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In fact, Larry once sued his own mother, no really: http://www.slate.com/id/2317/

Apparently you missed this and this and this and this and this and and and and

relatedly, here is data to show that top marginal tax bracket does NOT correlate with GDP: http://www.slate.com/id/2245781/

Right. You give one life sentence, the prisoner serves less than life. You want to ensure s/he serves life, you give two or more sentences consecutively so there's no possibility of parole.

Same here. Sue for [your interpretation of] a reasonable amount, the company pays much less. To ensure the company pays the most society will tolerate, you sue for an obscene number.

I don't see a problem with bitcoin in theory... but throughout history no currency has been stable without an army to enforce its existence. Disband the USA police/Army and the dollar would collapse.

You almost hit Bitcoin's problem spot on. The reason that fiat money like the US$ is viable is that there is an entity - the US government - that can force a US$-denominated debt on you via taxation. This taxation creates demand for the money, which is what ultimately underpins the money's value, once you go beyond all the circular reasoning of "You work for US$ because Walmart accepts US$ in payment for goods because Walmart needs US$ to pay its suppliers because the suppliers need US$ to pay their employees, i.e. you".

Historically, no monetary system could remain stable and useful for significant amount of time unless it was backed by an appropriate power of taxation to jumpstart the value of the currency. No power exists that is able to force Bitcoin-denominated debt onto people, and so Bitcoin will never be widely used outside of the fringe of curious geeks and gold-nutters.

And this is just the problem of how Bitcoin could gain traction. If Bitcoin ever gained traction, then G** help us. Recessions like this one would be inevitable and prolonged, because nobody has the power to jump-start the economy out of a recession by unilateral stimulus spending. (Of course, given how the political debate is going these days, we might as well use Bitcoins, since governments refuse to use the tools at their disposal with which they could get us out of it.)

By the way, if you really want to learn more about how monetary system works, I recommend billy blog as a good source by a modern monetary theory economist. The entry A simple business card economy is probably a good starting point.

Slate.com has an article about why Fanta is so popular around the globe.

Turns out Fanta was created by the head of Coca-Cola Germany during WW2 after Coke syrup stopping being shipped to Germany, and was initially made with whatever fruit could be found. ('fanta' after the German word for fantasy or imagination.) The brand name was revived in the 1950's when Coke needed to complete with an expanding line of Pepsi flavors oversees, and gained traction everywhere else, but was never pushed much in the U.S.

US Supreme Court started taking that away from the Corps just a few weeks ago.

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-1279.pdf

http://www.slate.com/id/2281715/

"The protection in FOIA against disclosure of law enforcement information on the ground that it would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy does not extend to corporations. We trust that AT&T will not take it personally."- Chief Justice Roberts

British Geological Survey is reporting up to 13 ft. to the east. Revisions will probably settle down and start agreeing in a couple of weeks.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12732335
http://www.slate.com/id/2288382/

Remember folks, the piece of earth that moved can be larger than the country sitting on top of it. In the case of Japan it almost is. When you jog a table it doesn't break your dinner plates in half.
http://crack.seismo.unr.edu/ftp/pub/updates/louie/kobe/kobe-sci.html

According to Richard Posner

"The rule of law means that judges decide cases 'without respect of persons,' that is, without considering the social status, attractiveness, etc. of the parties or their lawyers."

In some states, the laws are so many and, and so contradictory, and so onerous that "every citizen is guilty of something." Dissidents are selected for prosecution, and convicted according the law. But because the arrest and indictment are contingent upon the social and political status of the accused, the process does not fit within Posner's conception.

Of course, others define "rule of law" more loosely and elide over concepts of justice and fairness. These people are shallow.

Actually, nuclear is pronounced properly as new-clear.
Dub'yuh pronounces it as nuke-yu-lar, adding a completely superfluous syllable.

I have to assume that there must be some distiction between the two in the US too, though it is smaller than elsewhere.

