Slashdot Mirror

The social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook say that they are platforms, and therefore they should not be held liable for awful things that people say on their platforms. They aren't curated information streams like a newspaper, where nothing is published without editorial oversight.

However, they have been indulging in quite a bit of curation. And it hasn't been even-handed. If they like you, you can literally get away with inciting violence; if they don't like you, they will strike you down or shadow-ban you for any reason or no reason.

There are numerous cases of conservatives being suspended or banned from social media over relatively mild stuff (for example, telling a journalist to "Learn to code") while liberals can make jokes about the President being assassinated, wish for conservative people's children to be raped, etc. The post "#MAGAkids go screaming, hats first, into the woodchipper" did not result in any punishment from Twitter. This tweet was accompanied with a cartoon picture of a man feeding a body into a woodchipper and bloody snow. By "#MAGAkids" he meant some high school students who were in the news at the time.

https://www.rt.com/usa/449368-disney-producer-threatens-maga-kids/

Keith Olbermann wrote on Twitter these words: "we should do our best to make sure the rest of his life is a living hell." Who was the target of his wrath? A man who had a permit to hunt turkeys who shot a turkey. Olbermann has a million followers and some of them went on to harass the hunter. Twitter did not punish Olbermann in any way. (Faced by a backlash of bad publicity, Olbermann made a follow-up tweet saying that his words were not intended as an actual threat.)

https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2019/03/27/keith-olbermann-urges-followers-make-hunters-life-living-hell-killing-rare-turkey/

I found an article that claims that a statistical analysis shows that this isn't just a few anecdotes, it's a trend.

https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-twitter-treats-conservatives-more-harshly-than-liberals/

I tried to use Facebook Messenger to send a link to a satirical essay. It would not allow me to send it, and it gave a totally nonsense reason. I just tried it again just now and the same thing happened; here's the error:

It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You've been blocked from using it.

Learn more about blocks in the Help Center.
If you think this doesn't go against our Community Standards let us know.

I was "going too fast"? After not using Messenger for over 24 hours, I attempted to send a single URL, so that message is clearly nonsense. Obviously I was merely guilty of wrongthink. The essay makes the point that the USA is spending so much money that it's not possible to "soak the rich" to pay for it all, using a sort of reducto ad absurdium. Clearly someone who works for Facebook doesn't like this essay or doesn't like "Iowahawk". If you want to read this forbidden essay, here you go:

Iowahawk: Feed Your Family on 10 Billion a Day

Then there is the current controversy over Twitter apparently shadowbanning the movie Unplanned. So far Twitter has adamantly maintained that everything that looked like shadowbanning was just buggy code, but this seems really egregious. The Unplanned Twitter account at one point had more followers than Planned Parenthood, and then suddenly it had zero followers. Peopl

https://justoneminute.typepad....

“A committed, lifelong Green pounds the table for nuclear power. People familiar with the baseload problem and the unreliable nature of wind and solar won’t find the plot surprising, but the detailed studies of California’s seasonal use and generation from wind and solar were new to me.”

"WHY THE DNC WAS NOT HACKED BY THE RUSSIANS"

William Binney, former Technical Director NSA
Larry Johnson, former State CT and CIA

https://turcopolier.typepad.co...

Good.

"it's easy to spend other people's money" = Republicanism in a nutshell

What planet are you from?

On EARTH the tax & spend people call themselves "liberal", "progressive" or "socialist", but in reality are Marxist. Bloomberg describes how the Democrats want to reverse tax cuts and add $1 Trillion on tax hikes IF they win this midterm and in 2020. For sure they will use some of the tax money put more people on welfare so they'll become dependent on gov handouts.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news...

https://www.atr.org/democrats-...

https://www.watchdog.org/natio...

https://www.reviewjournal.com/...

http://illinoisreview.typepad....

Here's the truth:
https://www.investors.com/poli...

Companies and people have a sole duty to lower there tax bill as much as possible. If it isn't written in law do not give Uncle Sam anymore than the law says.

Here's the quote you were fishing-for:

http://intltax.typepad.com/int...

Associate Justice Leondra Kruger said in a separate opinion that she agreed that the removal order against Yelp was invalid, but for a different reason. Hassell did not name Yelp as a defendant, so the company did not get its âoeown day in court,â Kruger said.

