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Me and Rush Limbaugh are both wondering, just how is the American flag any better? It, likewise, flew over slavery, the subsequent racism, and was (still is!) used in imperialist wars. It covered — still does at times — sexism and parochial bigotry.

Whatever you can say against the Confederate flag, can also be said about the American. Yeah, the latter may have been used for some good, but the sheer period of its usage (over 2 centuries and counting), makes it much worse than the former, whose country only existed for what, four years? Five?

Can it get any worse? Yes it can! A recent study has shown, that simply seeing the flag can cause a hitherto innocent victim to vote Republican! And even a single exposure can last for up to 8 months!

As soon as we are done with KKKonfederate rag, we must turn our energies onto the AmeriKKKan one.

In fact, why wait? Let's act NOW!! .

Maybe, those misunderstood ISIS warriors destroying the symbols of defunct states that practiced slave-ownership are onto something, huh? I for one have always doubted Pythagorean Theorem — what can a long-dead White slave-owner possibly know about any hypotenuse?

Handing everyone a blank check to buy whatever they like (regardless of whether they can afford it) is the same thing we've done in the education market.

Nothing like that happened. If anything, government has been doing the exact opposite, subsidizing construction so that developers build grand McMansions when most of the people locally need more modest apartments.

Then you get economic displacement.

You know, I've just re-read your entire ode to supply-side economics and not only has it never worked, but it's also immoral, according to this guy:

http://www.usnews.com/news/art...

Yeah, not so much. You're welcome to keep that tinfoil hat on, and keep buying gold though.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/...
http://azizonomics.com/2013/06...
http://www.bloombergview.com/a...

This guy is off-base:

"By the end of my sophomore year at a small private liberal arts college..."

Private colleges are about 2.5 more costly than public (assuming in-state tuition):
http://www.usnews.com/educatio...

What makes this author and others like him think he is entitled to a private college education in a low-paying career? Let's face it, liberal arts degree in writing is not going to bring home the bucks. His family started out with a loan, then more, then bankruptcy. Is it any surprise there was a default? The bank should have stopped after the first one and informed he should transfer to a lower cost school before giving more money. Those who have repaid their student loans are now financing this author and others like him. It's not free, we all pay.

Perhaps degrees should have something like is on appliances for energy ratings, an average time to repay.

"This degree and this institution will take on average 20 years to repay"

Loan processors can use that to assess whether to grant the loan.

And so after sacking any scientist that did actual research, and slashing the EPA budget, and specificly exempting fracking from any laws that stop anybody else from polluting or contaminating drinking water, the EPA now releases a report based on information from the fracking companies themselves that says "most" fracking wells do not contaminate drinking water. Toxic fumes are not considered. This is mostly because the water was never tested before-hand and those toxins specific to fracking "might" have been there before they started. Does anybody think that releasing this report that has taken years to create, at the same time that States are stopping citys and counties from banning fracking is just coincidence ? http://www.usnews.com/news/bus...
This EPA report is not based on science, it is based on pharmaceutical science, where research is simply not done on things that might harm profits. The report does not reflect the facts so much as it reflects how far corruption has seeped into politics. Cancer causing Roundup in your food anybody ? , only if it makes a profit, Secret international trade deals that prevent GMO food labeling ? Copyright laws that make killing someone less of a crime than copying a movie ? Copyright laws that keep getting extended instead of reduced as it becomes easier to make and publish ? Welcome to the land of the free, where liberty is the highest priority.

JC Penny tried that and it failed

Governments worldwide that are marching to fascism want encryption banned.

Encryption is but a tiny side-show in the global march towards Collectivism — the coin, of which Fascism and Socialism are indistinguishable sides. As predicted long ago:

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.

— Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, Paris, May 27, 1788

It starts with concern for the poor, that inevitably causes the government to undertake support of the downtrodden with various "War on Poverty" initiatives.

A few decades and trillion-dollars into it, there are not only millions of recipients of the dole, there are also tens of thousands of government officials involved in distributing it. The combination makes it impossible to stop the foolish undertaking — it may be reformed and rearranged, but it can not be ended.

And then comes the idea, that, if we must support the unsuccessful among us, we should try to prevent them from doing (what we consider to be) stupid things: take drugs, drive too fast, eat fat (no, not fat, sugar!). Right here on Slashdot, the idea that our self-imposed responsibility for others allows us to control their actions, is alive and well.

