Slashdot Mirror

Anything is possible with Fantasy Calculus. The same sort of wingnut math that is used to argue that a Prius pollutes more than a Hummer can easily be used to ignore uranium mines and the vast amounts of concrete needed for nuclear power to throw stones at wind and solar.

Named and shamed.

https://slate.com/technology/2015/04/fake-peer-review-scientific-journals-publish-fraudulent-plagiarized-or-nonsense-papers.html

You should look at the tests they made blacks take to be qualified to vote.

I don't think many would be able to get it right in the ten minute requirement but given time to go back and look at it everyone else can laugh at how stupid the one taking the test is to not be able to follow such simple instructions.

Russian parliament passed new laws to punish people for 'spreading fake news' and for insulting government officials, national symbols, history, etc.

Basically it is now illegal to do any investigative journalism based on this law because the moment you say anything about anything you can be immediately, based on a complaint from anybody actually, without any court order (no court order will be required even though in Russia courts are completely useless, bought and paid for, under complete 100% control of the government and of putin) be blocked, fined, thrown to prison.

No court order is required and the information can (and must be) immediately blocked (by all local Russian ISPs), no court order is required and a person can be fined (there is a progressive scale of fines, repeat offenders also get higher and higher fines), no court order is required but a person can be thrown into prison.

The only way to fight this in Russia is to completely disregard this law, however I believe many people will self censor instead.

Although many nerds aim to be rational entities, humans have varied emotions/moral inbuild biases that make them lean in different ways and be hard to reason with in certain areas. Unfortunately, some of those leanings are for "my family/tribe uber alles", and aren't compatible with an interconnected global world where we can't tolerate *any* people going their own way on certain topics (vaccines, pollution).

Just silencing, or arguing against them doesn't help.

https://slate.com/technology/2...

Perhaps there's some sort of technical solution, a linguistic judo which could co-opt the moral systems with antisocial moral biases and redirect them in more generally beneficial directions. We have an increasing set of knowledge about social psychology, and huge interactive data gatherers like Google and Facebook should be able conduct interesting experiments to learn more. Then again, maybe that's just going to be another kind of propaganda.

  (But for *good* this time, right?)

I didn't know what you were talking about, but after some googling around I found this. That's so evil. Screw that.

Wow, you have really drunk the MAGA Kool-Aid, haven't you? Have you looked at the national debt lately?

US national debt rises $2 trillion under Trump in just 2 years.

> [Citation Needed]

Basically Everything Trump Said About the Economy Was a Lie
President Trump’s repeated claim: 'The greatest economy in the history of our country'
Trump’s Tax Cuts: The Rich Get Richer

> Recessions are a thing of the past now.

It's far more likely that our current policies will eventually lead to complete economic collapse, but party on.

Quote from the Slashdot summary: "... a Facebook vice president of public policy, Will Castleberry, spun the news as the attorneys general just wanting to help Facebook..."

The five most dishonest answers Mark Zuckerberg gave to Congress.

Facebook is using 'dishonest and manipulative' tactics to get EU users to agree to facial recognition, critics say.

The Backfire Effect has been grossly over-sold. Even the original evidence for it wasn't all that strong in the first place, and attempts at confirming it haven't been doing so well:

• https://slate.com/health-and-science/2018/01/weve-been-told-were-living-in-a-post-truth-age-dont-believe-it.html
• https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/1/8/1730754/-Has-the-Backfire-Effect-of-Debunkings-Been-Debunked

If you like cheap irony: the widespread conviction that the Backfire Effect is real is itself a sign of cognitive limitations-- people really like that story, and won't let go of it.

It may not be a good game because of catering to the perpetually offended. There is one fact I know: If you cater to the people that aren't your customers at the expense of your customers, then you will absolutely lose customers, and the people you catered to will move on to fuck with something else.

This has been learned the hard way in more than just EA's case. The destruction of the Star Wars golden goose by Kennedy and Johnson. Especially when they not only refused criticism, they attacked and ridiculed anyone who disagreed with them.

How'd that work out?

In the world of entertainment, it is pretty important that you produce entertainment that your customers want.

And if you produce a game based on a event like WW2, it needs to be accurate, because the customer is pretty well versed.

And yeah - an alternative universe WW2 game could be made. And as long as it's known as an alternative game, its all good.

