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Psychopathic Traits: What Successful Presidents Have in Common

Presidential success is linked with fearless dominance, a psychopathic trait of boldness that can sometimes turn reckless

The only reason you have microprocessors of any kind is because Intel invented them.

Or Gilbert Hyatt if you believe the story.

Manufacturing in general is losing jobs. Not only in the US but in third world countries like China and Mexico because of efficiency increases.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aRI4bAft7Xw4

It's a reprise of what happened 50 years earlier when farms became mechanized. It is an inexorable inevitable trend that machines will replace humans in routine tasks.

The fact is that manufacturing as an economic sector in the US is doing fine. To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of demise are much exaggerated.

The US is easily the world's most productive manufacturing nation in terms of output value per hour, and also has the largest manufacturing economy in the world.

http://www.nam.org/Statistics-And-Data/Facts-About-Manufacturing/Landing.aspx
http://www.seeitmarket.com/u-s-still-in-the-business-of-making-things/
http://business.time.com/2011/03/10/can-china-compete-with-american-manufacturing/

The United States of America achieved the highest Output Value Per Hour of all countries in the world by doing one thing - making super high valued items - like Stealth Fighter planes, Nuclear Submarines, Super-computers, and CPUs.

Except for the last item, which is produced by the millions, the rest of those super-high-valued items are not mass-produced - at least not mass produced to achieve the economy of scale.

That lies the problem.

The USA may be the biggest exporters of the world because there is still a great demand for those super-high-valued items - especially the weapons

And others are catching up.

Take the CPUs - Intel has been raking in truckloads of $$$ by producing CPUs that are worth much more than their weight in gold, since the 1980's.

Nowadays, however, Intel is increasing feeling the heat - competition is heating up. No, not from AMD, but from other companies which made ARM chips, and there are a lot of them - From TI of USA to Samsung of Korea to Nvidia of Taiwan to Allwinner of China

There _are_ competitors to other super-high-value items produced by USA, but fortunately, for the time being, the competitors aren't very well financed or don't have the required technology yet.

But that doesn't mean the competitors don't play catch up. They do, and they are catching up, fast.

Nowadays USA is not the only one capable of producing stealth fighters. Russia, Japan, Europe and China all have their own versions of stealth fighters.

What does that leave USA, then?

To innovate? Or to destroy their competitors, before they can play catch up?

If USA were to be run by those who is running Apple, Inc., no doubt the choice would be the latter.

Fortunately, the USA government hasn't yet completely relinquished its sovereignty to Cupertino.
 

Manufacturing in general is losing jobs. Not only in the US but in third world countries like China and Mexico because of efficiency increases.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aRI4bAft7Xw4

It's a reprise of what happened 50 years earlier when farms became mechanized. It is an inexorable inevitable trend that machines will replace humans in routine tasks.

The fact is that manufacturing as an economic sector in the US is doing fine. To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of demise are much exaggerated.

The US is easily the world's most productive manufacturing nation in terms of output value per hour, and also has the largest manufacturing economy in the world.

http://www.nam.org/Statistics-And-Data/Facts-About-Manufacturing/Landing.aspx
http://www.seeitmarket.com/u-s-still-in-the-business-of-making-things/
http://business.time.com/2011/03/10/can-china-compete-with-american-manufacturing/

Probably the a similar thing to what happens on airplanes: http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/10/14/revealed-why-airline-food-tastes-so-bland/

Which means that no Democratic congress will ever again pass a law, unless they have a supermajority.

Are you really saying that no laws have been passed in the last two years? What about the repeal of don't ask don't tell?

Your problem is, you don't understand political strategy. A congressperson can only afford to oppose a bill if it doesn't have much popular support in his home district. Thus, a good president will build political support for his program before sending it to congress. Bush understood this, and as an unfortunate result got us into a war in Iraq. Clinton understood this. Obama doesn't seem to understand this, which gives the Republicans a clear opening to oppose him. This is mainly a sign of Obama incompetence.

It's not about if someone making $149k, $150k or $151k can be considered rich.

Try instead to figure out who's standard of living is poor and how much are they making. Keep in mind that there are many levels below simply "poor".
Then you look above that until you get to an acceptable standard of living.
Then above that you'll find the "Doing OK" crowd.
Then the "Well off" ones.
Then the rich.
Then the very rich.
Then the super rich.

Or... you can take a shortcut and just look at the minimum wage.
I'm guessing that we can agree that it is a decent enough economic indicator for an online discussion between laymen.

You're making one minimum wage? You can barely afford the cost of living for one person. Yourself.
1-2 MinWage? You could support another person and still live poorly, or live at some more acceptable level alone.
5 times minimum wage allows you alone to support an entire family of four and then some.
Incidentally, that is apparently also the point where one earns enough to be happy.

It's pretty easy to see where those $150k guys, making 10+ minimum wages, fall on such a scale.

As for a "why a specific number"...
Well, try it like this.
If you are making enough money to provide a family of 4.1 (Mom, dad and the statistical number of children needed to continue the growth of population.) with their own 2*MinWage - you are the golden standard of upper middle class.
Each member of a such family can afford a middle class life on their own, and together they are a happy, economically functional, upper middle class family.
The fucking ***American DreamTM***. America The Beautiful starts playing in the background, a bald eagle flies through the frame.

Add those numbers up for the highest US MinWage (Washington) and you get:
$9.04 * 8 hours * 5 day * 50 weeks * 4.1 people * 2 = $148256

That is the PEAK of upper middle class in the USA. Above that starts the upper class - the rich.

That's not true and you know it.

It's much closer to true than you want to admit. If you send a group of average looking college students onto campus to randomly proposition people of the opposite sex, the majority of females will get affirmative responses, and the majority of males will get negative responses. Women have a much easier time than men getting laid. That's scientific fact.