This is the main problem though. Yelp was not a party to the lawsuit, so it's patently unfair to bind them to the judgment between two totally other parties.

What's more, these sort of third-party orders create the incentive for sloppy or outright fraudulent behavior. For instance, Google will voluntarily de-list a webpage if a court has found it defamatory. Sounds good, but what happens is that folks will find or invent a defendant that claims to have authored the webpage and who settles the lawsuit with an admission of libel. And this is where the "not a party" thing comes in -- when a court sees a plaintiff and a defendant agreeing to a settlement, it doesn't look too hard at it because the court (rightly, in most cases) assumes the parties have represented their own interests.

So you have an entire cottage industry of reputation-management companies filing real lawsuits against fake defendants in order to either request or demand takedown.

In a few cases, the lawyers have gotten in trouble (their defense: the reputation-management company did it, and while we didn't look too hard we were also not required to), but it's a reasonable guess that many more are getting away with it. The costs are basically zero, since there's no investigation or trial. Hell, from top to bottom they've gotten these done in 4 days, which in court terms is roughly equivalent to ludicrous speed.

This is getting way TLDR, but the only legal recourse is to say that if Alice sues Bob, she can only get an order binding Bob. If she wants an order binding Carol as well, she has to give Carol proper notice, in advance, and an opportunity to scrutinize the case and be heard in court.

It's kinda funny that Trudeau cites "diversity" as their strength. Canada has a higher percentage of white folks per capita than the US, or at least has historically.
http://worthwhile.typepad.com/...
Their largest non-white demographic, unlike the US, is Asian. To some groups like BLM, that doesn't really even count.

... says 25 year old white man.

It's kinda funny that Trudeau cites "diversity" as their strength. Canada has a higher percentage of white folks per capita than the US, or at least has historically.
http://worthwhile.typepad.com/...
Their largest non-white demographic, unlike the US, is Asian. To some groups like BLM, that doesn't really even count.

For extend, play with this interactive viewer. The decrease is, of course, not monotonous year over year, but the long term trend is depressingly obvious...

Remember. Earth day is next month.

You have posted the story about Korea's car taxes before. Would you mind providing references?

I have been googling a bit (also including the name Gephardt) and the closest what I can find is this:

http://benmuse.typepad.com/kor... : "All imported cars were legally banned in Korea until 1989, while the country was furiously building its own auto industry" (and there is more in that article)

And https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... : "Automobile Industry Promotion Policy in 1962, ... Foreign automakers were barred from operating in Korea, except in joint ventures with local business entities."

I first invented the methodology of connecting metal cylindrical communication nodes with a semi-tensioned fiber, thereby providing the very first internet. http://p1start.typepad.com/.a/...

You are providing free data to Google who sells it to companies who need to pay advertising. So you pay Google through the products you buy from companies that do online advertising.
The "Google ecosystem" is just a honeypot to get your data.
Same story for Facebook.
The business model of these (and many other "tech" companies) is to squeeze in between customers and sellers by luring away consumers and then charging the sellers for getting them back.
Seth Godin as explained it nicely here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/s...

The Laffer Curve dead-enders have been refuted time and time again in economics studies. Your example of 0% vs 100% tax rates don't really bear out in real life. We've been hearing this quasi-religious dedication to supply-sideism since the 1970s and it just doesn't happen. It increases the wealth of the top fraction of a percent, and degrades the wealth of everyone below that.

http://economistsview.typepad....

Until a few years ago, my parents were still using a 16" CRT TV with a built in VCR player. Really looked quite Space 1999'ish with the square 4:3 aspect ratio. Still have a memory of seeing those monochrome globe TV sets along with a sphere chair and thinking that would be so cool for my room.
(Apparently, the fibreglass chipped really easily so they broke quickly)

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini...
http://modculture.typepad.com/...

https://media.fds.fi/product_i...

Yeah, I was REALLY impressed that they somehow scared-up about 6 of those for the first Men In Black movie, in the "Interview" scene. It was hilarious to see those guys trying to figure out how to fill-out their questionnaires up against the sides of those egg-chairs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I would really like to have one, and put some nice surface-mount car speakers in it. How retro would that be?!?

