Slashdot Mirror

The poll shows something different.

56% want to be part of the EU and this east and west. Most though want to be part of an independent country and even in the east do want to be part of Russia nor be threatened any time Russia does not like what the country does. The seaport is err was in Ukraine Russia has no say what someone does with their own country.

Rebuild it and Putin will then say LOOK! THE CIA REALLY SUPPORTS THE NEO NAZIS OUT TO GET RUSSIANS.

Support can be twisted to mean lots of things.

There is only one way to fix this and it will be war. I can predict the news. Within days the eastern regions will petition Putin to join Russia. Russia will send in forces to secure its terrority (in Russia's mind Ukraine is no part of Russia) and Ukraine will fight them. War will break out.

Just like the civil war Lincoln stated a house divided agaisn't itself can not stand. Same with Ukraine. It is time for a showdown or a shut up and those who do not like Russia according to recent polls in the east will surely put up a fight once it invades.

I do not understand why Russia is so surprised by the condemnation?

It is not like the real eastern Ukrainians actually favor Russia or Independence? All the pro Russian protesters are really Russian pretending to be Ukrainians taking over TV stations and trying to whip up the Russian minority. They know this and everything is fake and is doctored by the media including hte western media when they call the special forces protesters??

Unless they actually believe the crap they see on state sponsored TV and really think they are the good guys stopping an evil Nazi regime sponsored the US and A to bully innocent Ukrainians and Russia? At least the demonstrators in Kiev who over threw the government were real Ukrainians and not American CIA agents. Idiots.

So Russia is angry it is being perceived as bully as result. Well the mirror doesn't lie and Russia deservers all its sanctions.

It is wearying to see people shout for unions as if theyre a panacea or dont have scores of their own issues. Anyone remember the thuggish behavior of the Verizon unions a few summers back, where they were pissed that their non-profitable department was not making as much as other, profitable departments? To prove their point, they went around slicing through fiber lines... one might almost dismiss the "verizon reps say" as just a smear campaign, except for all of the tech support calls I got during that time from verizon business customers whose internet mysteriously went out right as the strike was underway. Thats not suspicious, at all....

Unions did great things in the past, but these days they seem to be champions of vastly inflated salaries and fighting merit-based pay whenever possible. No way, no how, no thanks, Im doing quite fine in my merit-based, capitalist run industry. I've had quite enough of "workers unite" talk for a lifetime.

Um, no. The Whiskey Rebellion had nothing to do with "shitting on veterans". Veterans rallied around George Washington to put down the rebels.

George Washington was a millionaire at the time because he owned some extremely popular Whiskey distilleries, so when he imposed the first taxes of the nation (largely to pay our war debts), the first thing he did was put on a tax that hit himself hardest. This was considered fair. Even in those days, it was well known that alcohol came with severe social consequences, so this Sin Tax was generally accepted as the best way to raise national funds.

So what drove the Whiskey Rebellion? Largely it was early Borderlander (Scott/Irish) culture, one of the american nations, which simply wanted all the benefits of living the United States without having to pay a dime for its upkeep. This attitude, by the way, still completely dominates in these regions 200 years later, driving much of our politics: right wingers who pretend to "speak for the veterans" while at the same time refusing to pay for their benefits. Clyde Bundy is a poster child for borderlander culture

Thinking about it, I suppose you could say that "shitting on veterans" was the point of the revolution - it was just the rebels who were trying to do the shitting.

But those articles don't actually say that the RBOCs "had billions of government dollars to do it a decade ago, and didn't. Just took the money and pocketed it." It's not like the government handed out billions of dollars in grant money and then the RBOCs said "thanks, suckers!" and ran off.

The RBOCs got approval from local and state governments to charge infrastructure upgrade fees on home phone lines and they got tax breaks to incentive them to upgrade. Unfortunately this was happening at a time when "broadband" technologies were changing rapidly, governments didn't know how to deal with it or regulate it effectively, and the money was wasted - rather than pocketed - on things like installations of tech that was obsolete by the time it went into the ground, cost overruns that make deployments unfeasible, and projects that went nowhere because of overweening government regulations. Think of it like the failed helicopter that the US spent $2 billion on and ended up being cancelled before it ever got to production. It wasn't like Lockheed took that money and just ran away with it... it was spent on real things but the project was so badly mismanaged that, even after all that spending, it was cheaper to just eat the costs and put a stake in it.

Mexico has a tight restriction on guns yet their murder rate is 23.7, Switzerland where every adult over 18 is issued a true assault rifle has a murder rate of 0.7. It is not the gun laws that cause problems it is the culture.

Mexico has tight restrictions on guns yet are flooded with guns from the USA. This effect is so severe that researchers have actually studied the effect on Mexican homicide rates from the lapsing of the US Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which had a ten year sunset rule.

Switzerland does have a lot of guns .... at home, as part of their military system. There is no culture of people carrying around guns with them in civilian life just in case they get randomly attacked for no reason. I live in Switzerland. I've not spent a huge amount of time in the USA, just visits over the years, yet I've seen there a bar with a "no guns" sign outside. This is something I have yet to encounter here.