The Brits used full flash hoods for turret crews in World War 2, but these excluded the face. The modern British navy have anti-flash gear that covers much more of the face when in actual combat such as in the Falklands. These are made of Nomex today.

In those days, the US Navy was never much of a believer in anti flash clothing as the Royal Navy; though for a long time it did use anti flash cream for covering the face. Now I believe anti-flash hoods and sleeves are used in combat situations.

The US issued Anti Flash cream as early as 1943, to both navy and Marine corp, which was essentially titanium dioxide - same as is used for sun protection today.

That is not what the GP is referring to. The GP is referring to a different incident, post embassy bombings (?), where a special ops team had a visual on Bin Laden. Clinton had them stand down.

More right-wing fiction with no basis in reality.

Right wing fiction from CBS's 60 Minutes and the Huffington post?
"Hank Crumpton, a former CIA officer and top counterterrorism official, said in a recent interview that President Bill Clinton's White House missed a golden opportunity to take out terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in 1999. Bin Laden was in Afghanistan in 1999, Crumpton told CBS's "60 Minutes" in a segment that aired on Sunday. His convoy had been clearly identified by an early edition Predator drone, which at the time didn't have weapons capabilities. "We saw a security detail, a convoy, and we saw bin Laden exit the vehicle, clearly," Crumpton told CBS's Lara Logan, describing aerial images captured by a drone flying somewhere outside of Kandahar. "The optics were spot in, it was beaming back to us, CIA headquarters. We immediately alerted the White House, and the Clinton administration’s response was, ‘Well, it will take several hours for the TLAMs, the cruise missiles launched from submarines, to reach that objective. So, you need to tell us where bin Laden will be five or six hours from now.' The frustration was enormous." The administration also denied the CIA's request to engage their on-ground forces, Crumpton said, which could have acted more quickly. The missed opportunity led the CIA to speed the process of arming the unmanned drones with Hellfire missiles, so that they could act more swiftly if they found bin Laden again."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/14/hank-crumpton-cia-clinton-bin-laden_n_1514895.html

Bill Clinton signed the legislation permitting the credit default swap financial instruments.

And George W. Bush signed the legislation making it harder for consumers to declare bankruptcy - so banks promptly created a bubble by lending money to anyone or anything with a pulse. Blaming it on the CRA is the biggest wingnut lie in the history of wignnut lies.

Time magazine another right wing conspiracy member?
"Bill Clinton ... Among his biggest strokes of free-wheeling capitalism was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, a cornerstone of Depression-era regulation. He also signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted credit-default swaps from regulation. In 1995 Clinton loosened housing rules by rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act, which put added pressure on banks to lend in low-income neighborhoods."
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877351_1877350_1877322,00.html

Funny that you mentioned Glass-Steagal earlier. It seems it was really Clinton not Bush that signed off on its repeal.

All of the religions mentioned have faith based rules that are generally not as harmul

But they ALSO have rules that are beneficial. You have reduced all religious to a negative-only status.

For example, people that live in religious areas are more likely to donate to charity. Should they "stop listening to the friend in the sky" that is telling them to help others also?

Why is it SO HARD for people that hate religion to talk about terrible aspects of a single religion at a time? It really waters down your argument when you paint a world full of scientists and scholars as being no different than lunatics and misogynists.

It's not hypocritical for any thinking person to wish the whole Republican party into the proverbial cornfield. And it'll qualify as legitimate irony if a hurricane wipes them out.

SS takes in more than they make, you fucking moron. Which is where as these IOUs come from...the rest of the government borrows from them.

- hey, fucking moron, that's how it used to be, not anymore, dumb fucking piece of human excrement.

Jesus Christ on pogo stick, it's completely astonishing how many people are complete and total idiots.

- my thoughts exactly. That is YOU - total and unyielding idiot.

Akin's comments were tasteless and ignorant of current knowledge/data, but since no one else is coming to his defense, I will.

There are two aspects of his comments to which people take offense. To get the first out of the way quickly, "legitimate rape", the 2004 Maryland case of "delayed withdrawal of consent" is an example of "rape" that is not "legitimate".

Now, onto the pregnancy statistics. The theory that rape resulted in few pregnancies was common among conservatives, as TFA states. It came from the amlgamation of two scientific reports. First, studies have shown that female orgasm increases fertility because the vagina draws the sperm up like a conveyer belt as well as opens up the cervix. Second, until just a couple of years ago, rape victims reported orgasms in only 5-20% of cases. A recent study, however, showed that up to 90% of rape victims orgasm -- including those who could not otherwise normally orgasm. Women in previous studies were too ashamed to admit it (and in fact it's the greater psychological trauma than from having been penetrated).

This is an explanation for what was reported only in 2003, which is that the chance of pregnancy is greater with rape than with consensual.

Akin's information was out of date, was widely accepted by anti-abortion advocates (esp in the past), and had some scientific basis that was skewed due to rape victims' misreporting.

Citation needed for the explanation in your third paragraph. It's incorrect and it's not given in the article you linked.

Akin's comments were tasteless and ignorant of current knowledge/data, but since no one else is coming to his defense, I will.

There are two aspects of his comments to which people take offense. To get the first out of the way quickly, "legitimate rape", the 2004 Maryland case of "delayed withdrawal of consent" is an example of "rape" that is not "legitimate".

Why exactly is that not "legitimate"? As Maryland's Court of Appeals ruled in that very case, "The crime of first-degree rape includes post-penetration vaginal intercourse accomplished through force or threat of force and without the consent of the victim, even if the victim consented to the initial penetration."