Until a few years ago, my parents were still using a 16" CRT TV with a built in VCR player. Really looked quite Space 1999'ish with the square 4:3 aspect ratio. Still have a memory of seeing those monochrome globe TV sets along with a sphere chair and thinking that would be so cool for my room.
(Apparently, the fibreglass chipped really easily so they broke quickly)

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini...
http://modculture.typepad.com/...

https://media.fds.fi/product_i...

See: Goodhart's Law, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

Japan has an initial annual leave entitlement of 10 days. They also work less hours per week average than in the US.

South Korea has 15 days leave, and 40 hour work week enshrined in law. The 40 hour limit isn't universally enforced, but the company I worked for there enforced it.

The US has no required paid vacation, and no ban on mandatory overtime. 23% of US Employers offer no paid vacation at all. There are a few industries/jobs that have restrictions on overtime, but not many.

Higher productivity recently has meant more automation, which does result in better quality of life for the owners of the company, but does not result in higher quality of life for the workers out of a job, or the lower wages in general that usually result from more automation. GDP vs. income is a better measure or quality of life, and it hasn't kept pace. http://economistsview.typepad....

Cell phone data transmission standards are NOT even AN example of where on the sliding scale of socialism/capitalism a country falls, as 70-75% of the world uses GSM, and it's usage is not determined by political ideology. It's kind of stupid to have two "standards" in the same country. And since the US has the 35th fastest mobile internet speeds, it's nothing to brag about.

There is absolutely no basis for the assertion that cell speeds would have been slower if the US adopted GSM only. They are much more likely to be faster if the whole world was working on making the same thing faster instead of wasting resources on deploying a second standard. And most likely cheaper, as they wouldn't have had to license anything. It's not like the CDMA standard uses anything incredibly novel or difficult to figure out, it's just that they locked up the patents on it in the mobile space, requiring licensing.

This study may partly explain why models drastically underestimated Arctic sea ice loss: http://neven1.typepad.com/.a/6...

Possibly sea ice loss due to man made global warming is in line with projections, but natural variability causes the observed melting to oscillate outside of projections. If so we should see the melt rate slow over the next few decades.

Here's how arctic sea ice has fared relative to IPCC projections: http://neven1.typepad.com/.a/6...

So in other words, you'd rather just hand the EU over to Putin.

Point 1. Motive.
Your fear-mongering is so hyperbolic it's hard to take you seriously. The Russians, and Putin in particular, are pretty damn pragmatic. Russia has enough budget problems sustaining not-so-covert combat operations in Ukraine and very overt operations in Syria. Can the Russian government AFFORD to invade the EU? What would the cost-benefit analysis for that be? What is the end state? Russia's primary concern for the past decade has been US ABM sites in their near abroad. The ABMs themselves came after the US unilaterally withdrew from the ABM treaty. These concerns have fallen on deaf ears in Washington:
2016: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/...
2008: https://sputniknews.com/russia...
2001: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12...

In the absence of US missiles destabilizing the balance of Mutually Assured Destruction, Russia's force structure was primarily aligned for counter-insurgency in the Caucasus, not conquest of Europe. http://turcopolier.typepad.com... And given that Russia has fought 2 devastating wars against military alliances attacking from the West in the past 100 years, are you really surprised that they are unwilling to give the US & NATO the benefit of the doubt?

Point 2. Logistics
Have you looked at a map lately? Kaliningrad to Warsaw: 275km. Kaliningrad to Vilnius: 300km St. Petersburg to Helsinki: ~350km
Even the US military, probably the king of expeditionary logistics, strains to support a 300-400km mechanized blitz with a 3-6 month buildup.
The Russians hit Tskhinvali pretty quickly but that's barely 140km from Nalchik. They have not demonstrated the ability to sustain a brigade or larger element at the distances required, let alone multiple axes of advance against national capitals in a short timeframe (such as all 3 of the Baltic States).

Finally....you have yet to spell out exactly why I should get my legs blown off so the (numerous, tall, and well-fed) sons of Europe can sleep peaceably in their beds. How is the "EU handed over to Putin" undermining my quality of life as an American expat in Asia? Can you even begin to actually articulate that, in real terms? Or are you only capable of posting one-liners of empty rhetoric?