But speaking to that - you get interesting things when you cater to those people. The latest Wonder Woman movie which did indeed have a war setting, which did indeed have social Justice oversight - still outraged some of the easily offended.

They were outraged that Gal Gadot raised her arm - and horrors!!! To Twitter and scream!! Wonder Woman Gal Gadot had no armpit hair!! https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/...

What is worse, Wonder woman as a member of an immortal race of only women could not give true consent, therefore she was raped!!! https://slate.com/human-intere...

The point is good people, if you are dealing with a group who cannot be satisfied, there is no point in dealing with them at all.

They did this with 4G. Here's a quote from an article from 2012:

The emptiness of 4G was highlighted last week, when people who installed the latest iPhone 4S operating system upgrade noticed something that seemed too good to be true: The network indicator on their phones began displaying “4G” rather than “3G.” This change occurred only for people who use AT&T’s cellular service; Verizon iPhone users who installed the upgrade still saw the 3G indicator. Some people took the change to mean that their phones had gotten faster wireless Internet access, but that wasn’t true—the OS upgrade did nothing to change how your phone communicates with cell towers. All that changed was AT&T’s marketing. Early last year, essentially overnight, AT&T began rebranding its 3G network as a 4G network. So now that tired old 3G phone is fresh again—lucky you, you’ve got 4G!

because they're afraid we might start taxing their robots

Okay let's start with this.

Not enough pictures, but here's the gist: if the economy only produces hotdogs and buns, automating hotdog manufacture gets you producing 33% more hotdogs with 33% less labor. The journalist screams that millions of jobs have been destroyed, yet unemployment is low because we now need to produce 33% more buns and it takes 33% more labor to do that.

Long ago, we proclaimed America's economy was agriculture. Agriculture became more-productive--we make more agricultural products today than we did when we had 25 million farm workers, and we have fewer than one million farm workers--and there was this economic crisis because the agriculture industry collapsed. America didn't collapse: we got a lot of manufacture jobs.

General Motors was once the biggest company in the world. It was called the "Heartbeat of America". Manufacturing was American employment. We hear this story a lot today...oh, wrong story. There's a nursing shortage, and nursing is becoming a bigger part of our employment base because manufacturing is so damned productive. We manufacture a lot more today than we did in ages past; now everyone's getting into services--accounting, nursing, lawyering, even fast food.

So what does this have to do with taxing robots?

Imagine if we obsoleted 30% of our workforce.

Now imagine if the products didn't get any cheaper as a portion of income. We spent 40% of the average household income on food in 1900 and 13% in 2000--and in 2000 we ate a lot more food out of home, meaning we spent a lot of that 13% on services (the food number is closer to half that). As the cost of food and transportation went down, we spent money on other things.

"Taxing the robots" freezes economic growth and creates poverty. It's just raising the price for the consumer--or rather preventing the price from falling as jobs vanish.

If you want to turn productivity gains back to workers without increasing consumption, shorten working hours. This actually reduces the number of available jobs, but productivity gains increase the number of available jobs anyway.

There are good reasons to raise minimum wage with productivity and to provide a sort of universal dividend; the reasons you've given are complete bullshit.

There's this widespread mistaken belief that radiation is not normal, and is only created by nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors. Radiation is completely normal and is everywhere around you.

The highest radiation dose most people receive in a year actually comes from their own bodies. There's a naturally occurring radioactive isotope of potassium, and our nervous system needs potassium to function. Likewise, foods high in potassium can give you an elevated radiation dose. The radiation sensors at our border checkpoints designed to detect terrorists trying to smuggle in a dirty bomb are forever being triggered by cat litter, tiles, and foods high in potassium like bananas, nuts, etc..

After that comes rocks - mainly granite, but also things like beach sand. They have trace amounts of natural uranium which is radioactive. Having granite countertops in your kitchen substantially increases your annual radiation dose. The radon which can build up in your basement if you live in the mountains comes from rocks. Radon is one of the byproducts of uranium's natural decay chain.

After that is cosmic rays from space. Living at higher altitudes increases your exposure to this radiation source, since there's less atmosphere above you to absorb it. A transcontinental flight exposes you to about as much additional radiation as a medical x-ray. All the people who fled Japan after Fukushima by flying home unwittingly subjected themselves to more radiation during the flight than they would have received from Fukushima if they had just stayed in Japan.