There's an excellent (and funny) summary of the oral arguments at Slate.

http://www.slate.com/id/2281715/

To sum it up less elegantly, the issue is the Freedom of Information Act which defines an exemption for "personal privacy". It also defines many other exemptions that apply to corporations.

The case hinged on whether artificial persons such as corporations had a right to "personal privacy". A lower court had said yes --- based more or less on an argument-by-grammar. "Personal privacy" contains the root "person", and hence all persons must have it.

The Supreme Court decision pointed out that this is not much of an argument. Flesh and blood people have "personal space" and "personal issues", but corporations probably don't. They also pointed out that the legislators had clearly written exemptions into the law that applied to corporations, and so AT&T was asking for essentially a massive extension in what the law does vs. what Congress had intended.

It gives me a small amount of confidence in this court to see them rule against a major extension of rights for corporations. Maybe it will become a trend.

So you no longer wonder why it is that a country that has a sovereign right to print money and has a printing press is over 12 TRILLION dollars in debt? And why that same country just created TRILLIONS for the banks to cover their stupidity? Maybe there was a better way to handle the crises you speak of. Check this out: http://www.slate.com/id/2271828/ A quote:The Fed makes money ex nihilo, pulling it out of thin air rather than taking it from its coffers. Then, it pushes the money into the economy by buying up assets from banks. If you want to know why there is such income disparity in this country look no further than the fed. And check out: http://www.amazon.com/Web-Debt-Ellen-Hodgson-Brown/dp/0979560888/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1298568279&sr=8-1 Conspiracy theory? Hardly.

They have been doing it for years online. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29040299/ns/us_news-military/ http://www.slate.com/id/2126479/
The next gen would be very direct http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/15/sunstein
The old Office of Strategic Influence:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0219-01.htm

Jennings is hilarious:

Indeed, playing against Watson turned out to be a lot like any other Jeopardy! game... Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman.

I think he'd be quite at home on Slashdot, except he would actually be very smart instead of just thinking he was very smart.

The funny thing is, his "never known the touch of a woman" quip doesn't apply to himself--he was already married with a son the first time he appeared on the show.

Indeed, playing against Watson turned out to be a lot like any other Jeopardy! game... Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman.

I think he'd be quite at home on Slashdot, except he would actually be very smart instead of just thinking he was very smart.

1) Retired generals don't count as official military spokesmen.

They do if they're being paid as spokesman or being handed a list of what they're supposed to say by the Pentagon. read all about it.

2) No idea what this is referring to. It's sufficiently vague as to be meaningless.

Here's some of it

3) That was a military propaganda operation executed as part of a war -- it was not done to effect anything in the US

Are you telling me this image wasn't widely reported in the US? There's little question it was staged by the army, the only question would be who the target audience was.

4).Lynch's propaganda was formulated by the administration. The military merely executed their orders.
5) The Tillman propaganda was formulated by the administration. The military merely executed their orders.

Last I checked, US military personnel were expected to refuse to execute illegal orders if doing so would not endanger their life (e.g. if the president ordered a soldier to summarily execute a US citizen, the soldier is not supposed to follow that order.) Engaging in psyops in the US is illegal under 10 USC 167, ergo the military should not have carried out those orders.

In fact, they're offering a cool million bucks for the first company to bring it to market.

It seems to me that only those who abstain from meat for a particular type of religious and health reasons concerning the nature of animal flesh would have any desire to avoid meat grown in a lab. That's probably a very small subset of vegetarians.

To suggest that 'society' has any say over what two (or more) consenting adults can do in their own bedrooms (or anywhere else for that matter) is at the least obscene arrogance and at worst tyranny of the most insidious nature.

So basically you would take the position that incest is okay now. Have fun trying to convert the US (or any other country) to support your views...

