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But Obama tried to shove it under the carpet to meet a self-imposed deadline, instead of truly cleaning up the mess.

Obama had no such self-imposed deadline, the withdrawal of troops was a result of an agreement with the Iraqi government made during Bush's presidency.

You are falsely blaming Obama for a campaign promise(one that was entirely what the American people wanted, BTW) that was nonetheless tempered enough that he could have accommodated such action as you purport was necessary, while completely ignoring the fact that the decision for a specific date had been made prior to his election. Furthermore, you are not even noting the most important point. The Iraqi government and people WANTED the US to leave. No remaining troops. No agreement. Yankees go home. That's what they wanted. What are you going to do, suggest that Obama not only ignore what the American people want, but violate the sovereignty of another government that didn't elect him as well?

And there was no agreement to leave more that Obama could have signed, despite Bush's lies to the contrary.

Sorry, but Bush did more than drop the cake. He blamed Obama for his own mess. By lying.

The most you can say is that Obama wasn't persuasive enough to get everybody to agree to some other than what was done. Oh my, that's not a mistake, that's not an error, that's just not being able to enlighten everyone.

Unless, of course, you do support seizing power in Iraq just to keep the peace by use of an iron heel. In which case, sir, I respect your honesty, but reject your tyranny.

It's child's play to keep those records.

So on the resume, do blacks write down, "Black"? Do you as an employer have to write down, "interviewed black man for job"? Do all prospective employees have to tell you their race?

Now the person goes through the interview process. Do you have to record the whole process? All tests, interviews, and discussions? Because hiring somebody involves more than just putting somebody's resume into a lottery.

Our laws were designed to combat institutionalized racism.

And sometimes they perpetuate it by assuming racism is everywhere and injecting it as a factor everywhere. The free market will do a better job of handling it on its own than having the heavy hand of government getting into everybody's business.

Oh, you wanna harp on about dog whistles and shit? How about the real world, where affirmative action has ended up hurting the students it was supposed to help. Or maybe you could listen to Thomas Sowell, who makes the case that blacks have been harmed by liberal policies designed to help them.

Companies were illegally hiring foreign (Indian in particular) professional to replace IT workers at a reduced salary. It's not to say that foreign IT workers are bad, but citizens come first. The procedures are clear: Show you are unable to find someone in the USA (you are supposed to show job postings and let a reasonable amount of time and show lack of qualifications of the applications) before you apply for a foreign worker visa.

You get the general intent of the H-1B program correct, but you miss the legal loophole that tech companies put in. It only requires companies to prove they're not displacing American workers OR pay H-1B holders $60,000. So replacing US workers IS LEGAL as long as you pay a minimum of $60,000.

https://www.theatlantic.com/bu...

"In 1998—during the tech bubble—lawmakers amended the law to provide more visas at the request of the growing tech industry. At the same time, legislators cracked down on outsourcing companies that were employing large numbers of H-1B workers from Asia, and then contracting them out to American companies looking to save money. Though these consultants are typically called “outsourcing firms,” in a sense their work related to the H-1B visa program is better described as “insourcing,” since what they’re doing is helping companies find workers abroad whom they bring here for new jobs.

Under the amended law, companies that rely heavily on H-1B workers (more than 15 percent of their workforce) would now face additional scrutiny when applying for visas. These companies would have to promise not only that their H-1B workers would not replace American employees at their own company, but that they wouldn’t be used as replacements at firms that the company had contracts with either.

The new requirement would have provided some additional security for American workers, but a seemingly small, yet significant exemption was also written into the law. It allows those same H-1B reliant companies to ignore the requirements about protecting American jobs as long as they pay the foreign workers at least $60,000 a year, or hire a foreign worker with a master’s degree. It’s unclear why this exemption was included, though critics of the H-1B program say tech companies lobbied for it to undermine the new, tougher restrictions that might impact their ability to hire foreign workers. Considering the average IT worker in the United States makes far more than $60,000, that exemption makes it lucrative—and legal—for companies to displace American workers with cheaper H-1B workers. And it effectively undoes the additional protections of the 1998 bill."

and people in lockup get more then someone who just walks into the ER.

https://www.theatlantic.com/he...

Even if the total job count isn't shrinking any further, we're seeing a bifurcation of manufacturing labor into a small cadre highly skilled, highly paid specialists and a pool of low wage positions that only exist because it is not yet cost effective to automate their positions. Great if you're one of the new factory elite but sucks if you're the middle aged blue collar worker no longer relevant in the modern manufacturing landscape.

In another article it's claimed that they've solved this problem through a combination of a special scalpel to make very clean cuts of the nerves, and polyethylene glycol which promotes healing. They've only tried it on mice though.

You, like everyone here, get the general intent of the H-1B program correct, but you miss the legal loophole that tech companies put in. It requires companies to prove they're not displacing American workers OR pay H-1B holders $60,000. Guess which option companies choose?

https://www.theatlantic.com/bu...