If a woman tells you to stop, and knowing that she does not consent, you disregard her lack of consent and continue having sex with her, that sure does sound like "legitimate" rape. People bring up this case in an attempt to argue that a woman could say no during sex and a millisecond later, you're a rapist. You're not. It doesn't work that way. The crime of rape, as with all crimes, requires intent. You must intentionally continue farking while knowing you don't have consent. If you reasonably believed you had consent - like you would in that millisecond, and probably for several seconds before the words travel to your brain - then you're not committing rape.

Here's an analogy... Say you're kickboxing or doing MMA with someone. You punch them several times, but they've consented to the match and it's therefore not battery. At some point, they go down and you dive on them to get in several more punches. Are you committing battery? Nope, match isn't over, you still reasonably believe you have consent.
The ref shouts stop and starts pulling you off, while you get in one more punch. Is it battery now? You don't have consent and the match is over... but it's only been a second, and so you reasonably still believe you have consent.
Then, you do a bit of mugging for the crowd and cheering your victory while the ref fans the guy back into consciousness. People are applauding and your trainer is starting to enter the ring... and then you turn around and kick the guy in the head. Battery? Oh, hells yeah. Even "legitimate" battery.

In other words, consent can certainly be withdrawn. When your actions become criminal is not that instant, but when you reasonably recognize that consent has been withdrawn... and then still act. Intentionally continuing to fark someone after they've said "no, stop," and you recognize that they've withdrawn consent is "legitimate" rape.

Akin's comments were tasteless and ignorant of current knowledge/data, but since no one else is coming to his defense, I will.

There are two aspects of his comments to which people take offense. To get the first out of the way quickly, "legitimate rape", the 2004 Maryland case of "delayed withdrawal of consent" is an example of "rape" that is not "legitimate".

Now, onto the pregnancy statistics. The theory that rape resulted in few pregnancies was common among conservatives, as TFA states. It came from the amlgamation of two scientific reports. First, studies have shown that female orgasm increases fertility because the vagina draws the sperm up like a conveyer belt as well as opens up the cervix. Second, until just a couple of years ago, rape victims reported orgasms in only 5-20% of cases. A recent study, however, showed that up to 90% of rape victims orgasm -- including those who could not otherwise normally orgasm. Women in previous studies were too ashamed to admit it (and in fact it's the greater psychological trauma than from having been penetrated).

This is an explanation for what was reported only in 2003, which is that the chance of pregnancy is greater with rape than with consensual.

Akin's information was out of date, was widely accepted by anti-abortion advocates (esp in the past), and had some scientific basis that was skewed due to rape victims' misreporting.

“Apple, which ended its third quarter with $1.2 billion in cash, will use the additional $150 million to invest in its core markets of education and creative content, Anderson said.”

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/592FE887-5CA1-4F30-BD62-407362B533B9.html

http://lightbox.time.com/2011/10/06/in-a-private-light-diana-walkers-photos-of-steve-jobs/#10

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/05/apples-stock-rise-could-have-meant-5-billion-for-microsoft/

“Less than 12 hours before his big announcement, nobody here knows yet about the bombshell to come. In fact, Jobs is still negotiating it here at the Castle--on a cell phone. "Hi, Bill," you hear him say in the echo chamber of the old hall. Then his voice drops, and for nearly an hour he paces the stage, running through last-minute details with Gates. All the while, he leans over his computer, paces, lies down on the stage, paces, lurks in dark corners, paces and talks, paces and talks.

This is the fateful call for the boy titans of the personal-computer revolution, meant to settle the war. At one point, talking about Apple, Jobs says, "There are a lot of good things, happily--and a lot of screwed-up things." Then, to his crew, he yells, "Have we got satellite contact with the other side?" Assured this has been taken care of, he answers a question from Gates about what to wear on the morrow ("I'm just going to wear a white shirt," he assures him), and he finally ends the conversation with a heartfelt "Thank you for your support of this company. I think the world's a better place for it." And so that's how Apple and Microsoft, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, finally seal it--on a cell-phone call.

The deal is vintage Jobs. Amelio began the process of repairing relations between the two longtime rivals. But once he was out the door at Apple, Jobs contacted Gates to try to get talks started again. Gates dispatched his CFO, Gregory Maffei, who met Jobs at his home. Jobs suggested they go for a walk. Grabbing a couple of bottles of mineral water from the fridge, the two took off for a stroll around Palo Alto. Jobs was barefoot. "It was an interesting scene," Maffei recalls. "It was a pretty radical change for the relations between the two companies." The two walked for nearly an hour, through Palo Alto's green university area, as they pounded out the details of a potential deal. Jobs, Maffei says, was "expansive and charming. He said, 'These are things that we care about and that matter.' And that let us cut down the list. We had spent a lot of time with Amelio, and they had a lot of ideas that were nonstarters. Jobs had a lot more ability. He didn't ask for 23,000 terms. He looked at the whole picture, figured about what he needed. And we figured he had the credibility to bring the Apple people around and sell the deal."”

http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/13/3239977/apple-and-microsoft-cross-license-agreement-includes-anti-cloning

http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1292505/584.pdf

I'll just leave this here.

Really? That's new to me. Apparently no one informed Time either

My religion compels me to pray for you, and to let you be.

Your religion doesn't compel any such thing - it is your personal internal sense of morality that guides you. If a proof were produced that your god did not exist, would you suddenly throw away all of your morality and principles, and turn to murdering, raping and thieving? Of course not. Millions of people have been killed in the name of the world's major religions, and many more have suffered persecution because of their religious beliefs. The "peace" that we have have now is more a product of the Western world turning towards secularism than anything else; it was only 70 years ago that some Christians were busy rounding up Jews - when the leader of the Eastern Orthodox Church actually said, "Why should we not get rid of these parasites [Jews] who suck Rumanian Christian blood? It is logical and holy to react against them.". Of course it would be unacceptable for a religious leader to say something like that today, wouldn't it? Hmmm... are we really so arrogant to believe that we have evolved so far, culturally and as a species, that such thoughts are no longer possible?

