Slashdot Mirror

I know all you slavishly leftist Slashdotters of the current age think that Sarah Palin is a moron. But, she's got everyone using the term "death panels," doesn't she? Maybe she's not so dumb, after all, eh? The answer to the shortcomings of private insurance bureaucracies is not bigger bureaucracies, it's putting the decision-making back into the hands of patients.

"Let's see: Just shy of 72 years ago, my grandfather arrived in this country with $32 and unable to speak the language. He lived in a ghetto style apartment with a brother who had come over to America from Europe 18 months earlier. He spent a week learning enough English to get a job in a machine shop for about $1 an hour. "

The amount of roboticization and automation has drastically changed in 72 years since your grandfather arrived, I always hate these anecdotal tales the spinners of them which don't take into consideration that for every person that reaches a middle class life someone else is losing their lifestyle via war, imperialism or geography, offshorting, automation, etc, etc all reasons well beyond the contol of a significant number of human beings. Many people have gotten rich not by "hard work" but by exploiting the law of large numbers, your grandfather is just such a man, hard work does factor into the wealth equation somewhat but once a society has reached a certain level of tecnological and skills development, an increasing amount of the population is no longer *necessary* economically and povery becomes a matter of many things, some reasons against some poor people are valid, but it certainly can't apply to the bottom 2 billion of humanity, certainly statistically it's impossible to say that hard work alone is enough. I prefer evidence over statistically insignificant anecdotes.

You have yet to grasp that your grandfather is statistically insignificant, almost half of the the world's population is poor by your grandfathers middle class standard and no amount of 'hard work' was ever going to save the bottom 2 billion within their lifetimes, your grandfather happened to move to a country and be born into the right circumstances to have the werewithall and the ability to immigrate.

Offshoring and increasing amount of automation of tasks leaves a surplus population in developed countries without any marketable skills.

If you don't think this is a problem you should check out studies that have professional economists and policy makers worried.

http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/08/robots_and_the_future_of_unemployment.php

If your grandfather lived among the bottom most of humanity in a future where robots do most of the work, no amount of hard work is going to outcompete technology that is economically more viable then most human beings. This problem is coming down the pike within the next few generations.

Stories about hard work and how the poor deserve their lot will look infantile in front of such technology.

I can't see this being very popular. If people care enough to sort out an external news source to email them, then they care enough to set up a proxy or VPN. Why settle for someone else's choice of news to be mailed to you when you can go and get your own?

The issue is not whether the censors can be evaded, it's the cost/benefit of bothering. Most people don't care enough to try.

From The Atlantic: GM's Volt Offers Amazing Mileage, But At What Cost?

I used the Toyota Corolla (regular, non-hybrid vehicle) as my comparison, since it's popular and similar in style. According to Toyota's website, it gets 26 miles per gallon in the city and starts at $15,350.

..[various assumptions]..

if you assume $4 per gallon, then you'd need to drive around 177,000 miles to break even.

Using less gas is only partly motivated by price, things like this completely ignore two other major factors:

1. Emissions - even considering the emissions from the power plant that generated the electricity for a plug-in charge this car's emissions are massively lower than any normal ICE powered car.

2. That gas you are otherwise burning comes from somewhere, and getting it from there to here is costly in many ways that have nothing to do with money.

Although this car does make more economic sense in places like Canada (or most of the planet) where gas is much more expensive, the cost is only a part of the issue.

From The Atlantic: GM's Volt Offers Amazing Mileage, But At What Cost?

I used the Toyota Corolla (regular, non-hybrid vehicle) as my comparison, since it's popular and similar in style. According to Toyota's website, it gets 26 miles per gallon in the city and starts at $15,350.

..[various assumptions]..

if you assume $4 per gallon, then you'd need to drive around 177,000 miles to break even.

Sorry, I prefer the "unfettered capitalism" of the past -- at least, it was efficient and the same rules, however difficult, applied to everyone.

Unfettered capitalism inevitably leads to wealth concentration, and wealth concentration inevitably distorts the political system into favoring those with wealth. Even if you start out with the same rules applying to everyone, after a few decades, that's assuredly not the case anymore. Consider the big trusts of the 19th century, or the original AT&T, or the Teapot Dome scandal, or the more recent Department of the Interior Scandal, or own present-day financial system as described by Simon Johnson.

People like you, against all rational self-interest, argue in favor of those who currently hold the reins of power. People like you comprise the lunatic fringe that's historically impeded any attempt at breaking entrenched powers and enriching the life of the common person. In short, fuck you and the libertarian horse you ride in on.

