavanaugh sides with corporations over the interests of workers, also noting:

“Based on his record, we can expect that Judge Kavanaugh will continue to protect the interests of already powerful corporate CEOs instead of working families,” the Communications Workers of America said in a statement.

That article (and several others, below) also talk about a case where Kavanaugh sided with SeaWorld and against OSHA when a trainer was killed (and, apparently, eaten) by an orca -- basically asserting that "he knew the risks".

• Family Man Brett Kavanaugh Thinks Businesses Shouldn’t Be Liable if Employees Are Eaten on the Job
• Kavanaugh’s awful SeaWorld dissent – bad for workers, bad for the environment

OSHA used what’s known as the general duty clause to cite SeaWorld for safety violations after the whale Tilikum killed trainer Dawn Brancheau in 2010. SeaWorld challenged the citations, but the appeals panel sided with OSHA, ruling that SeaWorld knew its protections for trainers like Brancheau were insufficient and that it could have prevented her death had it taken the proper steps.

Kavanaugh disagreed. He compared working at SeaWorld to playing a sport like ice hockey that comes with inherent dangers, and, unlike his colleagues on the panel, argued that OSHA doesn’t have the legal standing to regulate it.

“When should we as a society paternalistically decide that the participants in these sports and entertainment activities must be protected from themselves – that the risk of significant physical injury is simply too great even for eager and willing participants?” he asked.

Jordan Barab, a former OSHA official during the Obama years, wrote Tuesday on his blog Confined Space that the SeaWorld case shows Kavanaugh to be “a threat to workers and to OSHA.”

“Kavanaugh’s idea of making America great again apparently hearkens back to a time before the Workers Compensation laws and the Occupational Safety and Health Act were passed,” Barab wrote. “Back then employers who maimed or killed workers often escaped legal responsibility by arguing that the employee had ‘assumed’ the risk when he or she took the job and the employer therefore had no responsibility to make the job safer.”

Maybe it's just me, but that's appalling. Can't wait for that precedent to be exploited, *especially* if Kavanaugh is confirmed to SCOTUS. Just get someone to sign something that says, "There is a risk of ..." and goodbye legal liability.

Ford customer: The car shifted into Reverse by itself, backed over and killed my grandfather.

Ford lawyer: (Pointing to sales agreement) He knew the risks.

Ford Sales Agreement
There is a risk that the vehicle transmission may unexpectedly shift from Park to Reverse, causing the vehicle to back over and kill your grandfather.

Judge: Hmm... Let me check Kavanaugh in OSHA v. SeaWorld... Okay. Case dismissed.

It also ups the ante in the arms race of evolution, which isn't universally seen as a good thing.

It certainty is a bad thing, which is why millions of people protested conventional breeding when late blight overcame the conventionally bred resistances in tomato and when hessian flies overcame conventionally bred resistance in wheat. Oh wait, that never happened because it would be absolutely idiotic, yet somehow, when genetic engineering is involved, the same basic facts of population genetics are suddenly terrible and proof that the technique itself is bad. Perhaps it is because the vast vast majority of the opposition to genetic engineering is coming from those with no background in agricultural or plant science and thus due to their complete lack of context it seems reasonable to them.

Calling objection "hysteria" doesn't make it so. Some protesters are quite enlightened and think long term.

And most of the protesters are the agricultural equivalents to the anti-vaccine movement. And when you are doing little in the way of scientifically justifying your concerns, instead preferring to use bunk science, fearmongering, and outright vandalism on non-corporate projects and farmer's fields, you shouldn't be surprised when you get characterized poorly. Hell, there is no small opposition to even things like Golden Rice (biofortified with -carotene) and the Arctic apple (which does not oxidize when cut). I'm sure there is a perfectly good reason as to why that is, if not unscientific hysteria, because this stuff isn't looking good.

Just about everything carries risk (again for context, even conventional breeding conventional breeding carries risk), just about everything has some negatives that come with the positives, there are actual issues, and not every genetically engineered organisms will necessarily turn out to be a good thing. But to paint the anti-GMO movement as a whole as anything even remotely reasonable would be like saying young earth creationists simply have a dispute with the minor details of a few phylogenies.

First, genetic engineering is a way of improving a plant. A monoculture is growing all the same thing. these are entirely different concepts. Trying to link the two only makes it look like you don't know the definition of either.

Second, how are Monsanto's seeds wrong? sure, the make Monsanto a profit, but there's nothing wrong with that. The insect resistant ones have feared pretty well, reducing pesticides and even benefiting farms that don't grow them. The herbicide tolerant ones have, for all their ill will, been environmentally positive, having reduced the need for tillage to control weeds (tillage degrades the soil quality and promotes fertilizer runoff into water systems), reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and replaced harsher herbicides.

Monsanto? Is that why anti-GE groups are protesting the publicly funded Rothamsted GE wheat trial in the UK? Is that why they complain about the Rainbow papaya, Arctic apples, Golden Rice, and BioCassava, or why groups destroyed the GE grapes in French, GE wheat in Australia, GE potatoes in the Netherlands, and GE wheat in the UK? It might be true for you, but that is minority thought. You can not play that card while the vast majority of the protest against GE crops is also applied to those that have nothing to do with Monsanto.