2. Regarding Canada's federal debt. As of a year ago Canada's total Public Debt hit $1.1 Trillion, but that was only 57.9 % debt to GDP ratio. That is regarded as low and is perfectly fine. Canada can handle that just fine and still sustain robust economic growth. The US recently exceeded a ratio of 100% debt to GDP ratio. That is bad because when the debt ratio exceeds 85-90 % then economic growth is inhibited significantly.

Canada did the right thing running up the deficit during the recession so as to maintain economic growth. The U.S also had to do the same to keep the recession from expanding into a full blown depression. But Canada had good fundamentals -- a relatively low debt -- so it could run large deficits for a while without undue long term effects. It can lower spending later and bring the deficit down using expanded revenues from future GDP growth. The U.S was not in as good a shape having already run large deficits through out the Bush years. Now we are saddled with a huge debt burden that is sapping our growth dooming us to many years of low growth and high unemployment.

This is a list of the ten countries most in debt based on this percentage.

"Last year, a federal program paid out $1.6 billion to cover free cell phones and the monthly bills of 12.5 million wireless accounts. The program, overseen by the FCC and intended to help low-income Americans, is popular for obvious reasons, with participation rising steeply since 2008, when the government paid $772 million for phones and monthly bills.

http://moneyland.time.com/2012/02/08/how-to-get-the-government-to-cover-your-cell-phone-bills/

This is bullshit. We should not be paying for phones, TV, Internet access, etc. All we do is add more and more people to government programs. When was the last time that the US government had a successful program to get people off of government assistance?

We cannot continue down this path. It is not sustainable.

For ths US, truth is advertising is required of commercial ads, but not of political campaigns. Both are speech. But the politcal ads are "political speech" and protected by the 1st amendment as protected speech, including lies and falsehoods. The commercial ads, while "speech", are intended to facilitate the transfer of goods or services for money, and thus are not protected speech because preventing someone from lying to a potential customer to make a sale is seen as the bigger benefit to society than protecting that persons right to lie.

And yes, the irony of a politican "lying to faciliate the transfers of goods or services for money" is killing me.

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1843796,00.html

what I'm asking, where the fuck is this summers heatwaves? there hasn't been a single good heatwave in Finland all summer now.

I think your heatwave may have got lost and ended up in Greenland.

Look; I don't really want to go on with this much longer; I completely respect your point about the N95 being a better selling phone. I will even, actually clearly admit that it was a better phone for a user trying to use it than the iPhone. I'd happily admit that the engineers designing the N95 did a better job at their brief than the engineers doing the iPhone. In fact; let's go further; I hated the first iPhone and would never have bought one. At the same time, even then I recognised and tried to talk several Nokia people through to understand the importantance of the iPhone. I always wanted an N95 and when I had one for some time was really happy with it. Where the N95 falls down is in it's aims and it's achievements. The engineers were given the wrong brief by their management.

"It's what computers have become."

That was the actual motto of the N95. Nokia described it as a "Multimedia computer". This was not some top end device for conservative business men. This was Nokia's management's attempt to be hip and define the market.

Both the N95 and the iPhone were trying to define a new category of portable internet/media devices. Key features that the iPhone achieved in this direction that the N95 never did include things like:

• long term over the air upgradability - creating a true "installed base" of almost identical systems.
• an immediate pointing device / touch screen - allowing rapid access to multiple options like in a WIMP based computer
• a true feeling of not being a normal phone but something different
• a proper multimedia library in iTunes.
• a system formed free of operator interference

This may all seem like post justification and hindsight, but have a look at this iPhone article from Time, especially the last two points. These things were obvious to the media in 2007, let alone people intimately involved in new phone design. Even if the iPhone had sold only a few hundred examples, it would still have been more of a success in the real fight. The aim to define a completely new market, than the N95.

Oh well. If you still don't get what I'm going on about then there's no real hope of communicating. Have a good day.

Here's the basic story of the Great Depression, which is very similar to the story of the more recent financial crisis. 1. Times were good in the 1920's on Wall St. People could and did make good money trading stocks. [..] 5. End result: Crash. And when one business crashes, their stock, which was considered good, is now worthless, so businesses holding their stock also crash, so it cascades through the system leaving things worse than if the Crimson Permanent Assurance had hit them.

Replace "stocks" with "mortgage backed securities", fast forward 70 years or so, and the same thing happened. It happens any time that a con man can successfully make worthless pieces of paper look like representations of valuable property. And yes, it could conceivably happen that the pieces of paper that say "One Dollar" on them will also become worthless - if it does, you want to have land and a team of people who will help you defend it.

It happens more frequently ! dot.com bubble of 2000, LTCM collapse, 1980s collapse, etc. Roughly every 5-7 years, with some collapses being larger than others.

This is really just our economy's analog of Chinese ghost cities.

Illinois here. I have not had *a* governor arrested recently.

I believe I'm up to 6.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1865681,00.html
Try to keep up, haters!

There's a lot of drivel there that doesn't deserve comment ("very few decent places to eat"? are you old or broke?), but this is ridiculous:

I lived in the PHX area 2003-2007 and there are indeed few decent places to eat. Most restaurants are chain and/or shitty. The thing that surprised me the most was how hard it was to find a decent Mexican restaurant in the PHX area. Forget about Asian cuisine.

It's been rated by several places as the worst city in America to drive in, mainly because it's so chaotic and because there's no consistent driving style (the frequent road-rage shootings don't help).