Anyhow, uranium is water soluble. As a result, seawater has a much higher concentration of natural radionuclides than you normally encounter on land. So if you're that paranoid about radiation, you shouldn't swim in the ocean (you shouldn't even go to the beach, where the sand and sun will irradiate you). The increase in radioactivity from pre- to post-Fukushima is tiny compared to natural levels. The reason we know it's coming from Fukushima is not because the water has suddenly become radioactive. It's because the radioactivity is coming from certain isotopes which have short half-lives so have long since disappeared as a natural radiation source. Fukushima was the only recent event which created a bunch of those short-lived isotopes, so we know that if we detect radiation from those isotopes, that they must have come from Fukushima.

When I worked at Oracle the rumor was he got in trouble for flying his MIG under the Golden Gate bridge.. I also remember him in that advertisement where he's in the Lotus Position saying "Ohhhmhm" over how enlightened his Linux based thin clients were compared to PeeCees. I wonder if he'd even cringe seeing one of those posters, now.

False:

https://www.theguardian.com/fo...

https://slate.com/technology/2...

Using this independent emissions calculator with a Model 3 in a zip code where basically 100% of the electricity comes from coal (an East suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio), it is still producing 1/2 of the carbon emissions of the average ICE-powered vehicle. It's even more compelling if you are in a zip code with a more clean energy mix, such as Portland, Oregon. (less than 1/4 the emissions) The up-front carbon cost to manufacture will be higher than an ICE, but the far lower operating carbon output will cross over into net-savings within a year or two.

Are they completely clean transportation? Clearly, no; and nothing is - not even walking. But they are "cleaner" which is what my earlier statement said. And now I've provided independent sources to back that up, with their reasoning and research attached.

Go away, troll.

The official number is more like 10,000.

This nation was built on genocide and it has been run by oligarchs in a slipshod, slap-dash fashion. Luck and natural resources have carried us so far, but that time is ending.

Like DVD, KFC or BP, the term BFR doesn't formally stand for anything.

That's funny. I was going to correct you with the meaning of those acronyms we all know, and when looking for sources I found that you're actually right. Thanks for the info.

• 
     
• DVD was initially supposed to be "Didital Video Disc", and later renamed "Digital Versatile Disc", and eventually nobody agreed on it and it was officially renamed to simply "DVD" (three letters), with many other unofficial meanings.

•    

• KFC were the initials of Kentucky Fried Chicken until 1991. From the previous link: Dieting trends had made “fried” a dirty cuss, and the plan was to banish it from view. Voila: KFC.

•    

• BP used to be The British Petroleum Company plc, but after many acquisitions it simply became BP plc in 2001.

pushed around by powerful employees who do not care about patriotism.

So, since when is Silicon Valley patriotic? As in, they care about America and their fellow Americans? Huh? Silicon Valleyites are "citizens of the world". They care far more about distant peoples from backwards cultures than their own neighbors in places like Texas, Idaho, and West Virginia. They regard us with mingled scorn and apprehension. Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk. Here is a great essay I have bookmarked that discusses the issue very eloquently and precisely.

Every election cycle like clockwork, conservatives accuse liberals of not being sufficiently pro-America. And every election cycle like clockwork, liberals give extremely unconvincing denials of this.

"It's not that we're, like, against America per se. It's just that...well, did you know Europe has much better health care than we do? And much lower crime rates? I mean, come on, how did they get so awesome? And we're just sitting here, can't even get the gay marriage thing sorted out, seriously, what's wrong with a country that can't...sorry, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, America. They're okay. Cesar Chavez was really neat. So were some other people outside the mainstream who became famous precisely by criticizing majority society. That's sort of like America being great, in that I think the parts of it that point out how bad the rest of it are often make excellent points. Vote for me!"

I was an Obama voter, and I have proud memories of spending my Fourth of Julys as a kid debunking people's heartfelt emotions of patriotism.

Here is a popular piece published on a major media site called America: A Big, Fat, Stupid Nation. Another: America: A Bunch Of Spoiled, Whiny Brats. Americans are ignorant, scientifically illiterate religious fanatics whose patriotism is actually just narcissism. You Will Be Shocked At How Ignorant Americans Are, and we should Blame The Childish, Ignorant American People.

Needless to say, every single one of these articles was written by an American and read almost entirely by Americans. Those Americans very likely enjoyed the articles very much and did not feel the least bit insulted.