"In 1998—during the tech bubble—lawmakers amended the law to provide more visas at the request of the growing tech industry. At the same time, legislators cracked down on outsourcing companies that were employing large numbers of H-1B workers from Asia, and then contracting them out to American companies looking to save money. Though these consultants are typically called “outsourcing firms,” in a sense their work related to the H-1B visa program is better described as “insourcing,” since what they’re doing is helping companies find workers abroad whom they bring here for new jobs.

Under the amended law, companies that rely heavily on H-1B workers (more than 15 percent of their workforce) would now face additional scrutiny when applying for visas. These companies would have to promise not only that their H-1B workers would not replace American employees at their own company, but that they wouldn’t be used as replacements at firms that the company had contracts with either.

The new requirement would have provided some additional security for American workers, but a seemingly small, yet significant exemption was also written into the law. It allows those same H-1B reliant companies to ignore the requirements about protecting American jobs as long as they pay the foreign workers at least $60,000 a year, or hire a foreign worker with a master’s degree. It’s unclear why this exemption was included, though critics of the H-1B program say tech companies lobbied for it to undermine the new, tougher restrictions that might impact their ability to hire foreign workers. Considering the average IT worker in the United States makes far more than $60,000, that exemption makes it lucrative—and legal—for companies to displace American workers with cheaper H-1B workers. And it effectively undoes the additional protections of the 1998 bill."

Take for instance, this article on forbes. (Yes, I know. Have noscript ready.)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/k...

It is rather short on details, but makes the salient point about alpha-go creating a wholly original move, through machine "creativity."

It is not really that big of a change in tactics required to train similar AIs to do, for instance, market trading strateges-- which has already caused a mass exodus of humans from stock trade floors.

Further refinements of such methods could eventually lead to radical shifts in how things like aircraft are designed, or computer chips are laid out. Skilled human minds that rely on intuition can be replaced with purely logically founded iterative software agents, with billions of prior tested design strategies to work with behind them.

To get an idea of how quickly the fallout of a major paradigm shift can rattle through an economy, take a look at this Atlantic article from last year.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...

It also has the following gem in it:

In 2013, Oxford University researchers forecast that machines might be able to perform half of all U.S. jobs in the next two decades.

which is on par with my initial statement. Since it was called out specifically, let's see if we can find it.

And here it is. (warning, pdf)

http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac....

Like I said, the linked story is not the only group that has looked at this issue. I am vaguely recalling at least 2 others that have reached similar conclusions to Oxford and PwC, and who have given a rough estimate of hitting the tipping point within the next 20 years, give or take.

I have no reason to argue against people better trained in trend analysis than myself.

This isn't a tax cheat, at least not with respect to the U.S. The only reason the IRS tried to cash in on this is because the U.S. is almost unique in the world in taxing income that its citizens/corporations make abroad. If you're a U.S. citizen and you live full-time in (say) Canada and work and earn money there, and have nothing to do with the U.S. other than having a piece of paper saying you're a U.S. citizen, the IRS still expects you to pay U.S. taxes. The U.S. has negotiated tax treaties with some countries to offset the most egregious forms of double taxation - taxes on earned income (wages) in one country can be applied as a credit for taxes in the other. So I didn't have to pay U.S. taxes on my wages since I'd already paid Canadian taxes on it (the Canadian taxes were the higher of the two). But I had to pay both U.S. and Canadian taxes on interest on my Canadian bank account, even though I was living in Canada, the money in the account was only from my Canadian job, and the money never left Canada nor entered the U.S. If I'd bought a house in Canada and made money when I sold it because it appreciated in value, the IRS would expect a cut of that.

Nearly all other countries tax based on location. If you earn money in the country, they tax it. If you earn money outside the country, it's not their concern. Even if this is a tax cheat, it really has nothing to do with the IRS, other than being a money grab simply because nonsensical U.S. law allows them to do it. The profit in Luxembourg came from Amazon's European operations. If Luxembourg or the EU wants to sue Amazon over this, then that's their legitimate right. But it has nothing to do with the U.S. nor the IRS.

http://pdfernhout.net/on-fundi...
"Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
    We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process?"

And also, earlier, this to Ray Kurzweil in 2000:
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/k...
"... It will be difficult for you to change your opinion on this because you have been heavily rewarded for riding the digital wave. You were making money building reading machines before I bought my first computer -- a Kim-I. But, I think someday the contradiction may become apparent of thinking the road to spiritual enlightenment can come from material competition (a point in your book which deserves much further elaboration). To the extent material competition drives the development of the digital realm the survival of humanity is in doubt.
    Still, you are a bright guy. If you study ecology and evolution in more detail, I think you may change your conclusion, or at least admit the significant probability of a bad outcome, and that we should plan
accordingly.
    If you do change your opinion in the future, and wish to fund work related to helping ensure humanity survives the birth of the digital realm, please remember me.
    MOSH to the end I guess!"

The Bayh-Dole Act is a big part of that disaster (letting universities privatize gains and tightly control use of what they make an with public funds rather than insist publicly funded research goes into the public domain):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...