And then government types begin to deliberately rearrange things to be able to attach their own strings to various incentives you can not refuse. The first example of this was, probably, the imposition of federal speed-limit by mandating, that States receiving federal Federal highway funds implement them.

The most recent example here is the federal take-over of education loans, which allows the Administration to better control, what the colleges teach and what students do. Because it raises the tuition costs so much, fewer and fewer students will be able to forgo such federal aid and will be forced to accept it — with all of the strings attached to them and the colleges they attend.

Compared to these aspects of the Collective increasingly controlling the Individual's life, use of encryption is of little to no consequence. Maybe, a new Republic in Antarctica, on the Moon or Mars will take the lessons of our errors to heart — the way our Founding Fathers studied those of the Romans...

Really nobody should be playing football.

Curiously this is almost always said by people who never played themselves. Tell me, what exactly is the problem with consenting adults playing a potentially violent game where there is some chance of getting hurt? How is it worse that an X-Games skateboarder who knows he's going to injure himself at some point? Or a sailor who knows they might drown?

You make very good points, though I read the GP as pointing out the apparent irrationality (to some) of playing football, rather than trying to outlaw it or something. It's one thing to make an argument that "no one should do X because X is bad, and thus X doesn't make sense"; it's slightly different to argue that "no one should ever be allowed to do X."

In any case, whatever the GP meant, I certainly don't have a problem with consenting adults doing whatever -- particularly if they are informed about the consequences of their actions.

Brain injuries are just one of the numerous medical problems caused by football

The only real problem I see with that is that children aren't adequately protected by the rules of the game when they play it.

Here's where your comment begins to seem a little disconnected from the current debate. You later go on to discuss "incidence of concussions and certain other injuries" for children and such. It's true that "concussions" and various other acute injuries are a significant problem, and perhaps modifications to rules to encourage more "sportsmanlike" play or whatever could help with some of those. But rule changes simply aren't going to change the fact that slamming your brain into your skull at high speed repeatedly for years on end now seems like it may have serious potential for chronic brain damage.

Perhaps even more distressing are recent studies that suggest the possibility of significant effects on the brain even without concussions. If this latter research is confirmed and shown to have long-term consequences, it suggests that the problem can't be fixed just by tweaking the rules or discouraging serious injuries -- the potential for chronic brain damage may simply be part of a game where people slam heads together on a regular basis.

I don't think there's enough evidence to make this latter claim yet, but if it proves to be true, there is in fact at least a valid argument to support GP's contention that "no one should be playing football," assuming they care about brain function. The use of padding, helmets, and various other equipment may have had a positive effect of preventing serious acute injuries, but it may also have the unintentional effect of allowing players to play longer and harder in other ways and thereby sustain serious chronic injuries without realizing it.

This is a completely transparent attack by right-wingers on the left-wing Brookings Institute.

or do you just stand against genetic engineering as we currently practice because you have an ignorant fear of what you don't understand?

I stand against genetically modified crops because I don't want fucking multinationals to own the intellectual property rights over basic foodstuffs.

this is what you represent:

And this is what you represent:

http://www.usnews.com/news/ene...

http://www.wvgazette.com/News/...

http://www.chemicalindustryarc...

Because make no mistake, those are the people who will own those rights. And they're the people saying GMOs will feed the hungry when GMOs are mainly targeted to countries where there are no hungry people.

I personally don't give a shit whether or not GMOs are safe. Hell if I cared about whether or not my food is safe, I wouldn't have eaten that burrito this afternoon from a street cart on Milwaukee Avenue run by the lady with prison tattoos. I care about what kind of sleazy motherfuckers are going to be gaining even greater wealth and political power from their iron grip on our food supply.

And, I'm also more than a little offended by people who say that consumers don't have a right to know the provenance of the food they eat. As if you've become some new arbiter of what information consumers may be allowed to base their purchasing decisions on. If I don't want to buy green socks, I don't have to buy green socks, even though they are every bit as safe as the grey socks I prefer. Does that mean that sock consumers must now not be allowed to see the color of the fucking socks in the package, because after all, green socks are functionally the same as grey socks? And if I don't want to buy GMO food, and you are hell bent against me finding out whether my food is from GMOs, we have a problem. Not because I'm denying some eternal law of Science, but because fuck you, I'm the one paying for that food. My purchasing your food is not some part of the social contract, and Monsanto making profit beyond the dreams of avarice is not part of some social contract, it's a simple consumer transaction. So if I want to know whether that sweet corn has been soaking in some Roundup lab experiment shit that has to be used in greater and greater amounts just to make the cockroaches drop dead, you'd better be prepared to tell me or no goddamn sale.