Here's another great essay, "Revolt of the Elites" that also addresses this issue.

When confronted with resistance to these initiatives, members of today's elite betray the venomous hatred that lies not far beneath the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence. They find it hard to understand why their hygienic conception of life fails to command universal enthusiasm. In the United States, "Middle America" - a term that has both geographical and social implications - has come to symbolize everything that stands in the way of progress: "family values," mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, retrograde views of women. Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly dowdy, unfashionable, and provincial.

These privileged young people acquire advanced degrees at the "best [universities] in the world," the superiority of which is proved by their ability to attract foreign students in great numbers. In this cosmopolitan atmosphere, they overcome the provincial folkways that impede creative thought, according to Reic

This explains why all movies now "feel" the same..

by illegally bussing in voters to vote for them

that is complete bullshit.

I am not going to waste any time refuting the rest of your Gish gallop. Your claim that illegal voters were bused in has no basis in fact, so you obviously have no concern about objective truth or fact.

but if you want a place to search for it in english, why dont you start here : https://slate.com/technology/2...

Aside from the technical challenges there's also vast uncertainty as to whether or not we've sabotaged our own ecosphere to the point where we can't depend on being able to live in it for the long term (meaning: at least the next 1000 years).

No, not really.

99% of the concern is that we might not be able to live in the current numbers and at the current burn rate. A plague that kills 3 billion people would set human progress back by about 50 years. Meanwhile there would be a great flourishing of all the other life taking advantage of all those resources we were no longer consuming.

We complain about pollution, but all anthropic pollution added together harms human health less than long-prevailing childbirth and infant mortality rates (survival to age six).

The Disturbing, Shameful History of Childbirth Deaths — 10 September 2013

Bearing a child is still one of the most dangerous things a woman can do. It's the sixth most common cause of death among women age 20 to 34 in the United States.

That's at the current, miraculously improved death rate.

Given all the dangers, how did deaths in childbirth fall to about one-fiftieth of the historic rate? ...
In the United States today, about 15 women die in pregnancy or childbirth per 100,000 live births. That's way too many, but a century ago it was more than 600 women per 100,000 births. In the 1600s and 1700s, the death rate was twice that: By some estimates, between 1 and 1.5 percent of women giving birth died. Note that the rate is per birth, so the lifetime risk of dying in childbirth was much higher, perhaps 4 percent.

United States in 1900: 850 per 100,000 live births. These are young, healthy women dying, not women aged 55 who inhaled too many fumes of some modern industrial varnish.

Short of tipping the whole planet into nuclear winter, we haven't done any damage to the planetary ecosystem that a great human dying off wouldn't put right in under a few centuries.

So what if the ice caps melt? It's happened before, and life survived just fine. Might be tragic for fancy apes with beach homes. But let's not imagine any whales are going to complain.

Historically when 1/3 or 2/3 of the population dies off suddenly, it's not a happy time for anyone who lives through it. We've have to discard a heap-load of useless modern technology, such as Twitter. But we'd keep the essentials running, such as a circa 2005-level Google search —though maybe with a 2000 ms response time instead of 400 ms (and maybe only 25% of the population would have direct access). It would be tough, but we'd all pull together (those of us who were still living) and we'd pull through.

Even if the entire planet died back to a stable population at the levels of the Roman Empire (circa 100 million people), humans would not loose their cherished conservation status: Least Concern.

Endangered species criteria (one of many):
* Population estimated to number fewer than 2,500 mature individuals.

* Total human breeding population of 2,500 individuals (in sufficiently close proximity) around Moan Level 8 (where 9.99 is one bun in the oven away from species-level exit stage left).
* Total human breeding population of 100 million individuals (in sufficiently close proximity) around Moan Level 3. (And that might be generous.)
* Everything below 3.0 is denominated in millimoans.
* Our biggest ongoing tragedies: about 100 millimoans each (the great plastic gyre, a few degrees C global temperature rise, things like that).
* A really severe global nuclear winter: maybe 3,000 millimoans. (In my system above, that's a 98.6% global human population loss.)

Perspective. It's a bitch.

...because it is idiotic, and could apply to EAS, or EBS before it, delivered via any medium, including radio and TV, or even warning sirens.

https://nypost.com/2018/10/03/...