The former mayor of Detroit, now a convict, Kwame Kilpatrick begs to differ:

http://www.slate.com/id/2183399/

From

http://www.slate.com/id/2282376/pagenum/all/#p2

Two Thumbs, Two Dimensions
Roger Ebert is done talking about 3-D movies. Thank goodness.
By Daniel EngberPosted Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2011, at 12:00 PM ET

As far as Roger Ebert is concerned, the discussion about 3-D is over. "The notion that we are asked to pay a premium to witness an inferior and inherently brain-confusing image is outrageous," he wrote in his blog Sunday. "The case is closed."

If that means Ebert will stop complaining about the medium, so much the better. For years now, the venerable critic has been griping that 3-D cinema is dim, distracting, and useless. And I mean for years: Even at the age of 10, young Ebert turned up his nose at Arch Oboler's stereo jungle adventure, Bwana Devil. (Deeply unmoved, was he, by the hails of spears.) That was back in 1952; more than a half-century later, he's still shaking his fist at the silver screen—I hate 3-D and you should, too! Professional obligations notwithstanding, Ebert doesn't want to see another movie in three dimensions. Ever.

I've had enough of this persnickety crusade, marching, as it does, under the banner of pseudoscience. "Our ancestors on the prehistoric savannah developed an acute alertness to motion," Ebert writes, in an attempt to explain why movies like Clash of the Titans totally suck:

But what about rapid movement toward the viewer? Yes, we see a car aiming for us. But it advances by growing larger against its background, not by detaching from it. Nor did we evolve to stand still and regard its advance. To survive, we learned instinctively to turn around, leap aside, run away. We didn't just stand there evolving the ability to enjoy a 3-D movie.

OK, let's not quibble with the idea that human beings might have evolved to jump away from oncoming automobiles on the prehistoric savannah. I'm more interested in the two notions that follow from this dubious logic. First, that we ought not consume any form of entertainment that doesn't derive from a selected biological trait; and, second, that standard flat-screen cinema is somehow better suited to our genetic makeup—more natural, I guess—than 3-D.

I wonder if Ebert really believes that the arts should cater to our Darwinian design, or that we're incapable of enjoying anything for which our brain wasn't delicately prewired. But in the event that he does, I'd only point out that such gimmicky and distracting art forms as, say, music, may very well be fiddling with our cortex in ways that have nothing to do with the fight-or-flight demands of a saber-toothed tiger attack.

It's just as silly to presume that viewing a film in 3-D is any less natural—from an evolutionary perspective or otherwise—than watching it flat. For starters, the human eye did not evolve to see elephants stomping across the Serengeti at 24 frames per second. Nor are we biologically attuned to jump cuts, or focus pulls, or the world seen through a rectangular box the sides of which happen to form a ratio of 1.85 to 1. Nor indeed was man designed to gaze at any image while having no control over which objects are in focus and which are blurry. If all those distinctly unnatural aspects of standard, two-dimensional cinema seem unobtrusive, it's only because we've had 125 years to get used to them.

According to Ebert, the 3-D effect brings in an "artificial" third dimension, which doesn't serve to make a movie any more realistic. In fact, he says, it makes an image seem less real, since under normal circumstances "we do not perceive parts of our vision dislodging themselves from the rest and leaping at us." Here he appears to be confusing cheesy, pop-out effects (which are used judiciously in the better—and more recent—films) with the medium as a whole. Yes, some 3-D movies do contain these gimmicks, but others do not.

In any case, it's not clear to me why one de

but it's good news about ageism in another way: it has been said that if you don't make a contribution to mathematics by age 40, you never will (all the great discoveries in mathematics are by young mathematicians)

http://www.slate.com/id/2082960/

so ono at least proves that geezer mathematicians can still do some groundbreaking stuff

We can have the benefits of the placebo effect without rip-offs and mumbo-jumbo.

How? It's the very fact that the people are deceived that empowers placebo. You MUST have believed deception to make placebo work in any fashion.

