Slashdot Mirror

The last time Volvo had a big self-driving rollout, it didn't, you know, work out so well. But it was totally because of shabby roads and Americans' inability to paint white lines and in no way the fault of the technology.

http://www.reuters.com/article...

This Reuters article has more detailed info. Among U.S.-based tech employees the stats are 3% Hispanic and 1% black, vs. 4% and 2% respectively among Facebook's global workforce. 17% of its global tech employees are women.

As one data point of comparison, here is some demographic data for AP Computer Science test takers in California for the year 2012. Looking at students who take the AP exam may be a good proxy for identifying students who will one day be applying for top-tier positions. Among this group, 7% were Hispanic, 1% were black and 21% were women. If those stats are representative of the pool of top-tier talent in the workforce, then Facebook isn't far off in terms of its hiring of blacks and women. It seems further off with respect to Hispanics. Though, California has a higher-than-usual Hispanic population, so maybe nationally the % of Hispanic AP Exam takers is less than 7.

This article in USA Today also has some stats. They looked at the demographics of CS and CE graduates from "top" U.S. universities. Not sure what "top" means. They claim that 4.5% of such graduates are black, 6.5% are Hispanic. They didn't report on what % were women.

I suspect the satellite launch has more of political than military purpose. China's economy is going downhill and so it seems is its hopes of Olympic gold, its standing as number 2 (behind US) being threatened: http://www.reuters.com/article...

Who knows, maybe the propaganda bureau decided some good news is in order.

What if you live over an hour south of Washington, DC or over an hour north of Boston Ma, or NOT ON THE EAST OR WEST COASTS

Welcome to the 20%!

See, this is why I don't like gerrymandering, it gives the loners in flyover country with a population density of 0.05/sqmi the feeling of actually being somehow relevant compared to the number of people in the cities.

"But Nick Timothy, May's influential joint chief of staff, also said last year that security experts were worried the state-owned Chinese group would have access to computer systems that could allow it to shut down Britain's energy production.

"Rational concerns about national security are being swept to one side because of the desperate desire for Chinese trade and investment," Timothy wrote in October 2015 in a column for a conservative news and comment website. " http://www.reuters.com/article...

Sorry China not everyone's your bitch....

..these are the folks we should have involved in internet governance
via UN
other venues

A form asking for a phone number in 2016 is as foolish as asking how many horses you use to pull your carriage.

Especially given that this seems to be the way that messaging apps are now being compromised, it seems to be really irresponsible of twitter to collect phone numbers that can be used against twitter users.

So you're saying that there's no truth to this story? Where's you're evidence? You have none? Then why should I believe your negative spin?

Always a clever tactic to demand an explanation and then triumphantly declare that the other person has none before any time has passed for replies to be made. Here, let me help you with that "missing" evidence. Have you missed the news for the past eight years? The F-35 program has been dogged at every step by cost overruns, test failures, design-by-committee creeping features, etc.

• * F-35 Fighter can't turn, can't climb, can't run
• * Trillion-dollar F-35 joint strike fighter can't even do dogfights
• * F-35 Program: a danger to US Defense
• * My favorite:How the F-35 could provide 23 years of free college for everyone

I could go on all day, but you get the idea. Just google "F-35" + "waste" + "failure".

They've tried to get some russian rocket stuff from their brother country in cuba. They failed.

There's a reason they're doing this. It's not just that the IOC is incredibly greedy. It's that their greed is fueled by NBC's money, and NBC is damn well going to get their pound of flesh for the $1.29 billion they paid for exclusive rights. If recent news reports are accurate, NBC is just barely breaking even, having sold $1.2 billion in advertising so far.

So sure, blame IOC's greed. But don't forget to blame NBC's greed too. They want every second of Olympic imagery to be surrounded by inescapable commercials, or they could be in serious trouble. If the interest of advertisers falls off even a tiny bit, they start losing money on the Games, and they have a contract out through 2032.

And, how many times they have illegally learned of something bad(tm) that was about to go down and did nothing, because they had "bigger fish to fry"? (A la Enigma intelligence, letting ships go down...)