But even if it is due to culture, you aren't going to turn the USA into Switzerland, so stop blaming culture (which implies that's how to fix it). Instead look to the UK, which has a culture far closer to America's. The UK experienced steadily growing gun crime rates for decades (graph on page 4), with very small occasional falls being quickly reversed by growth again. The big jumps in 1998 and 2002 are due to changes in counting methods - so you can mentally smooth the graph if you like. A few years after the UK passed much stricter gun control laws firearms offences started to fall dramatically and have continued falling every year.

I've noticed that UK statistics are frequently abused by gun rights advocates in the USA. Ways I've seen them be distorted include: chopping off the earlier years and then trying to claim that passing gun control laws made gun crime go up (it was going up anyway and the big jump was due to counting method changes), and claims that the UK has more violent crime than the USA (the category of "violent crime" excludes homicide, because the stats are collected through surveys and dead people don't reply to surveys, homicide rates are over 4x higher in America).

Something else to consider about the UK experience is that the stats cover up a lot of interesting detail, like the fact that whilst there are still firearms offences they are almost invariably committed with used guns and that provides a lot of evidence that can be used to bring the cases to resolution. "Clean guns" that have never been used before are exceptionally rare. In the USA they're the norm because it's so easy to buy new guns, so why leave a trail of evidence? Ammo is also hard to obtain. Some gangs have tried to make their own, but their home made ammo is far less deadly than professionally manufactured ammo.

I do not expect the USA to actually ever shift itself on the issue of gun control, even though it stands practically alone amongst developed countries. Instead American's who don't want to fear getting shot should simply leave.

Set it at 200% if you want. Laws are meaningless unless they're enforced. There are already anti-abuse provisions. When is the last time they were enforced?

Oh, I'd say they are being enforced "in force" in the Valley these days. Now is not the time to fuck with employment law in tech companies...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

A decade ago, there was boundless enthusiasm for everything google did, and now they've made it clear ...

Unless you were a complete retard, it was totally obvious what they were doing a decade ago as well. I don't see the big deal. Google offers lots of free services in exchange for targeted advertising. That is the deal, and they are very open and upfront about what they are doing and always have been. If you don't like it, then don't use their services. It is childish and silly to whine that they are not spending billions to provide you with something for nothing.

Yeah, you did have to be a complete retard to miss Google's business model being that of an ad agency - on steroids. An ad agency on a PCP bender on steroids.

But to say Google is " very open and upfront about what they are doing and always have been"?!?!!?

Then why the carefully-presented weasel words "never uses your content or student data for advertising purposes"? Doesn't that make you want to read the fine print and see what EXACTLY Google means by "content or student data"? And what about purposes Google can somehow claim are not "advertising"?

Why is Google lobbying so hard to prevent restrictions on data gathering in the wake of Snowden's revelations?

...

Today, Google is working to preserve its rights to collect consumer data — and shield it from the government — amid a backlash over revelations that the National Security Agency tapped Internet companies as part of its surveillance programs. ...

Also, if you don't trust Wikipedia itself, this is the source they cite.

Virgina's Attorney General is of the opinion is that using cameras to collect plate information is not legal unless its directly related to a criminal case. Apparently that hasn't affected the practice too much.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Moreover, the claim that's based on a website that was taken down is pure garbage. At least give us an archive version, please?

Not quite, but I can give you a Russian version and some discussion of that version in English.

The Volokh conspiracy has a link to a Russian version of the article which is somehow still up (and it sounds like it's an official government agency).

It sounds like this isn't so much an accidental leak as a deliberate shot from a Russian government agency that isn't fully Putinized. Either way to all the people who were doubtful about the missing article's existence... well there you go.

The US capitol is very prone to earthquake damage. And it turns out that is is surrounded by shale formations where fracking is or could occur. The Marcellus Shale formation to the North and now "The Taylorsville basin runs through some of Virginia and across the Potomac River to cover much of Charles County, some of Prince George’s and up to Annapolis. That basin was assessed and found to contain an estimated 1,064 billion cubic feet of natural gas" to the South surround it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/... The last earthquake did serious damage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2....

Realistically, the problem with a name change is that politics more than anything else -- calling it by yet another name will make the conspiracy theorists think that you're trying to hide or obfuscate something (the link talks about Benghazi, but the ideas apply to climate change too), and while that's not true, the end result is still that it overall causes people to take the problem less seriously. I think we should stick with "climate change".

I disagree for two reasons. First, something like anthropogenic global warming is far more descriptive. Note that all the discussion of "climate change" is about global warming. It's not about the other ways humanity can change its environment such as desertification.

That leads to scientifically perverse rhetoric like blaming the recent Syrian drought on a variety of things and "climate change" as well. The very first thing they mentioned in that article was "combined with the mismanagement of natural resources by [Syrian President Bashar] Assad, who subsidized water-intensive crops like wheat and cotton farming and promoted bad irrigation techniques". Those things induce substantial massive climate change in their own right, such as record-breaking droughts. So their use of the term, climate change in this case doesn't actually include the obvious profound climate changing effects of resource mismanagement. So what does "climate change" refer to, if it doesn't actually refer to climate change?

Second, this really is about propaganda. I think the whole point of the use of vague phrases like "climate change" or the more alarming, "climate disruption" is to enable a lot of confirmation bias such as happened with the "extreme weather" of last winter in the northern hemisphere. The next odd or destructive weather story can now be woven rhetorically into the "climate change" narrative.