It's funny that our consumer economy has made a fucking religion out of people's purchasing preferences, but as soon as someone says, "Hey, I'd like to know if this food product came out of Doctor Motherfucking Frankenstein's lab" he is told, "No, you are not allowed to have that information. Just purchase and believe. Even worse, when a company did decide to state on their label that their products did not contain GMOs, motherfucking Monsanto sued them. Fortunately, they lost, but I don't think for a minute that this won't be revisited. When someone is so desperate to hide a single fact, to the point of spending billions fighting legislative and grass roots efforts just to make sure there is this one, single, scientifically-verifiable fact, that food product X contains genetically modified organisms that makes me suspicious as hell. Because when did it become "pro-science" to hide information from people?

Also, the studies on GMO safety have been extremely narrow, looking for toxicity and certain types of cancer-causing effects. There have been no studies at all on people who've eaten GMOs for 20 years, because they've only been selling GMOs to people for 20 years. Further, no studies on the overall health of people eating GMOs or life expectancy of people eating GMOs or effect of GMOs on

Accomplishments:
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/... [usnews.com]

Accomplishments:
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/... [usnews.com]

Ambassadors killed:
We lost 3 under Nixon and Ford, Republicans Win!
Accomplishments:
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/...

Her health care initiatives did poorly for the same reason Obama is embattled, Bill and Hillary were outsiders (sometimes referred to as 'trailer park trash') who want to help all Americans, not just a few rich ones.

THE Halliburton who's exec Obama golfs with and to whom he gave a no-bid contract ??

I guess since it's not Bush and Cheney(aka Darth Vader) in-bed with Halliburton but now, but rather Obama and Biden(aka Jar Jar Binks), everything's A-OK!

Funny, but when Democrats cuddle with cronies like Halliburton (friends with who ever is in power, because they are crony capitalists) Republicans' big complaint is that this is hypocrisy (given the way Democrats screamed about it when it was the other team) and press (who self-identify as approx 90% Democrat) are giving it 1/10th the coverage. When Repubs huddlled with Halliburton, however, Democrats shrieked that the underlying acts were EVIL. For progreessives, the ends justify the means and there are no absolutes - and hypocrisy is just another means th their ends.

"if we can bring sleazy amoral switzerland to heel, we can do this"

As a Swiss, I would just like to say that the story looks rather different from this side. You are presumably in the US, and have the US media's version of events. This is the wrong thread to go into many details, but let's just take a couple of highlights:

- The US likes to apply American law to citizens and companies in other countries. With sufficient political pressure, and sometimes outright extortion, it sometimes even succeeds.

- There is no particular reason why Swiss banks should provide their customer information to the US government (FATCA), though this is what they have been forced to do - quite literally via extortion. Interestingly, the Swiss government asked "so can this be bilateral - your American banks provide equivalent information to Switzerland on Swiss citizens?" The answer was basically laughter, with the explanation that doing so would be far too burdensome for US banks.

Finally, there is an almost global acceptance of something that is really odd, if only you step back and take a fresh look. Your personal finances are a private matter: you don't want your neighbor looking at your bank statement, or you employer, or indeed really anyone. So why, exactly, does the government have the right to know every detail of your financial life? In Switzerland, the government does not have insight into your personal finances and your entire personal life, and it cannot confiscate your money without a court decision.

By Swiss law, if the government wants private information about you, it must show evidence of wrongdoing and get a warrant. If it wants to take your property, it must win a court decision. Why is Switzerland "sleazy" and "amoral" for providing people with privacy and due process? Yes, our banks are now being forced to remove these protections from foreign citizens. Why is this a good thing?

Or things you're surprised about because you are so young. Look back at the last 30-40 years, most if not all minority leaders were screaming to keep foreign workers out of the country, especially illegal immigrants.

http://www.usnews.com/debate-c...

Libs are so cute when you all twist yourselves up. I remember 50 years of "Minorities" backing the democrats while they did everything they could bring illegals. BTW the last president to do anything about illegal immigration was Eike

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/...