Right. Also, naturally colored diamonds are seriously rare, depending on the color (I think red is the rarest, if I remember correctly). There's a great article (from 1982!) from the Atlantic about DeBeers and the diamond industry. Although it's almost 30 years old, it provides a good perspective.

Wow! Your first link makes the "Breeder Reactor" sound just so wonderful. Unfortunately you omitted to mention that it still produces a waste that is beyond lethal for 25,000 years.

If you care to bring the facts to bear about nuclear energy, mainly what do we now do with the waste as well as the spent facility when all's said and done with ... for the next 25,000 years! The only answer anyone can give, a stupid blank look and shrug, will only indicate complete incompetence and a lack of thinking this one through, so don't bother.

Why do you consider the waste that a breeder reactor produces to be an insurmountable problem?

The ores that were fed into the reactor stayed radioactive for billions of years.

Yet the presence of naturally radioactive substances on earth didn't manage to kill us all.

Can we dispose of a small amount of highly radioactive waste in such a way that is unlikely to harm anyone?

It seems likely. There are several promising methods, the debate is what method to use. For example, check out seabed burial of glassified nuclear waste.

Indeed. Those who doubt the wisdom of this comment should read Mark Bowden's The Last Ace in the Atlantic, which also repeats the much-noted fact that no U.S. planes have been shot down by hostile forces in a war since Korea. U.S. firepower is so overwhelming as to be aerially undefeatable at the moment, and that's not even accounting for the rest of NATO and Israel.

But the "fuel" for the wind turbine is just wind - which is free

And that is compensated by the construction cost, which is extremely high. Everything included, wind electricity is substantially more expensive, per kWh, than conventional sources (coal, nuclear, hydropower).

Beat THAT with your nuclear reactors and their uranium mines,

What, the amounts of uranium needed are very small. And don't pretend wind farms don't need mines, for their hundreds of tons of iron and copper and whatnot. And more interestingly, lanthanide metals ("rare earths"), for high-density permanent magnets in the wind motors. Interesting because these occur in the same ores that thorium is mined from (not exactly uranium, but another nuclear fuel and radiologically similar).

See for instance Atlantic's recent Clean Energy's Dirty Little Secret, subtitle: "Hybrid cars and wind turbines need rare-earth minerals that come with their own hefty environmental price tag."

processing plants

The amounts of material used in enrichment facilities, or in chemical reprocessing plants, is very small, and it is manipulated in hot cells, and not released into the environment in any meaningful quantities. (I consider this the great theme of nuclear power: everything is "small", because the energy density is extraordinarily dense.) In contrast, (e.g.) solar photovoltaics go through large amounts of solar photovoltaic waste, which is not held to the high standards of radiological material, but (in many countries) simply dumped. Sure not in the US, but then we do import much of our PVs, no?

See for example WP's Solar Energy Firms Leave Waste Behind in China (about dumping of SiCl4 byproduct used in Si-cell manufacture), or CNET's E-waste looms behind solar-power boom, which points out that PV cells die and need special disposal considerations, because they contain toxic pollutants.

controlled by oligarchs.

Yours In Psychology,
K. Trout

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200812/hitchens-suburbs

Published in 1961 and set in 1955, this psychodrama of an ambitiously named development in Connecticut (the source of Yatesâ(TM)s superbly misleading title) recalls us to the period that saw the publication of David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), Sloan Wilson's novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), the pop sociology of men like William H. Whyte and Vance Packard, whose critiques The Organization Man (1956) and The Hidden Persuaders (1957) made American business seem impersonal and cynical, and-if this isn't too fanciful-Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Malvina Reynolds's song "Little Boxes," both of which made their debut in 1962. Pete Seeger had a huge success of his own with the song, which ridiculed the harmless citizens of Daly City, California, and gave us the word ticky-tacky. No less a man than Tom Lehrer was to say that it was "the most sanctimonious song ever written,"

Oh snap!

original ? which original ?

which of the more than 15,000 pages of "original" korans held by the yemeni government you guys like to memorize ?

the koran has as much history as any other sacred book out there. it's just that other religions are more willing to accept the fact.

Here's someone writing about a State department report: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/04/we-are-now-indonesia.html but I haven't found the report itself. I think the specific issue of waterboarding is kind of besides the larger point of torture, but it is strong enough on its own as well: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201170.html

After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan's military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding.

From The Atlantic. Ruthlessly compressed.