Your post is bullshit, including that load of crap about it being deliberately timed to coincide with the US elections. Anyone bothering to familiarize themselves at even the most basic level would realize the difficulties of the trial. I do like your "sort of" comment. I guess you think there was genuine doubt about Saddam killing massive numbers of people? I guess 800+ mass graves and nerve gassing the Kurds would leave some people in doubt.

I suggest simply reading this article to get a better idea of what was going on and the chaos they had to contend with.

Hussein Trial Halts Again, Setting Off Wave of Criticism

If your physical data is in the form of "fish", don't destroy it prematurely!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Not as often as they should be.

Hopefully the Supreme Court will rule the First Amendment applies to government employees.

And how many of those "poor" people have cable television?

And how many of them have, *gasp*, refrigerators? Imagine some of these *poor* people having computers!!!!

That was sarcasm by the way.

See, the thing is, some might have, but many do not. I know I didn't for the first 15 years of my life in this country. Similarly, a lot of people live in rental communities that already come with a cable bundle that you cannot opt out.

Say "oh well, they could live somewhere cheaper?" Yeah, they can live in a trailer on in a dilapidated ghetto. Certain utilities that might look like luxuries to you are non-optional. And the cost of having cable or a TV is peanuts compared to the cost of eating healthy.

I mean, shit, my wife and I spend a lot of money in getting organic foods for our family, our children. Then there is the processing that comes with it.

Although were are in above the 10% household income bracket, with significant savings and pretty much free of debt, we are very, very frugal. We aim to spend no more than $200 a week in eating (pretty much we don't eat out, it is just pure food-stock shopping).

We have done the math and we could slash by possibly half per week if we didn't buy organic/health food. That is $100 a week of taxable income (whereas the *cable* non-opt-out fee on a condominium, at least in the region I live, is about $30 to $40 a month

Meaning, your ZOMG-poor-people-has-cable non-sequitur is approximately a 10th of what people would spend on organic food.

Read that again. $100 a week of non-taxable income. $400 a moth. $4800 a year. At least! That is $4800 a year that you gobble when trying to feed your family healthy and organically. Money that you burn... and that you get taxed on when IRS time comes.

Yes, you get your default deduction tables, but we are talking cash flow here, on a week by week basis. I can take that.

People that can afford to eat health can take that.

The poor people that you tried to vilify with your cable comment, they cannot take that.

Here, have a read and educate yourself: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

What is wrong with saying a 2nd grader should know x before moving on to the 3rd grade, and a 3rd grader should know y, before moving to the 4th grade, and so on?

That's not really a good description of common core - it doesn't really do that. States can impose certain testing requirements on top of it, optionally, like Virginia's Standards of Learning (SOL), but you won't find any kind of requirement for "knowing" any objective facts in the Common Core.

So you are stating that is not what it does, and then as evidence state something that is part of the implementation, not the standards themselves, which was exactly the point I was making... The standards dictate what should be learned, not the how they learn and how they evaluate what they learn..

But I wont, ill just ask you, what is wrong with the STANDARDS THEMSELVES? And please do not come up with the usual list of proven incorrect statements, such as teachers not being involved in the standards themselves.

That's a pretty big topic. The Common Core advocates seem to do a lot of marketing around their process for creating the standards, which includes taking a lot of existing standards (really bad ones), and pretending they're worthy of expanding upon.

Which bad ones? Really hard to debate something if you are being vague possibly intentionally

I'll bring up a few of the basic issues and let you research more yourself.

Seventy-two CEOs hailing from corporations that usually like to stay out of the political fray, including Harley-Davidson, General Mills and Xerox, placed a full-page ad in the New York Times claiming that the curriculum will meet the “business community’s expectations.” That should tell you something right there: Are these companies interested in educating Americans to pursue their highest potential, or in creating a workforce beholden to the Corporate ladder?

correlation/causation issue with your statement. It does not really tell me anything on its own, however on the flip side what those companies are interested in has little baring on it, however the purpose of the schools is to prepare you for work/higher ed when you graduate

The fundamental theme of Common Core’s English language arts (ELA) standards is a focus on non-fiction “informational texts.” The ELA standards were fashioned so that elementary students read no more than 50 percent classic literature and high school students may read only 30 percent classic literature. The other 70 percent is comprised of informational texts.

and what is the problem with this? On the face it does not really seem to be a problem. However just like before THIS IS IMPLEMENTATION

The curriculum advocates a “close reading” of a text in which students are asked to analyze what they’ve read strictly from the available text without a whiff of historical context. This method teaches students to accept the information that they are given without question. It's an indoctrination technique writ large, through years of barraging students with lesson plans produced by government bureaucracies.

You mean like how we were required to say the pledge of allegiance every day, without being allowed to opt out, while growing up is indoctrination?

What you claiming is indoctrination is not necessarily so. It is also used to be able to break apart the grammar to pick out subject, verbs, nouns, and the like as it was when we were kids. There is no evidence that I have seen to point to indoctrination, and seeing how this is part of the IMPLIMENTATION, not seeing how it is part of the standard itself.

You can also check out some of the writing by Carol

What is wrong with saying a 2nd grader should know x before moving on to the 3rd grade, and a 3rd grader should know y, before moving to the 4th grade, and so on?

That's not really a good description of common core - it doesn't really do that. States can impose certain testing requirements on top of it, optionally, like Virginia's Standards of Learning (SOL), but you won't find any kind of requirement for "knowing" any objective facts in the Common Core.