Great, another ACH debit mechanism, which means that when a fraudster empties a bank account, it stays emptied because there is nowhere the protection present that a credit card has in place.

In the US, this. VISA talks about Zero Liability, with restrictions. That's zero compared to the legal $50 liability.

The only difference I've found is that your bank account will be zero until the money is put back, and I don't know what happens to bounce fees that occur in the meantime.

Meh. Way to discourage people from trying. Check the placement rates at the top engineering schools and you'll be amazed. Many are 90%+. This article is a few years old, but actually that makes it even more impressive because the overall unemployment rate was substantially higher then. http://www.usnews.com/educatio...

"SUNDAY, Feb. 22, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- A wearable patch that safely and gradually exposes the body to small amounts of peanut allergen appears effective in easing the allergy, an early new study shows."

http://health.usnews.com/healt...

A flexible endoscope is cleaned in a machine more like a kitchen dishwasher than an autoclave. The scope has internal channels for shooting air and water out of a nozzle on the tip. It has a large channel to pass instruments into the patient (biopsy forceps, cauterizers, even other more narrow endoscopes). An ERCP scope has an additional channel that carries a stiff wire that is used to deflect instruments coming out the end. This channel and wire is a very tight fit, so it is more difficult to clean.

Attachments to the channel ports should circulate the sterilizing fluids through all the channels. It's not difficult to imagine a clog preventing the fluid from circulating. Testing for leaks and clogs is part of the cleaning procedure, but in practice, of course, errors happen often:

Similar story from just last month:
http://www.modernhealthcare.co...

A biggy at the VA a few years ago:
http://health.usnews.com/healt...

Your argument is built on a sand foundation

FLASH!

Leftwing "fact check" site supports Left Wing "facts".

News at Eleven.

You named your post accurately I see

http://www.usnews.com/debate-c...

The last time CO2 levels were this high we had a massive die off.

CO2 levels have not been this high in any time period we've been able to provide an estimate for. Look at the historical CO2 levels against temperature.

Yow! That graph is pretty frightening. CO2 basically goes off the chart in the present, way above anything in the past..

That's beside the point: the thing to observe is that that graph clearly indicates that climate temperature is not significantly tracking CO2 levels. While there may be some effect, it's demonstrably not what drives temperature in the graph.

We can reach this conclusion because in the graph, historically speaking, temperature and CO2 track each other very well; but when CO2 was pushed separately consequent to our emissions, temperature did not follow.

Sorry, not enough information in that graph to draw that conclusion. This is a graph where the smallest division on the time axis is 10,000 years. It's clear that carbon dioxide and temperature correlate together very well, but it's impossible to tell which drives which-- note that there's also the possibility that they both feed back into each other, and that higher temperatures increase carbon dioxide AND higher carbon dioxide drives higher temperature.

In any case, you'd want measurements from more than just Antarctic temperature.

Here's a lecture from University of Barcelona pointing out what you just said, but with better graphs and drawing the conclusion that you can't draw a conclusion: http://www.am.ub.edu/~jmiralda...

And here's an article from 2012, on the other hand, saying that newer studies show that in fact higher carbon dioxide did cause the rising temperatures at the end of the ice age: http://www.usnews.com/news/art...
With a nice graph here: http://www.livescience.com/194...

The federal school loan program is turning out to be wildly profitable new tax program for the federal government. The loans are exempt from bankruptcy and are typically $40+k per student.

I don't know where you're getting your data, but you should never trust that place again. The average is less than $30k, you can discharge it in bankruptcy, and it's not profitable for the government. It would be, if everyone always paid their loans, but then the banking crisis never would have happened, either.

The federal school loan program is turning out to be wildly profitable new tax program for the federal government. The loans are exempt from bankruptcy and are typically $40+k per student.

I don't know where you're getting your data, but you should never trust that place again. The average is less than $30k, you can discharge it in bankruptcy, and it's not profitable for the government. It would be, if everyone always paid their loans, but then the banking crisis never would have happened, either.

The federal school loan program is turning out to be wildly profitable new tax program for the federal government. The loans are exempt from bankruptcy and are typically $40+k per student.

