Slashdot Mirror

Your anecdote does not invalidate the data. The data is that medical bills are the number 1 cause of bankruptcy in the US. From the USA Today/Motley Fool article:

The New York Times reported that 20% of Americans under 65 with health insurance had trouble paying their medical bills over the past year. Of those, 63% claim to have used up all or most of their savings to tackle their healthcare expenses

So even if people have medical insurance, in many cases they are spending every dollar they have for medical costs. This doesn't happen in most other countries. A lot of "shitholes" can provide all their people with medical care, but in the US it's not possible because the people who are making a lot of money off of other people's misery are much too powerful because of the horrible political system. If campaign finance is fixed then maybe there is a chance for this to change, but currently both the corporate parties are currently fully bought and owned which is the same reason that we don't have universal gun background checks or legal marijuana even though a majority of the people support such measures. We used to have a representative government, and we still do, but now the representatives work for the corporations and the rich rather than for the general public.

They had to vote on the ACA bill first before they could find out what was in it.

Yes... the Democrats passed the ACA after 79 hearings, and about two months of discussion, including multiple amendments from Republicans: https://mic.com/articles/17630...

I was paying attention to the Republican complaint at how "quickly" ACA was passed right up until I saw how they decided to do in the "repeal and replace" bill, which was NO hearings, a bill written in secret, and an attempt to pass the bill before the budget office even stated what the cost would be.

Not to mention provisions being added to the bill handwritten in the margins overnight before voting... which no senators or representatives actually admitted to adding https://www.vox.com/policy-and....

The Republicans did everything that they accused the Democrats of doing, but even more so.

At least. Or $2,000 or more. Or $3,660. Ambulences are insanely expensive. And the new thing: insurance companies are deciding after you have been diagnosed and treated whether you needed the ambulence. They can decide "oh, that wasn't life-threatening, it just seemed like it to you, but since it was not a heart attack, we won't pay for an ambulance ride.": http://articles.latimes.com/20...

HOWEVER, ambulances also bypass the first stage of emergency room screening-- they have radioed ahead and you get right in and seen. They will also start keeping you alive the moment they arrive.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/health/think-the-er-was-expensive-look-at-the-ambulance-bill.html

They do offer ridesharing, though. There is UberPOOL and Lyft Line. They are even going to start bus-like routes.

The FBI *did* include information about the political motivation of the Steele dossier. From the warrant application:

"FBI speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1's campaign."

Schiff's memo argues that the terminology used was due to an FBI policy of not unmasking intelligence targets or sources.

https://www.usatoday.com/story...

Fantasies?
https://www.usatoday.com/story...
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
https://www.theguardian.com/te...

The automobile analogy isn't apt because even though the average age of an auto on the road rose to an all time high of 11.5 years in 2015, new vehicles were still being purchased in record numbers...

Well, first I'd normally stop reading at the word "average" because the arithmetical mean is usually a lousy statistic. You don't need many 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60+ year-old cars still "on the road" (i.e. registered, even if they only ever get driven to 3 classic car rallies a year or are rented out for weddings) to drag up that average - there aren't many cars less than 0 years old to balance them out.

Second, "record numbers" compared to what? The "affordable" motor car has been a thing for a century, and if the Model T wasn't entirely practical, the basic "modern" car (that you or I would be able to hop in and drive without learning about double-declutching or advance/retard levers) was probably around by 1950, if not earlier. Developments since then have been slow and incremental - and the growth in the market has been slow and incremental, too, We buy new cars not because because our current car is obsolete, but because it is knackered (where the threshold for "knackered" varies from 'the ashtrays are full' to 'the floor just fell out' depending on your socio-economic status).

I don't think there was ever a 5 year period during which car ownership jumped from a few rich enthusiasts to 2.4 per family. Nor was there a 30 year period during which the price of a half-decent car remained the same, or lower in figures (even ignoring inflation) while the specifications of "half-decent" grew by several orders of magnitude. Yet that's exactly what's happened with personal computers/smartphones (NB: smartphones are personal computers by any definition that doesn't also exclude 90% of "real" personal computers).

If cars were personal computers, the Model T would have been out in 1979, the Mustang in 1983, the Prius in 1990 and we'd have spent New Year's Eve 1999 complaining about how we paid $800 for our Tesla Model 3 and still had to wait half an hour for the millennium bug patch to download on our 56k modems and had to buy adapters for all our old cigar-lighter powered devices.