But I wont, ill just ask you, what is wrong with the STANDARDS THEMSELVES? And please do not come up with the usual list of proven incorrect statements, such as teachers not being involved in the standards themselves.

That's a pretty big topic. The Common Core advocates seem to do a lot of marketing around their process for creating the standards, which includes taking a lot of existing standards (really bad ones), and pretending they're worthy of expanding upon.

I'll bring up a few of the basic issues and let you research more yourself.

Seventy-two CEOs hailing from corporations that usually like to stay out of the political fray, including Harley-Davidson, General Mills and Xerox, placed a full-page ad in the New York Times claiming that the curriculum will meet the “business community’s expectations.” That should tell you something right there: Are these companies interested in educating Americans to pursue their highest potential, or in creating a workforce beholden to the Corporate ladder?

The fundamental theme of Common Core’s English language arts (ELA) standards is a focus on non-fiction “informational texts.” The ELA standards were fashioned so that elementary students read no more than 50 percent classic literature and high school students may read only 30 percent classic literature. The other 70 percent is comprised of informational texts. The curriculum advocates a “close reading” of a text in which students are asked to analyze what they’ve read strictly from the available text without a whiff of historical context. This method teaches students to accept the information that they are given without question. It's an indoctrination technique writ large, through years of barraging students with lesson plans produced by government bureaucracies.

You can also check out some of the writing by Carol Burris, an award-winning educator that was a big proponent of Common Core until she started seeing the ugly details. Very enlightening.

Have you seen how they are teaching math under the Common Core now? The premise is that students should learn "estimating" instead of math or number theory. I guess that makes sense if you're a bureaucrat dealing with multi-million dollar budgets - as long as you're within 1 or 2% you're good. But that's not really good enough if you're trying to really learn the core principles. You should see if this makes any sense to you as a way to teach 5th graders math. I don't think it does.

You'll probably dismiss these issues as "growing pains" and issues that can be fixed over time. But we should not be experimenting on our children this way. Or they won't be able to contribute anything to the next generation of learners.

Solar, Water, Wind are all completely renewable sources of energy that upon failure...don't destroy the ecosystem around it.

Friend, please take a look at my mini-essay Electricity in the Time of Cholera.

We're talking about 7 billion people here. We all want access to clean water, sanitation, washing machines and electric lights. Half of the women in the world today wash clothes by hand. In rural areas 7 of 8 Africans, half of all South Asians, in total an estimated 1.5 billion people lack access to electricity.

What is the combined ecological impact of 1.5 billion rural people living without hope of electrification? They're burning charcoal, inviting short-sighted development practices. Embracing coal mining. Speaking of the United States, if we had not embarked on a massive endeavor to electrify rural areas in the 20th century a large area of our South and Midwest would still be without clean drinking water.

Never mind Water unless you live next to an un-dammed river whose inhabitants would love to be swallowed by a lake, and some powerful distant city has plans for the water, too. Will Solar and Wind deliver electricity to these people... or to anyone? Every time I see a windmill I imagine it as it will look like in 5 years, rusted and frozen. This is farming country, there are quite a few around and none are spinning, guess the cost of operation caught up. Every time I see a photo of a solar panel and hear talk of how it's made of common sand and we should be replicating them by the billions I think of the megatons of silicon tetrachloride that need to be dumped somewhere for this to happen. And the little elves who would wire them together out in the elements with ten pounds of electronics to make megawatts. During the day. And for watt? No real watts to speak of. NO ONE can afford PV and Wind because it will NOT run a water treatment plant for your local school let alone millions of people 24/7. Period. They are simply 'off the table'.

Nuclear energy -- even from water reactors as it has been produced in North America and Europe -- is the cleanest, safest viable form of energy on the table. But with the Molten Salt Reactor we have the opportunity to take it to greater levels, without the risks of nuclear energy that are most terrifying. Electricity is a centralized industrial-scale process and must stay that way. The math does not work otherwise.

If we do not revitalize our grid get or on track with an acceptable new source of base load energy that could transform the world, end the age of steam and fossil fuel... we could lose it all, you know.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

Authoritarian governments often see the political in what we consider the mundane. They are often wary of allowing "Western" or "bourgeois" ideas to "corrupt" the masses under their control. Even literature or art from their own society can be banned. Consider the example of Doctor Zhivago:

During Cold War, CIA used ‘Doctor Zhivago’ as a tool to undermine Soviet Union

I'm sure it has absolutely nothing at all to do with the fact that the last wave have until April 30th to pay...

...nor does it consider shenanigans like signing up jail inmates whether they want it or not, counting medicaid enrollees as obamacare signups, and similar.

Correlation is not causation.

Percentages of men vs women employed do not prove sexism exists, much in the same way that finding sick people in hospitals does not prove hospitals are making people sick. You wouldn't just walk up to someone and call them a White Supremacist, Anti-Semitic or Pedophile without clear evidence of their bigotry or perversion because those are vile slanderous labels which can damage careers: The same goes for the label of "Sexist Women Hater" too -- Or are we trying to normalize that label by over using it until it means nothing, hmmm? Responsible and honest people would want to ensure their perception of the situation at Amazon actually showed sexism or hatred of women before attempting to slander and shame their business practices. I don't see any evidence of sexism at all, all I see is more social justice shame being heaped for political reasons. To say that Amazon is a Book Seller which is traditionally Women Territory and ignoring how sexist that sounds and how unlike a book store Amazon is would be fucking insane, and yet there it is, right in TFS!