"Serve and Protect" unless we look bad. [See let a spy go as an "unregistered agend of a foreign government

If you are not connected, you are collateral.

I haven't quite figured it out myself, but from what I heard is that while Diesel exhaust is worse, you need less fuel than with normal gas.

I was obviously referring to the Volkswagen emission scandal.

Exaggerating much?

Not at all: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/...

None of the recent attacks were perpetrated by a refugee.

You don't even read the news about the country you claim to live in?
http://www.reuters.com/article...

strange that you should mention Berlin or Munich, which are two of the nicest and most vibrant cities in Europe today.

I don't know what you mean with "vibrant". I mentioned the aesthetics. Alert me when you see something comparable to the Trevi Fountain in "vibrant" Munich.

I'm also sort-of an immigrant myself

Which explains why you're pro-EU (although many actual germans are, since they are the only europeans who have benefited from the membership), and maybe also why you have no problems with Turks flooding the country you're living in.

The whole democrat party has history and ties with Russia and has never seen Russia as a threat to the US until the democrat party was targeted.

Really, let's see your evidence. Or accusations as it were.

"President Barack Obama was caught on camera on Monday assuring outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he will have "more flexibility" to deal with contentious issues like missile defense after the U.S. presidential election."
http://www.reuters.com/article...

A true statement of the reality in politics, come election time, a lot of empty and useless posturing goes on, making any accomplishments difficult when compromises are necessary.

Any honest president would say the same.

"Gov. Romney ... a few months ago when you were asked what is the biggest geopolitical group facing America, you said Russia, ...And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back. Because the Cold War has been over for 20 years. But Governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s"

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/2...

An honest assessment of Romney's dated views. Notice how the current drum being banged by Trump isn't Russia, it's ISIS? Who is at least as deplorable to Moscow as us, as they have a host of Islamic minorities to worry about.

Not to say Russia isn't a concern, they are a major state, but they aren't the Great Enemy of all that is Free and shouldn't be responded to that way.

Of course, you're not getting to the real meat of the expression, which was that Romney was simply borrowing messaging from the Reagan-era, which he was, and trying to use it for the modern day. It was not persuasive. People realize that was a big fat scam.

Sorry, but your evidence is scanty and non-convincing. You'd do better to leave off the accusations. Throwing things at the wall and hoping they stick is a poor tactic.

The whole democrat party has history and ties with Russia and has never seen Russia as a threat to the US until the democrat party was targeted.

"President Barack Obama was caught on camera on Monday assuring outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he will have "more flexibility" to deal with contentious issues like missile defense after the U.S. presidential election."
http://www.reuters.com/article...

"Gov. Romney ... a few months ago when you were asked what is the biggest geopolitical group facing America, you said Russia, ...And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back. Because the Cold War has been over for 20 years. But Governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s"

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/2...

Hillary Clinton and the Democrats have promised this for years.

While this is true...

Only Trump and the Republicans are complaining about the loss of jobs for Americans.

...complaining? Yes. Sincerely? Not so much.

Look, I realize that you hate Hillary with the intensity of a thousand suns, but it turns out that many people like her.

Not as many as you think (in fact, not even a simple majority). A majority of people either "dislike" or "strongly" dislike both Trump and Clinton, they are the #1 and #2 most-disliked candidates in the history of presidential polling. Additionally, most of the people who responded saying that they were going to vote for each of them said that their reason for voting was as a vote against the other candidate. So not even a majority of their own voters are voting because they like them, they are voting because of how much they hate/fear the other candidate.

This is not what representative democracy should look like. Any partisan idiot claiming that anyone else MUST!!! vote a certain way in order to stop the other person, and thereby continuing the status quo, is part of the problem. We need 3 or 4 viable parties and candidates in any major election. The way to get there is not to continue down the same broken path playing the same smoke-and-mirrors game. The media isn't going to pay attention to anything that they aren't paid to pay attention to, but if smaller parties get electoral votes in this election cycle then hopefully things will start to change for the next one.

And I guess none of this means anything either, right? http://www.reuters.com/article... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... But, you know, rounded corners was such an innovation. Literally took computer science forward 100 years.