One of the chief purposes and reasons for being for EAS (and EBS) is for the President to get a message directly to the American people in the event of a major national emergency.

It's a system that is desperately needed, and was expanded to include Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) via the IPAWS legislation signed into law by President Obama.

And though we hope the system is never used, it does need to be tested.

https://slate.com/technology/2...

PDT? That's the time zone for Redmond, Washington, right? If "Hypnotoad" is in any way related to Stormy Daniels' nickname for the President's intimate body part, then I can think of one company in Redmond that won't be impressed. And it isn't Microsoft.

I have no doubt Google adjust "trending" and "may interest" you to try to swing votes towards Democrats.

Do you have evidence of this?

This is what separates conservatives from liberals. Conservatives think intuition is just as valid as facts. You know, truthiness.

The problem is that the little bubble world they live in in college IS a "safe space." The worst personal injury that the coddled little brats have to worry themselves with is hearing the word "nîgger" yelled by some passing rednecks from a pickup truck. So many of them come from middle-to-upper-class families with nice homes and fancy granite and stainless steel kitchens. Oh, make no mistake, when I say they're wealthy, I mean some of these bratty college snots are "affluenza" grade wealthy.

What these innocent little spoiled babies need is to be real-world assaulted, real-world mugged, rendered real-world homeless, or otherwise real-world harmed in some way a few times. They need a cold hard understanding of what actual strife in this world is like. Ever wonder why you see a metric ton less 30-somethings behind this social justice horseshit than 20-somethings? It's not because of generations, it's because once you need a real job and try to start a real family, you get to experience the harsh reality of having actual problems. This cycle tends to repeat with every generation since World War II and millennials are being picked on because they just happen to be the current "young people." We are living in an era of unprecedented comfort and simultaneous infantilization of adolescents and young adults. Is it really any wonder that we now have "adults" in college (some of which are old enough to drink alcohol legally) demanding that they be treated like they are little children? No. No the fuck it's not.

Regardless of employers doing some things to accommodate the resulting mental damage from being a self-traumatized brat, they will face reality when hiring time comes. No one who wants to get a job done to make money for their mortgage and to feed their family likes these bratty little social justice warriors. They will eventually have to integrate or fuck off and be unemployed.

https://www.kansas.com/news/po... [kansas.com]

"Another 34 were identified by the Sedgwick County Election Office when staff attended naturalization ceremonies to register new citizens and discovered some were already registered."

If you read your link, you will notice that Kris Kobach, who is anything but a neutral observer, offers ZERO EVIDENCE that these things happened, but assures us that they did. Let's see...can we think of any other instances where Kobach lied or whether he had an incentive to do so?

https://slate.com/news-and-pol...

https://www.kansascity.com/new...

https://www.aclu.org/blog/voti...

https://www.theatlantic.com/po...

Here's even more recent news about Kris Kobach lying in order to enrich himself at the expense of a bunch of small towns by selling them on a non-existent "immigrant crisis".

https://splinternews.com/kris-...

https://www.propublica.org/art...

At the beginning of our country up through the early 20th century, America was a largely rural population. But the remainder of the 20th Century saw the majority of people move to cities and suburbs of cities. The effect of this was to give those remaining in rural areas outsized power.

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

I wonder how good it is with distance? Can you map a room with it?

It's not remotely like The Dark Knight, but a little bit.

And when the intelligensia become the fascists? People will see through that bullshit (and are), want to stop subsidizing it via taxes, and be called anti-intellectuals for their trouble.

https://slate.com/technology/2...
shows how public blockchain registers are being used to get around Chinese censorship.

But preventing crypto-currency madness isn't a bad thing. However, for the top 10% of people, risking/investing in crypto-currencies should be allowed, just like gambling and Pachinko is.

That people sleep less as they age due to hormonal changes and now that lack of sleep leads to weight gain (gut bacteria play a big role too).

That's not really what it found. What it found was that it changes the metabolic pathways to prefer the formation of fat tissue and retard the formation of muscle mass, so it will change the ratio between lean and fat body mass. Of course, this muscle consumes more energy than fat does, so this will end up decreasing the energy you burn, which will promote weight gain unless you change your diet.