Anyway, I'm still trying to limp along making glacially slow progress doing free stuff (Twirlip/Pointrel/etc.) on GitHub in increasingly vanishing spare time... My latest small increment:
"High Performance Organizations Reading List"
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

The real world does not support that statement. Economies in the EU are mostly in bad shape. The US is strong and growing

Yeah, it's wonderful.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/03/economic-despair/520473/?utm_source=feed

if you want things you need to capitulate to what others want too

There you go begging the question again... I do not want "things" — except the defense from external enemies and internal criminals. These are the responsibilities of the government according to the Constitution since day one. Everything else — help for the poor, public education, retirement savings, mortgages, space exploration (except where militarily useful) — is mission creep.

The country can not survive without defense and maintaining law-and-order. Everything else is unnecessary and should therefor be done by non-government entities.

Otherwise why don't you go move to Somalia?

This bullshit meme really ought to stop. Somalia's current squalor is due to its past Socialism — your beloved Venezuela is to join the same sorry club soon. No doubt, the same morons currently claiming Somalia to be a "Libertarian paradise" will soon start spreading the same lie about Venezuela...

Taller people, on average, earn more.
https://www.theatlantic.com/bu...

Gone are the days of:

sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me

The Illiberal Left's War on Speech continues and we've almost lost it... Major positions have been surrendered without or with little fight:

• "Safe spaces" on campuses have been weaponized and are used to suppress opinions, that make others "uncomfortable";
• The nonsense of "gender-neutral pronouns" and "transgenderism" in general came out of nowhere — a pregnant woman coming to a hospital to give birth claims to be a man, and is offended, when referred to as "mommy" by the nurses.
• Though one can not (yet!) be arrested for making others "uncomfortable" with one's opinion, one may already be fired for same.
• "Hate speech" is already illegal in many Western countries — with movement afoot to bring the same oppression into the US.
• Though the Bill of Rights is still, supposedly, the law of the land, its treatment has changed:

  “This isn’t really the ’60s anymore [...] people can’t really protest like that anymore.”

• The "right to be forgotten", having never existed before, is suddenly "a thing". Can't wait to discuss the court-ordered memory-erasures on SlashDot...

This just infuriates me. It is part of the reason why people don't have any faith in the two major US political parties. It is sort of like how people will eagerly issue wedding invites to relatives they have no desire to see when they are confident that the invite will be refused. The Republicans now obviously have the same lack of spine as during the last 6 years of the Obama administration. During the Obama administration they quickly rolled over on every debt ceiling increase and budget increase requested. They sent unworkable legislation that they knew Obama would veto (not just Obamacare repeal bills). They were clearly posturing/grandstanding.

This is something you didn't know from the start? Trump's own blandishments were a joke. And his excuse that nobody realized how complicated it was? That's what we call revealing insight into his character.

I can't help but feel that the way they are behaving now is an effort by the establishment types to subvert Trump because they don't like him. Funny enough, I think that they are likely to more damage than the Democrats that also don't like Trump.

Yes, your average Republican is more likely to do more damage than any Democrat, the party has turned crazy enough to elect Trump is full of nutbars.

Yeah, I got whiplash from last 16 years. Rewind to the Bush administration and dissent was patriotic, at least according to the media. It was hysterically funny to see the diehard Democrats who tried to pass themselves off as being all about civil liberties oppose renewal of the PATRIOT Act under Bush, but not really a peep out of those same people when Obama pushed for the same exact renewal of powers as Bush had.

In reality, you were only called racist because you were paying attention only to the deluded ravings of Orly Taitz, meanwhile, unbeknownst to you, the ACLU, EPIC, and FreedomWatch continued their opposition to the Patriot Act, both in the courts and the legislatures.

In fact, most Democrats opposed an extension in 2010,2011 2013, and 2015. Rand Paul might be the only name you know, but Dennis Kucinich and Ron Wyden stood against it numerous times as well.

This is why you have no credibility, you go along with the empty-headed Mi when he plays the "race card" card, while anybody with a modicum of information can point out the flaws to your story. The deep factual ones.

If on the other hand, I deliberately try to serve cookies containing peanuts to you, knowing you're deathly allergic to peanuts

Peanut allergy is real. So, apparently, is the effect of strobing images on epileptics. But it is still worrying...

Recall, that "trigger warnings" are already "a thing". What if my political opinion "triggers" somebody — causing them pain and/or other suffering? For now, such snowflakes are content to escape the brutal realities of life in "safe spaces". Unfortunately, those prolifereate and are already used to silence certain opinions.

True, FBI is not yet used to go after the "triggering" folks, but that can't be far off. When the current crop of students enters real life and their careers place (some of) them into actual decision-making positions, Law Enforcement will equate such triggering with assault — and doctors, currently in pre-med at those same campuses, will certify in court that the "victims'" "pain" is real...

Oh, and did you know, movement is seriously afoot to make "hate speech" a crime too?

tell someone that my intention is to do you harm

Yep. Right here... I do consider certain Illiberals to be beyond repair and do wish to make them uncomfortable — my very /. signatures are designed to mock something they hold dear. Intentionally.

Whatever this intent says about my own character flaws, it is still protected by the First Amendment today. But we are already sliding down the slippery slope... The First Amendment may be protecting a nebulous "right" to sell pornography (except for the child sort, for some reason), as well as to (quietly!) video-tape police. But, if the current trends aren't reversed, it will — in a generation — become illegal to say certain things because of the "painful reaction" such speech might cause...