What's the problem, does the square NS-EW street grid confuse you? You're going to need to back up that claim, because Phoenix is nowhere near the worst cities to drive in:

http://fillmyemptyblogspace.com/2010/12/24/10-worst-american-cities-to-drive-in/ http://www.businessinsider.com/cities-with-most-car-crashes-2010-10?op=1 http://autos.yahoo.com/news/15-dangerous-cities-for-driving.html http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/05/22/going-nowhere-10-worst-u-s-cities-for-traffic/

In fact, if you look closely, you can see Chandler listed by Allstate as one of the safest cities to drive in.

If it is so damn safe to drive, why were my auto insurance rates double what they were in Chicago while I lived in PHX? I routinely found myself at 4-way stops where everyone stared at each other wondering who should go next. There were major crashes on the 10 almost daily. People drive as if they are wandering aimlessly. If I am on the road, I have a destination in mind and want to get there.

You can't bicycle here (one of my favorite outdoor activities) because of the heat most of the year

People bike here year round, Facebook posts from other people doing just that are proof. You choose not to, that doesn't mean other people don't do it also. There are people enjoying the Phoenix Mountain Preserve, Dreamy Draw, and South Mountain year round.

Yes, crazy people bike there year round. I was amazed by how many people I saw out jogging at 2pm in 105 degree heat. Pure insanity. Not only the heat, but it is so dusty and dry, outside exercise is pure torture most of the time. Not to mention the threat of valley fever. The other thing that got me is that even though it is a desert, people use insane amounts of water. Every new subdivision has a big water feature out front. Most people opt for a big green lawn (that has to be watered daily). The drinking water is absolutely terrible unless you get an RO system or get bottled water. Public transportation is a joke, mainly because the population density is not high enough to merit the infrastructure. They build roads like crazy, though. The other factor is the people. This is purely subjective, but the PHX area has a lot of evangelicals and conservative religious types. And don't forget the plain old (and I mean old) conservatives. Maybe that's your cup of tea.

Woolly Mammoth?

Almost as cool, easier to find viable DNA, and good practice (just in case).

There's a lot of drivel there that doesn't deserve comment ("very few decent places to eat"? are you old or broke?), but this is ridiculous:

It's been rated by several places as the worst city in America to drive in, mainly because it's so chaotic and because there's no consistent driving style (the frequent road-rage shootings don't help).

What's the problem, does the square NS-EW street grid confuse you? You're going to need to back up that claim, because Phoenix is nowhere near the worst cities to drive in:

http://fillmyemptyblogspace.com/2010/12/24/10-worst-american-cities-to-drive-in/
http://www.businessinsider.com/cities-with-most-car-crashes-2010-10?op=1
http://autos.yahoo.com/news/15-dangerous-cities-for-driving.html
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/05/22/going-nowhere-10-worst-u-s-cities-for-traffic/

In fact, if you look closely, you can see Chandler listed by Allstate as one of the safest cities to drive in.

violent home invasions are common

Define "common". The police claimed that for 2008 there were "over 300" home invasions and kidnappings (fewer than 1 per day, in an area with 4.2 million people), and that claim was investigated by the feds to see if it was exaggerated to get more funding:

http://www.azcentral.com/community/phoenix/articles/2011/01/26/20110126phoenix-crime-stats-federal-audit.html

You can't bicycle here (one of my favorite outdoor activities) because of the heat most of the year

People bike here year round, Facebook posts from other people doing just that are proof. You choose not to, that doesn't mean other people don't do it also. There are people enjoying the Phoenix Mountain Preserve, Dreamy Draw, and South Mountain year round.

They used to have Mill Avenue in Tempe that was kinda fun to walk along, which used to have a bunch of quirky little independent shops, but the Tempe government drove all those out of business to make room for a bunch of mall stores and high-rises, which of course went south when the economy crashed, so most of the place is boarded up now.

Really? The main recreational area next to the largest university by enrollment in the country is boarded up now, huh? That's weird.

This place sucks, and I can't wait to move out in a couple of months.

Neither can I. Let me know if you need help leaving.

Well, our government does have a history of spying on Americans.

Giving diseases to Americans

And then there are the countless accusations of spying against peace activists.

And the whole thing about warrants - there is no oversight or transparency. All an agent has to do is go to a judge and say that they are a suspect and need to be under surveillance - especially if they have an Arabic name.

Basically what you're saying is, you'd prefer to believe, without proof, allegations that the NSA is illegally dragnet-spying on ALL Americans, and has been doing so for more than a decade, which would involve at the very LEAST hundreds, and more likely thousands, of civilian and military NSA employees, all of whom don't mind that they're directly violating the Constitution, but only one guy who hasn't been at NSA in over a decade is telling you "the truth"? That really seems plausible to you?

Absolutely it is plausible. Google (almost )does it. All the NSA has to do is order ISPs, cell phone companies, google, amazon, yahoo!, etc .... to hand over their data. Your storage is free. Computing power? Dirt cheap.

It would be nothing to do what folks accuse the NSA of doing.

The burden of proof is on the Government -NOT its citizens. Period.

Lastly, I don't believe you. You have no proof and you just posted links to speeches - BFD.

If the NSA or their representatives say something; it's a lie until proven otherwise - that's what spies do: lie, cheat, and be subhuman douche bags.

As for camoflage, folklore has it that during WWII a bomber was flying over the Pacific and one of the crew, colorblind, spotted an enemy ship that none of the others could see even when he pointed it out. But he convinced them to fly down for a closer look, and then they saw it.

TIME article from 1940, which unfortunately now requires a subscription (it didn't when I bookmarked it).

From my own experience, I describe it to people that I don't "see color". I know that different things are different colors, and if someone asks me what color a car is, I can usually get it close to correct, but after 10 seconds, I won't remember what color a car was if I don't deliberately commit it to memory. After spending my entire life not being able to accurately tell colors, my brain just doesn't bother processing that detail.