But here's the thing: you can fix both those problems. Exercise will promote the formation of muscle mass, eating less will prevent weight gain at all, and of course sleeping better (which is often promoted by both better diet and exercise) will fix the underlying issue altogether. The fundamental problem is that modern man (especially the modern American) eats too much, because high calorie low nutrition food is cheap, readily available to nearly everyone, advertised constantly, and surrounds most people every day. It's not genetics, it's not stress, and it's not lack of sleep: all of those have existed for all of mankind's existence, and widespread obesity is an incredibly new phenomenon.

Also the gut bacteria/obesity link is vastly overstated, if a link exists at all in humans.

The Internet Blowhard's Favorite Phrase

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

Surprisingly, the statistics is suggestive: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/0...
"They say they believe in freedom and share our values. They say a few bad apples shouldn't bring down judgment on their entire kind. Don't be fooled. Though they walk among us with impunity, they are, in the words of Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, "a group that is notoriously associated with terrorist violence and fundamentalist political beliefs."
    They are engineers.
    Farrell, of course, was kidding. He posted that comment on a blog shortly after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (confessed Al Qaeda operative and engineering student) tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit last winter. But the satire was rooted in a statistical fact: in the ranks of captured and confessed terrorists, engineers and engineering students are significantly overrepresented. Maybe that's a numerological accident. The sociologist Diego Gambetta and the political scientist Steffen Hertog don't think so. ..."

And also: http://www.slate.com/articles/...
"It's true that eight of the 25 hijackers on 9/11 were engineers ..."

Alternatives: "The Ethical Engineer: An "Ethics Construction Kit" Places Engineering in a New Light" by Eugene Schlossberger
https://www.amazon.com/Ethical...
"On occasion, professionals need to use moral reasoning as well as engineering skills to function effectively in their occupation. Eugene Schlossberger has created a practical guide to ethical decision-making for engineers, students, and workers in business and industry. The Ethical Engineer sets out the tools and materials essential to dealing with whistle-blowing, environmental and safety concerns, bidding, confidentiality, conflict of interest, sales ethics, advertising, employer-employee relations, when to fight a battle, and when to break the rules. The author offers recommendations and techniques as well as rules, principles, and values that can guide the reader. Lively examples, engaging anecdotes, witty comments, and well-reasoned analysis prove his conviction that "ethics is good business.""

And also: "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt
http://disciplinedminds.tripod...
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
    In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
    The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
    Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

I believe the right called Obama a racist (he is - provably so - by his own words), and a Kenyan muslim anti-colonialist (again, provably so by is own words). But I don't remember him being called Hitler. Stalin, or Mao, perhaps - but not Hitler.

Fortunately your memory isn't required, we have records.

And we even remember you denying you did it before.

It seems to me that most "dog whistles" the modern Left complains about are just phrases commonly used by people they don't like. Most explanations I've seen for them were nothing more than conspiracy-esque rants.

For one example, the Welfare Queen was a real person who had been in the news in the 1970s. It became a "racist dog whistle" after Republican candidate Ronald Reagan used the term to describe a news report he had read about this specific person.

It's much like how Pepe the Frog became a hate symbol after the Trump campaign adopted it.

Essentially the energy wasted to raise an animal that you then only get to use a fraction of

People like to make a big deal about how ancient, "primitive" cultures used every part of an animal, but the fact is that we do the same. We don't landfill anything. The bones are ground up for bone meal, or burned to make pigment. The fats are used in other food products, or in cosmetics, or even converted into biodiesel. (Better to make green diesel, though, since it has a much lower gel point.) Even the hide and hair are rendered. Your imaginary food animals where only a small part of the animal is used do not exist.

How's the weather in St. Petersburg today?

• 2009 — opponents of Obama are all racists.
• 2016 — opponents of Hillary are sexist
• 2017- — supporters of Trump are Russians (and racists too).

At least, dissent is patriotic again now...

It is a long established fact that Yucca Mountain is not suited as a nuclear waste deposit.
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwast...
http://www.sciencemag.org/news...
http://www.slate.com/articles/...

Why don't you just change flags and advocate for Solar and Wind and Pumped Storage?

i see Penguinisto's post mentioning cows and cadavres in a discussion about plastic as flame bait. nonetheless, i hazard human cadavres (or other half-singed animal remains) have a much slimmer decomposition half-life than polyethlyne plastic compounds etc.
"eight to twelve years to decompose [a human cadavre] to a skeleton" and not sure how many decades more for the bones to dustify.

vs. a 500 to 1000 year half-life for some plastics ?