Slashdot, being a tech focused site, tends to focus on gender imbalance in the tech field. However, gender imbalance exists in all fields. Furthermore, stories about discrimination in the tech sector put it under the microscope. The fact that these imbalances exist is no doubt something to be investigated and addressed, but forcing people to work in a field the don't have a passion for is not a solution.

Is there harm in gender imbalance? Not if there is equal opportunity. However, the wage gap suggests that is not the case. Traditionally, segregation has a strong correlation to oppression.

...You're so, so, so very late to the party. Google is only allowed to operate in China if it plays by the rules. There's quite a lot of history behind this. Outside of China, Google's moral compass is largely guided by its founders, including Sergey Brin, who grew up in the USSR and has been an outspoken opponent of censorship. Even Julian Assange feels strongly that Google's political objectives align closely with those of the Obama administration, a point backed up in Brin's Wikipedia article, where he's quoted as being concerned, on a geopolitical level, that more countries are following in China's footsteps and want to construct national firewalls.

While there are certainly very reasonable grounds for feeling insecure about the amount of control that large media companies can exert over the availability and visibility of facts and opinions, the example of Google seems to be a particularly benign one, at least for the time being.

That all said, the American outlook of total opposition to censorship is rather abnormal; most functioning democracies have found it either needful or expedient to ban hate speech, including holocaust denial. From the perspective of those other countries, one might say Google is following in the footsteps of other companies that have taken it upon themselves to compensate for deficiencies in American political philosophy, albeit in a greatly diminished capacity. As Twitter has also recently discovered, hate speech contributes negatively to discourse communities.

tar baby.

Not even close.

400k a year for a specialist is easy,

The data doesn't back that up:

http://www.medscape.com/featur...

https://www.theatlantic.com/he...

https://blog.doximity.com/arti...

Daylight savings is the perfect example of government's regulatory overreach interference in people's lives for theoretical gain. What is there is an increase in stress, time, money and heart attacks.

It's a concept that kills people, something studies have shown for years. Meanwhile anyone who wants an extra hour of daylight can make a personal choice and adjust their sleep schedule.

http://www.livescience.com/567...
https://permies.com/t/509/Debu...
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfor...
https://www.theatlantic.com/na...

Business was punishing Obama for Obama-care by not hiring. Whether there was an upside or downside to the bottom line, there was an attitude of Obama isn't going to tell us what to do. Business and companies have been short-staffed as we have seen in the productivity statistics, but now the percieved pressure is off and businesses are hiring again.

Iin places like Australia they pay $14+ per hour to fast food workers, and somehow the price of a value meal is the same there as it is here.

It's kinda sad, IMO, that this has to explained. Even once.

It's actually kinda sad that it has to be explained -- even once -- that there's no such thing as a free lunch. The reality behind your misleading statistic has been well understood for years now:

To start, some Australians actually make less than the adult minimum wage. The country allows lower pay for teenagers, and the labor deal McDonald's struck with its employees currently pays 16-year-olds roughly US$8 an hour, not altogether different from what they'd make in the states. In an email, Greg Bamber, a professor at Australia's Monash University who has studied labor relations in the country's fast food industry, told me that as a result, McDonald's relies heavily on young workers in Australia.

There are many counties with large gun ownership and low crime rates. Crime rates as low as in Europe.

I'm blocked at work from getting these stats.

Well, then you have made a claim without proving it, but it's moot anyway, unless you can establish valuable considerations to examine.

The point I'm contesting is that gun ownership leads to murder. It does not.

No, you weren't limiting your remarks to that narrow point.

Instead, we've got a lot of dialogue about history and statistics going on.

If gun ownership lead to more murders we would see a correlation even if the overall murder rate went down.

Even in a broad sense we know this to be true. There are more guns today than 20 years ago. If there was a correlation between gun ownership and murder than we would see that those areas with a higher percentage of gun ownership would have more murders. We would see a correlation between the rate of growth of gun ownership and murders. We don't see that correlation.

The important thing to remember is ALL crime is down. ALL crime. This means you've got a long up-hill battle to establish any correlations.

It is foolishness, a lie in fact, to assert that more guns equals more murders.

It is foolishness, a lie, in fact, to assert an argument against something that wasn't said.

As far as the gun lobby is concerned. I am the gun lobby. The gun lobby is not evil corporations. It is millions of people who pay GOA and NRA dues; who fund raise. The amount of monies provided by gun manufacturers to the total amount is small (less than a 1/4 of the monies received).

Then you're limited in your information.

The gun manufacturers are hugely influential in lobbying politicians.

PS, Chicago's incidents are not proof of a true trend, you should know better than to assert from limited information.

But now, only 50% of the people have jobs. So there are fewer households that can afford the $1,800 models.

There are 4 farmers.