So its not really an analogy - rather, its an example of the business model for a mature product that isn't driven by Moore's Law making 18-month old products genuinely obsolescent. The IT industry is going to have to adapt to that model - the whole mobile computing thing has served to delay that day a little, now we're seeing (finally) price inflation and blatant planned obsolescence.

-- a paradox attributable to substantial increases in reliability.

True innovation is what's lacking, and perhaps phone manufacturers have been resting on their laurels, confident the need for the "newest shiny thing" would be enough to carry the day.

My first thought on seeing the headline was about using technology to read ancient manuscripts which may be too fragile to open or may have even been written on recycled even older manuscripts. They use x-rays and computer imaging to read that which cannot be read by the human eye.

I've seen a few stories about this over the years.

Scientists read ancient sealed documents without opening them

MIT and Georgia Tech develop technology to read books without opening them

Scientists Read Ancient Hebrew Scroll Without Opening It

Scanning an Ancient Biblical Text That Humans Fear to Open

There's lots more out there and note those aren't just 4 different links to the same story.

But this story is still interesting to me too. I'm sure that the people doing the work in the linked article might be tasked with transcribing or translating the images of pages they can't actually touch.

my views as a finnish person

You're drunk right now, aren't you? I love Finland and Finnish people, but they are drunk almost all the time.

in my experience trump does authentically have higher popularity until you get up to category of +60 year old women who overwhelmingly would've preferred clinton

In your experience, do you realize that there are actually data that shows you have it completely wrong? Among women, Trump is most popular with women over 65.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...

http://college.usatoday.com/20...

The data doesn't support your anecdote: Young people of both genders were both more likely to vote for Clinton than the general population. See e.g. http://college.usatoday.com/2016/11/09/how-we-voted-by-age-education-race-and-sexual-orientation/

Re 'why are cyber criminals still not in jail?"
None of the really smart law enforcement want to tell the other side or their own corrupt staff the "how" of collect it all.
Law enforcement like to tell the media that they gave a bad person a million US$ and watched the money move around the bad banking world.
Not that collect it all had the crypto to all their banks in real time for the past decades.
Governments like to map out all the bad people, see who has skills, who is evil, who is political, who is greedy, sloppy.
The clandestine services might like to turn some into support for their new "freedom fighters" i.e. another Iran Contra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...–Contra_affair.
Once a group has the support of the US clandestine services, no "cyber criminals" in that group get investigated, none go to jail while the US mission to support some "freedom fighters" is productive.

The other aspect is that US and UK law enforcement cannot trust their own investigators not to talk/sell information to lawyers, human rights groups, politicians, the media, criminals, their cult, their faith, as a dual citizen be totally loyal to another nation.
Too many bad people have been given security clearances in the police, gov, mil, security services to allow for "illicit proceeds" to be tracked without such efforts been discovered and methods sold/goven away to the very people been investigated. The police and mil in many once secure nations are now full of staff with political consideration and staff that have advanced under "political correctness". They are not loyal, criminal or will always support another faith, a criminal group, another nation.
Such staff with clearances cant be trusted not to report back to their cult, faith. another government, criminals.
So few in the police, mil, clandestine services really what to show what ability they have, even to law enforcement as generations of security cleared staff cant be trusted. The politics of an agency head has reduced the security clearance level to some political reward that is handed out to political party members.
Bad political people have had total US law enforcement oversight in the USA for decades only due to politcal party considerations.
Is the US gov doing what it did to the phone system to blockchain? Yes but they don't want the world to know what the police can do and stop interesting people trusting traceable blockchains.
"U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades" (April 7, 2015)
https://www.usatoday.com/story...
Some effort was put into voice prints, phone collect it all. The same went into blockchain.
The NSA and GCHQ are watching. If for example some Irish groups spin up US funding for Irish politics the SAS will be ready to for such transactions.
Until then its just all about collect it all, the over time, the new upgrades to the security services, lots of US/UK contractors who see money on the table.
Nobody wants to tell the bad people they are all been watched 24/7 and that their banking crypto to and from the blockchain is junk.blockchain Let the bad people keep on trusting their banks and making crypto mistakes, their criminal networks just become more visible to investigations.
Why did so many IMSI-catcher like systems get used? Police cant trust telco workers, the legal system not to give away their work to the bad people.
Its the same with banking crypto, blockchain tracking. Its been used to track people, but nobody has to know about it.