This 2003 article in slate says the world produces 64,000 tons of yellow cake uranium per year, the numbers in this article seem 'off'.

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

Was just reading this article earlier today, and it seems to make a lot of sense. We need to A) come up with a plan to protect our satellite infrastructure and B) have MORE cooperation between the various branches of the military (and NOT another branch that will inevitably have different motivators than just supporting the others), so the Space Force is not the answer, but we need to do something.

Let's also be clear...

https://slate.com/news-and-pol...

What kind of person takes other peoples children hostage as a "negotiating strategy"??

Yes, I am going to use the T-word, terrorist, in this case.

"The ’Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia .. smuggles 70 percent of the cocaine in Europe. It runs arms all around the world. It embezzles tens of billions from the European Union and the Italian government. All that activity requires a secondary industry of money laundering. So good has it become at money laundering, and its penetration of the financial market, that other major organized crime groups ask the ’Ndrangheta to wash their cash as well." ref

To make any difference requires a drastic change in modern lifestyles. I mean massive and complete change in how modern man lives.

Not really, much of people's impact on greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation and electricity generation. We do not need to eliminate all emissions, we just need to reach a point where we are not rapidly increasing the levels. It's entirely possible to reduce that without dramatic or draconian changes.

Given that you can't convince a majority of people to give up their cars, air conditioning, beef and hundreds of other things that would have to go plus do something about population growth I don't see any real solution.

You don't need to do that. Electric cars can be powered by solar and wind energy. Air conditioning is most necessary on sunny days, which means there's solar power to power the air conditioners. Population growth problem may solve itself, some predictions guess that the global population might fall to 3.5 billion by 2200 with no specific intervention. A different alternative suggests that the global population may stabilize around 10 billion and stay there. But the run-away population growth scenario doesn't seem like a reasonable projection given that birth rates fall as women are educated. Western democracies are largely not having children at a rate high enough to sustain their population.

A global thermonuclear war might solve it but that brings it's own problems. Without a world government exercising dictatorial and draconian laws we're on a course for a hotter planet.

A world government would only be needed if the world ends up having to go to war to stop the polluter nations. If every country voluntarily reduces it's emissions there will be no need for an enforced solution.

That or maybe technology will save us.

There is some hope on that front. There was a paper not so long ago about an improved way to extract CO2 from the atmosphere in a way that is nearly profitable now, and could become profitable without subsidies in the future. So it appears there's more potential there than previously thought.

That's the way that comports with the Constitution. Congress makes laws, the executive *implements* the law passed by Congress. Which includes details of *how* the Congressional law is implemented. How, not *what* the law is.

That's a distinction without a difference. Any decision on a means of implementation (a regulation) de-facto IS a decision about what the law is. Congress delegated law making power. If Congress does not like a particular interpretation of the law they are empowered to pass legislation to clarify the powers they are delegating to the legislative branch or to give them further constraints. Congress is empowered to be as specific as they like with how they want a federal agency to behave. But in the absence of specificity from the Legislative branch federal agencies can and do write laws in the form of regulations on a daily basis within whatever mandate they are granted. Regulations ARE laws. Whether Congress writes a detailed law itself or delegates that authority to the Executive branch (which they do most of the time) has exactly the same effect at the end of the day. There is NO difference.

The Constitution, and common sense, disagree with you on this.

You would fail Constitutional Law 101 with that opinion. You're not arguing with my opinion and whether or not you think it sensible is irrelevant because that is how it works. I suggest you educate yourself on this point because it's important.

IF Congress passed a NN law, we could discuss at what level of detail Congress should act and what level the can legitimately leave to the FCC.

The FCC has already been granted powers by Congress. We can debate whether those powers extend to regulating Net Neutrality or not (the Judiciary has held that they do thus far) but the fact is that the FCC like all other federal agencies is granted substantial power to interpret the laws via regulations and to enforce those regulations. EVERY federal agency has the power to write laws via regulations. Regulations ARE laws whether you like it or not. That is how it works whether you like it or not.

In fact Congress chose NOT to make NN law.

That does not matter if the powers Congress already granted the FCC are broad enough to permit them to create (or remove) regulations surrounding Net Neutrality. It appears that the FCC does indeed have powers that broad as the Supreme Court has issued a ruling supporting the FCC's authority to write (or not) such regulations back in 2005. There have been other federal rulings that similarly affirm the FCC's authority to make such regulations under their existing authority. If Congress wishes to change this state of affairs they are empowered to do so.

