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No, that is the most dangerous myth about the 2nd Amendment.
It was never about being able to stop a rogue government.

The citizenry would find a way to do with with or without hte 2nd Amendment (indeed, with the overwhelmingly conservative (and anti-government) nature of the majority of military and police, just who the flying fuck do you think a rogue government is going to get to enforce its will???)

Reality is the 2nd amendment is about the ability of the militia to exist and be capable of fulfilling its mission of assisting in national defense.
The early nation did not have sufficient army to provide for the defense. the idea being that they would be reinforced with citizen militia.
The army then provides the knowledge and experience, and heavy weapon such as cannon, and the militia provides the bodies.
The army lacked the equipment to supply every militia though, so it was necessary for the militia to be able to supply its own arms.

Today, with the militia now being hte National Guard, and the National Guard having no trouble supplying its members with gear, its safe to say needs for providing for the national defense have changed.

Some light reading to correct your ignorance:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
http://www.slate.com/articles/...

If Gun Massacres Are the Price of Liberty, We Need to Reconsider What Liberty Means.

If constant gun massacres are an inevitable result of American liberty—if we cannot be truly free without letting every madman, abuser, and hothead with a grudge get guns, if we cannot send our children to school without fearing they may be slaughtered in a hail of bullets—we need to reconsider what liberty truly means.

And you should also not pretend that we dont regularly restrict or limit the rights in the constitution over various greater public interests.

Freedom of speech has its limits: cant yell fire in the movie theater.
So does religion: you dont get to impose your religion on others even if its what your religious expression or observance calls for
Assembly: cant block public streets, or you must get a permit to do so

So dont pretend that the 2nd Amendment is any different, or any more sacred and inviolate than the others. There are times and places to limit it. By imposing background checks, on ALL sales. By requiring training to prove your anret incompetent and a threat to others. By requiring proper storage, so that unauthorized persons, such as children, get access.

That depends. Seems like fucking up a white boy is the only thing that cops get held responsible for, even if it takes years.

You can't tell the cop you're going to do that, otherwise in a few minutes you will be committing "suicide" with two shotgun shells to the back.

Yes, the difference between the jd's scientism and religion as discussed above is just the difference between an epiphany and an apophany. Fatalistic belief in determinism with all of physics nowadays seeming to say the opposite is clearly apophany (see for example http://www.slate.com/articles/...).

Also...

http://www.rollingstone.com/tv......
http://www.forbes.com/sites/in......
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/......
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bro......

In any case, glad this abusive, corrupting program was shut down.

A time article on John Oliver's influence including noting his show on civil forfeiture. Here's an article where you could read that he had an effect on CF...

http://time.com/3674807/john-o......

Quote:
After the increased exposure given to the issue by the (Washington) Post and Oliver, Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week that he would enact major limitations on the law.

Updates on the stories that matter. Anyone want to make a submission?

Will the Trans-Pacific Partnership Force Us to Fund the Paris Climate Agreement?

Saginaw [Michigan] County Board calls on Congress to oppose Trans-Pacific Partnership

Poll: Donald Trump trails Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders in matchup

(This one may seem random, but is perhaps the most on-topic to this discussion of the bunch. People got killed but she didn't join Daesh at least? USA #1!) Suspect in Vegas crash said she was stressed living in car

Sanders Campaign Suspends Two More Staffers Over Data Breach

Global Trade Faces Fragmentation Risks From TPP, TTIP, TiSA

You are blaming the entire problem on half of those actually responsible. Many scientists today refuse to let facts get in the way of their theories. This stems from many factors. Pressure to produce results, ego, fear of failure. But there is overwhelming evidence the scientific model has been superseded by the trending now model.

Can California's electric grid hold up if VW really did replace all those vehicles with electric cars?

You generally charge them at night, not during peak usage hours. Of course, Californians could also install a solar panel, SolarCity is offering them at no money down.

Even hydro capacity has decreased, as more dams are broken than built because they apparently bother the fishies.

As someone who lives in the west I would love to see windmills on farmland and solar power installed on rooftops replace dams. Free flowing rivers are an incredible asset, it's not just about fish.

Oh there is a reason, it just has nothing to do with safety.

Or there is a reason, it has to do with safety, or with optimising throughput, or some other valid concern, but that reason is not obvious to every dummy driver on the street.

The throughput argument bears repeating. Many drivers don't understand this, but sometimes you can get more people through a bottleneck (AND have fewer accidents) if everyone drives more slower at a constant speed than if everyone is trying to drive faster at the same traffic density. This is particularly true when you have a high variability of vehicle speeds, like in a mountainous area where trucks are forced to go slower or in an urban area where frequent incoming and outgoing traffic at exits often travel at different speeds from the rest of the highway.