Not quite. The current wisdom is that You Can Have the Placebo Effect, Even If You Know It's a Placebo.

-
Remind me again, why is this story in the idle section?

Obligatory Jack "Technophobe" Valenti quote about boston strangler and VCR here, perhaps?

Or would the old "buggy whip manufacturers vs modern automobile" bit be more appropriate?

Plenty of companies still make money selling games. Plenty of people still make money creating them. And then there are companies that seem to think coasting on old successes and re-releasing the same old tired game for umpteen platforms is their "model."

For that matter, plenty of bands manage to make money playing music - the Dave Matthews Band, like them or hate them, make money because they focus primarily on touring and working for a living. Of course, they became known in the days before radio consolidation made it so that the only thing heard on the radio is the top-40 paid-for Payola scam crap we see today (I'm in the 3rd largest radio market in the country and we have FIVE TOTAL FORMATS, six if you count right-wing bile-spewing talk radio; the other five are "classic rock top 40, drugs and sex woohoo", "rap top 40, let's shoot cops", "hip-hop top 40, let's pimp hos", "country top 40, play it backwards and your truck starts working and your wife and dog come back to you", and "How many times did that racist asshat just say gringo? what the fuck is this that sounds like a combination of a mariachi band, yoko ono, and a cat having its intestines pulled out through its mouth?").

Yes, it's a myth. According to this article, the break-even point is somewhere around 10 seconds.

The headline is overstating things a lot. The First-Sale Doctrine isn't lost overseas. Since this is a 4-4 tie decision by the Supreme Court, only the lower court decision is upheld. There is no precedential force behind the decision at all. Thus, the only thing that can be said about this is that Costco loses this particular instance, but the right of First-Sale overseas remains in effect since this decision isn't useful for any subsequent precedent.

http://www.slate.com/id/2109077/ --- A good analysis of what happens when a tied decision occurs.

Nutjob and liar. What a great combination. It is a shame because he tackles issues that do deserve some attention, and then he invalidates the discussion his his bullshit.

These are not the droids you are looking for. Move along.

Never mind, I found it:

http://www.slate.com/id/2277768/

The only reason he is being singled out here is because the VA suit is the first one that had traction.

First one out of the gate! Woo hoo!

Virginia's attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli II, is a man in a big, big hurry. He had promised to challenge the constitutionality of the newly enacted health care legislation "as soon as the ink is dry" on the president's signature. And—true to his word—less than five minutes after the bill was signed this week, Cuccinelli's staff sprinted over to Richmond's federal courthouse with a lawsuit aimed at blocking the measure. While 13 other state attorneys general hoofed it to court to file a joint lawsuit in Florida, Cuccinelli opted to go his own way, filing his own suit tethered to a brand-new Virginia law providing that "no resident of this Commonwealth shall be required to obtain or maintain" an insurance policy.

Quick-Draw Cuccinelli
Why high-speed lawyering can be hazardous to your health.

And just for the shits and giggles. Here's a first hand account of how loopy Chavez really is. http://www.slate.com/id/2262520/

I can't really see what else it would be called.

What about Sex by Surprise. S U R P R I S E !!.

OTOH, I hope Julian is not as innocent as Hans Reiser...

Well, that's not how modern societies work, not how they can work. Going back to agrarian population densities would necessitate some drastic measures... (but everybody is free to move, to be within like-minded people)

We are perfectly accepting public transit. Haven't you heard of airplanes? Now up to ~500 passengers(*) at a time (and see what people generally put up with en masse (TSA) to fly them). While there are few enthusiasts, they do it in a designated airspace - almost analogous to racetrack or offroad course.

Or school busses. Or - do you see many manually operated elevators, to exercise "individuality"? (pushing a button, telling an automated system what to do, is not what manually operated elevators are about)

How trains or local general public transport are quite unpopular in some areas is largely because of how they didn't have the chance with lobbying of automotive industry; and specifically building the surroundings to make it impractical to use anything other than a car. I'd say that's at least largely also a case of forcing a conformist behavior. The bike would seem more "individualistic" anyway...