If there is sexism let's root it out, fine, but before we go sensationally bat-shit crazy and jump the gun let's just do a quick informal reality check: Ever try talking tech to women? What's your experience, do equal percentage of women vs men enjoy really geeking out about technology? It's my experience that more men do than women. OK, take a deep breath. Now, let's just ENTERTAIN THE CONSIDERATION that men and women may like doing different things; Disproving that is key to proving sexism exist... So, why isn't the professional offense league trying to do just that? It's just like when social justice warriors drone on and on about the lack of minorities in positions of influence and then forget to correct for the fact that 77% of the USA is white: You get out what you put in, geniuses. If women have equal opportunities but are not applying for the jobs that they don't want to do then you won't find them in said workforce. That's not sexism, it's free will.

Where's the ONE STUDY, just ONE flipping survey even that shows the degrees that women vs men enjoy and desire various jobs? Mightn't that be the FIRST FUCKING STEP to showing whether or not society is sexist or people just want to do different things? There are very few male romance novelists -- You can even use a pen-name, so there's no barrier to entry -- but it's not sexist that more women want to do that job than men... 40 years of feminism, but they still don't have any evidence that women aren't just exercising their right to select the more people friendly jobs they typically prefer. What are they trying to say? That decades of the social justice war have been completely pointless? Really? "Let's test the Null Hypothesis before being heinously slanderous," said no social justice warrior ever. Equal opportunity won't produce equal outcome because behavioral sex differences exist. Notably: Women are more extroverted (outgoing, socially interactive) than men and more developed and more egalitarian societies yield greater sex differences. The greater behavioral difference is probably because the people are freer to choose what they want to do instead of what they have to do to make money.

The gender pay gap doesn't exist, and it hasn't existed for around four decades. There's also no shortage of STEM workers. You see, if Amazon and other companies are shamed into having a 50/50 M:F hiring ratios regardless of the percentage of q

Correlation is not causation.

Percentages of men vs women employed do not prove sexism exists, much in the same way that finding sick people in hospitals does not prove hospitals are making people sick. You wouldn't just walk up to someone and call them a White Supremacist, Anti-Semitic or Pedophile without clear evidence of their bigotry or perversion because those are vile slanderous labels which can damage careers: The same goes for the label of "Sexist Women Hater" too -- Or are we trying to normalize that label by over using it until it means nothing, hmmm? Responsible and honest people would want to ensure their perception of the situation at Amazon actually showed sexism or hatred of women before attempting to slander and shame their business practices. I don't see any evidence of sexism at all, all I see is more social justice shame being heaped for political reasons. To say that Amazon is a Book Seller which is traditionally Women Territory and ignoring how sexist that sounds and how unlike a book store Amazon is would be fucking insane, and yet there it is, right in TFS!

If there is sexism let's root it out, fine, but before we go sensationally bat-shit crazy and jump the gun let's just do a quick informal reality check: Ever try talking tech to women? What's your experience, do equal percentage of women vs men enjoy really geeking out about technology? It's my experience that more men do than women. OK, take a deep breath. Now, let's just ENTERTAIN THE CONSIDERATION that men and women may like doing different things; Disproving that is key to proving sexism exist... So, why isn't the professional offense league trying to do just that? It's just like when social justice warriors drone on and on about the lack of minorities in positions of influence and then forget to correct for the fact that 77% of the USA is white: You get out what you put in, geniuses. If women have equal opportunities but are not applying for the jobs that they don't want to do then you won't find them in said workforce. That's not sexism, it's free will.

Where's the ONE STUDY, just ONE flipping survey even that shows the degrees that women vs men enjoy and desire various jobs? Mightn't that be the FIRST FUCKING STEP to showing whether or not society is sexist or people just want to do different things? There are very few male romance novelists -- You can even use a pen-name, so there's no barrier to entry -- but it's not sexist that more women want to do that job than men... 40 years of feminism, but they still don't have any evidence that women aren't just exercising their right to select the more people friendly jobs they typically prefer. What are they trying to say? That decades of the social justice war have been completely pointless? Really? "Let's test the Null Hypothesis before being heinously slanderous," said no social justice warrior ever. Equal opportunity won't produce equal outcome because behavioral sex differences exist. Notably: Women are more extroverted (outgoing, socially interactive) than men and more developed and more egalitarian societies yield greater sex differences. The greater behavioral difference is probably because the people are freer to choose what they want to do instead of what they have to do to make money.

The gender pay gap doesn't exist, and it hasn't existed for around four decades. There's also no shortage of STEM workers. You see, if Amazon and other companies are shamed into having a 50/50 M:F hiring ratios regardless of the percentage of q

Same with the IRS targeting Tea Party groups

Not the same since that was proven to be nothing more than a Teabagger conspiracy theory years ago. What part of "both liberal AND conservative groups were investigated by the IRS, and the ONLY group to be DENIED tax exempt status was a LIBERAL one" did you guys not understand?

There's no shortage of real abuses of power from Reagan's 8th term in office without having to make up stupid bullshit.

WRONG!!!!