For example, if you're driving on a highway through an urban area and they lower the rush hour speed limit to 45 mph (some areas now are adopting such dynamic speed limit signs), the idea is that if cars actually go 40-45 mph, the road will actually be able to handle the amount of traffic while also allowing all the people merging on, getting off at exits, changing lanes, etc. at a safe speed.

If, instead, everyone tries to drive 65-70 in the same area, what can happen is that the merging or changing lanes will eventually cause someone to cut someone else off, which causes sudden braking, which then causes some tailgaters behind them to brake suddenly, others follow and overcompensate because they were going too fast and suddenly see much slower cars, and within a few minutes you have a "traffic wave" of stop-and-go traffic backed up for a few miles which might take a half-hour to resolve, where throughput is dramatically reduced. (How many times have you gotten to the end after sitting through 10 minutes of such stop-and-go traffic waves, and there's nothing there -- no accident, no merge, etc.? This is often the kind of thing that happened.)

At a slower speed, the slower car may not have been forced to "cut someone off" in the first place, or if he does, the impact of a bit of braking may not cause such massive changes and overcompensation. Traffic thus recovers faster and throughput is maximized.

Maybe next time use the normal phrase instead of some screwed up version you misheard, mmh sunshine?

Actually, the phrase "could care less" dates back roughly 60 years in English, and the phrase "couldn't care less" is perhaps only 10 years older.

So, they basically emerged around the same time and always mean the same thing, i.e., "I don't care." As that link discusses, there are plenty of other English idioms that have similarly irrational constructions. Grammatical logic does not trump idiomatic usage.

And as for your contention that it's a "screwed up version," you might have a look at this article, which include statistics showing that even in the New York Times (usually somewhat conservative in usage matters), the two phrases have become almost equally common since 2000. And recent databases of spoken rather than written English show that (the supposedly "screwed up") "could care less" is roughly five times more common than (your supposedly "correct") "couldn't care less." Whether you like it or not, the usage you claim is "wrong" has become quite standard.

Regardless, this whole "grammar police" discussion is pointless. As usual with these sort of things, language marches on, and the grammar wackos are the ones who make trouble for everyone. Without you folks, we'd likely transition to "could care less" completely in a few decades, and "couldn't care less" would mostly die out. But no -- you'll keep it alive, because you think it's "more logical," and in 30 years nobody educated will be able to use either phrase, because "couldn't" will have become so rare as to sound weird, and "could" will be branded as "wrong" by the few wackos still holding the line.

Whatever. I could care less... or, actually, ya know, I really couldn't....

Because he posts the single most interesting stories on the site?

I don't know whether to (+1, Ironically Funny), or (-1, Fuck off Ethan), but you made me laugh either way.

We've known it's density waves for years. Decades, arguably. If Ethan's blogspam is new and revelatory to you, you haven't been paying attention. If you want a pop-science focus, http://www.astrobio.net/ is decent, as is Phil Plait's Bad Astronomer. If you want mission updates, http://spaceflightnow.com/ has good (and in some cases, live) coverage. If you want well-sourced articles on a wide range of topics, any of the blogs on the Planetary Society will do; these authors have been working in the field for decades.

Literally anything is better than Forbes/Medium blogspam. All the guy does is take a few pretty images that show up first on a Google Image Search for whatever it is he's cutting and pasting about, then tells you how amazing it is that space. And time. Are, like, the same thing. Like a gravity and a bowling ball and a rubber sheet. Here's that .GIF we all saw in grade school. And black holes are like where light can't come out, and the sheet is torn. And here's that same .JPG we all saw in high school. And umm, yeah, we don't know how gravity works and that's all you'll need to know about clickbait, I mean, relativity. Now let me spam my next blog on Slashdot, because they're the only site dumb enough to greenlight it multiple times a day.

It's true. I think the major issue with pedestrian collision would be to just program the car to repeatedly ram the obstacle until they're dead.

We can hope, but it's not looking too good just now.

I realize you're being facetious, but I still want to remind people that the Golden State produces a ridiculous percentage of the country's produce that is not corn or wheat. That's where most of the water goes, even during severe droughts. http://www.slate.com/articles/...

The sensible goal is not to eliminate inequity but to narrow the gap to something that 'reasonable' people can live with, for example in most scandinavian countries the tax system makes it difficult/impossible for the highest paid to earn more than ~10X the lowest paid. You can still have your corporate empire but you can't suck it dry and spend it all on solid gold plumbing.

Gates did not get his fortune from earnings, nor did most of the billionaires.
They got their wealth because they owned something that they made, and the wealth they have is due to the value of what they owned.
They did not get it from earning 10, 100, or 1000000x the workers. They got it from the value of what they made. And there is no way to prevent creating value outside of a state-controlled economy like communism.