The actual problem is licensing and economics.

The problem with that notion is that there is just as much opposition to publically funded research as ther is corporate funded research. What do GE grapes in French, GE wheat in Australia, GE potatoes in the Netherlands, and GE wheat in the UK have in common? They were all publicly funded, and they were all attacked. The Rainbow papaya (a virus resistant GE papaya) was developed not by a corporation.but by the University of Hawaii, and you are free to save the seed, yet the anti-GMO people are against it just as much as they oppose Monsanto's crops. The same could be said for Golden Rice, which was developed for the sole purpose of helping people. I've never seen a single major anti-GMO group voice support of any GE crop, even ones that do not have the issues often used to argue against GE crops. So, you can't say that it is about licensing and patents and the like when this sort of stuff happens. It is about the science, and those issues (regardless of whether a particular topic in that area has merit) are added as secondary arguments.

In France, Monsanto need not be involved. Publicly funded non-corporate research research gets destroyed too, which is why I don't buy it when people say this is about the alleged 'evils' of Monsanto, not the science (or economics or politics as the case may be).

One problem with that notion. Europeans oppose publicly funded research that would not have that problem too. Ever heard of the potatoes at the University of Ghent, the government funded grape rootstocks in France, or the government funded wheat & potatoes and apples in Germany? Destroyed. Meanwhile, I've never heard of them having any problem with patented non-GE plants. Maybe the patents factor into it, but you really can't take the patent or corporate angle here. The main issue is the science. They're against genetic engineering and ALL GE crops, regardless of specific circumstances, period, and they're not going to let nuance or facts or science change their minds about that.

Voting with your dollars works!

Unless of course it gets you arrested instead. GoDaddy would probably be thrilled if they could have people arrested for transferring domains to another registrar if too many people try to do so at once -- and don't be surprised if some future version of DMCA/SOPA/FUBAR actually includes such a provision, or at least language which can be twisted that way. Face it, folks, they're not going to quit pushing.

And don't forget that agricultural research in Europe has a tendency to find itself on the wrong side of an angry desrtuctive mob. Food producers won't like the lost subsidies, and lot of people in Europe just don't want science in their food so I can't imagine they'll support more research either.

These are the same people who destroyed a French government GMO grape test too a while back. Considering that the anti-GMO folks destroy government funded research, and also oppose university developed GMOs like the Rainbow papaya (a virus resistant papaya developed by the University of Hawaii), and charity NGO ones like Golden Rice and BioCassava, the whole anti-corporation thing looks an awful lot like just an excuse to justify their unscientific beliefs.

If you want to hear a real bad one, there were some GMO grape in the news a while back. They were viral resistant, funded by the French government so no corporate stuff involved, and they were rootstocks, meaning no above ground part, so the fruit itself wasn't GMO and there wasn't even the chance of them cross pollinating anything. Yep, they were destroyed too. This is what we're dealing with here. The is no reason here, only excuses, and these people aren't enlightened activists with a noble cause, they're just violently ignorant scientifically illiterate thugs looking for a chance to destroy something. I hope they all rot in prison.

But of course, I'm just one of those evil GMO scientists trying to contaminate the whole world with my science experiment because we're all just Saturday morning cartoon villains twisting our mustaches and cackling maniacally in out stone castle laboratories guarded by alligator filled moats at the thought of being evil for some vaguely defined end goal. We sure are evil with our virus/fungus/insect/drought resistance genes and nitrogen use efficiency traits and Golden Rice and BioCassava.to prevent blindness, malnutrition, nutrient deficiency, and starvation in the developing world. Yep, people should definitely spit on us and destroy our research and tell us how mean & nasty we are for that stuff.

California politicians are great. http://redgreenandblue.org/2009/03/20/feinstein-argues-against-mojave-desert-solar-power-plans/

tyranny of the majority is still tyranny. Why should a group of "concerned citizens" be able to block development on someone else's property? If there were an accident or a meltdown, or whatever other problem might come about from it, let the aggrieved party sue the daylights out of them. That is the free market feedback mechanism preventing harm to people.

Do you also support the removal of the subsidies nuclear power gets? Nuclear Power is Hooked on Subsidies. Wall Street would not fund nuclear power without subsides. Notice how at the bottom of the Forbes article, hosted on a free markets institutes's servers, it says:
"How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."

Now if you had said that about offshore wind farms, like the one Ted Kennedy opposed, I'd agree.

Falcon

The fact that the Democrats didn't even hold a vote on domestic drilling despite overwhelming public support is something that ought to be mocked.

The majority of Americans do not support more drilling, much less an overwhelming number of them.

hmmm I wonder if someone "important"
http://redgreenandblue.org/2008/06/15/senator-attacks-solar-energy-industry/
isn't ready to get in line so they
http://green.bligblog.com/oil-companies-and-solar-energy-682.html
are slowing down applications until that "person"
http://thepanelist.com/Hot_Topics/Alternative_Energy/_200805271019/
is ready.