It has become conventional to think that a corporation, for better or worse, takes on the coloration of its CEO--Jack Welch turns GE into a tribe of aggressive, rigorously unsentimental alpha dogs; Jeff Skilling populates Enron with nihilists expert in gaming the system.

But how strong is this power--or any executive power?

James March goes so far as to say that in any well-run company that's conscientious about grooming its managers, candidates for the top job are so similar in their education, skills, and psychology as to be virtually interchangeable. All that matters is that someone be in charge. "Management may be extremely difficult and important even though managers are indistinguishable. It is hard to tell the difference between two different light bulbs also; but if you take all the light bulbs away, it is difficult to read in the dark."

One problem with the idea of the transformative CEO, able to reshape corporate culture or inspire workers to new heights is that people simply don't feel allegiance to large entities like corporations, no matter who's at the helm. Their loyalties are far more localized. Like infantrymen, their sense of belonging extends to their own platoon but no farther. And in these postmodern times, employees are scornful of grandiose rhetoric about higher purposes and the nobility of their cause. From this perspective, the CEO's power to affect performance, while strong within the immediate team of top executives, rapidly diminishes as it extends beyond that team.

The highly localized nature of loyalty means that the real power to influence corporate performance resides not with the CEO but with middle management. In the The Truth About Middle Managers, Paul Osterman contends that middle managers are neither "victims," robbed of the ability to act independently by some faceless bureaucracy, nor "villains" like Dilbert's Bozo-haired boss, too clueless to do anything but gum up the works. In Osterman's view, the middle manager is the secret hero in the large corporation's rise to social and economic dominance. That rise "depended on middle managers, because you just couldn't achieve the scale that we have without people doing the kind of planning work that they do." As "craft workers," middle managers value their task, sense its importance to the larger cause, and feel great loyalty to the people they work with. But their loyalty to the corporation is fraying, largely because they see top management hogging all the rewards and glory. "There's more cynicism" in the middle-management ranks now, Osterman says. "There's less willingness to go the extra mile."

CEOs in some industries have a great deal of discretion. They're known as "Unconstrained Managers." In a company such as Apple, the CEO is the one who decides which new cell phone to release to a waiting public, which chip company will supply the integrated circuits that make it work, and which phone-service providers to partner with.

In hotly competitive industries where new-product development is crucial and choices about which markets to focus upon are difficult an Unconstrained Manager can have a big impact. Investors worry about Steve Jobs's health because they believe Apple needs his flair for making inspired choices.

Not every Unconstrained Manager is a Steve Jobs, of course. Donald Hambrick and Sydney Finkelstein, who coined the Titular Figurehead/Unconstrained Manager dichotomy in a 1987 article suggest that the world would be better off if leadership effects were always negligible. "If we had to choose as a society between doing away with Figureheads or Unconstrained Managers," they wrote, "it is the Figureheads we would keep."

"Good leaders can make a small positive difference; bad leaders can make a huge negative difference," Jeffrey Pfeffer told Fortune in 2006. Many Americans, surveying the aftermath of eight years with an Unconstrained Manager as their chief executive, might be tempted to agree.

Do CEOs Matter? [June 2009]

[Bruce] Schneier took from his bag a 12-ounce container labeled "saline solution."

"It's allowed," he said. Medical supplies, such as saline solution for contact-lens cleaning, don't fall under the TSA's three-ounce rule.

"What's allowed?" I asked. "Saline solution, or bottles labeled saline solution?"

"Bottles labeled saline solution. They won't check what's in it, trust me."

They did not check. As we gathered our belongings, Schneier held up the bottle and said to the nearest security officer, "This is okay, right?" "Yep," the officer said. "Just have to put it in the tray."

"Maybe if you lit it on fire, he'd pay attention," I said, risking arrest for making a joke at airport security. (Later, Schneier would carry two bottles labeled saline solution--24 ounces in total--through security. An officer asked him why he needed two bottles. "Two eyes," he said. He was allowed to keep the bottles.)

Well, I thought it was funny.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/airport-security/2

They still have something similar at the new BA Heathrow terminal. If you're a business or 1st class passenger you get your own special lane in the security checks where (presumably - I'm just an economy pleb) the line moves faster (fewer unwashed masses) and maybe the staff are less rude to you. I guess it's just another part of the "aspirational" nature of flying, where you wish you could afford to fly business because it might be a slightly less depressing and dehumanising experience.

The cynic in me says that this is a natural and welcome part of security theatre. Like forcing everybody to rebuy their bottled water every time they fly, this practice seems to have a lot more to do with making companies associated with flight security a pile of money than it does making anybody safe.