As for the Scandinavian's holding down the wealth gap ...
http://www.slate.com/articles/...

They sure do have mandated classes in Qatar for religion though. Texas on the other hand, doesn't.

Yes, Texas has mandated teaching of religion in schools.

http://pandasthumb.org/archive...

http://www.slate.com/articles/...

http://io9.com/a-map-showing-w...

In the article, it mentions female undergraduates, and only females. Guess what, men get raped too. Why is there no insurance for that case? Because every man is an insaitable sexual animal who can't do anything but assault the nearest woman? That's not very gender equal, is it, to automatically assume that the male is automatically the rapist? Isn't this the very definition of sexism, to treat someone differently solely by gender?

That's ignoring the absurdity of not checking this in court or anything either. In some states, rape is a capital crime, punishable by death in the US. If another person and I have a vendetta against someone, can't we just file two reports? Boom, no proof required, no pesky legal checking. Minimum, they'd be ruined for the rest of their whole lives: potentially, they could wind up on death roll (in some places). That'd be indirect murder, clearly a very funny college prank, yes?

It's astonishing to me how no one thought this through or even put aside their cultural biases to do any research into this whatsoever.

This could also make power speculation and arbitrage possible. Buy power to charge up on windy nights and sell on hot days. (In summer, anyway) Bulk wind power in Texas on the spot market has actually dropped below zero on a few occasions. http://www.slate.com/articles/... This would fix that imbalance.

Well I am sorry I have to share a country with you (I assume). It really pains me that you can't see the need to ensure the safety of your family, friends, and fellow citizens as a first priority. You want to jeopardize all of us so you can feel all enlightened or whatever. That is truly a same.

So here were are:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the...

Already some evidence the ISIS threat to embed fighters among the refuges is happening.

about left/right????

I only mentioned "left" (not "right") because THEY are the ones currently pushing speech codes, complaining that any speech they dislike is "hate speech" that must be suppressed, showing up at speeches and rallies (by many different speakers of many different political stripes) to shout-down the speakers, hijack the microphones, etc.

As for it being "hypocritical" - well you seem to like to troll using that accusation but you seem not to know what the word means. I should not need to cite left wing suppression of speech when it's in the news on a nearly daily basis and is all over the web and is currently the subject of another active thread RIGHT HERE ON SLASHDOT. How about liberal rag Slate DEFENDING speech codes. Even the ACLU has had to recognize the plague of liberal speech suppression on the campus. Here's the left-leaning The Atlantic defending the suppression of free speech. It's happening in all the formerly Judeo-Christian nations as they become more secular and more left-wing as can be seen at The Telegraph

The following actual or publicly-thought-of-as right-of-center people have been attacked while speaking at public events by leftists wielding pies: William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, G. Gordon Liddy, Anita Bryant, Rupert Murdoch, Ann Coulter, David Horowitz. While pie attacks have been used by leftists against other leftists for not being left enough, I have never heard of a right-winger attacking a left-winger with a pie on stage in an attempt to shut-down the speech of the left-winger.

Of course there are also the incidents where people like Condoleezza Rice, first black female Sec of State was disinvited to speak. How about this: list of stuff leftists have banned from various colleges? Here is a Harvard Crimson editorial in favor of junking free speech in favor of "social justice". If you are so inept that you cannot ferret-out even a tiny bit of evidence from the publicly-available tidal wave of evidence that the left is responsible for most of the speech suppression these days then you are the last person who should be labeling other people as trolls - apparently simply because they disagree with you (Making yourself an example of the phenomena)

Please cite the most recent 5 examples of a US College or University event where a left-of-center speaker was shut down (speech blocked/microphone seized/Pies thrown/etc) by a bunch or college Republicans or TEA Partiers. Please cite any occasions in the past 20 years when any right-leaning group has demanded a left-leaning speaker be shut up (and please exclude those very few cases where such a plea was made as part of a call for balance AFTER left-wingers successfully block right-leaning speakers) on a university campus. The university USED to be the place where all speech was welcome. This is no longer the case

http://www.johntfloyd.com/scan...
http://www.slate.com/articles/...

tons more:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q="black+magic"+crime+lab+fraud+hair+rape

You're not going to get an argument from me that coal is bad. It is a shit industry, they don't want to change and you already know my opinions, based in knowledge of the appropriate bills, how and why the nuclear industry is still, like all of us, beholden to coal and oil.