I don't know where you're getting your data, but you should never trust that place again. The average is less than $30k, you can discharge it in bankruptcy, and it's not profitable for the government. It would be, if everyone always paid their loans, but then the banking crisis never would have happened, either.

How about a non-Islam run country? The United States doesn't exactly have clean hands in this regard.

And the vast majority of those who are Muslim in the world do not condone nor celebrate these kind of murders done in the name of Islam

Really??? - http://www.usnews.com/news/rel...

Whoops. Someone else was having a 9 mile long minimum wage argument with me; I thought this was a moving goalposts thing. My bad.

The hell? Remember when 80% of the workforce used to be farmers? Then they moved more towards factories. Do you not see that shift from the primary to secondary industry? There will always be some people in the primary industries (I don't think complete automation is really viable), but the bulk of the demand for workers has indeed shifted up the pipe.

Do you remember the Industrial Revolution? Do you remember greater than 70% unemployment, because machines took jobs? Do you remember it lasting 60 years, before we got back to some 5%-15% level of unemployment, like a normal, civil society?

Do you honestly think we're going to just up and move people to new jobs? We'll face major unemployment for decades in a giant paradigm shift. The demand for jobs will vanish until we invent a new way for people to be useful that cannot be equaled by machines. The ones we already have apparently haven't solved unemployment for us yet.

And... really? You think getting an engineering degree is going to "fail" since other people want those engineering jobs? HA! Well this might just be an anecdote, but it worked pretty well for me. And every other engineer I know.

Good to know no credible research shows an oversupply of the STEM market. There's news that STEM graduates have low unemployment, with half of engineers and computer people not working in STEM jobs, and 75% of STEM graduates overall not working in STEM-related jobs. CIS has found 8 million non-working STEM graduates, and thinks there are 50% more STEM graduates than STEM jobs.

Yeah, you're hearing 2+2=5, but that's not what I'm saying.

You're saying there is infinite demand for engineers. All current research says we have plenty more than we need. You know why I'm not listening? Because I have access to current data that says exactly the opposite of what you're saying, coming out of multiple research sources, and plastered all over the fucking place. In short: you're wrong.

Yes, that's harsh, and unfriendly. But you can take a fucking look and see. My sources linked above are 2013-2014 sources, not 2002 or some stupid shit. It's current. I'm arguing correctly, by credible and recent data. I understand that part of good negotiation is to give people a way to save face, but I'm going to call a lifeline here and say I know more about the job market in this discussion than about how to not make you look stupid for being wrong.

Wow, corporate control over not only the wages of all their workers, but also the primary force of upward social mobility.... yeah, that paints a pleasant picture of the future.

That's what universal college education is: cheap labor, pre-trained workforce, trained on the backs of the individual and the taxpayer, with an oversupplied labor market so wages can be kept low. When your education is no longer adequate, we'll replace you with a new college grad who is up-to-speed, unless you keep yourself up-to-speed using money from your wages we pay you, without costing more than a replacement grad.

Have you not realized that selecting an education career is a risk? It's a big risk: even if it's free, it's years of your life relegated to whatever useless McBurgerJackInTheAss fry runner drive thru job you can get, with the hopeful return of a career. If you pick the wrong career, you will not gain employment by your degree; your upwards mobility

WMD's found http://www.usnews.com/opinion/...

Just shut up and send them some bags of grain right?

We send them our industrial base. We also send them signed trade agreements with MFN status.

They send us finished goods made safely outside the Environment. And sans any OSHA EPA NLRB costs, tariffs or the slightest customs impediment. Thus, we are free to pad our regulatory nest however much we need to gratify our environmental virtues.

And this scheme works ok until you create a huge cohort of former-middle-class-now-subsistence-worker voters. Those folks have no patience for hypocrite climate warriors.

The GP is dead-on correct. Cold, hungry people don't count carbon molecules while sitting in the dark.

The above might eventually make sense to the common mope — after enough of his wealth and liberty are outlawed. But I am far more cynical. You see, our elites don't actually work with this calculus. To them, "environmentalism" is a means to power, because nothing is beyond the scrutiny of their green tyranny.

He has a point. Every story about women in STEM is plagued with posts trying to disrupt any effort to improve things. Typical arguments include: - There is no problem - Girls just don't like computers ...