Say what you will about vinyl, but there is a huge difference in the experience of reading on a computer screen that sits a foot in front of you and a paper you can hold in your lap while kicking back on the couch.

I hold my computer on my lap as a kick back on the couch - they call them laptops.

I know, but there's something about the feel of a physical paper that's so much more pleasant than a bloody screen. I hate not being able to see the whole page in one view without having to scroll. It's like when I worked in a drawing office as a CAD draughtsman. Sure we'd long ago dispensed with the drawing boards and all the design work was done on screen, but when it came to reviewing drawings and looking for potential problems, checking calculations etc. it was time to run a plot and pore over the thing flat out on the desk. There'll always be a role for paper.

See also, from The Atlantic (which I happen to buy in print form) on why The Economist newspaper is doing so well. The Economist uses long form reporting, doesn't charge for online content (except for the archives) and is still growing strongly.

5 years cancer survival rate is well-known to be biased:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/08/dissent-of-th-1.html

"""
        Cancer survival rates are based on the time from diagnosis to future point in time - say, 1 year, 5 years or 10 years, etc. Because of this, they are subject to what researchers call "lead time bias." Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_time_bias

has a much better explanation here than I can ever give, but in short it means that advances in cancer screening can artificially inflate the "cancer survival time."

        Here's an example, involving prostate cancer. U.S. male patients usually get screened for prostate cancer starting at around age 50. Many European countries don't bother screening for prostate cancer at all, since many studies don't show any survival benefit (meaning people's lives aren't extended) to screening. A hypothetical American male may find out at age 52 that he has prostate cancer - which is often a slow growing cancer. Say he lives for another 20 years - which is not uncommon - before dying of something else, such as a heart attack. His "cancer survival time" is now 20 years. A hypothetical European man isn't screened for prostate cancer, but it is discovered when he is 65 during routine lab work. He lives another 7 years before dying of a heart attack. His "cancer survival time" is now only 7 years. And so on, and so on.

        As you can see, cancer survival rates can be inaccurate for measuring the quality of health care.
        """

That's pathetic to point out those rates to support USA health care system ...

It didn't work that way in Memphis:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/memphis-crime

Diamonds ?
You do know diamonds are absolutely worthless don't you?
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198202/diamond

Even those don't make much. Joel Spolsky has said that referrals from Joel on Software make ~$100 a month. Megan McArdle of The Atlantic says she gets about enough to fund her book habit too. Both are very well-known, highly trafficked sites. If they can't make it, who can? Almost no one: and that's the point. People read articles like the one from the WSJ and think they can make it, causing me to shake my head at the level delusion said articles not only show but propagate to others.

Here.

Four NSA domestic surveillance programs.

• Terrorist Surveillance Program, which involves the monitoring of telephone calls.
• "Stellar Wind," e-mail meta-data mining.
• a program that keeps tabs on all the information that flows through telecom hubs under the control of U.S. companies and within the U.S.
• Pinwale e-mail exploitation.

I mostly agree with you, but I'm going to take it easy on hating twitter for the time being, since it seems to be the only mass media still operating in Iran at the moment.

One of the biggest problems is that the money that is being spent by the US government (and foundations) for basic research is being less effective because of a misguided notion that research results are worthless unless they are exclusively owned by someone and turned into a proprietary business in a narrow way. See:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act
    http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/03/press.htm
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html

But what is life really all about anyway? Am I more of a success because I have a faithful wife and healthy children or is it something else?

Those are big questions...
The Harvard Grant study has tried to address those issues. Here is a recent article about the study (also from the Atlantic):
What Makes Us Happy? - The Atlantic (June 2009)

I had a path similar to the one you described - gifted high school, Ivy League college, burnout. Though instead of "civil service" I have ended up in a dilbert corporate cubicle job to pay the mortgage.

I hope this boy doesn't get Lost in the Meritocracy like I did.

Check out: Lost in the Meritocracy - The Atlantic (January/February 2005)

Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever by Walter Kirn

-- I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom. General George S. Patton

Great link Frallon. I enjoyed the story. Reminds me a lot of my Sisters experiences in medical school. At least as far as the tendency to be socially ostracized since she was there on her merits and missing one well off family. You can succeed on merit in America but only so far. But what is life really all about anyway? Am I more of a success because I have a faithful wife and healthy children or is it something else?

I had a path similar to the one you described - gifted high school, Ivy League college, burnout. Though instead of "civil service" I have ended up in a dilbert corporate cubicle job to pay the mortgage.