Like other posters said, maybe people that are color blind aren't fooled by camouflage as easily because the intensity is a more important detail than the hue. I've also wondered if it has to do with the brain focusing on shapes and edges more than normal because it isn't processing color as much.

How can you possibly say it was priced too high? If all of the shares Facebook was selling were bought by someone at $38, then that was the correct price.

You realize that initial covering of this price was required by their underwriter, Morgan Stanley [1]. They were basically sustaining the price at $38 all of opening day.

[1] http://business.time.com/2012/05/22/facebook-ipo-fallout-four-lessons-from-a-troubling-public-debut/

Most likely lack of exercise to compensate for sitting most of the day contributed to the health risks.

The research has shown that sitting is bad for you regardless of other factors like weight, or whether or not you exercise regularly.

Why Prolonged Sitting Is Bad for Your Health: "adults who sat for 11 hours or more a day had a 40% increased risk of dying in the next three years than those who sat for less than four hours a day. Even after taking into account physical activity, weight and health status, researchers found that the unsettling association held."

Scientists' latest depressing find: sitting down is really bad for your health: "sitting for more than three hours per day cuts about two years off your life expectancy. They added that watching more than two hours of TV per day will cut your life expectancy down another year or so. An even bleaker discovery? Moderate exercise doesn't seem to offset the effects of this excessive sitting either."

What's really bad about this is that a fast-food restaurant like McDonald's should, in theory, be the last place you might get food poisoning.

Theory: Everything works as planned.

Reality: Douchenozzles stand on lettuce and post pictures on 4chan.

(Surprise: 4chan got the guy fired.)

And how does this relate to the fact that children are getting Diabetes type 2 younger and younger, at an increasing rate?

The answer is simple; carbohydrates.

Most of our carbs come from plants more closely related to grass(corn, wheat), than to a vegetable

Solution: eat grass fed animals, eat lots of root and leafy green vegetables and some fruit ... ditch the soda, pizza, pasta, burgers, donuts, etc.

>>(...) evolution has been an insanely successful theory. We literally wouldn't have today's understanding of biology without it.

If you and the previous commenter give some documented examples, you might make me believe in macro-evolution again. I already believe DNA allows certain variation within species ( micro-evolution ).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroevolution

>> You seem to be terribly confused. First, there has been no "retraction", just publication of two papers which disagree with the original one.

I'll trust you on that one

>> the actual claim was "We found this bacterium living in an arsenic-rich environment on earth , (....) That never meant "OMG BACTERIA CAN GROW ABSOLUTELY ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE!!!!!".

You're quite alone in your opinion. I googled hundred of major magazines, newspapers and blogs. They somehow made the same association I did:

Time magazine: “Scientists who hope to discover alien life someday”
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2034601,00.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8174040/Life-as-we-dont-know-it-discovery-could-prove-existence-of-aliens.html
http://news.yahoo.com/scientists-nasas-form-life-untrue-015324767.html
http://gizmodo.com/5704158/nasa-finds-new-life

>>You're parroting a really stupid creationist lie () that Zadel's fraud had anything to do with evolution or abiogenesis.(...)nobody outside of creationists ever thought Zadel's paper had any implications for abiogenesis.

On the hoax, the reputable Science magazine stated:
"they initially hailed the result, which appeared to have major implications for the pharmaceutical industry as well as for understanding of the origins of life."
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/pdf_extract/265/5168/21

>> failed fruit fly experiments ( ) you've grossly misinterpreted the meaning of the results as a fatal failure for evolution. (The abstract you linked pretty clearly indicates that evolution took place!)

The abstract states: “We conclude that, at least for life history characters such as development time, unconditionally advantageous alleles RARELY arise, are associated with SMALL net fitness gains or CANNOT FIX because selection coefficients change over time.” [ emphasis mine ] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20844486

>> nothing more than an example of creationist quote mining

I did not mine for quotes. I was informed of many problems of abiogenesis at a presentation by Dr. Wing Sung. Such as lack of protection from UV damage in reducing atmospheres and from oxidation reactions in atmospheres like ours.

Background on Dr. Sung: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoVZe1NhmOI

I still have photocopies of his presentation slides with sidenotes in Mandarin. I can scan and email them to you if you like.

>> (...) have to expect from people who have decided that anything which contradicts their interpretation of a religious text must ipso facto be false. (...) They're not in it to discover reality, they're in it to preserve their delusions.

Before seeing Dr. Sung's presentation, I used to be a theistic evolutionist. I accepted your “reality”, sir. I accept the gap theory.

It seems to me like:
1. The FTC is actually doing something about these complaints. As you said yourself, they've taken people to court and gotten convictions, e.g.
Time on the ever-popular "This is Rachel from Cardholder Services" scam. My guess is that the office that handles this is not staffed to handle all the complaints, though, so they probably count up the complaints and only really go after the top offenders.
2. Most of the problems with catching spammers also apply to catching phone scammers, like finding them in the first place. They make all sorts of efforts to hide who they really are, because they know law enforcement is after them.
3. The "corporate veil" (where employees are not personally liable if their company breaks the law) is protecting the scammers from going to jail or losing some of their own money, which means that scammers can just form a new company and keep scamming if they get caught. Full disclosure: I'm not a fan of the corporate veil, because it means that if somebody gets told to break the law, it's safer to do so and remain employed than to blow the whistle and likely lose your job.

Thank you for the article, Timothy. I would have never seen the retraction without it. I would have kept on believing that bacteria can grow in any planetary environment.