1850. Total population: 23,191,786; farm population; 11,680,000 (est.); farmers 64% of labor force; Number of farms: 1,449,000; average acres: 203

1900. Total population: 75,994,266; farm population: 29,414,000 (est.); farmers 38% of labor force; Number of farms: 5,740,000; average acres: 147

1950. Total population: 151,132,000; farm population: 25,058,000; farmers 12.2% of labor force; Number of farms: 5,388,000; average acres: 216; irrigated acres: 25,634,869.

1990. Total population: 261,423,000; farm population: 2,987,552; farmers 2.6% of labor force; Number of farms: 2,143,150; average acres: 461; irrigated acres: 49,404,000 (1992)

That is the United States farm population history as farm technology reduced farmers as part of the labor force--and total number of farm workers at all.

Observe the labor force participation rate. Since 1950, we've gone from 25 million farmers to 2 million farmers. How much has the labor force decreased, considering participation rate has become somewhat higher and unemployment is around 5% today?

You should account for time and scope. Let me show you.

So the resulting reduction from the layoffs does not significantly reduce the number of total households that can afford the $1,800 models. However, what if all the other factories do the same thing?

If this factory cuts back, then, as you observe, tens of million of households can now afford these stoves. This factory must scale its production, leading to more jobs lost; or other factories must follow suit. However, the lost $1,400 of wages at $8.25/hr minimum wage represents one minimum-wage job lost per 11.78 stoves. For every household in the country (all 121 million of them), that's 10.3 million jobs. That's your maximum job loss in total on stoves. We're assuming 20.6 million Americans out of a workforce of 151 million are devoted to building $3,200 stoves, however.

On the other hand, households tend to replace stoves ... when? Once every 10 years? Call that a 10-year turn-around. Now we're talking about 1.03 million jobs lost per year, a bump of 0.68% in unemployment, 0.057% per month. The economy can actually handle that.

This is still a bad analysis. For one, we'd be moving tiers of stove tech downward, so now your $500 stove is a much better stove because it's a $1,000 stove made with half the labor. There's another problem: an $1,800 stove is still an $1,800 stove; a $500 stove is still a $500 stove. These are essentially priced based on the amount of labor involved, so the same number of people are employed to make these. That means if we make an even better $3,200 stove and the people who were buying the now-$1,800 stove instead by that, no jobs are lost, in total, once this new model is in production and being sold.

Let's try a different model, then.

Assume that people buy the same stove they ever would.

So now we can go back to those job losses. We're talking about 0.057% unemployment per month; but, each of these $3,200 stoves is now sold for $1,800. That means each household buying a stove has $1,400 more spendable income after the transaction--per month, for 121 million households over 10 years, this is $1,411,666,662. That represents 85,556 minimum-wage jobs per month, 1.026 million jobs per year.

What happens when they try to spend that other $1,400?

Obviously, if we unemployed 10 million people at once, that would hurt; if we unemployed 10 million people across 10 years, not so much. The above turn-over ends in a ton of money that's no longer getting spent each month, and a tiny fraction of additional unemployment. The unspent

Free market economics views reduced productivity as an inefficiency, and tries to get rid of it (actually it simply offers greater rewards for higher-productivity activity, which has the side-effect of strangling low-productivity activity).

The point of the article and this concept in general is that 'employing a person' and 'being a low-productivity activity' are becoming the same thing.

We have two potential futures: one Star Trek-like utopia where goods are too cheap to sell. And another much like Feudal Japan or Europe where the starving poor shamble past giant glorious castles protecting horded valuables from the frequent rioting outside their walls.

Markets only pick prices for things, not values for things. If you can do things that raise the price far beyond the value - like monopoly pricing or protection rackets or bribery - then that's perfectly permitted under a free market. But we need to correctly value things - like public education or infrastructure and not just cost them.

During the feudal periods of societies there was no shortage of fancy things offered to the nobles while the peasants starved. Value and price becomes completely disconnected. Once you are one of the rich you no need to care about if people can buy your stuff. Price is no longer a consideration for things you want. As long as your "values markers" are intact other rich and the poor masses will continue to feed your appetites while your neighbors starve. (This relative-wealth-makes-me-better concept might be a defect built into the human society.)

Additionally, simple Economics 101 theories like free markets run smack into the face of 'F-you money' and 'needful things.' Rich people literally cannot spend their wealth. That is kind of the definition. So the rich buy 'needful things' that they want, not necessarily things that have positive economic effects.

because only a government can deprive people of freedom to make their own economic decisions.

Laws don't come from nowhere. The non-working ultra wealthy, the old money, are sources of economic inefficiency that self-reinforce. These "haves" buy things like bad laws to protect themselves. California's housing situation is an example: laws to prevent the 'free' market operating were just another item in the 'free' market to buy, another cost of business.

'F-you money' is the same destroyer of free markets but at the other end of the spectrum. This is not the same as the very low 'survival' level pay governments are playing with to prevent homelessness and destitution. This is equivalent to early retirement. The idea is to get out of the rat race.

But a modern Protestant and God-fearing economy can't have too many people walking around not doing anything productive. People with free time might have the time to think or vote or do something actually effective. In particular, thinking people are dangerous when the path to easy riches depends on scamming people with false dreams.