I hope this boy doesn't get Lost in the Meritocracy like I did.

Check out:
Lost in the Meritocracy - The Atlantic (January/February 2005)

Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever by Walter Kirn

--
I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom.
General George S. Patton

This story is nonsense from start to finish. Yes, some newspaper execs got together and discussed paywalls. Big deal.

There is nothing illegal about that. I realize everyone on Slashdot thinks of himself as an antitrust expert, but industry people do this all the time. Credit card companies have trade associations, and so do banks, car dealers, fast food franchisees, and book publishers.

"Models to Monetize Content" is the subject of a gathering at a hotel which is actually located in drab and sterile suburban Rosemont, Illinois; slabs of concrete, exhibition halls and mostly chain restaurants, whose prime reason for being is O'Hare International Airport. It's perfect for quickie, in-and-out conclaves.

Omigosh! An industry conference! But if we call it a "quickie conclave" it sounds sinister...

In which they discussed ways their members might adapt to the market! Stop the presses! Wait - they apparently had some legal counsel to make sure they weren't breaking the law! Wow!

This story is sensationalist nonsense. There is truly nothing to see here. The best part is the guy from the Atlantic whining about the decline of journalism, while simultaneously providing an example.

It's clear and undeniable that different families have different physical attributes. It's clear and undeniable that different families have differing level of susceptibility to different diseases, conditions, etc. Is one really to believe that everything is heritable EXCEPT for anything to do with the brain...really? What makes the brain exempt from evolution and heritability?

Nice straw man. I never claimed the brain is exempt from these. My claims are that intelligence is a culturally biased concept, that intelligence tests consequently have an inherent cultural bias, and that "race" is irrelevant in determining intelligence, its correlation with culture being mere coincidence. Not a word you said has done anything to refute these claims, for which the scientific evidence is overwhelming and widely accepted.

But the death blow to your argument is that there are no races. Individual/familial genetic variation is so much greater than genetic variation between races that the latter is insignificant, making any "racial" distinction on the basis of superficial appearances such as skin colour meaningless. That makes race a purely cultural concept.

How about this--if you had said the SAT was culturally biased, you MIGHT have a point. Brainpower is brainpower.

I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean, but I think you might be implying that brainpower is purely genetically or "racially" determined. If so, that's wrong; environmental factors including culture have everything to do with it (ref.: Nature, Nurture and Early Brain Development). It starts right in babyhood where interaction with the baby is an important factor in determining brain development. How this interaction is done is culturally determined to a high degree.

It continues through adulthood where our mode of interacting with the environment is culturally determined and determines which brain parts are stimulated and strengthened and which are not. For example, London taxi drives have enlarged hippocampuses because they have memorized the entire London street map. More generally, our visual processing capacity has been massively increased for the recent few generations due to television and the image culture; simultaneously, most of us now have the attention span of a gnat and have become impaired in our ability to read a book or otherwise stay on the same task for hours on end. Conversely, our ancestors would have considered MTV a form of visual torture; their brains couldn't possibly handle it. These are all very real aspects of biological brain development that are culturally determined. (Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains is a good social commentary on that phenomenon.)

More proof? The Flynn effect: average IQ scores worldwide tends to increase about 3 points per decade, reflecting improvement in education standards worldwide. They have to periodically recalibrate IQ tests because of that. In a more extreme example, Dutch conscripts gained 21 points in only 30 years, or 7 points per decade, between 1952 and 1982 (see the wiki article for the reference). There is no way for any of this to be caused by genetics. Genes don't change that fast.

In short, denying cultural influence on brain development is just as silly as denying genetic influence on the same. And "race" is a genetically insignificant factor compared to individual and familial genetic variation, which puts any and all nonsense about Africans being stupid due to genetic inferiority in the rubbish bin where it belongs.

Well, if you don't count money spend in Iraq and Afghanistan as war spending, and if you can't extrapolate that the figures from Wikipedia were compiled from government sources, trying to show you facts is close to useless.

If you really want to know what social security is, and learn why it shouldn't be lumped in with the rest of the budget, you can read this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98jul/socsec.htm

Social security is not federal income tax. That's why it's a separate line item on your pay stub, and it's not lumped into the general fund, unless you mean by the way the government lends social security funds to itself through treasury bonds. Social security is huge, and is included in federal budgets because it very nicely makes it seem like we spend a lot of money on social services, when we actually spend very little.