And yet, not enough people want to do this job:

Two fold problem: First there's more freight being shipped then before. The other problem is in the US, the previous administration stacked on so many regulations, requirements, and so on that the average person simply refuses to put up with it. Burnout is common, not from the driving, but because of the absurd amount of regulations. If you have XM radio, listen to Road Dog Trucking the people driving during the call-in segments go on quite often how these regulations hurt them.

Read this for example. Let me give an example that isn't covered. Let's say you're going to be on for 10hrs/day, you pull into the dock and for whatever reason you spent 8hrs sitting there so you simply go to sleep. Well, under the new regulations that 8hrs sitting in the dock counts towards the time you're on the road. So you can only drive 2hrs. Now if you know anyone in the industry, you'll start hearing about "dock time" pay and so on, because if your truck isn't rolling you aren't earning money even if it's a company truck.

Who also just so happened to step down right before all this.

Billions of dollars are at stake with the NFL. You think that is just going to evaporate?

Like it or not, the evaporation is well on it's way, to the point where NFL stadium are full of paying customers disguised as empty seats:

There were so many empty seats at the start of the Cowboys-Redskins game

Thursday’s game between the Redskins and Cowboys in Arlington kicked off in front of a mostly empty stadium. Reporters at the game certainly took notice.

That's one of the most heated rivalries in the entire NFL - by two teams that pretty much avoided the politics of the NFLs national anthem protests no less - and there were empty seats. Not only that, the Cowboys and Redskins are two of the most valuable NFL franchises because they both have large, rabid fan bases.

Used to be there wouldn't be an empty seat in any Cowboys-Redskins game no matter what the team's records were.

And TV networks are having to rebate ads because of missed ratings:

Fewer NFL Viewers Force TV Networks to Give Away Ads

Oh, yeah, that's from 2016 and it was worse in 2017.

Re "Be careful what you wish for...."

Could end up like another supersonic transport (SST) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... funding .
Someone has to pay for the placement of the 5G telco network all over the US road network to cover networked transport.
Give it to the private sector and pay the private sector for every part of the network to cover the most remote parts, difficult to network of the USA?
Not just networking all the strategic highways and around the mil sites that need telco security.
Let the private sector find the lowest cost workers/robots globally (not in China) and mass produce the network parts? Design in the USA, made in ........
Build a 100% US gov telco factory in Florida? New Jersey? Have that state win the design and scale up a big telco build of products for all of the USA for that 5G generation.

Re How many agencies are still SCREAMING for "back doors"
They got them with PRISM, NSA ANT catalog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Room 641A, "U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades" (April 7, 2015)
https://www.usatoday.com/story...
That was without a nice US wide 5G network as part of the deal.

Healthcare they can't afford, and don't need? That's laughable. So when they do get sick, I'm supposed to pay for them? Isn't that what you fucking people incessantly rail against all the fucking time? That's all I ever hear my dopey fucking sister ever say - "I'm tired of having to pay for these people!! I'm tired of having to pay for these people!!' She sounds like a fucking parrot. It makes me want to shove a god-damned cracker down her throat, followed by my fucking fist. Since Obama got the unemployment back down so fucking low after inheriting W's god-awful mess, they shouldn't have any trouble going out and finding a fucking job, so they can afford healthcare. If you're tired of paying for them, then why do you vote for a system that virtually guarantees you will have to pay for them (and their fucking kids) for the rest of their lives?

"Trump Bump vs Obama Effect." So, no, probably not sheer coincidence. However, seeing how unpopular Trumps policies are, it is my firm belief that the Trump Bump is due to the market's confidence that he'll fail to put most of his damaging policies into place.

You stupid fuck. Do you seriously think Shumer is going to allow that fucking crybaby have his wall? He can have all the temper tantrums he wants, but even most Repugs agree - HE"S NOT GOING TO GET THAT FUCKING WALL.

You'd think if Shumer was lying about the wall offer ever having been on the table, then Trump surely would be calling him out on it After all, it's been all over the fucking news. Funny that's not happening.

Things took a YUUUUGE Democratic turn with the last election cycle. Boy, I can't fucking wait until mid-terms. Gonna slap your bitch around.

Hey, the next time I see Chuck, remind me to ask him what tune he's playing on that violin. I kind of like it; it sounds like a waltz.

Explain this. What you call chain migration others call reuniting families.