That's why historically in developed nations, the rich have gotten richer, and the poor have also gotten richer

That's only true for a very exceptional and brief period after World War II, one which ended with the government 'un' reforms of the 1970s in developed countries. Usually the only way the poor got richer was when a cataclysm - war, famine or disease - eliminated much of the wo

So, if anyone tries explaining anything, it can be ignored because of Islam's "beating black heart"?

It's not explaining anything by ignoring the big picture and making excuses. Islam is authoritarian, violent, and expansionist, and that's reflected across the globe. Blaming US foreign policy doesn't cut it. But then I'm sure we've had this conversation before.

I know some Muslims around here who have no desire to install Sharia law.

Wow, I'm so relieved! I guess there's nothing to worry about then, because you know some Muslims who express that opinion. However, there are other Muslims who think otherwise.

In the US, I'm much more worried about fundamentalist Christians who want to impose their authoritarian beliefs which they claim were drawn from the bible.

In the US, you can have displays of "Piss Christ" and countless criticisms of Christianity without anybody getting killed, despite the United States being 70% Christian, but if you try to draw Mohammad you'll be attacked with guns, despite Muslims only being about 1% of the population.

Moreover, I do know some history, and there was a time when the most vibrant and very tolerant society was Muslim.

That's "McHistory", peddled by liberal professors and media. What they don't tell you is that society was formed by conquering, and that non-Muslims were second-class citizens. And by today's standards, fundamentalist Islamic countries are completely regressive and authoritarian.

The practice of Islam has changed since then, but it shows that Islam is not inherently evil or backward.

No, that's willful ignorance speaking. Islam is fundamentally authoritarian, violent, and expansionist. If anything, Islam is changing to get with modern times, even though useful idiots like the Southern Law Poverty Center like to brand reformers as "anti-Muslim extremists".

I am saying it is already fucked up. I want mitigation immediately. Mitigation, which by the way, was working just dandy up until 2005 when the SCOTUS idiotically ruled in Brand X that it would be OK for the FCC to get rid of net neutrality.

We could also have the government instead open up real competition into the ISP market by mandating local loop unbundling,

The great irony of what you said is that we had local loop unbundling until the the Brand X SCOTUS case. We also had net neutrality until the Brand X SCOTUS case. The same ruling killed both of those things because they are both mandatory for "telecom services" but not for "information services." Brand X let the FCC reclassify ISPs as "information services" and so we lost it all at once. Under Wheeler ISPs were re-classified back as "telecom services" and now Idjit Pai is switching it back to "information services" and, I suspect, Congress will soon get involved and make it permanent.

FWIW, in a rare bit of sanity, Scalia actually thought the BrandX ruling was stupid as fuck.

The AC is correct here. The MMWA requires the manufacturer to prove the warranty isn't valid. Here's an example case where this happened:
Apple claimed, and continues to claim, that they can detect water damage to a phone.
Yet Apple knows that the sensors don't work and paid a settlement over it. Yet they only had to pay the settlement when enough people got together and brought a class-action lawsuit.

Under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, apple can claim whatever terms they want. But ultimately, Apple had to prove to the court that the strips were indeed proof of water damage. When they failed to do so, they had to honor the warranty.

I hear all this talk about learning "The Language". And I am reminded of the Edsger Dijkstra / folklore quote "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." IMHO, kids need to learn some basics of the machine and what it does, before going into learning a language to do those things. (And yes, I am aware of the Bill Gates quote that seems to say the opposite (if taken without context). But I'm not a big MS fan, so maybe I'm biased against Gates in any case.)

On the other hand, Finland seems to introduce their school kids to the principles and concepts of e.g. looping, conditionals and variables without computers and in conjunction with other (real-life) activities. But hey, who has time for Linus' home country and their crazy ideas?

Please read the article before your next post. The very first sentence makes it clear it is referring to income inequality, not equality in general.

If you read a little further, He notes that voting rights and government intervention in the private sector also were a result of this. Unles she was intentionally spouting a non sequitur that you happen to know about.

I read the story, and I call Bullshit as well.

He writes how "By contrast, Latin America, which sat out the 20th century’s largest conflicts in relative isolation, duly did not see inequality drop until the early 2000s". Perhaps this source might differ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... If misery created income and voter equality, well South America should be leading the way and passed us a long time ago.

Apparently the bolshevik revolution in Russia, and the communists taking over in China was the best thing that ever happened to the world, culminating in equal prosperity for all of their citizens. DO I really need to debunk that, Is Old Joe Stalin the key to equality? The solution to the middle class's resurgence? There is more to debunk, but I find his prose annoying and in the end boring.

No,old Walt Scheidel cherry picks data with a skill a AGW denier would be proud of, and arranges his fruited narrative to fit his world view. And his world view is a combination of highly left wing idealism, and a get of my damn lawn mentality that leaves him yearning for old fashioned toilets. Speaking of, it might be a good idea to read his next story in line "Why nothing works any more" https://www.theatlantic.com/te... Oddly enough, the two stories are quite related in a scatological sort of way. 8^)

[This entire post regards the United States]

Uh, 5% unemployment at historically-high labor force participation rates? We're not at peak, but we're above the 59% historical labor force maximum participation rate.