This isn't really true. Consider "Hitler's Co-Conspirators" in The Atlantic:

New histories reveal that the Nazi Regime deliberately insinuated knowledge of the Final Solution, devilishly making Germans complicit in the crime and binding them, with guilt and dread, to their leaders.

The situation is far more complex than you think, and the knowledge of the German population greater than your post implies. As the article states regarding the many books it reviews:

Most striking is these books' consensus: despite their authors' different aims and methods, and despite their contending interpretations of a host of questions, they all agree that, contrary to claims made after the war, the German people had wide-ranging and often detailed knowledge of the murder of the Jews.

None of the authors uses that conclusion to render easy moral judgments, nor to argue that the population fervently embraced the regime's lethal anti-Semitism

In other words, the German population did know quite a bit, and a vast genocide bureaucracy existed. The article argues that this knowledge drove the Germans to keep fighting after it was obvious they had lost; to cite one representative quote, "as a soldier who had witnessed the massacre of a village of Jews on the Eastern Front put it, "God forbid we lose the war. If revenge comes upon us, we'll have a rough time." "

SIGINT isn't the right tool for tracking terrorist cells anyway. They don't generate enough signals.

Yeah, I think you might be right. I suspect what this really means is that they're incapable of actual, old-style spy-work. Here's what a CIA Near-East operative said:

"The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ's sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing." A younger case officer boils the problem down even further: "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."

That's from The Atlantic's The Counterterrorist Myth:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107/gerecht

Pay some unmarried dude 20 million a year to live this shitty life in return for his services and, additionally, pay well some willing prostitues to be shipped in secret CIA planes to have fun with him secretly - call it "operation secret panties". Are there too many religious right-wingers at the CIA for ideas like this to stick?

There is a pretty good article on Atlantic from a former official at the IMF call The Quiet Coup. There isn't a lot that is news in it, but it does have a compelling idea, that the U.S. crash has a LOT in common with other crashes around the world in the last couple of decades, including in South Korea a while back.

The main theme is that Wall Street started growing in economy influence and power in the 80's, THANKS REAGAN, as it recovered from being boring and regulated in the wake of the Depression. As its power grew its control of Washington grew, and Washington started relaxing regulation like repealing Glass Steagel and allowing 30-1 leverage, thanks to Hank Paulson then Goldman Sachs CEO, and killing every attempt to regulate credit default swaps before they turned in to weapons of mass economic destruction.

Wall Street and Washington became so fused it became an oligopoly or a plutocracy. Worked great for a while because as regulation disappeared Wall Street made buckets of money and grew to be a completely disproportionate percentage of the economy which just made it even more powerful in Washington... until it crashed.

If it were any other company the U.S. would be begging the IMF for a bailout and the IMF would be forcing austerity measures that would seek to break the power of the plutocrats and those in government feeding them. South Korea is notorius few extremely powerful corporations which completely dominate the entire country, both economically and politically, so its not surprising they would lock up a blogger for criticizing their corporations.

Since the U.S. dollar is still the world's reserve currency the U.S. can just print money to bail itself out, and change the rules like "mark to market", a luxury no other country has. We just get to hope that in a couple of years there wont be hyperinflation that will wipe out the dollar and all those responsible people who saved instead of borrowed, squandered and gambled. If you are deep in debt inflation is great because it basically wipes out your debt.

Its no accident Rubin and Paulson went from Goldman Sachs to Treasury secretary, and Larry Summers spent the last couple years making $130K for one speech at Goldman and $5 million the last couple years working a day a week as a big hedge fund, D.B. Shaw. Wall Street does for all practical purposes run the financial parts of our government using a revolving door with people moving from Wall Street to the Reserve and Treasury and back again, plus campaign contributions to control Congressmen. They are using the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury and its printing press to bail themselves out of the mess they made, while workers and tax payers get killed. They are for all practical purposes reinflating the same financial bubble that caused the problem in the first place.

The guy at the IMF rightly points out the U.S. is avoiding taking the medicine for its wrecklessness, or really fixing its plutocracy.

Andrew Sulliva;s Virtually Normal has been delisted: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/04/amazon-delists-gay-books-as-adult.html Sullivan's post may be misleadingly titled: is Virtually Normal, (a non-fiction book about gay rights, from a conservative perspective) a "gay-themed" book? Or is it just that its politics is likely to make someone uncomfortable?