IRS chief: No ‘targeting’ of tea party groups, just ‘inappropriate criteria’

The IG’s report was carefully written, but at this point, it is silly and counterproductive for Koskinen to fall back on bureaucratese — or even deny that the phrase “targeting” had been used. While perhaps technically correct in terms of the report, this is a slender reed to hide behind. After all, George publicly said that all three allegations of “targeting” were proven, and that using “inappropriate criteria” was the equivalent of “targeting.” That demonstrates that the term “inappropriate criteria” is simply a euphemism. Accept that means “targeting,” and move on.

Why is it so important for you to be so wrong about this?

Your opinion is that batteries don't make incremental improvements, but only revolutionary improvements once in long while when a completely new battery chemistry comes along.

Your opinion is completely wrong.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Getting to the point? We're there. We passed that threshold a while ago.

Correct. However, what many fail to realize is that in the 70's we didn't need to pay the educational extortion racket for permission to get work. The computing explosion was exploited to force the majority of the populace to seek degrees, but elementary school kids now have mastery of required technologies. The tools are more high-tech but the interface is even simpler than ever, certainly things that could be learned in on-the-job training.

The folks bitching about not being able to afford degrees are fools just now feeling the effects of an education bubble about to burst. The tech that created the education bubble has brought ">advances that made degrees obsolete. You can always tell a bubble by the final pump and dump of ramped up attempts to cash in on overly optimistic valuation. You are now aware that degree mills exist...

The requirement for college accreditation has always been a method for discrimination against the poor who would otherwise self-educate. More stringent degree requirements are a means by which corporations can drive down wages and get more government approved H1B visas and outsourcing. In reality, requiring employees to have a final exams is foolish since it doesn't actually prove they know anything at all -- That's why your boss is likely a moron. Entrance exams would instead suffice to prove applicants had the required knowledge and skills, without requiring they be saddled with debts by the educational gatekeepers of employment -- It doesn't matter how you learned what you know. Promoting to management from within makes cost cutting improvements in ability to predict and not make unrealistic expectations upon the workers, it also gives upward mobility to aging experienced workers instead of considering them dead at 40 (family raising age).

We're already on our way of getting to the point where you cannot recover your college fees during the rest of your working years.

Negative, debt levels have long since passed that point, and owing a debt to the careers you enter has always been unacceptable in the first place. College as anything more than elective learning college is just shifting around the Company Store by leveraging "intellectual property." We need college degrees less now that in the 70's. ::POP::

That guy RS is not a professor, but has a PhD in applied informatics.

We here in Germany no longer believe it was unintentional though, because the particular department where he works at T-Systems (the IT daughter of Deutsche Telekom), also did the remote maintenance for DLR, the German Aerospace Center, that coincidentally reported it's been hacked.

the Colorado Government is already at it with their right wing propaganda

Colorado is (narrowly) governed by the Democrats, not right wing. The Democratic governor is trying to slow down states from legalizing, despite it being a roaring success for everyone.

In fact what you'll find these days, is that most right-wing people lean libertarian - which is exactly why the people of Colorado (who lead independent/to the right) were perfectly fine legalizing something so many people did all the time anyway.

Look to the Democrats to shut it down... They are the ones that need the massive funds the government gets from the war on drugs to help fund lots of other progressive measures.

to be clear, the picture specifically identifies one Eric Parker as the man holding the rifle sighted in.
The attribution of the picture is to Jim Urquhart at Reuters.

Just one of many that prove you wrong:

Eric Parker from central Idaho aims his weapon from a bridge as protesters gather by the Bureau of Land Management's base camp, where cattle that were seized from rancher Cliven Bundy are being held, near Bunkerville, Nevada April 12, 2014. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

And there are other photos of the same gentleman, on wingnut "freedom" blogs all clearly labeling him as a member of the militia, proudly proclaiming the he "was providing cover for the patriots".

I say again: You are an idiot.

Heres the slides (warning TS//) http://apps.washingtonpost.com... They are from 2007, before iPhone came out. Much has changed since then.

NSA capabilities now include tapping phones of an entire country this is even U// by now https://firstlook.org/theinter...

Since Tor was identified as interesting in 2007 and since it hasn't died, it is safe to assume efforts are continuing to be applied against it.

And no, I don't have access to Internet scale data streams here, just using the standard Tor disclaimer at https://www.torproject.org/abo... but even 10 minutes is a long time if you have constant near-realtime communication.

Of course, Tor would be very effective for messaging services where you send one message and then disconnect!

Who is that? Is he like David Helkowski?

Except when a third party, say the Green Party, does put forth a candidate, say Jill Stein, who qualifies to be in the Presidential debates, *she is actually detained by the police and held for eight hours*. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Here's an interesting article that looks at the legal aspects of this case:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

tl;dr version: The charges are bullshit.

One important but often overlooked point in the WS article is how special education classes are setup. As the WP points out, in addition to kids who really need help they become dumping grounds for behavioral problems; as a result teachers have to teach and deal with troublemakers and the administration simply expects them to deal with it. So, instead of addressing the problems schools simply ignore them; especially since actually taking action and expelling the kid or moving them to a school designed to deal with troublemakers is a long and difficult process. If the teacher is lucky they can document the problems and get the kid kicked out of school or if they are an out of district kid, give them so much work to do that they decide to go back to their original school. No wonder many special ed teachers tell young kids who want to do that to do anything but teach special ed; and the kids who really need help suffer because teachers spend far too much time dealing with troublemakers.