"Boiling seas" is needless hyperbole. The truth is startling enough. This is one year and it's not clear that this dramatic excursion from the trend isn't just an anomaly. Anyone interested in polar ice should follow Neven's Arctic Sea Ice Blog

I've had a similar experience to yours. Three months pushing through the side effects including erectile dysfunction, inability to reach orgasm and then full blown loss of libido. I didn't experience the change in identity but had a slew of other effects. I quit overnight and had the 'brain zaps' and depression.

The reason I'm replying is that it took months before my sex drive started to come back, months more before it was even close to 'normal' and longer again before I had any confidence in that. Not great news, but hang in there. Getting back to regular exercise helped me. Trying to eat well and making sure to get 10-20 minutes of direct sunlight each day. I also had some success with magnesium supplements You're recovering from putting your brain through a wringer. It will take time to settle down. In the mean time, do what you can to get there and don't beat yourself up for not being able to do as much as you might want to.

It will get better.

I've been hearing a lot of talk about "Give Trump a chance", and "let's judge him when he gets to office" by people who voted against him, but are practical enough to want a good leader.

However, this seems to be a pattern with Trump - using donors or people who already agree with him in key positions and advisors. His economic team consists of big donors, and discredited hacks like Stephen Moore and Larry Kudlow (this is non-partisan; even economic advisors of previous republicans presidents don't agree with Moore). He takes an climate-change skeptic (Myron Ebell) to lead the EPA transition.

Yet, I haven't heard a peep from most people who supported Trump about this. The "blue collar" crowd who supported him was about people sick of "Establishment politics", and instead wanted someone "looking out for the working class". Trump's isolationist and trade-war leaning policies, and embrace of supply-side economics have a proven record of hurting workers. Together with clear cronyism (to be fair, this was obvious before the election), I'm surprised that the "blue collar" crowd isn't even slightly upset.

Trump's supporters seem to still be in the post-game high - "Our team won!"; are they going to hold him to his (crazy) campaign promises? Are they going to expect him to loosen libel laws, build a wall, bring back sweatshop factory jobs? A co-worker remarked "Trump's victory speech was a step towards healing", instead of realizing that the stirred up crazy is still out there; he doesn't get credit for not being as crazy enough to follow through on his campaign promises.

My stab at an answer, based on reading Seth's blog for over a year:

• Embrace your tribe (made up of people who love your product) and encourage its members to help it grow. A strong tribe will bring many repeat customers as well as new customers.
• Focus on producing a quality product over providing "value for money". The former will engage your tribe, while the latter will just put you on track for a race to the bottom.
• Employ people who are as excited about your product as you are. This goes double for employees who interact with your customers.
• Set aside time to work on big ideas. Ideas that other people dismiss as "that will never work". Then implement them and enjoy their success or learn from their failure.
• Do not let your critics define what you do, including your inner critic. Listen to them, but be wary of their advice.

His answer will probably also include "read my blog or one of my books you can download for free and share with your friends".

When I'm president, we're not going to have these weak "semi" conductors, we're going to have full conductors...

A full conductor.

KDE is not dead at all, not even by a long shot. I'm using the latest Plasma 5 desktop in Slackware (current) and I find it lean, fast, and quite stable.

I think the problem lies in the fact that the codebase is quite big and the developer base is shrinking. There are not many hobbyists working on it right now, and there are simply no distros sponsorinng any paid developers to work on KDE. The result is that there are a lot of emblematic KDE apps/frameworks which still need to be ported to Plasma 5, such as Kile or Krusader, KHTML, or Reqonk (some may say that some of those apps/frameworks are already ported but there are no releases of them). One by one, the applications and frameworks get abandoned.

Among the latest to suffer this behavior was KDE-Telepathy, which is right now losing its maintainer.

So, there was a time where several distros sponsored some developers, and there were also other high-profile developers working on KDE as a hobby. These got new jobs, so their involvement in KDE had to be cut, and there was no replacement in sight.

I think KDE is trying to correct the problem. They are a good community, but to be honest, it is a difficult process.

The problem is that they do not offer a more convenient alternative. You might remember how it is.