Is it possible that either of these are true, even in a general sense? There are gender disparities in several fields. The median salary for nurses is $65,470, whereas the median salary for IT Technicians is $42,992

OMFG, who the hell would want to work in IT for less than $42K a year? Because if $42K/year is the median that would suggest half of all IT technicians are getting paid peanuts. Unless you live in a low-cost, rural small city or town, less than $42K/year is very goddamned low nowadays.

There are gender disparities in several fields. The median salary for nurses is $65,470, whereas the median salary for IT Technicians is $42,992, but you don't hear a whole bunch of FUD over the fact that 90% of nurses are females. And when it comes right down to it, nurses are far more valuable to society than IT techs.

The male nurse point is a bad example because people do care about that.

He has a point. Every story about women in STEM is plagued with posts trying to disrupt any effort to improve things. Typical arguments include:
- There is no problem
- Girls just don't like computers
...

Is it possible that either of these are true, even in a general sense? There are gender disparities in several fields. The median salary for nurses is $65,470, whereas the median salary for IT Technicians is $42,992, but you don't hear a whole bunch of FUD over the fact that 90% of nurses are females. And when it comes right down to it, nurses are far more valuable to society than IT techs. Meanwhile, oil rig workers, about 95% male, make on average $99,175. Why no big push for women in that field?

After the results if this midterm election, it's not surprising Facebook is ending their get out the vote program?

Why? Because Millenials are increasingly voting Republican and Libertarian after decades of lip service from the Democrats. Jobs, college debt, and personal liberty are extremely important issues to this generation.

Facebook, with its left leaning executives, would see no reason to mobilize their opposition's base.

The USPS hasn't raised prices several-fold. The price for a stamp has gone down in inflation adjusted terms since 1975. And we all know WHY the USPS is broke. Not because it can't deliver letters, but because it's being forced by Congress to prefund its pension/healthcare/workers comp funds to an absurd extent, and not permitted to invest in anything but government bonds.

Why can't bridges compete with each other?

Bridges have a natural monopoly over their local environment. In fact, in NYC there are completely free options to get out of the city, but most people still use the toll bridges because time equals money, and most people aren't willing to drive five miles out of their way in traffic to save $7.50 or $10.00. With that in mind, why would a private bridge owner have any incentive to lower prices? They would be like cable companies, using their monopoly to gauge consumers to the greatest extent possible. Prices would likely go up since the owners would be completely unaccountable to their customers.

And btw it might be decent in some parts of the country but $30/hr is a shitty wage in NYC.

What about regular loans (home, auto)? Credit cards? I understand those are quite hard for someone to get those at 18, and if they do it's usually for a smaller amount with a higher APR. But when I was 18 I could get a student loan for $20K with my mom co-signing (I understood loans, just not the realities of the future.) The difference? Student Loans are far harder to discharge in regular bankruptcy proceedings. Therefore, institutions making those loans take on far less risk themselves, especially if the government can garnish your pay checks or social security to pay them.

I think it's okay to trust 18-year-olds with loans, but it should be limited (or make them take a financial class to be sure they fully understand what they're getting into). Remove the protection for student loans and you'll probably see both tuition and average student debt turn way down after a decade.

Surprisingly, youth are switching away from democrats, and voting republican. Oh, maybe they're switching away from Facebook, too; that old, washed-up platform for hipsters and grandmas.

This isn't the first ebola outbreak West Africa has had. It's not an especially "fast moving" disease, either. And "soldier on to what may be a post apocalyptic world" is a great way not to spread panic</sarcasm>. In the developed world, we can contain ebola. If it spreads past the infected Texas healthcare workers, that wouldn't be good, but the world's not ending.

Reading your post, I'm reminded of a Slashdot poster during the housing crisis who said he was betting with his investments on sustained, deep economic decline. I wonder how that worked out for him.

That is to say, if you were accepted to Harvard, but instead attended a state school, you will statistically wind up with the same salary as if you had attended Harvard. http://www.usnews.com/educatio...

This is all very interesting, but some details of the study you cite suggest that other factors are at play. From your link:

As with the earlier study, there were some students who did fare better financially if they attended elite schools. The students who fell into this category were Latino, black, and low-income students, as well as those whose parents did not graduate from college.

In an E-mail, the researchers explained these exceptions: "While most students who apply to selective colleges may be able to rely on their families and friends to provide job-networking opportunities, networking opportunities that become available from attending a selective college may be particularly valuable for black and Hispanic students and for students who come from families with a lower level of parental education."