It was a lot more than just rounded corners.

And I guess none of this means anything either, right? http://www.reuters.com/article... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... But, you know, rounded corners was such an innovation. Literally took computer science forward 100 years.

These days, China has substantial value as a consumer. It makes sense to keep some (but not all) of your manufacturing where you have a billion consumers.

Seriously, that has been proven false decade after decade after decade for over a century now. Perhaps two centuries. Look at jet engines. Western manufacturers were enticed to "share" technology and manufacturing techniques to get a part of the Chinese market. And now:

"China's cabinet may soon approve an aircraft engine development program that will require investment of at least 100 billion yuan ($16 billion), state-run Xinhua news agency quoted unidentified industry sources as saying. China is determined to reduce its dependency on foreign companies like Boeing Co (BA.N), EADS-owned Airbus EAD.PA, General Electric Co (GE.N) and Rolls Royce Plc (RR.L) for the country's soaring demand for planes and engines."
http://www.reuters.com/article...

Dude you're quoting out of context from a 2013 article.

If words are too confusing for you look, at the picture on thie DHS chart (posted in reuters last year):

http://blogs.reuters.com/data-...

Critics may declare President Obama soft on immigration, but as this Reuters graphic shows, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data the Department of Homeland Security deported 414,481 people in fiscal year 2014, down from 438,421 the year before. Each year of the Obama administration has seen more deportations than any preceding president; the pre-Obama high of 358,886 removals in FY2008 came during President George W. Bush’s last full fiscal year in office.

So, let me get this straight AC--

A country that imports more than it exports is "Great!" in your estimation, and pointing out that the actual quote from ricardo concerning his theory is as follows, with a little added emphasis of my own:

[blockquote]
"If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them [b]with some part of the produce of our own industry employed in a way in which we have some advantage.[/b] The general industry of the country, being always in proportion to the capital which employs it, will not thereby be diminished ... but only left to find out the way in which it can be employed with the greatest advantage."
[/blockquote]

Note, his thesis does not work at all when the bolded part is not met.

While the US does have the second largest export market, A significant proportion of the US's labor force is not tied to manufacturing or exports, most of it is service industry. Further, the manufacturing capacity of the US is currently struggling.

http://www.reuters.com/article...

Reuters attributes the low manufacturing performance to a high valued dollar, and low oil costs (globally)-- resulting in labor for manufacturing being too expensive in the USA-- THE EXACT THING WE HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT, and that tariffs are intended to help avert.

Their opinion is not alone-- The economic policy institute has a rather lengthly report about it.

http://www.epi.org/publication...

To which they credit " nearly two decades of policy failures that have damaged its international competitiveness" as the primary causal factor behind the massive reduction in US manufacturing. What policy decisions have been enacted in the past 20 years? Various free trade agreements that removed trade tariffs.

It further states that manufacturing accounts for only 8.8% of the US's labor force. Meaning that most americans are not employed doing manufacturing, but in some other industry.

Yet somehow, despite the massively disproportionate segment of the US labor force that is allocated to service providing, industries seeking service workers (No, software is NOT a manufacturing job. it is a service job.) "Simply cannot find qualified applicants!" Perhaps we aren't training enough people to meet those needs? No-- the NYT seems to feel otherwise.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04...

The costs of attaining a college degree are spiraling out of control, while the benefits of getting one diminish, due to labor force saturation. This is because there is out of control demand for college education, coupled with lackluster pay once it is attained. Basically, the service industry in the US does not want to pay for the education requirements it is demanding, and is leaving hopeful applicants holding the bag.

Instead, the service industry leadership wants only the cream of the crop, so to speak, of the potential applicant pool. It demands only the very finest caviar, and wants to pay cheesewiz prices. (Why not, it can get caviar for the price of cheezewiz elsewhere!)

This comparative difference in labor rates is ALSO controlled innately by tariffs, and prevents this kind of labor shopping-- at least as far as outsourced labor is concerned.

Now that I have buried you under a pretty substantively sized wall of text with some citations and opinion pieces by bonafide economists, perhaps you can be a little more forthcoming in how my interpretation of your rhetorical question is so clearly "Wrong", yes?