I think you need to lay off the oil-nuclear conspiracy theories. And yes, that's what I'd relate them as. Nuclear has historically been a baseload electrical power source, with Oil only being used for emergency power(including at nuclear plants) in most areas. In the previous thread where you posted more on this, I was seriously off-put by your allegations.

'Coal' opposing nuclear is more understandable, but it's important to remember that coal isn't a single entity - and they're actually more in bed with each other than being opponents. A lot of coal power plant owners also own interests in nuclear.

You also know that I think Nuclear *could* be better if we could get past all of the people who think they are supporting it, but in reality are preventing it from evolving a safety culture. It needs to be divorced from private industry's profit motivation and moved into the domain of government where it can be managed with the same type of safety culture that exists in military installations.

You do realize that 1/3 of the major nuclear disasters was from a government controlled nuclear plant? If you go below 'catastrophic' and look at the behavior of government controlled plants, you'll find that their record is actually much worse than the commercial plants. That includes the USA and USSR.

Consider that for commercial plants that an accident means lost money, huge amounts of it. There's plenty of incentives to be safe.

Also, I've worked on military installations. 'Safety Culture'? We're not really any better than private industry. Also, consider that the USA hasn't had a major disaster since TMI, which is when we went through and drastically increased safety requirements, instituting drastically altered safety protocols. Defense in depth, automatic safety systems, etc...

Well, I think you need to read my comments about IAEA and WHO [slashdot.org] however I see that it has already been modded down, perhaps the facts are a little too confrontational. It doesn't matter - the real conversation about Nuclear power is always at -1 here at /.

Looked at that post. First, your citation as to the hazards of DU consists solely of a heart-string tugging google image search. In short, at best you have some coorelation there, but also a lot of images of birth defects that have nothing to do with Iraq, photoshopped images, fakes, and normal birth defects that happen in any population, especially when nutrition isn't that great and pre-natal care is relatively primitive. And you complained about me posting a yahoo news link?

Your second reference, which you claim supports a death toll of ~980k, doesn't say so at all. I see references of 4,000-93,000, the latter by greenpeace, which I've read as having problems since they pushed out most of their more scientific members.

What I could find of your higher figure, I see a number of issues that make me rate it as 'uncredible'. Consider global warming research - there are still papers written and published that deny it's existence, they're just not credible. To be blunt, it seems that they're counting 'all cancers' where another cause, such as smoking, isn't identified.

As for killing less than solar, I think it is clear that that is a contrived situation.

Contrived, how? Dead is dead, whether it's by radiation leak, lung cancer fr

Speaking of which, I thought it was the pallet that changed everything..

Pallets: The Single Most Important Object in the Global Economy

I find it hard to understand why "are games art?" strikes anyone as enough of a question to even be asked.

Because, for better or worse, we've given our government the ability to censor things that are not "speech" and the government has decided that artistic value is one of the things that it will use to decide what is "speech" or not.

Because, for better or worse, certain people have been agitating for years for the government to come in and start censoring videogames. (This predates the current batch of agitators, and will likely continue long after these are gone.)

Actually when I made that statement, I was just echoing something that a few European governments have lamented. More details here:

http://www.slate.com/articles/...

If you disagree, then go take it up to your own leadership who is now resorting to legal tactics to try to push out American competitors to local European firms for no reason other than they just can't manage to produce a good enough product to effectively compete on the global economy.

The unspoken assumption, that folks like Google wish to remain unspoken and unexamined, is that "better then (sic) a human" part. That they are so committed to glossing over that suggests that they are also doubtful about how soon automated cars will, in fact, driver better than humans. Certainly, we're nowhere near that now.

Your instincts about the article smelling kind of skechy are almost certainly right. Yes, that's what your source says happened, but as you note, they don't back it up with anything. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that anti-GMO activist groups are, if anything, even less trustworthy than international megacorporations when it comes to spinning the truth, omitting important factors, or just making stuff up from whole cloth. They're up there with creationists and anti-vaxers when it comes to needing to follow up on the primary documents for every claim they make.

If an article quotes those activist groups and they phrase something in such a way as to "not exclude" what they want you to think but not to actually come out and say it, it's usually not a real thing. If it was, they'd be pounding the drum and saying it outright and stating the facts clearly. My guess is when you hear meaningless phrases like "Monsanto went after" instead of "Monsanto threatened/filed suit against" what they really mean is that an investigator went to the farmer and asked if they were saving unlicensed GMO seeds, didn't find evidence of a violation, and then closed the case.

From what I've actually been able to verify, actual actions against farmers are extremely rare. Only a handful have actually gone to court, and the cases I've followed up on by reading the court decisions have been obviously one-sided with the farmer obviously intentionally violating the rules. The fact that when they're asked for specific cases, their big figurehead "victim" is usually Percy Schmeiser (side note: This is Monsanto's web site summarizing the situation and they link to the relevant decisions, which should tell us something) is an indicator that there isn't much in the way of real collateral damage here.