Here's an interesting article that looks at the legal aspects of this case:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

tl;dr version: The charges are bullshit.

Not only is it morally reprehensible, it is not even effective.

And yes, it is torture.

The Senate report's findings are not some surprisingly new or unforeseeable result. This was well established and repeatedly pointed out to the Bush administration.

And No, the greatest US generation did not do this.

Only in a deeply warped society would some weasel lawyers construct the kind of twisted logic that you are espousing. Your definition is so far outside the mainstream, it doesn't even qualify as a joke. So yes, it is irrelevant.

And while I am happy that you are not happy about this state of affairs, it doesn't make a yota of difference. Your rational is irrational and the method profoundly wrong.

As to being able to catch terrorists without torture, you didn't pay attention to what I earlier wrote. We got all the RAF bad guys and one of the worst terrorists before Bin Laden was caught the old fashioned way, with solid intelligence and diplomacy.

Terrorism was always a reality in most Western countries (but North America) and we dealt with it without misplacing our values.

If you never even heard of Hitchens it's a pretty save bet that you never heard about any of this foreign history, and live on a Faux News diet.

Maybe you should try to travel the world a bit.

Like at Chernobyl, as I suggest here: http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"At SUNY Stony Brook, I knew one grad student who studied wildlife (turtles) in a reservation around a nuclear contaminated area, and while there was more mutations, in general, the wildlife was thriving [because human activities including hunting and habitat destruction were effectively excluded]. ... So, despite the problems, half-seriously, I suggest designating the NY Adirondack Park (where I live) for a nuclear waste disposal of glassified (vitrified) apple-sized lumps of waste. :-) That would be very good for a resurgence of wildlife in the Park. I might move out, but I would know a place I love would be "forever wild" for sure. :-)"

See also: "Chernobyl Area Becomes Wildlife Haven"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

I would also point out that the "US" - commonly condemned in such statistics - is probably the least homogenous country in the world. As such, it's probably useful to look at the state by state rankings, both positively and negatively: (ranked by deaths per 100k) 1. District of Columbia 30.8 http://www.city-data.com/forum...

That comes from the same book of statistics that tells us the US has the best healthcare in the world. If you even take a day trip to Toronto you'll see more ethnic diversity than in the US. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Or have you actually seen someone arguing that it is because of global warming that we shouldn't pollute our ecosystems with dangerous pesticides?

Well, people are blaming Syria's disastrous agricultural policies on "climate change" (actually meaning global warming, of course). I don't know if that situation has been aggravated by pesticide abuse. But if so, then there you go.

Sure, there's a reasonable case to be made that global warming makes desertification and human-caused drought worse. But these things would happen anyway at a very severe level even in the absence of global warming.

I see your hungry people and raise with...
twice as many dead babies as France.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/... Even when all the sick ones die at birth, the rest of your healthy ones still dont live as long.
https://www.cia.gov/library/pu...

Hmm. Concerning the theocracy and Shia Islam part, what's your opinion on the most recent attempts to (re)introduce Jaafari law to Iraq?

Iraq poised to legalize marriage for girls as young as 9
Iraq ready to legalise childhood marriage

But the legislation, known as the Jaafari law, introduces rules almost identical to those of neighbouring Iran, a Shia-dominated Islamic theocracy.

As long as it remains, the misogynists will have the argument that

The misogynists will always have an argument because they're working from an unshakable personal assumption that they are superior because of their gender. There's really no point pandering to them since they'll just writch to another argument.

No, you don't get it.

Let's say you have a company where they try to hire everyone "over the bar" regardless of any factors. You'd expect the gender ratio of the company to be whatever the percentage of the candidates who are above that ratio. (If it's not - and it often isn't, for various reasons - fix that first)

If this ratio is not 50/50, say because there are less women overall, and you determine that it is more important to fix the ratio than maintain the hiring standards, then you will unavoidably be diluting the pool of females with people of a lower standard. (If you don't decide to lower the bar, then you won't be changing the ratio)

So you are a rational individual (of any gender) in this company and you are presented with some person. It is an unavoidable fact that the average woman is of a lower competence than the average man. It is the only logical conclusion! The hiring process made it so!

This is a catastrophic approach because the sexist, backwards attitude shouldn't be made the correct logical inference! But by instituting the quota, the company has done exactly that!

There is a lot a company can do if it wants to have more females, without lowering the bar. Women typically require different outreach than men, such as more encouragement (men are more apt to pursue a path even in the face of active discouragement), seeing other females "leading the way" (part of encouragement), describing a job in terms of social impact (vs the "vanquish the challenge" aspect that appeals disproportionately to men). There's nothing wrong with this - a company that wants the best recruits should be picking the best messaging for many different groups, like new grad (great learning!) vs experienced industry (run stuff!), young (cool projects!) vs older (great benefits!), and, yes, even men vs women. Even something as simple as dropping the puzzle interview questions can help, since aside from being useless, a lot of the "fun" ones depend on cultural touchpoints (superheros and zombies in that article) that don't generally resonate with women. It's really an overall "change how we think about this" approach that's not generally too controversial - even stupid stuff like "hide the names on resumes" and "figure out what you're expecting before you meet the person" can help an interviewer avoid unconscious biases - against any group.

None of this is instituting a quota.