The US isn't running out of room in it's landfills. You can put a modern landfill just about anywhere. The limiting factor is nobody wants a landfill in their county.

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

The other factor is we are throwing away less and less garbage per person, as packaging becomes more efficient. 30 years ago nearly everything you bought in a store came in it's own box, even if it was already in a tube or dispenser. Wal-mart forced companies to do away with the extra box to save money.

This is why suicides are up, I agree.
Oh, not with your facts - your facts are almost entirely wrong, tendentious, or meaningless.
What I'm pointing to is YOUR histrionic overreaction to asserted facts that make you think that "everything is terrible"...when in fact, despite what CNN is telling you 24/7: life in 2018 is pretty fucking great by every objective measure.

"The division between the rich and poor, is without a question, worse than it was in 1999.": So? It's better than it was through the bulk of human history.

"the world is straight the fuck up, dying" No, it isn't. Humans have likely overpopulated the planet, but believe me, there will be a correction. And the earth itself? Won't even notice. The earth's ecosystems have been through FAR more cataclysmic changes than humanity could ever inflict at our worst, and after some oscillations, has returned to a fairly stable norm. Yes, likely that correction will kill lots of people but TBH with 7000+ million on the planet, losing even 50-100 million really isn't as big a deal objectively as everyone makes it out to be. (Setting aside "every life is sacred" bullshit that nobody ACTUALLY believes except at their own convenience.)

"Then we have the internet" which is basically the problem.

"Co2 is up, heat is up", the paleoclimate has spiked both CO2 and temps regularly about every 120k-140k years ago. Last one was about...140k years ago. Really, aside from some postmodern ethnocentric narcissism that insists humans are the center of everything, this is normal.

"methane bubbles are going off in siberia", happened before. There's clearly some feedback mechanism that reacts to send the climate plummeting again.

"animals are dying out, bees are dying off" yep, adapt or die; that's how Darwin works. Of course, you're only talking about highly specialized megafauna in regards animals, which are a vanishingly tiny part of the earth's ecosystems. Bees? Try facts, instead of popculture hysteria.
  https://www.attn.com/stories/1... and http://www.slate.com/articles/...

"America is slowly crumbling into debt." America has been plunging into debt (not slowly) since Vietnam. Think about that: we are the wealthiest society ever in human history, yet we STILL can't pay for everything we want to have. Evolution works by death, and a society so wedded to consumption beyond its means gets what it deserves.

Violent crime is down. Modern politics are far tamer than they were 200 years ago. The economy is roaring ahead. Unemployment is at a long-time low (historic lows for minorities!). Women, minorities, and historically marginalized groups are treated legally fully as equals, and culturally we're getting there. People living at the "poverty line" in the US are better off than 85%+ of the rest of the world, including (by some measures) better than the middle class in Europe. (https://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/air-conditioning-cable-tv-and-xbox-what-poverty-the-united-states) From that link:

The typical poor household, as defined by the government, has a car and air conditioning, two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR. By its own report, the typical poor family was not hungry, was able to obtain medical care when needed.The typical average poor American has more living space in his home than the average (non-poor) European has.

So really...it's you. And people like you. Buying into the tocsin of doom and gloom in the media that is calculated and designed to make you anxious, make you fearful, and make you pay attention because that's how they sell advertising (or worse, manipulate you in other ways).

That support for the civil rights movement was very unpopular among the traditional southern Democrats, so they left the Democrat party, just like the Republicans had 30 years earlier. They ended up in the Republican camp.

Then you would expect deep southern states to have turned red during that period, except they did not. They did not turn Republican until the 90's (some early, some late). For most so-called "dixiecrats", political identity was second only to God.

Then you would expect deep southern states to have turned red during that period, except they did not.

Except they did.

Which is what Sarten X already said.

Sorry man, but it's not worth being in denial about. Your political correctness while a partisan tenet, is not based on fact or reality.

They did not turn Republican until the 90's (some early, some late). For most so-called "dixiecrats", political identity was second only to God.

Only if you mean the Almighty Dollar. Otherwise, they are brazenly crass in their false appeals to any form of respectable deity in order to serve their agenda.

Just like today.