Even having to spend 2 days to find a new torrent source beats this.

http://mediatrackers.org/wisco...
http://www.washingtontimes.com...
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news...
http://www.campusreform.org/?I...
http://www.mediaite.com/online...
http://taxprof.typepad.com/tax...
http://www.climatedepot.com/20...
http://freebeacon.com/issues/s...
http://overlawyered.com/2015/0...
http://legalinsurrection.com/2...
http://dailycaller.com/2014/03...

When my father first brought one home from Shell (Compaq Portable), I though it was a new Singer sewing machine for my mother. That is, until after he removed the cover.

Well you can tell him about it here: http://questioneverything.type...

"The Guardian is attempting to convince readers that its columnists - those heroic truth-to-power-speakers – are, unlike writers for any other national paper, continually besieged by an ungrateful rabble, and that an alleged avalanche of sexist, racist readers’ comments proves how righteous and heroic said columnists are in their truth-to-power speaking."

http://davidthompson.typepad.c...

Too easy

Fail. You did not include links to predictions — only to the supposed confirmations. The reason I insist on seeing links separated by space and time is that it is too easy otherwise to pick 1 "successful" guess out of 1000 less successful ones. For example, I can reliably "predict", how a coin falls, by making two guesses and publishing only one of them after I know the actual result.

Which is why I wrote:

Each of your two (or more) examples must contain a link to the prediction and a link to confirmation...

and then added:

the two links in each example I'd expect be themselves different and several years apart

That said, I can't help but notice, that your second example does not even claim a successful prediction! According to it, the actual data for 2012 is far outside the supposedly predicted range.

Too easy: http://uclu.org/sites/uclu.org... and http://neven1.typepad.com/.a/6...

It is incorrect to conflate prostitution and human trafficking. Even if every street-prostitute could be shown to be willingly engaged, that does not mean that there isn't a separate market for people kidnapped against their will. I doubt I could back this up with statistics because of the nature of the crime. People get estranged from their families and disappear into cults like scientology and EST/landmark-education never to be heard from again. I lived in a house where the owners were involved in EST and one of them went missing, abandoning her dog and belongings in Texas. She was spotted in NM and the only evidence afterward was cryptic blog post about "finding her new home". Case unsolved.
http://www.inquisitr.com/50063...
There are reports about attempted kidnappings of children every couple days in LA. What do you think the purpose of those kidnappings is?

        I have run into 'traveling magazine sales vans' since I was a teenager hanging out in places that I probably shouldn't have. I once told them I would join up and had them give a ride across town. I just jumped out and bolted into the woods instead of going to pick up my stuff like I had told them. I knew it was some scammy shit but I thought I was invincible at the time, so I was just trying to get a free taxi ride. These people learn to spot victims that have fallen through the cracks of society.
http://america.aljazeera.com/a...
http://lizditz.typepad.com/i_s...

        The most valuable thing for a good portion of humanity is sex, especially for people who already have plenty of money. I have heard stories from Mexican girls in East LA about being sold back and forth between gang members for thousands of dollars. They don't even try and report it to the police because they think no one will believe them. Gangs or cults have made it into a profession to control every aspect of a person's life. The street term for someone marked for sale is a "barbie doll". There is a lot more to the criminal underworld than what makes it to the police blotter.

They are conflated--trafficking is a source of women who are prostituted against their will and don't see a way out. It is common for men to purchase sex with trafficking victims and never have a clue the person is coerced.

Fracking uses 0.00062% of California's freshwater. Nestle bottled water uses 0.0035%. You're hyperventilating over a non-issue. Source

How's this for tip number one. Logically if they have the technology to make it here, they will also likely have the technology to hide being here (as evidenced by slow but sure advances in our own stealth technology), so logically if they are seen it is only because they want to be seen. The only logical reason for them being here, of course the great show we are putting on, now that's some real reality TV, assuming advances in technology, 3D sensorama, feel what the short hair crested rock throwing monkey people feel. As for communicating look up into the sky and https://www.youtube.com/watch?..., try to avoid the stabby bits but don't forget to be entertaining.