I'm generally pretty quick to believe accusations against big corporations because they're very often true. Unfortunately, the anti-GMO lobby has done so much to burn my trust that I'd take a peek outside if they told me the sky was blue. Will Saletan at Slate has a good summary that just scratches the surface of the whole mess here.

Actually if you ever go to a Chipotle, you can watch them prepare the ingredients, which is a deliberate restaurant design choice they use for that reason. And yes, you can watch them wash the lettuce (it's been this way for years.)

Your talking points are what we call denial. You sound just like Greeenpeace. Here, read this article:

http://www.slate.com/articles/...

Namely, read the arguments Greenpeace makes about Bt plants. Tell me how your arguments are different from theirs.

Well the nice thing about biology is that we can get to a good cause-and-effect description of why something might cause harm to you.

In the case of organic, it's simple: Cow shit is well known to have many parasites, salmonella and e. coli among them. Both are known to cause people to get sick, and in some cases kill people, because both excrete chemicals into your intestines that are highly toxic, which your intestines try to flush out, giving you bad diarrhea.

As for GMO...let's see, we have a few studies suggesting a very shaky "link" to cancer in rats, immune problems, and digestive problems. Yet every single one of these studies has proven to be A) borderline fraudulent B) scientific misconduct, or C) both. And furthermore, there is no cause and effect description in a single one of these studies.

http://www.slate.com/articles/...

Here's the thing:
I'll believe my military did a lot of bad shit if you can show me a motive. For example, we embarked on multiple murderous bombing campaigns against the Japanese mostly because of racism (notably, we refused to use similar tactics against the Nazis on the basis they would not work).

There is no motive for blowing up a hospital. Even if somebody in DC had a thing about MSF, they had to know it would be the top story of the counter-offensive and they'd get canned.

OTOH, getting through to NATO officials in Kabul is not gonna get a bombing campaign called off quickly unless they're the exact guys involved in the actual bombing. Getting through to our official in DC will also not stop the bombing, unless the official in question is one of a) the President, b) the Chair of the Joint Chiefs, or c) the Secretary of the Air Force. And 2 or 3 AM Saturday in Afghanistan is roughly 6 or 7 PM Friday in DC, which means none of those guys is going to be easily reachable at his office, and they were doubtless dealing with the operator at the switchboard.

I'm stunned they got results in less then an hour.

Hell, did you read your source? The reason they were bombing it in the first place was "The Afghan interior ministry said a group of 10 to 15 militants were found hiding in the hospital."

So the bureaucracy has to deal with a guy on the phone, from the hospital, saying "we're civilians please don't kill us", and balance that against the Afghan troops (identified in other sources as police) swearing up and down that there's a squad-level unit in the hospital killing them. If that guy on the phone is lying then dozens of Afghan troops will die, and your mission will be compromised forever because the survivors won't trust you. If the troops are lying you have a hospital full of corpses. Which means that maybe the safe bet is to not bomb, OTOH the troops are known quantities who have been vetted by your bureaucracy. The guy in the building is an unknown quantity who may Taliban. You have no clue because all you've got is a voice on the phone.

In other words, just because the news story you read has one side of the story (in this case, the MSF's firm, and so far unconfirmed, claim that there were not 10 to 15 Taliban in their building), a bunch of commentary on an issue tangentially related to this (the Red Cross Guy, for example, is linking the attack to others on their personal, and most of those are done by the Taliban), and a throw-away line about why we actually did it the logical conclusion is not that our military are mindless butchers who kill without reason. The logical conclusion is that you should read something from somebody who elaborates on that one line.

Look man, bottom line:
This is a war. People will die. Many of them will be innocent. The first report, from both the military and the civilians, will always be one-sided, because neither the military nor the civilians are magical psychics who can figure out the other side's case without hearing it. Generally there's elements of truth to both.

I suspect in this case what will come out is that the Afghan Police were making it up out of spite. They have the motive to lie, and get the building destroyed. OTOH, MSF personal may not have seen, or heard, a fireteam or three on the roof, and have 19 very good reasons to be extremely adamant in their contention that said fireteams did not exist.

It got approved because the Afghan Police specifically asked for it to be leveled. They alleged that the hospital was being used as a firebase:

The Ministry of Defense said “terrorists” armed with light and heavy weapons had entered the hospital compound and used “the buildings and the people inside as a shield” while firing on security forces. Brig. Gen. Dawlat Waziri, the ministry’s deputy spokesman, told The Associated Press that helicopter gunships fired on the militants, causing damage to the buildings.

Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said 10 to 15 “terrorists” had been hiding in the hospital at the time of the strike.

“All of the terrorists were killed but we also lost doctors,” he said. He said 80 staff members at the hospital, including 15 foreigners, had been taken to safety. He did not say what sort of strike had damaged the compound.

Around 2pm the Taliban seized the medical compound, according to Sarwar Hussaini, the spokesman for the provincial police chief.

“Fighting is continuing between Afghan security forces and the Taliban,” he said.

This isn't Google maps. This is war. It's way too chaotic to trust automatic measures.

The Taliban had taken over Kunduz. this means they could easily have killed the entire MSF staff, taken them hostage, or simply informed that them the roof was going to be a machine gun nest for the foreseeable future. Your entire automatic no-kill map should have been wiped out the minute the Taliban took the City.

The machine gun nest thing is precisely what the Afghan Police told the Air Force happened.

  So the interesting question in this little fuck-up isn't "Why did the US Military fuck up?" it's "Were the Afghans lying through their fucking teeth about taking fire from the hospital, and if so why did they do that?"

There is a Holy Shit you're bombing friendlies protocol. But the MSF is not a friendly. It's a neutral. That's kinda the entire point, and the most likely explanation is actually that some Afghan Cop got pissed at them for being too neutral and asked for the strike out of revenge for them treating the Taliban.

As a non-friendly, MSF does not have a guy in the theater chain-of-coimmand, with has a hotline to the guy who knows exactly which squadron to call to scrub the exact bombing raid going on in Kunduz province at this second. That would probably take 10 or 15 minutes. MSF's gonna have to call somebody (probably at the Embassy, because getting too close to the military would be taking a side), who has to figure out who to call to get to the "you're bombing the wrong damn thing Ghost Squadron" guy. And since none of this happens on a militarily secure phone line, with a protocol for verifying that the MSF guy isn't saying this because 150 Taliban have taken over the building and are threatening to cut his head off on international TV, they've also got to go through some process to verify the MSF guy is an actual MSF guy and is not lying.

There isn't much we could have done.

The Afghan police requested the airstrike. Everyone (including me) assumes they were lying because MSF has a very good reputation, but if the Taliban take a city, and an allied paramilitary unit says that retaking it requires blowing up a building that was used as a hospital before the invasion, because guys on top of it are killing them, you're not gonna subject them to the fifth degree before you do it.

A half-hour is lightning-fast in terms of stopping it when it turned out the Afghan police were wrong. The Air Force is a 308k person bureaucracy, the guy whose number MSF has is probably not in the chain-of-command of the relevant unit, and quite possibly is not on a first name basis with anyone in that unit, so they have to call that guy. He who has to rustle up someone who is in that unit (and is trusted by the brass of that unit) and can verify he's not the kind of idiot who would fall for an obvious Taliban trick.

It is.

And they do precisely what they say they'll do. They blow up the exact building the airmen intended to blow up.

The problem in this case is the Afghan police told the Air Force they were taking fire from the MSF hospital, and they needed it to be leveled. Since the Taliban controlled the entire fucking city, including the hospital, a whole yesterday, the Air Force didn't bother to check the pre-Taliban-list of targets you shouldn't level in Kunduz.

The Afghan Police are still swearing up and down they were being attacked from the hospital, MSF speculates this whole fiasco is revenge for MSF's "treat anyone, even Taliban" policy, and I doubt the US Government will make a determination over whether the raid was justified until they can prove conclusively whether the Afghan Police are making shit up. Which will be somewhat difficult, given that said police specifically asked for most of the evidence to be destroyed.

Keep in mind military terminology is really old. Way older then you.

They're surgical strikes, and smart bombs, compared to ones we used in the last big war against the Nazis. Both us (against the Japanese), and the Brits (against Germany) used night bombing campaigns to avoid enemy air defenses, and had to work their tails off to make sure they hit the intended city. Avoiding specific buildings was simply not possible. Day-bombing raids (used by us against the Germans), was better, but would still have been unable to avoid leveling the hospital if used against a built-up area:

As U.S. participation in the war started, the USAAF drew up widespread and comprehensive bombing plans based on the Norden. They believed the B-17 had a 1.2% probability of hitting a 30 metres (100 ft) target from 6,100 metres (20,000 ft), meaning that 220 bombers would be needed for a 93% probability of one or more hits. This was not considered a problem, and the AAF forecast the need for 251 combat groups to provide enough bombers to fulfill their comprehensive pre-war plans.[21] The bombsight was used for first time in March 1943.[29]

For all it's sins, the military we've got uses significantly less brutal solutions then were possible in any previous generation. It's not their fault that Presidents much prefer airstrikes (which have large civilian casualty-numbers if they go wrong) to special forces-ops (which can turn low casualty operations into political disasters because we really liked those 18 guys).