To be fair the Dems aren't out to protect us all that much either. If they were they'd do something about the 500,000 workers here on expired visas, most of whom came here on H1-Bs. I don't really care about 'chain' migration because that's mostly Mexicans taking low pay service jobs.

But anyway, Trump could send those 500k illegal aliens (expired visas, so the term fits) back any time he wants. With the stroke of a pen. He could also undo the Obama era rule allowing H1-B worker's spouses to work in the States. Again, stroke of a pen, no input from Congress, he could do it today. The fact that he doesn't shows you something. It shows you who he really works for.

But isn't that what we ostensibly already have? Remember, Trump is a "very stable genius" who is "like, really smart" because his "I.Q. is one of the highest". Would he keep challenging people to IQ contests if he weren't a very stable genius?

"'People Who Boast About Their IQ Are Losers': Studies say that bragging about your superiority makes people like you less- so what does Donald Trump hope to gain?"

Even if you have the heading right, it can still go wrong.

Boeing Jumbo Jet Lands at Wrong Airport

Bonuses..not raises.

In fact some companies are giving out raises... including WalMart, so that report of WalMart saving more in layoffs than they spend in bonuses is kind of #FakeNews since as you point out, raises will be around forever.

But also even those not giving out raises - the employees get raises ANYWAY because withholding from each paycheck will be lower. People all over the US are seeing higher paychecks now, because of the supposedly deadly tax bill passing...

OK, enough with the ignorance already. Every US military leader would not take kindly to being labeled a mass murderer,

...but most of them absolutely are, because they were not fighting a war to protect people, but to protect profits . Who gives a fuck how they feel about being called what they are? Ignorance is no excuse, either. It's your responsibility to do your homework before killing people.

Also intent matters, which is exactly why he's being charged with involuntary manslaughter and not murder.

That's wrong, though. His intent was to get someone killed. He should be charged with first-degree murder, since it was "willful and premeditated with malice aforethought." Or with being an accessory or accomplice to same, as I have argued, although I am fast coming around to the idea that the cop is the accomplice (and guilty of voluntary manslaughter) and the SWATter is the murderer in the first degree. He planned the murder (via SWAT team) and then carried it out. The only reason anyone SWATs anyone is because they know that it is dangerous, and that the danger goes up to and includes the death of the victim (and possibly innocent bystanders, maybe even babies.)

We have one last bit of information. U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades (April 7, 2015)
https://www.usatoday.com/story...
Would the FBI still risk such bulk sorting of voice print data within the USA given criminal, cult, faith and legal interest in all things collect it all?

http://college.usatoday.com/20...

He wants a replacement processor which almost certainly is never going to happen. Basically he's asking for every processor produced in the last 20 years to be replaced for free. If you think that's realistic I've got a bridge to sell you.

How is this different (aside from magnitude/number of units sold) from Takata's airbag recall? I wasn't affected by an exploding airbag, but I still get new airbags in my Dodge. Interestingly, it's apparently still going on

I suspect a recall this large would bankrupt Intel, much like the airbag recall is bankrupting Takata. We've seen our automakers get bailed out because they were deemed "too big to fail", but maybe Intel failing could be a good thing (though I don't know of anyone that can simply step up to replace them).

I certainly trust veterans with firearms much more than I do police in the USA. At least veterans have proper respect beaten into us.

You can't beat respect into someone. You can beat rifle skills into them, but not respect. You can beat violence into them, but not respect. You can beat a dark future for humanity into them, but not respect.

It's a fact that the military has had to dig deeper and deeper into the barrel as people have become more and more aware that our military exists to project power and maintain our empire, and not to make the world a better place. That's why racism is a massive problem in the military which is trickling down to law enforcement. Military may receive better training, but that's not a good thing when they're someone who never should have had military training in the first place. They will be inclined to use the deadly parts of their military training right along with the parts you like. And if they joined up in the first place because they're a bully who wanted to push people around, they're just going to do more of that as a cop.

The idea that soldiers are more responsible than the average member of the population is beyond ridiculous. There are many reasons why people might join up, and the military cannot afford to reject those who do not meet their standards, because they would otherwise be even shorter on recruits than they think they are already.

http://ftw.usatoday.com/2017/02/donald-trump-rory-mcilroy-golf-florida
There's a few. Of course that's a sports page so they only list sports people they know about, but its not a great start if you're trying to suggest that he's doing business while golfing.

But even if he was conducting presidential business.. he's supposed to be the "smart money guy" type.. who apparently thinks its great to spend literally millions of taxpayer dollars every week to go golfing. You would think he could hold a few of those meetings in his office, wouldn't you?