This is linked at the bottom of the EFF brief, but seems more credible, as the Atlantic is not litigating, so I'm putting the link directly into the comments thread:

http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/04/shut_up_its_still_a_secret.php

--
Toro

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL1277265220080312 - Islamic states seek world freedom curbs: humanists

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE52O5QY20090325 - U.N. urged to reject bar on defamation of religion

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iRHXSIoJJdXQpG3kPrRO2LWMnWTAD975TOK00 - UN body OKs call to curb religious criticism

http://www.secularism.org.uk/108265.html - Defamation of religion passes at UN Human Rights Council again

http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2009/03/26/the-slow-death-of-freedom-of-expression/ - The Slow Death Of Freedom Of Expression

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/03/freedom-for-the.html - Freedom For The Thought That We Hate

Lots more at http://news.google.com/news?um=1&ned=us&cf=all&ncl=1320377548

I'm glad to see that Slashdotters are sceptical of what they read, but sometimes all it takes is a 10 second Google.

Discussed here

One of the first things you see in the game, seconds after taking control of Chris Redfield, is a gang of African men brutally beating something in a sack. Animal or human, it's never revealed, but these are not infected Majini. There are no red bloodshot eyes. These are ordinary Africans, who stop and stare at you menacingly as you approach. Since the Majini are not undead corpses, and are capable of driving vehicles, handling weapons and even using guns, it makes the line between the infected monsters and African civilians uncomfortably vague. Where Africans are concerned, the game seems to be suggesting, bloodthirsty savagery just comes with the territory.

also here

And because there's a history of demonization and subhuman portrayals with regard to people of African descent, there's a certain sensitivity around that. I understand that legacy for the most part is completely different in Japan. But that history of negative portrayals was what informed my reactions.

Removing all road signs and warning signals is know to make the roads safer. This has been done in several localities in Europe. Removing all the distractions makes people pay more attention to driving and to the road. This concept and the psychology of driving and traffic safety are described at length in a nice article in Atlantic Monthly by John Staddon, a psychologist.

(search on keyword "battery" if you don't want to read all the way through)

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200904/chinese-innovation/3

Some here may already have read about this, but it appears that China makes some very good batteries, mainly for the electronics industry. Now, it seems they had not long ago seen a company produce (ugly) electric cars, but batteries that rival the USA Big 3 (well, which of them's big anymore?) and even Tesla. Given that Tesla's demo/sports car ran over $100k, and despite their announced sedan:

http://www.autoblog.com/2008/02/17/tesla-whitestar-electric-sedan-to-debut-this-year/

there is going to be some stiff global competition for such batteries, especially if what Chinese companies are working on can take off.

To recap the recent Detroit Show:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200901u/detroit-auto-show

(search on keyword "battery" if you don't want to read all the way through)

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200904/chinese-innovation/3

Some here may already have read about this, but it appears that China makes some very good batteries, mainly for the electronics industry. Now, it seems they had not long ago seen a company produce (ugly) electric cars, but batteries that rival the USA Big 3 (well, which of them's big anymore?) and even Tesla. Given that Tesla's demo/sports car ran over $100k, and despite their announced sedan:

http://www.autoblog.com/2008/02/17/tesla-whitestar-electric-sedan-to-debut-this-year/

there is going to be some stiff global competition for such batteries, especially if what Chinese companies are working on can take off.

To recap the recent Detroit Show:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200901u/detroit-auto-show

Which every hacker should read.

Back at Data General, one day during the debugging, his weariness focused on the logic analyzers and the small catastrophes that come from trying to build a machine that operates in billionths of a second. He went away from the basement of Building 14 that day, and left this note in his cubicle, on top of his computer terminal: "I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."

Defund transit agencies so transit-dependent people (of whom a disproportionate percentage are minority) can't get around

- Public transportation should never, period, be a "for-profit" institution. You and I are in agreement here. That being said, the actual number of people hit by this are the elderly, not "minorities."

Retain entrenched discrimination in housing through redlining and other tactics

Entrenched demographic differences in areas are retained far more through cultural bias, self-segregation, and even the famed "yuppie flight" that happens when a lower-income demographic (and accompanying crime problems) is forced into other neighborhoods. See also: Memphis.

Fail to fund special education, a disproportionate amount of which is handled in urban schools

If it is actually needed, by all means, fund it specifically. This is precisely the sort of real response we need (e.g. "$X to hire four more special-ed teachers to handle class of YZ special-ed students") that the Democrats NEVER GIVE US.

Cut state aid to cities, forcing them to raise property taxes and cut after-school and rec programs

Uhm... you're shitting me, right? Texas has it even worse - some dumbshit democrat decided the best way to "handle" school funding was with a program they called "robin hood", which actually stole money from 'richer' districts to give to 'poorer' districts. Within 5 years every single "robin hood" targeted district had hit the cap on their yearly allowed property tax increases and STILL couldn't pay all their bills.