In this case it doesn't seem like a US Military internal fuck-up at all. It seems like some embittered Afghan police officer sent in the coordinates of the hospital on purpose because MSF treats Taliban casualties. The Afghan Police concerned are still swearing up and down they were taking fire from the building.

The crime of jaywalking didn't exist until cars came along. Streets were once shared spaces for everyone.

And then someone figured out that things with large amounts of momentum required long stopping distances, and that you were an idiot if you stepped out in front of them, and expected the laws of physics to bend to your whim.

And then someone else came up with traffic signals and road markings, which made it safe for pedestrians and cars to share the street again ...so long as everyone, including the pedestrians, obeyed the signals and road markings.

And then "jaywalking" ... not obeying the signals and road markings in a way dangerous to those sharing the road with you ... became a crime.

And everyone lived happily every after! Except the people who were jaywaking: they got splatted like birds flying into the path of a 747 (something that also can't stop on a dime, even if the birds happen to be members of an endangered species).

The crime of jaywalking didn't exist until cars came along. Streets were once shared spaces for everyone. Cars were slaughtering people left and right, so to protect their own interests, the automobile lobby came up with the term "jaywalking" to ridicule the victims, and they also managed to get legislators on their side.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, motorists violate the right-of-way of pedestrians more often than the other way around. (See the linked article above for proof.)

And are you aware that crosswalks can be unmarked? The details vary between jurisdiction about how to identify an unmarked crosswalk.

Turing is not big pharma. It's Martin Shrkeli's new play toy. For those who don't know who he is, he made his money as a tiny hedge fund manager that specialized in shorting crap/scam companies.

He also owns League of Legends and DOTA2 pro teams.

How much you want to bet he posts about ethics in game journalism on 8chan?

Here is an actual photo of Martin Shrkeli:

http://www.slate.com/content/d...

And, if you think I'm being unfair comparing Shrkeli to a certain now-defunct hashtag group beginning with the letter "G", I suggest you read through some of his Tweets. See if you recognize the tone and substance of his arguments. In other words, where have you seen this kind of stuff before?:

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/0...

The level of fear-mongering, ignorance, outright lies, and sometimes spittle-flecked hatred is so disturbing that it's taken all the fun out of mocking right wing science-deniers. And occasionally it descends to violence, like the assholes who destroyed the Golden Rice (note: not a Monsanto product) plot in the Philippines.

The actual debates over Golden Rice and the Rainbow Papaya give a depressing look at how much the goalposts are moved in the debates too.

G: "Golden Rice, fortified with beta carotene, could save 40,000 lives a day!"
A: "It might not be poison this time, but it doesn't produce enough beta carotene, so it's useless. Don't use it. Cultivate a home garden, ghetto kids!"
G: "It's not feasible to suggest that these dirt-poor people with no yards or houses grow beans and pumpkins."
A: "Well they can't afford yellow rice."
G: "Most of it will be given to farmers for free."
A: "Oh, that's terrible, it will contaminate local food supplies!"
G: "You're right, it didn't have enough beta carotene. Here's a new version that has far more beta carotene."
A: "Well that's a problem, beta carotene and Vitamin A are dangerous. They can cause direct toxicity or abnormal embryonic development."
G: "Only one study showed problems with Vitamin A, and you'd have to 20 bowls of golden rice to ingest the same level."
A: "The National Research Council says genetic engineering has a higher chance of introducing unanticipated changes."
G: "The NRC said it had higher change of introducing changes like narrow crosses, but a lower chance of introducing other more dangerous changes."
A: "Some retinoids derived from beta carotene cause birth defects."
G: "Every leafy green vegetable has these retinoids. You said people should grow their own food."
A: "Keeping rice GMO-free is an issue of consumer choice and human rights. Genetic Engineering is controlled by multinational corporations and governments. Governments forcing this is bad."
G: "But how to solve the deficiency problem?"
A: "We recommend the plan to make Vitamin A fortification compulsory. And mix it in with the staples of sugar, flour, and margarine. The Philippines made that law and it worked there. Governments forcing that is good."
G: "But those contained the retinoids that you said--"
A: "Sorry, I was busy protesting China's clinical trials, where Golden Rice was fed to 24 children! Children! It's never been tested in animals, and we know that retinoids that can be derived from beta carotene are toxic and cause birth defects."

The arguments are circular. There is no winning.
* (Mostly taken from this excellent Slate article. )

This isn't the only time the FBI has been heavily invested in false science

quote: The majority of the state's residents live within the region regulated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, an "island" that generates and supplies all its own electricity—unlike, say, New York City or Detroit, whose residents found out the hard way that lots of their power comes from Canada. link: http://www.slate.com/articles/...