See US Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate which is currently 62.9%, down from a peak of just over 67% 1998-2000, now back to a level reached in mid-1977. It has been flatlined for about 2 years.

But yes, the labor force participation rate is higher than when women worked in the kitchen barefoot & pregnant...

You might be thinking of the Civilian Employment-Population Ratio which is at 59.9%, a level equivalent to Dec. 1984. It has been rising since July, 2011.

Regarding wages, Average Hourly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees: Total Private is currently at an all-time high, $21.84/hour.

If you'd like to adjust for hours worked and inflation, and look at a median instead of an average, Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over is also at an all-time high of $348 1982-84 CPI Adjusted Dollars, but frankly that isn't too much higher than $335 in 1979, but above the lowest point of $309 in 1981.

Over the last 10 years, the following costs are up: food, health care, child care, vehicle maintenance, and college is way up. On the other hand these prices have fallen slightly: housing, personal care, clothing, cell phone service, and these are much less expensive: toys, computers, televisions.

Unemployment was 0.1% higher in January 2017 than December 2016--no surprise, there's always that slump.

At least the total number of jobs has been increasing since March, 2010.

https://www.theatlantic.com/te...

I'd love to live in a wonderful present where liberals actually deal in facts, instead of just shouting down other people's conversations.

This may come as a shock to you, but we nerds have eclectic interests. Sure we love tech, but we also love science fiction and fantasy. Two subjects that crop up here a lot. Some of us enjoy sports, art, and literature, and other subjects that crop here from time to time.

And some of enjoy discussing politics. Particularly when we have, without a doubt, the worst president in history. A man who is a climate denier and anti-vax. A president who releases classified intelligence on his phone in a country club for all and sundry to see. Whose political aides are so stupid that they can't even find a damn light switch. I fear I don't have time to document this administration's mistakes as they create even bigger gaffes in the time it takes me to write this.

46% of Americans want him impeached, and it was 43% last week. Also using the term SJW marks you as a bumbling entitlement warrior bravely trying to drag the world back to an era that never existed.

Except that Twitter actually allows super sick shit. Like literal Islamic Terrorist recruiting and PR accounts.

Good try, but no. Here's an article from a year ago about Twitter shutting down 120,000 ISIS accounts.

https://www.theatlantic.com/in...

You, like everyone here, get the general intent of the H-1B program correct, but you miss the legal loophole that tech companies put in. It requires companies to prove they're not displacing American workers OR pay H-1B holders $60,000. Guess which option companies choose?

https://www.theatlantic.com/bu...

"n 1998—during the tech bubble—lawmakers amended the law to provide more visas at the request of the growing tech industry. At the same time, legislators cracked down on outsourcing companies that were employing large numbers of H-1B workers from Asia, and then contracting them out to American companies looking to save money. Though these consultants are typically called “outsourcing firms,” in a sense their work related to the H-1B visa program is better described as “insourcing,” since what they’re doing is helping companies find workers abroad whom they bring here for new jobs.

Under the amended law, companies that rely heavily on H-1B workers (more than 15 percent of their workforce) would now face additional scrutiny when applying for visas. These companies would have to promise not only that their H-1B workers would not replace American employees at their own company, but that they wouldn’t be used as replacements at firms that the company had contracts with either.

The new requirement would have provided some additional security for American workers, but a seemingly small, yet significant exemption was also written into the law. It allows those same H-1B reliant companies to ignore the requirements about protecting American jobs as long as they pay the foreign workers at least $60,000 a year, or hire a foreign worker with a master’s degree. It’s unclear why this exemption was included, though critics of the H-1B program say tech companies lobbied for it to undermine the new, tougher restrictions that might impact their ability to hire foreign workers. Considering the average IT worker in the United States makes far more than $60,000, that exemption makes it lucrative—and legal—for companies to displace American workers with cheaper H-1B workers. And it effectively undoes the additional protections of the 1998 bill."

1. Perspective is a funny thing. https://www.theatlantic.com/po... You can see that the tents were located just past the Smithsonian Castle, which is more like 2/3 of the way to the Washington Monument. https://www.google.com/maps/@3... You can also see in CNN's gigapixel http://www.cnn.com/interactive... that the section between the tents and the first row of green barriers is almost empty, and the section after that has very few people standing on the north side, matching very closely with photographs taken from behind. I'm not arguing numbers, but in this case at least, the evidence seems to match statements published elsewhere.

It could also be the false flag operation.

This is true - but a false flag operation with that many people is difficult to maintain. With thousands of people rioting, if they were all secretly Trump-supporters, *someone* would blab.

The false flag operations we've seen in this election cycle have generally been small-scale: an individual committing some petty act of vandalism or graffiti, but making it appear to be done by the other side as a hate crime. The biggest example I know of (that has been identified as a false flag) was a black church burned down and spray-painted with "Vote Trump" (story), in which the culprit later turned out to be a member of its own congregation (story).

Is that the one from Baghdad? When Spicer can't take it any longer, I bet Sahaf is still available.