Well, the problem is seeing sick people in the hospital and thinking the doctors are making people sick. Correlation is not causation. Girls have equal opportunity and are making the choice not to be in CS and IT, that doesn't mean there's sexism or any reason to try to fix it. I mean, we don't have a shortage of STEM workers.

Hell, even the girls that DO like to code are looking at Silicon Valley, where you're considered dead at the family raising age of 40, and making far better decisions about the future than the silly guys who will do what they like to do whether it's very profitable or smart in the long term sense -- Just look at the Mathematicians and Scientists who scrap and fight for funding, they're not doing it for the money... You can code for a hobby and make games or something, but have a real job elsewhere that's got more stability than churn.

So what's the deal? If they know men and women are different, and that cross-culturally more egalitarian societies have even larger sex differences (probably because people are more free to do what they like doing), then they know no amount of teaching girls to code is going to fix the "gender gap" in the shitty STEM fields. So what's up with all the claims of anti-women discrimination when there isn't any evidence of that at all in the west? Ah, well they can leverage false guilt and shame and say, "We tried as hard as we can! We have a shortage of female workers in STEM! Title IX! Let us have more (lower paid) H1B employees and to correct the SEXIST M:F ratio!" You don't want to be called a SEXIST even if we have absolutely zero evidence of that, do you?! Ugh.

Yeah, that's exactly what's going on. To be perfectly clear: We can accept that our gender differences will produce trends in the workplace without limiting individuals to only following the trends, and without or shaming them if they do so. However, all this inequality nonsense is rubbish. Equal Opportunity won't produce equal ratios of M:F because males and females are different! Look, it's not sexist that there are so few male romance novelists, right? Guys just don't want to do that job nearly as much as women do. Where's the research that shows the percentage of girls vs guys that actually enjoy STEM work (not just those that think they'll enjoy it as a prestigious high status position, then bail, like 80% of female participants from my gamedev group, when they realize how much time and social life they'll be sacrificing for thankless work mostly no one will appreciate)? I mean, you'd think that before shouting "SEXISM" they'd at least want to know for sure that it's not just women opting to take a different career path (like therapy, psychiatry, teaching or other female dominated fields), Right?!

Wrong. Where's the outrage that there aren't enough male teachers, therapists, romance novelists, or more female coal miners, brick layers, waste management technicians, etc? Isn't that "sexist"? These Social Justice Warrior campaigns are just self selecting data and refusing to test the null hypothesis so they can leverage false victimhood to suit their political and economic agendas just like they've been doing so for at least the past three decades. You can expect as much from these fucking sexist and racist bigots, always. Not satisfied with making College into a social justice indoctrination camp they're bringing the totalitarian Orwellian bullshit to the lower grade levels; The better to brain wash your kids with, my dear.

Next thing you know they'll want

The WTOP article drops the story in 2007.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

The Wikipedia article tell us that the case went to court -- you know, like when you feel you've been wronged, and you put the people who wronged you on trial, and the thing is judged by a jury of your peers (normal people not cops), and the jury awarded $5,000 in damages -- the size of some medical bills.

A jury -- of normal people -- thought, after getting much more insight into this case than you or I, that the cops were a little rough on her, and nothing more.

It seems like that's the problem -- the evidence that should have proved her story was non-existent because *seven* police cameras (cameras that we all paid for with our taxes and were *required* to be running due to a settlement with the DoJ) somehow malfunctioned and did not capture any video. How many cameras do you think would have malfunctioned if they backed up the story of the police? All the jury had to go on was her testimony and the testimony of 7+ police officers. I wonder if anyone involved had any vested interest in lying about the events?

Finally, the case is nearly A DECADE OLD.

What's next? Some cases where a firehose got turned on the colored in Mississippi?

7 years ago doesn't seem like that long ago, but are you really holding up past discrimination against blacks by those in authority as a good example of why the past doesn't matter?

The WTOP article drops the story in 2007.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

The Wikipedia article tell us that the case went to court -- you know, like when you feel you've been wronged, and you put the people who wronged you on trial, and the thing is judged by a jury of your peers (normal people not cops), and the jury awarded $5,000 in damages -- the size of some medical bills.

A jury -- of normal people -- thought, after getting much more insight into this case than you or I, that the cops were a little rough on her, and nothing more.

Finally, the case is nearly A DECADE OLD.

What's next? Some cases where a firehose got turned on the colored in Mississippi?

Regardless of what some advocacy organization says [...]

Like The Washington Post and ABC News?

Actually, as of late, they haven't been passing. Again, you have to stay up to date. There are a bunch of legacy laws that need to be overturned, granted, but you're not seeing any new laws banning gay marriage in the last year or two--the last ban was back in 2012.

> ...to what extent was the US involved in other countries?

Have a look at this:
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

and then weep: the CIA distributed tons of chinese-manufactured AK 47 in Afghanistan, probably those who later killed American and European soldiers -- just to annoy the Soviets. Heck, Osama Bin Laden was a CIA pawn against the Soviets.

Dear USians -- you gotta reign in your three-letter agencies as long as you can.

You can't teach critical thinking in schools. The Texas state Republican party platform is explicitly opposed to it.

--
I piss off bigots

Your sig is ironic since your opinion is quite bigoted. There is a great deal of pseudoscience belief on both sides of the isle. The left has irrational beliefs on nuclear power, GMO foods, etc. There was an article in the Washington Post about Democrats believing in horoscope and astrology more than Republicans/Independents: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...