You seem to be terribly confused. First, there has been no "retraction", just publication of two papers which disagree with the original one. The original researcher still stands by her claims. (She's almost certainly wrong, but sometimes people in the spotlight get stubborn about backtracking.)

Second, the actual claim of the original paper was more or less "We found this bacterium living in an arsenic-rich environment on earth , and we think it's using arsenic as a substitute for phosphorous." Arsenic acts enough like phosphorous chemically that it's somewhat (but only somewhat, as I understand it) plausible that maybe bacteria could evolve to use it. That never meant "OMG BACTERIA CAN GROW ABSOLUTELY ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE!!!!!".

In 1996, NASA claimed Cyanobacteria where found in Meteorites - debunked in same magazine ( http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2057461,00.html ).

Are you noticing a theme here? I'll give you a hint: it's NASA.

I am tired of scientists who foist their beliefs on us. In 1994, at the University of Bonn, Guido Zadel was found spiking the chemical solution in an experiment "proving" earth's magnetic field could select the correct building blocks of life. (Science, July 1, 1994). (...) Hoaxes require a motive. I think they are desperately trying to prop up their dead theory until they find that elusive evidence that exonerates it.

You're parroting a really stupid creationist lie.

The scientific fraud part was real enough, mind you. Zadel's doctorate was revoked for a good reason. The creationist lie is that Zadel's fraud had anything to do with evolution or abiogenesis. Zadel's paper claimed that the combination of a magnetic field over 1 tesla and certain reagents could cause selective reactions:

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cen-v072n026.p007

The Earth's magnetic field strength at the surface is over 10 million times weaker than ~1 Tesla (look it up, you can easily find this information on wikipedia), so no, nobody outside of creationists ever thought Zadel's paper had any implications for abiogenesis. Zadel's research was about finding newer, cheaper ways of accomplishing selective synthesis in a non-biological industrial process.

This is nothing more than an example of creationist quote mining. Instead of trying to formulate real arguments in favor of creationism, creationists spend their time digging through scientific papers and other writings for any tidbit which can be used out of context to lie about what science says and does. It's a deeply dishonest approach to intellectual discourse. But that's what you have to expect from people who have decided that anything which contradicts their interpretation of a religious text must ipso facto be false. They're not in it to discover reality, they're in it to preserve their delusions.

In 1808, John Dalton started modern atomic theory. Decade after decade, it opened up avenues of research. We consistently generated scientific laws based on the initial premise — ultimately finding the Higgs Boson to complete the standard model. Darwin proposed evolution in 1859. By now, we should have scientific laws culled from the initial premise.

Uh, I hate to break it to you, but evolution has been an insanely successful theory. We literally wouldn't have today's understanding of biology without it.

We should not be finding lethal problems with the initial theory.

We aren't. Darwin's ideas have not all stood the test of time, but there haven't been any "lethal" problems. Especially not with his most central and fa

Yeah but that requirement is obviously driven by the presence of human-piloted vehicles on the roadways.

Would be nice if you had reference what you mean by "that requirement"... Assuming you mean it in reference to dedicated roadways, it's not 'human-piloted' that's the issue, so much as the sheer volume of traffic. 250 million cars on the road is 250 million cars on the road, regardless of who's controlling them.

On top of that, thanks to our continuing foray into the abject failure that is trickle-down economics (/rant), people are hanging on their cars for much, much longer... If the trend continues, 25 years from now the majority of cars on the road very well may be 2012 model years.

In 25 years, do you think you'll be able to drive your own car anymore? I doubt it. Autonomous vehicles are coming, and I suspect that in a quarter century we'll be regulating human-operated vehicles off public roads.

First off, assuming we don't extinguish our species by then (always a possibility), who gets to drive what and where will be the least of our problems.

Second, 25 years is a long time in the socio-political and technological sense. Who knows what might happen? Any prediction that far out is pretty much guaranteed to be incorrect. Otherwise, we'd all have been flying our jetpacks to moon condos by the 1980s.

Thrid, no, I don't think I'll be able to drive my own car, I know it, and for several seemingly obvious reasons:

- Not everyone will want/be able to jump on to the self-driving car bandwagon.
- Preventing people from operating their own motor vehicles on publicly funded roads is a Constitutional violation of the right to travel freely
- Upgrades to the entire country's infrastructure would have to be decided, approved, and funded by Congress... you know, the fucktards who are typically so busy arguing about petty bullshit like spoiled 8-year-olds, they appear incapable of so much as considering such important matters.
- Again from the political angle, "regulating human-operated vehicles off public roads" sound commie. Nobody (in America, from an idiot-political standpoint) likes commies.
- There are almost 60 million miles of paved roads that would have to be altered, and another million miles of unpaved roads which, more than likely, would be ignored. No big deal for those living in highly urbanized areas, but what about those of us who live in the boonies? Your self-driving car would never make it within 10 miles of my country home.
- "Death by GPS," only w/ self-driving cars, you can't blame it on human error. Can't wait for the flood of lawsuits because of a simple map glitch (['turning left here' "Shit, that's a ravine, NNNNNOOOOOOOOOooooooooo..." SPLAT] * [every car on the road] = [one really big fucking mess])

I do imagine there will be a fair number of automated autos on the roads within the next 25 years, but the idea that they will completely replace human-controlled autos is specious at best.