So far that's just on social media, so although it's gotten people fired, it doesn't quite look like Germany in the 30s yet.

It's looking more like Germany in the '30s every day.

http://www.slate.com/content/d...

https://prod01-cdn06.cdn.first...

https://markosun.files.wordpre...

Nice try, but it originated with Slate.

Couple this with the fact that as a rule, Economists do NOT cite employment relationships when publishing papers. In any other scientific field, this would be considered an ethical conflict of interest. In Economics, it's just standard practice.

http://www.slate.com/articles/...

The fact that Economists are actually taken seriously in guidance of national and world economic policy, should be of major concern, because it has had absolutely DIRE consequences for general economic prosperity and stability, and has DIRECTLY contributed to several economic recessions, crises, or crashes. Hundreds of millions of people are suffering extreme poverty that persists generation to generation, all because we have listened to their oh-so-convenient pronouncements.

The profession, as a whole, needs to be discredited, wiped out, and replaced with a serious, rigorous academic discipline.

Only about the fact that there are reports of extortion and suicides now linked to the hack including a police captain.

Oh, maybe that's because algorithmically generated papers tend to generate long titles.

Check out the generated phrases here.

HOW THE FUCK do you "lose" money that you never actually had in the first place?

Based on an estimate of how much money you expect you could/would have earned otherwise.

The pharmaceutical industry does this when determining how much to charge for a drug. It's not actually (or solely) based on actual development costs, but also - and mainly (from the articles I've read) - based on how much the company would have earned by simply investing that money instead doing development. For example, from: The Make-Believe Billion

The statistic Big Pharma typically cites ... is that the cost of bringing a new drug to market is about $1 billion. Now a new study indicates the cost is more like, um, $55 million.

I'm not saying this is morally/ethically right, just answering your question.

The issue is that people are inherently manipulative, so they don't want better numbers. Studies use intentionally incorrect information, like you point out with male rape not being counted as rape.

Had they been manipulative they'd change the data and simply report inflated numbers - not use vague, badly worded definitions, prone to misinterpretation, or protocols and methodology prone to bias from both surveyors and surveyed.

You are describing a conspiracy where "studies use intentionally incorrect information".
I am describing a situation where confirmation biases of people designing and running the study, forces them to set goalposts so wide in order to get the results they are expecting - that the results they get are so high it is obviously ridiculous.

Your theory proposes existence of scientifically sound studies which produce correct conclusions based on falsified data (scientists lied), which could not be proven wrong without repeating the study.
My theory suggests a reason for faulty interpretation of correct data (both scientists and subjects told the truth) - which can be proven by just looking at the data and methodology of the study.

Two other manipulations heavily used are studies that count bisexuals as gay and as bisexual to double the wanted demographics numbers. Murders not being counted as murders to make it appear like crime is being reduced. Deaths being linked to a specific cause to manipulate society even when the cause was only a minor factor.

Now that sounds even more conspiratorial.
Fake gays, hidden murders and lying about causes of death. Oh my!

My point was not intended to say that science is not possible

Neither was mine.

It was to suggest that people coming up with those specific studies have their minds set about what those studies MUST show - so they unintentionally or through the lack of scientific rigor (they are often psychologists) produce badly designed studies.
No one is lying, faking or hiding anything. They are just incompetent.

Great retort.

MGuire AFB is not guarded or patrolled by the TSA. It's an Air Force base. You has a point there, I know but it's not just invalid. It's oblivious to reality.

So far, every test by the FBI etc that we have been informed of has shown the TSA is spectacularly inept at finding contraband that agents have tried to smuggle on board an airplane. They've relieved me of several Leatherman Micras over the years, though. My pen is equally dangerous. Go figure.

Do we know if the TSA has discouraged anyone from attacking a plane? I don't really care. I'm interested in if they have prevented anyone form attacking a plane. How many passengers have they dragged off in cuffs from the screening area? Two?

Similar issues have shown up in other fields. Psychology has had serious faillures to replicate many major studies http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/07/replication_controversy_in_psychology_bullying_file_drawer_effect_blog_posts.html and when there have been attempts to replicate them they have often not gotten the same results. And there are very similar problems in education https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/14/almost-no-education-research-replicated-new-article-shows. Pre-registration of experiments is important, but it would also help a lot if there were journals dedicated to replication and also if academia took replication more seriously: I know people who are tenure track who haven't tried to replicate some studies because it doesn't look as good for tenure promotion to just replicate something rather than do something new. There are serious cultural issues that need to change.