The researchers want to blame the effects on all networking, which is undoubtedly significant, but that's not to say there weren't also other factors present -- like the fact that minority kids, poor kids, and kids without well-educated parents might not have the kind of cultural exposure to the "upper class educated world" that white rich kids with high SAT scores might have. By going to a better school, they might be exposed to more ideas that are more typical of wealthier classes, as well as learning social skills and networking.

Whatever the cause -- the point is that this is SERIOUS confounding variable in this study. Students with high SAT scores are already disproportionately from upper-class or upper-middle-class white (and Asian) families. Saying that those sorts of people will achieve whether they go to Harvard or not isn't actually saying much at all.

The fact that "better" schools make a significant difference for all these other non-privileged groups proves that they actually do something for students who actually NEED the help to succeed in life.

Moreover, I just find this finding hilarious:

Applicants, who shared similar high SAT scores with Ivy League applicants could have been rejected from the elite schools that they applied to and yet they still enjoyed similar average salaries as the graduates from elite schools. In the study, the better predictor of earnings was the average SAT scores of the most selective school a teenager applied to and not the typical scores of the institution the student attended.

Holy crap! If I want my kid to succeed, I just need for him to APPLY to Harvard, since the best predictor is the average SAT score of the most selective school he applies to. It doesn't matter whether he's accepted, rejected, whatever -- as long as he applies, it will help.

Of course... that's preposterous. Once again, the interpretation of this finding gets murky. What's probably more telling here is that kids who BOTHER applying to Harvard or wherever are mostly from households with high-achieving parents or parents who really push their kids to succeed. Those kids will likely do well wherever they go to.

The question of whether better schools "add value" is mostly relevant to kids who would NOT generally have good opportunities to succeed in life otherwise, like poor kids, minority kids, kids whose parents were not well-educated. And for those kids, your study absolutely shows a significant difference.

Several orders of magnitude less than feminists claim.

Do you understand the benefits of a union?

Classically speaking, unions existed to drive up benefits through threat of strikes or walkouts. In the 20's and 30's, unions were responsible for the 40 hours workweek, Saturdays off, and a living wage -- by preventing things like random firings and unpaid work (see 80 hour work weeks in the game industry).

To be clear, if individuals were better at negotiating wages, we'd see a rise in salary in the field, but according to statistics this is quite simply not the case. "Ah, but salary went up from 80K to over 100K you say", to which I agree, but if you adjust for inflation, you'll see that that $80K in 2004 is equivalent to $100K in 2014 (26.1%). In the same period, the tech heavy Nasdaq grew 143%. While some of this can be attributed to there being more people employed in the field, I doubt there 2.5x more CS graduates than there were ten years ago.

So while pay is still decent, there's still no rise in salary despite what many consider an obvious shortage in the field. If more CS majors studied those useless fields like "history", we'd have a union and there wouldn't be a bunch of indentured servants known as H1Bs driving wages down (by artificially inflating the labor pool with people who can't quit).

Seriously? The chance to cause global disasters and a million war deaths (by the most off-the-wall-extreme measures for the US's war on terror) and the like are not preferable to Africa's situation?

Let me count some of the tragedies in recent years in Africa.

• 1.2 million annual aids deaths
• Over 550,000 Malaria deaths.
• Massiveethnic cleansing and Religiously motivated murders.
• Large areas without water, or without clean water
• Basic democratic process failure

I'm not arguing that first world countries are utopias but to claim Africa has it better or is doing things better is silly on the face of it.

The scientists were about evenly divided on whether they thought the effects of global climate change over the next 50 to 100 years were likely to be near catastrophic (41 percent) or moderately dangerous (44 percent). About 13 percent saw relatively little danger.

While this is a group of knowledgeable outsiders, it's a group of knowledgeable outsiders with somewhat less conflict of interest than those who study "climate change".

Economist Don Boudreaux and econ PhD Liya Palagashvili look at the published data of this study and evaluate whether the conclusion holds water in Obama's Misleading Minimum Wage Statistics.

It had nothing to do with the invention of self-service pumps.

Uh-huh.

Economic data is historical data. It can produce correlations, never, ever Cause and Effect. Someone please design for me a control system based on correlational data.

In other words, "I can't produce any data showing where job growth slowed or people lost jobs because of a higher minimum wage, thus all data is garbage".