Then again I suppose its good business to spend other peoples' money while you can..

Actually, Amazon uses a mix of carriers, and has been making aggressive investments to build its own delivery capacity. The largest carrier by number of packages that Amazon uses is UPS. It also uses FedEx and OnTrac more than USPS based on its financials and its public statements.

USPS is primarily used for non-time sensitive shipping (read: free super saver whatever).

Still, in recent years, they have been making investments in the US and Europe to have a greater stake in regional carriers and to build intra-network shipping capability, as well as true "to the door" capability in major metros which drive high delivery volume.

Amazon is running several jets in both Europe and the US.
https://www.usatoday.com/story...

Amazon has acquired stakes in france and the UK
https://www.usatoday.com/story...

Amazon Flex - where Amazon is running its own "Uber" to deliver packages
https://flex.amazon.com/

Actually, Amazon uses a mix of carriers, and has been making aggressive investments to build its own delivery capacity. The largest carrier by number of packages that Amazon uses is UPS. It also uses FedEx and OnTrac more than USPS based on its financials and its public statements.

USPS is primarily used for non-time sensitive shipping (read: free super saver whatever).

Still, in recent years, they have been making investments in the US and Europe to have a greater stake in regional carriers and to build intra-network shipping capability, as well as true "to the door" capability in major metros which drive high delivery volume.

Amazon is running several jets in both Europe and the US.
https://www.usatoday.com/story...

Amazon has acquired stakes in france and the UK
https://www.usatoday.com/story...

Amazon Flex - where Amazon is running its own "Uber" to deliver packages
https://flex.amazon.com/

It doesn't matter what amount of time and resources Mueller's got. His investigation is not finished, and therefore we don't know what he's got in the way of evidence.

When the best thing Mueller has is to charge Flynn with perjury?

Mueller's got NOTHING. He can't use anything Flynn says - Flynn's a convicted perjurer now, with zero credibility.

I'm waiting for the DoJ Inspector General's investigation into political bias at the FBI to be completed:

Analysis: The quiet probe into Clinton email investigation could be a landmine for Robert Mueller

In early January, news that the Justice Department’s inspector general launched an investigation into the government's disputed handling of the Hillary Clinton email inquiry was quickly overtaken by the chaotic run-up to President Trump’s inauguration.

Nearly a year later, Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s wide-ranging review of the FBI and Justice’s work in the politically-charged Clinton case now looms as a potential landmine for Russia special counsel Robert Mueller.

For months, Horowitz’s investigation — which has amassed interviews with former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former FBI Director James Comey and other key officials — had been grinding on in near anonymity. That is, until earlier this month when the inspector general acknowledged that Mueller was alerted to a cache of text messages exchanged between two FBI officials on his staff that disparaged Trump.

...

What on Earth do James O'Keefe and Roy Moore have to do with this?

You could have read the links. Well, maybe not, aren't you sworn only to let yourself see that which comes from authorized and approved channels?

Wouldn't want you to break your solemn oath.

It's not like anyone is disputing the fact that Black Bloc rioted on inauguration day.

It's not like anyone believed you when you were crowing the truckers either.

There WAS no Republican governor of Hawaii to verify the certificate.

Democrat Hawaiian Health Director Loretta Fuddy who approved the questionable certificate was the only person to die in a plane crash after she supposedly verified the birth certificate. Interesting, and fuel for conspiracies, but no actual proof of anything.

Democrat congressman Neil Abercrombie was outraged by the birtherism and while campaigning for Governor of Hawaii made it an issue in the campaign - He promised to, if elected, get the original Obama birth certificate out of Hawaii's records and display it to the public to end the birther stuff. After he was elected and became governor, Abercrombie was questioned about the matter and he had a series of excuses for why he could not produce the document, and he never did.

Incidentally, I am no "birther" and I despise most conspiratorial nonesense, but it's junk like this that gives the suspicious and conspiratorially-inclined the ammunition they need to go over the edge. My attitudes towards this sort of nonsense does not, however, override my inclination to oppose the posting of dishonest and/or ill-informed fake "facts" like what you posted.

It would be the right option, given the parameters of your former post.

If you're genuinely interested in knowing what sources someone else uses, may I suggest, next time, asking for it directly, instead of making a red herring yourself, and then acting as if you don't know you did exactly that? It might be slightly more fruitful.