All in all still really childish to be scared into denial (please on please let there be no aliens in a universe of galaxies, or so sillily arrogant, oh yeah we are so special only we can exist in an entire fucking galaxy, uh huh ). Where life can exist it will and where environmental conditions promote the advantage of the adaptability of intelligence over slower physical evolution it will. When societies can advance sufficiently to travel the stars without destroying itself they will. Our location and the age of the galaxy, means the math puts us very, very (billions of years) late in the game. Suck it up and grow up, what does it mean, not much at all, live, eat, work, fuck, sleep, die. You can bet, logically they will not want the show to end, that mass carnage without being directly involved in it, would be a thing of fascination. What will the crazy monkey people do next, blow themselves up with nukes, GMO themselves to death with a bad mutation, render their planet uninhabitable for themselves, maybe they take bets, maybe they have their favourites, maybe they can pry right in there with quantum remote sensing at a distance (in that case giddyup dobin and make the ride interesting).

Then again just http://johnfenzel.typepad.com/..., if it makes you feel better, so be it. Likely wont alter the entertainment value at all, just make it last longer and just like us, we never want our favourite shows to end, our favourite characters dying off (even when the emotions are so fulfilling) and then love to discuss what has happened and tried to guess what will happen next. A possible audience of trillions, which mean thousands might find any one of particular one of you fascinating, still likely dibs for the best rides.

What's "magical" about 1979 is that's the year the satellite that allowed us to continuously monitor and get detailed records of sea ice were launched. Here's a report on a study of Arctic sea ice extents back to 1935 using at least in part ships logs. As one of the authors of the report says it's not the last word on the subject but it does advance the science.

As for the rest of it I've been holding back but I have to say that most of the cites you make (WUWT, Steven Goddard, Murry Salby, etc) have no credibility with me. You might as well resign yourself to continued frustration because unless your side can put together a coherent narrative and make climate models that explain the current situation better than existing models you will continue to be ignored by most scientists.

Your "wiping the floor" comment made me laugh out loud. What I see in you is someone whose political leanings color your understanding of climate science. You don't like the obvious solutions so you seek out evidence that is counter to the mainstream, ignoring the stuff that doesn't fit your view. But physics doesn't care. It is what it is. As the future unfolds we'll see who is right but I'm pretty confident that the scientists in the mainstream are honestly reporting what they find.

The second amendment doesn't grant the right to keep and bear arms, it recognizes it as pre-existing

Is this sort of like a pre-existing condition, like kidney stones, or do you mean they were granted by Jesus or something?

And the data - is it in question? It comes from the IRS data itself, and has been published by the Tax Foundation for years and years. If it was in error, wouldn't someone have caught it by now?

Yes, it's in error, and yes, the Tax Foundation has been "caught" more than once.

http://economistsview.typepad....

http://www.cbpp.org/archives/t...

http://www.nj.com/opinion/inde...

http://mathbabe.org/2014/02/14...

http://angrybearblog.com/2012/...

http://www.citizensforethics.o...

The Tax Foundation is as phony as a three dollar bill.

In early 2008 Barack Obama campaigned publicly for the support of educators by pointing to his plan for education which on page 15 explicitly said:

"The early education plan will be paid for by delaying the NASA Constellation Program for five years"

Everybody with a brain knew that would end Constellation and all the people transitioning from Shuttle to Constellation would lose their jobs (given that none of the vendors would be able to keep employing those people for 5 years with no cash flowing in from the customer (NASA).

Democrats in the "swing state" of Florida were panicky over this, and aware that space advocates might know about it since the long-standing Obama plan had been reported in space advocate circles as early as fall of 2007, so they setup a big space event for Obama in Florida to fool the space workers. In August 2008, assisted by his go-to guys for fooling space advocates (Senators Glenn and Nelson) Obama went to Titusville and said this:

"Today we have an administration[Bush43] that sets ambitious goals for NASA without giving NASA the support it needs to reach them. As a result, NASA's had to cut back on research, trim their program, which means that after the space shuttle shuts down in 2010, we're going to have to rely on Russian space craft to keep us into orbit. So let me be clear: we cannot cede our leadership in space. That's why I'm going to close the gap, ensure that our space program doesn't suffer when the shuttle goes out of service. We may extend an additional shuttle launch. We're going to work with [Senator]Bill Nelson[D-FL] to add at least one flight after 2010 by continuing to support NASA funding, by speeding the development of the shuttle's successor, by making sure that all those who work in the space industry in Florida do not lose their jobs when the shuttle is retired because we cant afford to lose their expertise." - Barack Obama