Which is why the economic growth rate is, over the last 100 years, inversely correlated with the power of economists and our government.

You think it's economists who are behind the movements to raise the minimum wage? You think government wants this and working people are against it? Maybe you should look at this:

http://www.politico.com/story/...

"On minimum wage, voters support raising the federally mandated minimum, 72 percent to 27 percent, including a majority of Republicans, who support it 52 percent to 45 percent"

And surprisingly, even 61% of small business owners support raising the minimum wage. Now why would that be?

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/...

Your argument that a raise in the minimum wage is something thought up by economists and government is just provably wrong.

Which is why the economic growth rate is, over the last 100 years, inversely correlated with the power of economists and our government.

You complain about "correlations not being causation" and then come up with THAT argument, which is based on a spurious correlation? Every rise in the minimum wage has been not the result of eggheads in government, but because of a groundswell of demand from the people who are, you know, actually doing the work.

There's not a single person in national elected office, House, Senate, or White House who has a PhD in Economics. Not one. There are people with other kinds of PhDs and professional doctorates, but not one single economist. But, you argue, economists control everything. Here's a correlation for you, "People who espouse neoliberal economic theories are highly likely to throw any kind of argument at the wall, based on no data or even any kind of provable theory." If anything, if you want spurious arguments and assertions based on nothing but feelings and doctrine, go to an Austrian School economist or someone who believes that crap.

Gone are the days, when pursuit of happiness was understood as a natural right granted to each human being not by their government, but by the Creator.

Everyone understands that this is a fundamental tenet of the founding documents of the United States, but that doesn't prevent it from being quietly ignored by those who, say, disparage the Constitution as "a charter of negative liberties."

The IPCC's latest report does NOT state that the science supporting global climate change is "weaker than ever".

That's a pretty abusive characterization of the latest report. The most important climate variable, the temperature forcing sensitivity of CO2 concentration in atmosphere was loosened to a factor of three difference between highest and lowest estimate. It's now back to where it was in the late 19th century with Arrhenius's estimates (which I gather is the basis for Jane Q. Public's claim that the science is "weaker than ever"). Extreme weather was put on the back burner. We're left with a greatly weakened case for urgency as a result. Those are huge changes.

Sure, a few minor botches were discovered in the report, but that doesn't change the fact that there is some evidence, supported by the opinions of a large though undetermined majority of climate scientists (most who don't have any more experience or knowledge than knowledgeable outsiders), that global warming is real and partly caused by human actions.

FIFY. Note both the weakness of the actual claim made and that it doesn't actually translate into a call for action. Just because a narrow category of scientist, most which don't actually do research on global warming, happen to have an opinion that there is some degree of human-induced global warming doesn't mean that we need to act to reduce CO2 emissions.

And I question whether there actually is that high a level of agreement. From this story, we have the following comment on a 2007 survey:

Of the 489 Earth and atmospheric scientists surveyed by Harris Interactive, 97 percent said that global temperatures have increased during the past 100 years, and 74 percent agreed that "currently available scientific evidence substantiates the occurrence of human-induced greenhouse warming." The findings mark a significant increase in concern over climate change since 1991, when a Gallup survey of the same universe of scientists showed only 60 percent agreed that temperatures were up and 41 percent believed that evidence pointed to human activity as the cause.

74% is a fair bit short of your "over 90%" claim, but that includes scientists without a direct financial or status stake in global warming being true. Now there's been a few years since 2007, but I see no evidence, despite widespread government bribery, that the evidence has improved significantly. To the contrary, the IPCC had to weaken their case as Jane Q. Public noted.

Actually Common Core was an initiative started by States, not the Federal Government. http://www.usnews.com/news/spe....

But absolutely agree with the rest of your post.

Actually, the Federal Government has been a lot more involved with Common Core than you think.

Among other things, people in the administration who were pushing Obama's "Race to the Top" initiative pressured States to adopt it and threatened loss of funding if they didn't.

There is also funding from DoE and other support from the Obama administration. Republicans tried to pinch it off, so far without much success.

There is propaganda on both sides, but here are some facts: Common Core was centrally planned, with cooperation and input from the Obama administration. It was not conceived or initiated by States on their own. It was adopted by individual States, but at the same time they were pressured to do so in order to receive Federal and private funds.