Exactly, this kind of thing is an absolute disaster for the food rationing business. Now they just lost one more reason for starving people. Even the charity business will suffer for this. Note, I am not mocking you. These sociopaths really think that way. And now they have to keep this stuff in the warehouse even longer before it rots.

Now they are eyeball deep in the looting scandal that stole over $2.5 billion dollars out of the Malaysian economy.

Goldman Sachs' (GS.N) work with Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB is under the spotlight over U.S. government allegations that billions of dollars were diverted for the personal use of officials and some people associated with them.

The Wall Street bank helped 1MDB, which was founded by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak in September 2009, raise $6.5 billion in three bond sales in 2012 and 2013 to invest in energy projects and real estate to boost the Malaysian economy.

Instead, more than $2.5 billion raised from those bonds was misappropriated by high-level 1MDB officials, their relatives and associates, according to U.S. Department of Justice civil lawsuits filed in court on Wednesday.

Goldman Sachs, which earned close to $600 million to arrange and underwrite the 1MDB bonds, has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

Still, the lawsuits allege investors were not properly informed about the use and nature of the bonds.

The U.S. Justice Department said that the offering circulars for two of the bonds issued in 2012 contained "material misrepresentations and omissions" over what the proceeds of the bonds would be used for and the nature of the relationship between 1MDB and International Petroleum Investment Company (IPIC), an entity owned by the Abu Dhabi government.

So no matter how much fun it is for Wall Street types to tie up hookers, or be tied up by them, nothing comes close to egomaniac thrill of wrecking entire economies for profit. That's why they keep doing it over and over again.

BTW, one of the truly ironic features of this case is that some of the stolen money was used to fund the film The Wolf of Wall Street. You can't make this kind of shit up.

A Brazilian congressional commission on Wednesday recommended a bill that forbids authorities from blocking popular messaging applications, just two days after a judicial order left 100 million Brazilians without Facebook Inc's WhatsApp.

Brazilians have this judge to thank for that. Award the judge today's Law of unintended consequences prize.

A Brazilian congressional commission on Wednesday recommended a bill that forbids authorities from blocking popular messaging applications, just two days after a judicial order left 100 million Brazilians without Facebook Inc's WhatsApp.

Brazilians have this judge to thank for that. Award the judge today's Law of unintended consequences prize.

Since the rest of the thread seems to have devolved into a lot of name calling, here is some results from 5 minutes of google searching:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/go...

http://ogleearth.com/2012/07/c...

In short, the restriction is not specifically on GPS, it's on mapping services in general. So they can use GPS to determine your location, but they're not allowed to show the details of the location you are at in high detail. Since you can see a (not very useful) map in Pokemon Go i guess it falls under the restriction? Either that or Niantic/Alphabet/Google wasn't willing to take the time to differentiate between requests to the map DB from Pokemon Go vs requests from Google Maps.

On the other hand the jitteryness of the location reported by GPS that you observed may or may not have been due to GPS jamming by North Korea:
http://www.reuters.com/article...

Checking some geocaching forums no one in South Korea mentions GPS issues and there are plenty of caches in the country.
You do have issues with north korea jamming GPS signals. http://www.reuters.com/article...
Instead of GPS being illegal what is happening is that Pokemon GO is not enable for SK. This is done by the methods mentioned except that the place mentioned in the article is not part of the country block.

So I glanced through the article and it seems to me that they're making a few bad assumptions about UBI to arrive to their conclusion. One is that they're saying it's bad because it's not tied to working like most existing social programs and there's little experience from social systems that are not tied to work. However the very reason the western world will need UBI or something like it in the close future is that across the board the western countries are facing a situation were automation is making many, many jobs obsolote and the rate at which these technologies create new jobs do not match that. It is pretty much agreed by economists at this point that a 100 % or close to a 100 % employment is an impossibility when you start seeing jobs such as driving and data-entry etc. disappear in the coming decades.