President Obama won Florida in 2008 by only a 2.8% margin. Space workers are obviously not enough to make up that entire margin, but they were PART of that margin, which is what "community organizing" aided by "micro targeting" is all about - rounding up lots of special interest groups and pushing the right emotional/political "buttons" to get each group to turn-out and vote even if some groups are turning out having been told this will support interest X and others are turning out having been told it will oppose interest X. Some Obama supporters now try to pretend that Obama meant something other than Constellation as the successor to Shuttle, but at this time in history, none other was proposed by any candidate or policy so Space Workers were clearly supposed to assume Constellation, particularly given the line about preserving ALL their jobs.

By 2012 when Newt Gingrich was talking about a moon colony, even 60 minutes, hardly a right-wing news outlet, had to admit to the dishonesty of the 2008 campaign visit to Florida.

It's a sad truth that many of the space advocacy groups are far more into partisan politics and helping politicians fool their members that they are into actual space policy; Space policy pays nothing, but you can make a good living consulting for and organizing groups of supporters for, national political campaigns. AFAIK none of the people who setup that 2008 event in Florida have ever apologized to any of the thousands of Space Coast workers who were fooled into voting for Obama and then lost their jobs (and in many cases l

Secondly, it's usually something like ALT+F keys that are trapped, not the F keys by themselves.

WordPerfect made heavy use of ALT+Fn, CTRL+Fn, SHIFT+Fn.

Maybe all top universities should study Perfection Wasted by John Updike, and encourage online discussion. Just watch the demographic change and the measurement become useless.

Can you imagine how bad the original Star Trek would have been if SJWs had been involved?

http://heydeadguy.typepad.com/...

Are you sure? Here's a NASA paper from 2012 that says: Mass Gains of the Antarctic Ice Sheet Exceed Losses. Same title as the current study. You may be thinking of the Arctic, which is losing volume at an accelerating rate: http://neven1.typepad.com/blog...

They have been preparing us for their code for thousands of years but only those who are in the know like this guy can read it correctly!

Just look at this. From nat. geo. Polar bear deaths

Fucking sad.

Fixed the link for ya. And well quoted point well taken but the implications of what is happening to the arctic are much further reaching than just the sudden extinction of the top predators!

And that is the whole issue in a nut shell. What is even more concerning is as the sea ice changes so does the ecosystem that supports the arctic cod that requires sea ice habitat. This in turn supports the summer populations of sea birds, seals and the food web of the arctic. So it gets much worse than that in a hurry. The entire food web of the arctic is now in chaos and we will see increased extinctions, the polar bears will be the first because they are at the top of the food web. Then the seals and finally the sea bird populations will crash.

The whales that live off krill will die off as the krill population crashes due to changes in currents. In some places there will be minor increases in local populations of specific species but by and large the large animals will all die off.

Our ocean fishery is doomed because of rapid climate change and within the next 20 years it will become obvious that what we have done to the environment of planet earth is going to starve us off as well. There is no stopping the coming extinction cycles. The only realistic solution is for us to evolve as a species and that evolution must be artificial. We need to genetically modify ourselves to survive. A body that can survive in low gravity is the answer, essentially a space cadet or grey alien like body with very light bone structure and a high resistance to extreme g forces seems the most sensible modifications. Perhaps this guy is right! I guess that is why my favourite movie of all time is a doomsday one. I consider myself lucky to be of the last generation that could have prevented the global extinctions and instead chose to go out with our collective heads in the oil sands of time believing that paving the planet would lead to a bright future! We have ignored the obvious warnings and we are doomed because of our greed and stupidity. The human race is not worth saving because it did not learn to rise above greed and the ensuing acts of war that tribalism creates. Our chance to become a single species is past and we instead are again falling into a narrow minded self serving tribal economic chaos which we call capitalism. We have lost the only chance we had to rise above greed and strife. Mother nature is about to cull the herd and it will be brutal because we are incapable of thinking beyond ourselves as individuals regardless of skull and bones and secret hand shakes and all the other bullshit that we delude ourselves with the human race is going to evolve and that evolution is not something which we have control over!

The way it all began

Well, presumably, the purpose of religion is to increase the founder's inclusive fitness.

http://gocomics.typepad.com/.a...