As you may have noted, I'm not the parent poster, nor did I even really delve into the question whether or not Twitter should rather be considered left or not and why. I just thought your question 'how so?' was rather trollish in nature, since surely you'd noted that of your own counterargument it was silly, and you actually knew you were using a red herring. Granted, we're on slashdot, so it's not like it's uncommon or unforgivable. ;-) But I still wanted to point this out.

A cursory look at the issue gives me some links: https://www.usatoday.com/story... , and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tec... ... and those were on the first 3 links, so I'm not sure how well you searched. The first seems not very much substantiated by statistical or other scientific methods, so I would regard it as rather having low worth. The latter is more interesting. For instance, it clearly indicates twitter users have a far more positive outlook on immigration, something which is more of a left-wing tendency, than a right wing attitude, we'll all agree on that. They clearly do not represent the populace as a whole (aka, they are not representative, in scientific terms) and have a tendency to promote and be supportive of things the leftists are promoting and supportive of the most as well. One can argue this does not mean a one-to-one relationship between the two groups, sure. But let's be realistic: it ain't the rightwingers that are going to be suddenly more positive about topics they typically are not fond off, just because they use twitter, now are they? The most likely explanation, thus, is that the correlation between the two - the same mentality and attitudes towards the same subjects and goals, of leftwingers and twitter users - also have a causal relationship.

This indicates that Twitter - also in the userbase, thus - is, overall, more leftist than rightist.

Net Neutrality only applied to legal content.

https://www.usatoday.com/story...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to implement new net neutrality rules designed to make sure Internet service providers treat all legal content equally.

Emphasis mine.

I.e. even if Net Neutrality still applied they'd be allowed to block or throttle bittorrent. And legally they can probably have a 'three strikes and you're out' policy.

What's probably legally dubious even now is to block IOT access to customers who torrent. E.g. if you share an internet connection with someone who torrents and the ISPs blocks access to some critical IOT device, can you sue? Over a heating system I guess it doesn't matter. Still it's not impossible something more important could be connected to the net. And you can imagine a (for the ISP) nightmare scenario where one person pirates using bittorrent, the ISP cuts the connection, someone else who is dependent on a Internet connected medical device dies and the ISP gets sued.

I guess that's the reason for this warning.

Push hard and you can see discounts of near their marginal tax rates on income.

Which is a rip. You know they are keeping the cost of what they sold you on the books, just forgetting they got paid.

Protip: Only works when dealing with the owner, or at least someone who understands.

Then you take great the "cash discount" for your product, and report them to the IRS or local tax authority for investigation (great if they also offered to "fogive the sales tax" too) and maybe you can get a "snitch reward" on top o the great purchase deal! And a criminal gets some payback! Win-win-win!

IRS links for reporting fraud - https://www.irs.gov/individual...

Probably this type of "they offered me a great deal" evidence isn't enough to actually get the reward payout, but hey, worth a try, no?

story on how to get paid for reporting - https://www.usatoday.com/story...

the current administration

What exactly have they done that another administration wouldn't have done?

How many former presidents have openly insulted the North Korean leader?

Not saying this is good, but a majority of the voters is inflicting Republicans on themselves without good reason.

They are not a majority. Trump got millions of votes fewer than Clinton. Congressional House Republicans got 6 million fewer votes than Congressional Democrats. Republican senators got millions of fewer votes than Democratic senators.

In the United States we are not governed by the party that gets the most votes. In fact, we are governed entirely by the party that got fewer votes.

https://www.usatoday.com/story...

So, internet regulation is now back to what it was from circa 1980 - 2015? The horror .... the horror ....

The Internet Had Already Lost Its Neutrality

. . . the major problem with the FCC’s move: It forced ISPs into an 80-year-old framework designed for the telephone monopolies of a much different era. Those regulations were more concerned about things like controlling market power than, say, promoting innovation. And while the advocates for net neutrality stressed the benefits for competition among content providers, the critics asked what would happen to competition among ISPs, since heavy-handed regulation often acts as a barrier to entry for new startups, which can’t afford to negotiate the regulatory apparatus. Those of us old enough to remember the telephone service looked like in the 1970s, before the FCC unwound a little -- which is to say, pretty much like the service our parents had when they were children, down to the astronomical prices for long distance calls, and the chunky plastic rotary telephones -- can see why critics were concerned about giving the FCC that kind of power to block innovation.

Federal meddling can't improve the Internet.