Secondly about the cost: they're saying that the cost of 219 billion would be too much, but really, it's not if you actually started making sure the companies and super-rich paid what they're supposed to. Look at the corporate tax revenue for example, in 2014 you got around 320 billion dollars out of it. However, we know that the effective tax-rates of corporations are far below the nominal 35 %, at 27,1 % because many corporations pay nothing or close to nothing in taxes.

Just by making sure corporations actually paid the required 35 % instead of the 27,1, you'd get an extra 95,5 billion. And we're not even talking about raising the taxes, this is the amount you're currently missing by allowing corporations dodge taxes. and that alone would fund nearly half of the program.

Then if you look at the state of the estate tax:

A simple calculation shows that our estate tax system is broken. Assets that are passed to relatives or other personal relations are often badly misvalued relative to what they cost on an open market. The total wealth of American households is estimated at more than $60 trillion. It is heavily concentrated in very few hands. A conservative estimate given the lifespans of Americans would be that 2 percent ($1.2 trillion) is passed down each year, mostly from the very rich. Yet estate and gift taxes raise less than $12 billion, or just 1 percent of this figure each year.

So you're essentially taxing 1 % of the 1,2 trillion dollars that gets passed down from generation to generation every year. This is insane. The whole point of the estate tax is to try and prevent income inequality from exploding since wealth once accumulated can create more wealth for its holder without the holder having to do any work for it. As an example say someone who is 35 inherits say 6 million today. Let's suppose he's not some financial genius but simply puts it to some safe index fund to sit and generate profit, let's assume 5 % PA, and let's also assume the guy in question pays his taxes, which for long therm investments at that size would be 20 % if I've read the US tax code correctly (and do correct me if I'm wrong), and after that spends half the profit he makes on living, buying things etc... so the total profit he'd be making every year after taxes and living expenses is 5 % * 0,8 * 0,5 = 2 %.

The average life expectancy in the US is about 79 years, so let's assume a period of 44 years from 35 to death. At 2 % a year, this comes down to 11,72 million dollars that's left in the fund, and this figure obviously does not include all the assets and mansions the guy has bought with the yearly ever increasing half of his profits I've assumed above, so in reality the wealth to be inherited is even greater than 11,72 million, that's just the cash.

This is the reason the estate/inheritance taxes are important when you have as much super-concentrated wealth as you do

Do you know what they do with the left overs after squeezing the ethanol out? They sell the corn mash as animal feed. The real problem has been drought causing ranchers to cull their herds hard. Fewer cattle to supply beef means higher prices for you.

Guess what? Electric grids were already hacked in what appears to be one of the first more or less real cyber-wars (previous - Estonia 2007, Georgia 2008 - were primarily powerful DDoS attacks to either disrupt services or cut off the country from the rest of the world).

The hacking happened in December 2015, in Ukraine. The attack was a sophisticated APT attack from Russia.

You can find more by following description in IR-ALERT-H-16-056-01 or reading the Wired article by Kim Zetter.

And, by the way, malware did find its way into nuclear power plants (though not control systems).

And waterproofing.
http://www.reuters.com/article...

Hey thanks!

I searched the page for "religion" and "Christian" but not "church."

Reading the articles, it's unclear whether he was actively attending this church.

> Borgie recalls a proud, intelligent boy who was determined to go to graduate school. He last spoke with the suspect about six years ago. The pastor says the family has belonged to the San Diego church for about 10 years.

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

via

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

and

http://www.reuters.com/article...

via

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

It may seem like splitting hairs, but the question is was his Christianity motivational for his murder or merely incidental? Did he cite Christian scripture as his justification? Did he commit murder at the promptings of his pastor?

These are the comparisons which should be emphasized when drawing parallels to mass shooters who were actually motivated by their faiths.

http://www.reuters.com/article...

Now should BP oil have paid 10x more or VW less?

Is "run from a country with a track record of flagrant disregard of international copyright law

By that logic, pointing out, that welcoming refugees from countries with a comparably flagrant disregard for women's rights may not be smart, is Ok too.

And yet, Donald Trump, who suggested a freeze of such immigrations, was widely denounced as just that — a racist everywhere, Slashdot included... But bashing the entire China is Ok?