In reality, people follow very strict fashions (and readily consider distant ones as "weird") - but yes, being under an illusion of nonconformism is enough...

(*)That's the key. Surely you don't think in the terms of "500 pilots" - so think in the terms of "passengers" also for cars. That's damn common, contrary to how people would like to perceive driving (otherwise 2-seaters would be probably most common, with virtual absence of cars having 4+ seats). So many "individual" things to do with the travel when don't have to care about it, instead of doing essentially mindless (but still requring constant attention) automatism, the same as every driver around. Travel time probably decreasing would be a nice bonus (things you mention in the first post ceasing to be an issue; human drivers are the biggest cause of trouble not only for automated ones)

I just happened to stumble upon this article on the topic, which notes that in the United States, the legal implications of the particular alleged events vary, significantly, by state. (The legal implications, of course, may differ from the moral implications. Nonetheless the article seems interesting and relevant.)

Is _sex by surprise_ illegal in the United States?

Sorry messed up the link:

http://www.slate.com/id/2274276/

The sad part is, we don't need Wikileaks to know that the Fed should be abolished

http://www.amazon.com/Web-Debt-Ellen-Hodgson-Brown/dp/0979560888/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1291296798&sr=8-1

Whether it is a failed educational system or just plain apathy, the Fed really doesn't have to hide that much of what they do. No one seems interested in questioning why a country that has a sovereign right to print money ends up TRILLIONS in debt.

http://www.slate.com/id/2271828/

From the above link: The Fed makes money ex nihilo, pulling it out of thin air rather than taking it from its coffers. Then, it pushes the money into the economy by buying up assets from banks.

So the banks get all this free money at the same time we talk about "deficit reduction" in the form of extending the retirement age, cutting medicare/medicade benefits and a host of other spending (except wars of course). Maybe if we didn't give the banks free money we would have money for things like health care.

Precisely, this line of thinking might prevent some from a chance at a normal life.

http://www.slate.com/id/2245889/

This young boy has a developing latex glove fetish, should he be refused proper medical attention for fear of "accidental" rape?

Germany Is Tired of Paying Europe's Bills. "Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks. And sell the Acropolis too!"—headline, Bild newspaper, March 4, 2010 http://www.slate.com/id/2247257/

Did you even read what you wrote? When you say "return to standards of living circa 1970", for a large portion of the populace, this wouldn't be a hardship since their standards of living haven't improved since then! Growth as a function of GDP is still increasing in the U.S. But, this growth is disproportionately being done by incomes that are in the top 1%. The middle and lower incomes have basically stagnated. For example, high school graduation rates have been at roughly 70% since 1970. Ideologues like yourself are very fond of quoting that life expectancy has continued to increase, but the reality is, life expectancy is only substantially increasing in the U.S. for people in the top half of incomes. Look at Table 4 in this study. Since 1977, life expectancy has risen 6 years for the top half of incomes, but only 1.3 years for the bottom half of incomes.

We can only hope. But yet some people are actively trying to get the public to submit: http://www.slate.com/id/2275681/

They're called Bidenisms

We have Sarah Palin and she can see Russia from her front porch

What Palin actually said was

"They're our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska."

http://www.slate.com/id/2200155/

Which is literally true since from Little Diomede part of US territory and Alaska you can see Big Diomede which is under Russian control.

A legitimate critique of Palin would be that she considered Russia being visible from an island of Alaska, as saying something useful about her international experience and foreign relations.

I thought this was a good writeup on the issue:

http://www.slate.com/id/2223023/

In the end you didn't get anything like what the Democrats wanted, yet they have a majority. Your rhetoric about something being forced on someone is disingenuous in that that is the definition of politics as opposed to e.g. persuasion. When you vote for something, then you are voting to force the issue against those voting against and vice versa. It is what politics is, and that is exactly why politics makes people so angry. The funny thing is that what Obama is getting in trouble for is precisely that he tried to go beyond that and inevitably failed.