The hockey stick has not been discredited. It has been replicated numerous times, by numerous people and organisations.

https://www.theatlantic.com/te...
> Climate deniers threw all their might at disproving the famous climate change graph. Here's why they failed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
> Arguments over the reconstructions have been taken up by fossil fuel industry funded lobbying groups attempting to cast doubt on climate science.

https://www.newscientist.com/a...
> In fact, later studies support the key conclusion: the world is warmer now than it has been for at least 1000 years

The graphs we /were/ talking about go back much further - XKCD's 20,000 years, and your favourite the Vostok core, 400,000. And they all show the same data.

Good luck with your research.

*PLONK*

The OP was exaggerating, but he's probably referring to the Trump supporters who were literally making Hitler salutes at an alt-right convention:

http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

I don't know that any of these actual neo-Nazis are in any government positions, but many of Trump's people do have ties to people in these groups.

So yes, the comparisons between Trump and his administration and supporters and Naziism are quite well justified.

Alt right IS far right. Change a few words, dress up like hipsters, but otherwise behave, act and think like nazis. Punchy McPunchface, leading light of the nazi (oops alt right movement) was giving a nazi style salutes to Trump only a few months back. They're far right.

If you want to call them Nazis, then you are saying they are far left, not right. The Nazi movement was a socialist movement, and is on the left, along with communism and fascism. The far right is Anarchy.

Far left is 100% control and zero freedom. Far right is 100% freedom and no government control. Any other scale is obfuscation by leftists to make themselves look better. The lie that Nazis and fascism were on the right end of the political spectrum is straight from Joseph Stalin.

Alt right IS far right. Change a few words, dress up like hipsters, but otherwise behave, act and think like nazis. Punchy McPunchface, leading light of the nazi (oops alt right movement) was giving a nazi style salutes to Trump only a few months back. They're far right.

There you go believing BS the Post says again.

http://www.washingtonexaminer....
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

Also, yes dissent is patriotic...when it's not rooted in racism.
As yours so demonstrably was .

We oppose Trump because he is racist.
You opposed Obama because you were racist.

What speech codes? Like treating people with respect? And which words or phrases are now criminalized?

Not using people's "right" pronouns could get you fined in NY
In Canada it's basically illegal to insult anyone or say or do something they don't like: "A teenager was later arrested for growling and woofing at two Labrador dogs in public, a café owner was investigated for showing biblical passages on a TV screen, and an LGBT group was arrested under section 5 for protesting anti-gay persecution in the Middle East. While one would hope such a law would only be used in extraordinary circumstances, it's actually very common."
40% of millenials are OK with making "offensive" speech illegal
The overwhelming majority of college staff are leftists and colleges overwhelmingly limit speech on campus
EU is banning anything that is politically sensitive: "To paraphrase Humpty Dumpty, hate speech means just what those in power choose it to mean – neither more nor less. And now, continent-wide censorship has been forced upon us by the powerful, and they will decide what the rest of us can and cannot say and can and cannot hear, all with the aim of dictating what we can and cannot think."

I could go on...

However the modern version always seems to have some catch

Welcome to the "neoliberalist" groupthink, a cancer which started in the 70ies and is culminating these days in blights like anorectic states, austerity, "free" trade agreements carefully engineered to fuck over the poor, mass migrations, and lastly, a Renaissance of fascism's ugly face.

(No, liberal not in the sense which is common in the USA, which means "liberty for people", but more in this "neo", which means "liberty for money").

Oddly enough, this started in part as a reaction to Watergate.

The Washington Post calling out anybody on alternate facts is dubious at best. Downright scandalous at worst. And MSNBC plainly state they are an opinion station not a news agency. I want to know where anybody is getting "official" numbers for any of the inaugurations since they stopped taking headcounts years ago. All counts you see put forth as fact are actually guesstimations based on a photo of the event. The numbers can be close but never verified. The inauguration is harder to count because no aerial photography is allowed (No fly zone). Add to that rioters blocking the entrance to the Mall preventing attendees from actually entering and numbers become even more irrelevant. I didn't want to believe the media had gone completely partisan but the more they publish hearsay and innuendo the more it looks like they have.

Saudi Arabia is modernizing their energy sector. Three years ago, Saudi Arabia announced a goal of building, by 2032, 41 gigawatts of solar capacity, slightly more than the world leader, Germany, has today. According to one estimate, that would be enough to meet about 20 percent of the kingdom’s projected electricity needs

Meanwhile USA is investing in ... Coal? This while Solar is closing in on price parity with the likes of coal — with full-cycle, unsubsidized costs of about 13 cents per kilowatthour, versus 12 cents for advanced coal plants

Between the hoards of diamonds that DeBeers keeps locked up, and the ability to make them in a lab, there are a ~trillion of them. Diamonds have no real value, go sell one "used" and you'll find out much they're worth.

Obligatory:-

Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?

The Diamond Myth

Between the hoards of diamonds that DeBeers keeps locked up, and the ability to make them in a lab, there are a ~trillion of them. Diamonds have no real value, go sell one "used" and you'll find out much they're worth.

Obligatory:-

Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?

The Diamond Myth