That is what gets me in all of these cases. In almost every one the government really screwed the pooch. We were told by the Russians to be on the look out for the Boston bombers but we fucked that one up. The mastermind of the Paris attacks was featured as pig fucker of the month in Daesh's monthly magazine. The Orlando shooter was investigated by the FBI a few times and supposedly was reported by a gun shop owner for suspicious behavior attempting to buy ammo in bulk and body armor. So instead of the government doing their fucking job and actively investigating these people that really seem to need a closer look they instead seek to take away rights from everyone else.

Trump is good at persuasion and negotiation; it's part of business.

You're assuming the average person cares about policy details, facts, and logic... they don't...

The problem comes when you lay out facts and logic in short, concise form in front of someone people look to for leadership, and his only response is, "Uh, I don't believe that." You can get away with that to a very limited degree, even with the authority of popularity behind you; it's impossible to continue to look good when your attacks are cleanly parried and reversed.

Take Trump's talk about immigration, for example. Trump said we let hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants into this country, and "hundreds" of they and their children have been implicated in acts of terror. Pundits are yelling a lot of "No Mr. Trump, you're wrong and stupid," pointing out that the Orlando shooter's parents moved to America 25 years ago and he was born and raised American, so there's no sensible way to pre-screen this. Of course nobody buys into that.

We associate terrorism with murder.

In the United States, we have 4.9 murders per 100,000 people per year. Of 783,000 Muslim refugees from Afghanistan and Iran in the past 15 years, three (3) have been implicated in terrorism. Over 15 years, we've stocked 2.77 million Muslim immigrants and their children, including those refugees. If only 100 are implicated in terrorism, then any single full-blooded American is TWENTY TIMES as likely to be a murderer as one of these Americanized Muslims. Even if as many as 2,000 were implicated as terrorists--which even Trump hasn't claimed--that's still a lower rate of murderers among Muslim American immigrants than all other Americans.

You pull something like that. It puts Trump on the defensive. Now he has to say something about how a non-immigrant American is way more likely to murder you than a Muslim immigrant, but not really, because Islam; or he has to just claim whatever you just said isn't true, somehow. You pull out all your contorted logic *after* you put him on defense. Trump argued that Muslims don't turn in their own; the FBI says otherwise. This is where you pull out the logical argument that someone born and raised American for the whole 20 years of his life and radicalized over the Internet by out-of-country extremists isn't a threat we missed when his parents immigrated here.

You don't go in and say, "Let's think about this rationally: do you really believe there's a checkbox that says you plan to raise a child to be a fifth-column terrorist while you're here in America?" You quickly and sharply pull out facts-and-figures, something hard that will nudge him off-balance. Then, before he recovers, you hit him with every other proposition; the audience will just see a clown stumbling around on stage. If you start with something that doesn't solidly undermine his argument and force a response, you'll just get mocked for having a differing and sheltered opinion, and then *you* look stupid, which means no one's convinced you have a clue what's going on.

I like economic policy though.

Trump's entire argument against Bernie-style policies (e.g. a UBI) is funding: where do you get the money? I can actually tackle that (Bernie can't; he has undeveloped ideals with lots of holes, most of which are legitimately dangerous). This is a *huge* problem for Trump, because his entire line of debate would be undermined: for any attack he has, I can give a short and concrete answer.

Not only can I answer for funding problems, but I can also cite and control immigration risks, fanciful unemployment risks, and risks of diminishing the support of our existing system. My arguments for a Citizen's Dividend include that it establishes a basic standard-of-living and worker protection via a non-wage income stream, which avoids the job loss and reduction of consumer buying power cause

Sweden is an interesting choice for comparison, because they are slipping [mbctimes.com] in some of the ratings of late, plausibly because of the new(ish) diversity in their demographics.

Actually it's because they private education in the door, who started cutting corners to boost profits. But good try on the racist explanation, though.

Mass shootings are frequent occurrences in the US because the US is big

Amazing, huh? Norway has about 1/60th the population of the US, so mass shootings should happen at 1/60th the rate.

The only thing amazing is that you wrote that not realizing how idiotic it makes you look.