Republicans are not concerned with pleasing democrats, and I don't know why they would be. The strange thing is that democrats are concerned with pleasing republicans. It is as if they don't understand that in a two-party system they are playing a zero-sum game for power. They are acting as though they are in a many-party system where consensus is the way to make decisions.

First I was going to say that the Obama administration should hold no sway over the DoJ's actions, but then I saw this. I can scarcely imagine who would be running that place with McCain/Palin in control.

Republicans and Democrats are 2 wings of the same corporate party...I fear he is correct. When you look at the causes of the financial meltdown we experienced, there are policies by both R and D congresses and presidents that all made it possible. I hate to over-simplify, but it appears they both suck.

And Jesse Ventura said he would be against Independents forming a 3rd party because you would have a 3 headed monster instead of a 2 headed one...I fear he is correct as well. His idea of disbanding all political parties sounded interesting, though.

Who knew that giving control of our money supply to private corporations was a bad idea? I mean besides Ben Franklin.

http://www.slate.com/id/2271828/

"The Fed makes money ex nihilo, pulling it out of thin air rather than taking it from its coffers. Then, it pushes the money into the economy by buying up assets from banks."

Now, here's some facts: we've been doing this "progressive taxation" thing for quite a while now, at least a few generations or so. Yet the gap between the rich and the poor in the USA has only increased. In fact, what's happening is that the middle class is shrinking, the upper class is staying relatively stable, and the poor are growing.

It doesn't look like the growing income inequality in the U.S. is due to tax policy. See this Slate series (Part 5 discusses tax policy).

Finally someone understood my point. I think all the talk about "wealth envy" vs. "tax the rich!" in the media has contaminated many otherwise sane discussions about this topic. If you even mention taxation, everyone is automatically trying to figure out which of those two "sides" you are on so they can label your viewpoint and therefore trivialize it. Of course you're "either this or you're that" and there's no third options in anyone's minds, or so it would seem. It's a shame.

It's refreshing that you are able to think for yourself enough to see what I was getting at.

Now, here's some facts: we've been doing this "progressive taxation" thing for quite a while now, at least a few generations or so. Yet the gap between the rich and the poor in the USA has only increased. In fact, what's happening is that the middle class is shrinking, the upper class is staying relatively stable, and the poor are growing.

It doesn't look like the growing income inequality in the U.S. is due to tax policy. See this Slate series (Part 5 discusses tax policy).

You're kidding, right? Look at this:

Now let's look at how often the Supreme Court decides that the 9th got it wrong. Last term, the Supreme Court's reversal rate for 9th Circuit cases was 90.5 percent. Yikes—that's huge! But wait, for on-the-merits cases, the Supremes reversed the 3rd and 5th Circuits almost all of the time* last term. Cases from state appellate courts fared no better: They also had a 100 percent reversal rate. Overall, this past term the Supreme Court reversed 75.3 percent of the cases they considered on their merits. The pattern holds true for the 2004 and 2005 terms as well, when the Supremes had overall reversal rates of 76.8 percent and 75.6 percent, respectively. For those years, the 9th was reversed 84 percent and 88.9 percent of the time, or about a case or two more each year than it would have been if it had conformed to the reversal rate of the other circuits. How do one or two cases a year add up to a court run amuck?

In America, 1% of the population takes 24% of the income. So actually, a policy affecting those few people can have a huge impact.

Yeap, old news.

http://www.genomeweb.com/peer-review-broken
http://www.slate.com/id/2116244/

All it takes is one bad reviewer that doesn't know what he's talking about, or only skimmed over the paper, to get a paper rejected.

The Slate write-up was much better:

http://www.slate.com/id/2267262/

Not the degradation of income for 99% of the population.