Thank you for the article, Timothy. I would have never seen the retraction without it. I would have kept on believing that bacteria can grow in any planetary environment. In 1996, NASA claimed Cyanobacteria where found in Meteorites - debunked in same magazine ( http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2057461,00.html ). I am tired of scientists who foist their beliefs on us. In 1994, at the University of Bonn, Guido Zadel was found spiking the chemical solution in an experiment "proving" earth's magnetic field could select the correct building blocks of life. (Science, July 1, 1994). To explain, all living organisms are built out of left-handed amino acids enantiomers (See 1). But in a theorized prebiotic soup, right handed D (dextro) amino acids are ever-present in the solution 50/50. Like a poison to life, they produce useless malformed proteins because the amino acid chains fold in the wrong direction when proteins are manufactured. Currently, only fully-formed life can efficiently select L amino acids on the scale required to feed a living ( reproducing ) manufacturing plants of manufacturing machines that we call a cell. Breitmaier and Zadel were trying to "solve the problem" with a hoax and gain notoriety for doing so. Hoaxes require a motive. I think they are desperately trying to prop up their dead theory until they find that elusive evidence that exonerates it. In 1808, John Dalton started modern atomic theory. Decade after decade, it opened up avenues of research. We consistently generated scientific laws based on the initial premise — ultimately finding the Higgs Boson to complete the standard model. Darwin proposed evolution in 1859. By now, we should have scientific laws culled from the initial premise. We should not be finding lethal problems with the initial theory. Scientists are still mucking about with failed fruit fly experiments. They are on the 600th generation ( see 2 ). Anyone who claims to know the truth about the origins of life is following a religion no matter if it is disguised in the language of science. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enantiomer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiral#Chemistry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amino_acid#Isomerism 2. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20844486

http://techland.time.com/2012/04/23/dnschanger-fbi-warns-infected-computers-will-lose-web-email-access-in-july/

"DNSChanger targets Windows or Mac systems (Linux, iOS and Android users are in the clear) by manipulating Domain Name Servers (DNS), which translate syntax-based URLs into IP addresses. "

I searched time.com for asia pacific gateway, and TIME Magazine has nothing to say about it. I wonder if there's a potential trademark case between TIME and TIME.

Ah, the old "Christians were just defending themselves in the Crusades!". Explain the Albigensian Crusade then, 1 million killed because the Pope ordered the complete extermination of a competing Christian sect. "These heretics are worse than the Saracens!" exclaimed Pope Innocent III, and on March 10, 1208, he proclaimed a crusade against a sect in southern France that became one of the bloodiest blots in European history.

Some say there are links between Bin Laden family and the White House. The attack was very convenient for beefing up military and invading random foreign countries, something that Bush promised to do during elections in 2000. This also raises some questions about Bin Laden's assasination: why kill him, why not bring him to trial? Was it Bin Laden who was killed or some innocent scapegoat? Was Obama afraid that some inconvenient facts would surface during a public trial?

Most of the commenters here will twist this story into how the US is somehow evil, and drone on (pun intended) about how the US and West governments and/or corporations and/or political systems are what's wrong with the world, when in reality, people are suffering and dying under actual tyranny and oppression.

Like in Syria.

You are absolutely right, and absolutely wrong.

In December of 2001, U.S. agents arranged to have a German citizen flown to a Syrian jail called the Palestine Branch, renowned for its use of torture, and later offered to pass written questions to Syrian interrogators to pose to the prisoner, according to a secret German intelligence report shown to TIME on Wednesday. The report is described in the new book Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program by British investigative journalist Stephen Grey. The complex arrangement was part of the CIA's sprawling practice of extraordinary renditions, the secret transfer of terror suspects to hidden prisons across the world -- which has involved the aid of numerous foreign governments and the knowledge of key Western European allies, according to the book, which was shown to TIME by the author. After U.S. officials long refused to confirm the CIA's secret detention of terror suspects abroad, President Bush last month admitted that terror suspects had been transferred abroad to secret CIA facilities, but U.S. officials continue to deny that such prisoners have been tortured, saying that foreign governments assured them that they would be treated fairly.

Inside the CIA's Secret Prisons Program, Time Magazine, 2006

And before you backpedal on what happened to Maher Arar:

This week the Supreme Court denied, without comment, the appeal of Maher Arar, a dual citizen of Canada and Syria who was arrested in transit through JFK airport in 2002, then shipped off to Syria and tortured for 10 months. Arar's abuse allegedly included repeated beatings with electrical cables and confinement in a cell the size of a grave. When they realized they had the wrong guy -- the really, totally, and utterly innocent guy -- Arar was released without charges. He was then completely exonerated of any link to terror by the Canadian government, which impaneled a commission to investigate the incident, issued a 1,000-plus-page report on the matter, held its own intelligence forces responsible for their role in the screw-up, then apologized and paid Arar $9.8 million. Whereas the U.S. government -- as Glenn Greenwald observes -- has never apologized, never acknowledged any wrongdoing, never held anyone responsible, and, on President Barack Obama's watch, has only redoubled its efforts to prevent Arar from having even a single day in court.

So, we took an innocent man, illegally shipped him off to Syria (probably in exchange for easing off pressure on the Assad regime), tortured him, and now we're denying him his day in court to hold our government to account. Stop pretending that you, or the American government, has any principled position on matters of human rights. Syrian torture facilities are just dandy when we want to use them. The fact is that we have put more bodies in the ground this decade than the Assad regime has in it's entire family history.

That's why you focus on Assange, instead of dealing with what his organization has revealed. The truth isn't important to you. Protecting American state power is. Oddly enough, the American government keeps telling me that they're free to subpoena everything about me and my life, and that I should have nothing to fear if I have nothing to hide, and now we're saying the same thing. Why is the American government so afraid of the truth?

As a huge world power, they've got lots of little people like you, desperately clinging at the teat of the empire, ready to kill eno

It's complicated.

Perhaps he should fight extradition on human rights grounds -- as a paedophile successfully did.

I'll just leave this here...

Interesting outcome in Portugal after 5 years and after 10 years - there were warnings of doom if they decriminalised at the time - all the drug addicts in europe were going to move to Portugal apparently. Big difference between decriminalised and legalised (imo) though.