What you've done here called lying with statistics. For Norway, its basically a one off event; but it happened to be a big one, and it happened to fall into a narrow date range they were looking at. Its a statistical outlier, and it's plain dishonest to count it like that.

For example, the US is about 10x the population of Canada. Therefore if 1 person per decade spontaneously combusts in the states, we'd expect it to happen 1 in 100 years in Canada everything else being assumed equal right?

So... lets get some data...

1905 - 1 in the US
1916 - 1 in the US
1924 - 1 in the US ...
2002 - 1 in the US
2015 - 1 in the US; and finally 1 in Canada

Now lets make a chart looking at the last 10 years: 2006-2016 what do we see:

1 in the US, and 1 in Canada

OMG, the rate is the SAME! Holy shit balls... Canada has the same rate of human spontaneously exploding as the US! Now lets calculate that per capita...

US : 1 in 300,000,000; Canada 1 in 30,000,000

Amazing huh! Canada has 10x the rate of exploding peeps the US does!

Now, tell me you do see the how absolutely retarded that argument is?

That's the same argument you and that website just made about Norway.

Norway is a statistical outlier, because it had exactly one mass shooting, but it was large; and it distorts the data, and that was amplified by selecting the date range it happened to occur in. For example, try expanding the date range from 2009-2013 to 1970-2013... how many mass shootings will Norway rack up if you do that? Meanwhhile the US just keeps piling them on.. 24 from 2000-2008 (adding another ~114 victims); 42 more mass shootings in the 90s adding another ~155 victims. 32 more mass shootings in the 80s...etc..

The Norway figure isn't going to budge, while the US is going to steadily climb the ranks; as more data adds up.

Gun control has never been shown to have any significant effect on either homicide rates or mass shootings.

Well ... except in Australia.

homicide rates

"The chances of being murdered by a gun in Australia plunged to 0.15 per 100,000 people in 2014 from 0.54 per 100,000 people in 1996, a decline of 72 percent, a Reuters analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showed."

or mass shootings

"It was the April 28, 1996, shooting deaths by a lone gunman of 35 people in and around a cafe at a historic former prison colony in Tasmania that prompted the government to buy back or confiscate a million firearms and make it harder to buy new ones.

"The country has had no mass shootings since."

http://www.reuters.com/article...

Not saying Australia is a solid argument for gun control but you are going to have to pull your head out of your ass and make a cogent argument why it isn't instead of just pretending its not real.

Already got this...

The US and the UK banned slavery right around the same time, and the emancipation of ex-slaves on both continents was largely simultaneous.
At least, according to this: http://www.reuters.com/article...

UK abolished slavery, and freed slaves in the Empire, in 1834. The slave trade in British vessels was abolished in 1807. In the 1830s and 1940s, the UK was actively forming treaties with other states to suppress slavery. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_slavery_timeline. USA lagged by a generation.

'my people'? Nice generalization there, especially for someone who's supposedly against the expression of such things. Most people in the US are the same peasant stock as those in Europe. The US and the UK banned slavery right around the same time, and the emancipation of ex-slaves on both continents was largely simultaneous.
At least, according to this: http://www.reuters.com/article...

America was built by racists and slave labour.

So was Europe. Of course, the countries of your continent have are much better at the whole self-loathing thing, taking in mass numbers of ill-educated barbarians who assault women and demand crazy cultural concessions. Enjoy your islamic future. I'm sure it'll be quite 'progressive.'

Today in the west (at least for now), everyone has equal opportunity, both in the US and western Europe. The current squabble in the states is over affirmative action/equal outcome which is an entirely different animal. It's largely being triggered by well funded agitprop. Personally, I do not like being told I owe something to someone else because of skin color. My ancestors never owned slaves or were aristocracy, not that civilized societies should stoop to blaming sons for the sins of the fathers.. That's so old world.

In fact, Republicans stand for the status-quo. i.e., standing for big oil, big gas, big electricity or big (insert your favorite lobbying group here).

Is that why a Republican President (along with Republican-dominated Congress) allowed the fuck-ups like Enron, MCI, and Lehman Brothers to collapse, while a Democratic one bailed out GM, Chrysler (not the first one), and AIG?