Set up school districts so whites need not have anything to do with anyone else of a different color

Bullshit. Not just bullshit, fucking bullshit.

Show me ONE location where this has been done. No, seriously, give me proof. You will not be able to show it, because you're nothing but a fucking racist liar.

Fund exurban development by raiding the tax base of cities and inner-ring suburbs to fund sewers, roads and other infrastructure in what used to be farmland, when plenty of space stll exists in further-in cities and suburbs

Yes, if you want to have a "concrete jungle" where there isn't a single tree in a 100-square-mile space, by all means.

If you actually want a sustainable environment consisting of residential buildings, public parks and recreational facilities, well, you're going to have to leave some "undeveloped" land behind.

And guess what? Population growth happens.

Give tax cuts rather than invest in our communities

Again, what form of "investment" are you proposing? I'd like to see some specifics. You want to sponsor a city Boy/Girl Scout program? By all means, I'm all for it. That's a wonderful program that raises good citizens and teaches youth leadership. You want to fund the creation of more city parks and outdoor recreation? Youth or Adult sports leagues? By all means - propose what you want, I'll bet you can get it to pass.

Don't tell me "invest in the community" when you are really just proposing "give free handouts to the illegals" though. That is something I will NOT support.

Oh, you're one of those. Sorry I wasted your time.

Oh, you're a racist retard with no respect for the law. That explains a lot in regard to your attitude.

Just offer a small compensation from the multi-million dollar Mozilla Foundation budget and people will volunteer. As Schneier said, "If McDonald's offered a free Big Mac for a DNA sample, there would be lines around the block."

You've obviously never heard of Experimental Economics:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200812/financial-bubbles

And economic models are constantly being validated against observational data.

Atlantic Mag on BG, Jan09

"Where a proper space operaâ"from Star Wars to 2000â(TM)s Scientological BattleÂfield Earthâ"advertises with chilly pride its remoteness from life as we know it, the retooled Battlestar Galactica has plunged into the burning issues of the day. Suicide bombers, torture, occupation, stolen elections. Homosexuality, reproductive rights, religious fundamentalism, genocide. All of it grappled with, workshopped outâ"diegetically, you might say. With crater-voiced Edward James Olmos in the role of Adama, and the Galactica itselfâ"rather gaily lit in its â(TM)70s incarnationâ"now steeped in an atmosphere somewhere between that of a diving submarine and a backstreet in the Victorian East End, Moore and Eick have pushed and pushed at the hot buttons. UnÂaddressed as yet: steroid abuse, the slow-food movement, and the declining standard of international travel. But thereâ(TM)s still half a season to go."

If that's what you're waiting for, than you might want to have a look at this article about http://www.usaspending.gov/... It's an eye opener...

This comment (and the GP) illustrates the point that people's expectations for the US government are often much lower than justified. This reflects the fact that there is much in the government that is thoughtful, competent, efficient, and honorable.

If that's what you're waiting for, than you might want to have a look at this article about http://www.usaspending.gov/... It's an eye opener...

I agree with enjoying tutorials that include video and so forth.

But the implementation didn't fail because animated characters are retarded. The implementation was retarded because Clippy, Bob and the Pathetic Fucking Search Puppy(*) just launched by themselves as an annoyance, not in response to a request for help. Further, as another poster suggested, the so-called help guessed very poorly what it was that was being worked on. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1078567&cid=26299781

Given that it's completely retarded and evil to have software work that way, it's actually internally self-consistent that these components are displayed in the most retarded fashion possible.

If they had done "a proper, professional, and serious implentation" as you suggest, then this dung would have never infected our minds.

I find the very same can be said of the company's commercials and several of their products (Access, anyone? That now-missing member of the Office Suite?)

The avatars were born in Bob, noted as the 7th worst product of all time, an open joke as the MS campus, and unfortunately not the dumbest idea ever at Microsoft. Links, in their respective order:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
http://www.pcworld.com/article/125772-3/the_25_worst_tech_products_of_all_time.html
http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/04/clippy_update_now_with_organiz.php
http://blog.tomevslin.com/2007/05/microsoft_memor.html
(yeah, I know how to inline the refs in html, but I prefer to let people clearly see where they're linking to)

(* Pathetic Fucking Search Puppy - Ask for it by name!)

Yeah, because we all know how much repressing sexuality makes it go away.