While China is exerting its technical superiority, here in the US, the regime in power has banned the use of the phrases, "science-based" and "evidence-based" from government-funded scientific organizations.

https://www.usatoday.com/story...

We are so fucked.

Netflix offers media hosting servers so that Netflix traffic doesn't have to travel over the ISP's upstream link - Netflix's library can be hosted and served locally within the ISP's network. Netflix offers this for free to larger ISPs. Verizon and Comcast refused Netflix's free offer just to manufacture a false argument for fast lanes

False. Netflix "offers" those boxes "for free", on condition that the ISP provide space, cooling, power and bandwidth to it, never look inside it, and ignore the fact that it hosts data other than the expected data related to Netflix's normal service offerings. And if you didn't accept the "offer" Netflix artificially limited features and told users that the ISP was to blame (despite the customer of the ISP having plenty of bandwidth). They even made websites with fake speed tests naming and shaming ISPs who dared to deny Netflix's offer. Netflix was artificially preventing users from getting the highest quality stream if their ISP hadn't bowed down to Netflix to get on the "nice list".

They were forced to stop this bullshit because a few ISPs didn't back down and threatened legal action over their bullshit. https://www.usatoday.com/story...

Netflix pulled the whole stunt in the first place because ISPs asked Netflix to pay for all the bandwidth it was using. So Netflix threw a tantrum. (Hint to Netflix: You're not a fucking peer for the purposes of any equal peering agreement, you don't carry as much bandwidth for others as they do for you. Not by a long shot. Pay for your bandwidth.)

Netflix tried to use those boxes as a wedge to become a full-fledged CDN without having to pay for the network. They had plans to sell space and service on those boxes to anyone and everyone, for any purpose.

http://ftw.usatoday.com/2017/1...

in addition criminal networks also hold vast amounts and may be even less ethical than the fbi

Less ethical than the FBI, the same organization that has operated child pornography web sites three times that we know of? I would love to see who is more vile, disgusting, untrustworthy, and morally bankrupt than anyone who knowingly and willfully distributes the filth that is child pornography.

By that definition, Obamacare as it was passed is fascist.

Yes, and the cited opinion states exactly that.

Socialized medicine seems less evil by a mile.

Only because you've never tried it. As bad as Fascism is, Socialism/Communism is much worse — which is why I can't sympathize with the "Antifa" assholes, who "fight Fascism" with hammer-and-sickle.

Consider the example of Spain — ruled by Fascism for decades. For all their Collectivism-induced troubles, they were always better off than the USSR and, when they abolished the Fascism, they were able to recover pretty quick. Recover to the levels, that Russia could only dream about even during the height of its gas-fueled boom.

Charities are often scams on both sides. e.g. The Clinton Global Fund.

Sorry, but the Clinton Global Fund has been assessed as not a scam, nor has its parent entity.

Why did it's funding go dry the day the bitch lost?

Why did the GOP tell so many lies about it?

Sorry HornWumpus, but you've discredited yourself.

You're just too much of a partisan ideologue.

PS:

Increasing the average farm plot size should be a goal.

It is. Of the Corporate Farming Oligarchy.

Stop being an ignorant mouthpiece, at least insist on being an informed one.

Then again, you're obsessed with the losing candidate, while the winning one just might be incapable of feeding himself in a few weeks.

Then stop the glut of local and state governments creating a monopoly on service providers

I'd very very much like to stop that "glut". Yes. For years I've been reposting this link

you're nothing but a fascist fool destroying what's left of America.

You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.

I was about to say the same, but with some numbers for context:

Currently, about 700,000 people hold 50% of the world's wealth. While that's 700 times the number of people in control compared to BTC, it also $280T or roughly 1000 times the total market cap of BTC.

https://www.usatoday.com/story...
https://blockchain.info/charts...

Sorry, no, that's the equivalent of coin MINING. We are talking about the TRANSACTION costs right now.

USA Today fluff piece indicates that a Visa payment processing center uses 50,000 house-days of power every day, but they use that to process 400 million transactions per day. That works out to .000125 house-days per transaction. The numbers I have access to indicate that each BTC transaction uses 8.5 house-days per transaction.

Cats kill 3.7 Billion a year... that is with a B. You were saying?

https://www.usatoday.com/story...

I would appear that 16 was the age of consent in 1979 when the act supposedly took place. reference

It's not just diplomacy though - Trump has promised sanctions. That will surely be the turning point?