They outlaw cash, so there's no reason to have civil asset forfeiture. http://www.reuters.com/article... https://www.theguardian.com/wo...

So Reuters is pro-Trump then, for informing us of this:

As evidence of what they say is Curiel's bias, Trump and some of his supporters have pointed to the judge's membership in La Raza Lawyers of San Diego, a local group for Hispanic lawyers that is affiliated with the Hispanic National Bar Association.

(Emphasis mine.)

Please help me clarify which group of La Raza the judge belongs to.

The Swiss vote 'No'

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-vote-idUSKCN0YR0CW/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/referendum-offered-money-for-nothing-and-the-swiss-say-no/2016/06/05/2c09f1d8-2b24-11e6-b9d5-3c3063f8332c_story.html

I'm afraid you have no clue about what the GDP actually is, and how it is calculated. Nothing is "double counted", and State-owned enterprises are never accounted as part of the government "budget", they have their own assets and debts, their own revenues and expenditures, they release their own quarterly reports, and their money doesn't go to welfare, except the taxes they obviously pay, just like any other company.

So 20% of GDP is the energy sector, and a big chunk of that money gets collected as taxes, and then those taxes are used to fund welfare services, which are also counted as GDP. Where am I wrong?

Anyways, flip whatever you want, if that's what you call "capitalism and free markets" (with the "exception of tariffs", lol), then I'm ok with that, but neoliberal economists really are not.

Mixed is mixed. If capitalism and free markets were so horrible, then why doesn't Norway abandon them completely?

For what bizarre reason would they ever want to join a nation with lower life expectancy, skyrocketing obesity, a shrinking middle class, 15 million people without healthcare, and kim katrashian on tv?

Obesity is a modern Western diet problem that is growing around the world, including countries like France, but ultimately it's a personal choice, as is what you watch on TV. Not sure how any of that counters how they are economically poorer. And life expectancy is still pretty high for the United States (82 vs 79 for France vs US, for example), so big whoop. And the population of the United States is over 300 million, so 15 million uninsured is less than 5%, and I imagine that number is continuing to change under Obamacare.

Why do you have no answers for China's dramatic improvement when they moved towards capitalism and free market ideas? Why do you have nothing to say about countries like Greece and Venezuela?

Aluminum smelting uses enormous amounts of electricity. If there is extra, use it to start up a smelter that closed.

Otherwise, the alumina is mined and refined, loaded on a ship, then sent to captive power for smelting, then shipped again to be made into finished goods.

4 years ago I could buy a lbs of beef for $1.99, it's around $5.99-7.30lbs these days. Top that out with 94m people not in the labor force, you've got a recipe for people popping themselves off. Past trends show that as well regardless of what the government says the unemployment rate is, especially unemployment rates where you simply fall off after several years.

Thanks Obama

Thanks Obama

Thanks Obama

Forbes is relying on the written law to figure that out. But this is the age of Obama. As we saw with the GM bankruptcy proceedings during the auto bailout, the government can order the bankruptcy judge to ignore the law and pay whomever the government wants paid. This allowed the union to get paid before shareholders despite the law saying the shareholders had priority.

There is no liar like a right-wing AC liar. In the GM bankruptcy proceeding debts were paid in strict accordance with the law. The bondholders (not shareholders) that were upset about not getting preferential treatment were unsecured creditors, unlike the banks that did get paid off first, and had no seniority in settling GM's obligations. They were in the same asset category as the union to whom GM owed a lot of money, and it is up the administrator of the filing to determine how the parties in the same category get treated.

so where is the revenue from the now defunct dirty polluters going to come from, the revenue that was promised to the people to offset the costs of going green?

That's a ways off yet, but by then, the industry adaption schemes will be done with, the renewables early-investment subsidies won't be needed any longer (as the market will have matured to cover the whole energy sector), and the consumer tax cuts can be slowly scaled back, if needed.

Remember also that getting off coal will save hundreds of billions annually in the US alone, mostly in avoided health costs ($1.7 trillion over the whole OECD). So overall we'll be significantly better off.