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http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/11/gop_wins_could_mean_cuts_in_pa.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/rick-perry-ron-paul-have-mixed-record-on-energy-subsidies/2011/10/19/gIQA457kyL_story.html

Get rid of the social stigma attached to being non-degreed, get rid of the bogus requirement to have a degree, any degree, in order to 'succeed' (heh - and THAT's defining success as 'marginally above the poverty line and insured so that medical expenses are less likely to bankrupt you'), and we'll talk.

Until then this will continue.

We were put on this track by Griggs v. Duke Power Company. That decision banned employment tests because those tests were shown to discriminate against certain minorities. Without the test to filter out the applicants, employers sought for some other filter... and settled on the college degree, because the certain minorities tended to not have degrees. Full explanation here. The rest is history.

We'll only get out of this rut when we, as a society, find the will to say "Some groups of people have different abilities than others, and employers know this, so let them test and hire as they wish." Then we can drop the degree as a proxy test for whiteness, and stop wasting so many millions of manyears sending our youth through college.

So you're trying to say that the only reason many employers are requiring degrees (or often experience levels) is to keep the black man down? Really? That's the reason?

Do not attribute to malice what can adequately be attributed to stupidity. Instead of some "keep certain minorities down" it seems far more likely that a trend got started where it might have made sense and then propagated, in the way of trends, on to areas where it makes less and less sense. Companies, or more likely HR departments, probably keep doing it for the same reasons they put out job requirements with insane lists of qualifications. Failure to research or think. Plus, possible company policies that a position over level X in the company requires a degree of level Y. A requirement that probably also got there in the same manner, a trend got started.

Get rid of the social stigma attached to being non-degreed, get rid of the bogus requirement to have a degree, any degree, in order to 'succeed' (heh - and THAT's defining success as 'marginally above the poverty line and insured so that medical expenses are less likely to bankrupt you'), and we'll talk.

Until then this will continue.

We were put on this track by Griggs v. Duke Power Company. That decision banned employment tests because those tests were shown to discriminate against certain minorities. Without the test to filter out the applicants, employers sought for some other filter... and settled on the college degree, because the certain minorities tended to not have degrees. Full explanation here. The rest is history.

We'll only get out of this rut when we, as a society, find the will to say "Some groups of people have different abilities than others, and employers know this, so let them test and hire as they wish." Then we can drop the degree as a proxy test for whiteness, and stop wasting so many millions of manyears sending our youth through college.

Google's speech to text capabilities are essentially trash.

oh and of course the rubbish that is Siri is so much better.

Google's speech to text capabilities are essentially trash.

I don't know if you are being sarcastic or just don't know Mr Job's dark side.

He didn't earn millions or billions by offshoring his factories.

Most of Apple's products are made in China or did you forget about the suicides at the Apple factories

He didn't profit by patenting his work.

Apple holds many patents and vigorously defends them.

And he never sued anyone.

Do you remember the Orange? It was an Apple2 clone that was sued by Apple and put out of business. When Windows 3.1 came out Apple sued Microsoft for infringement when Apple was really just copying from Xerox. Recently there was a battery backup manufacturer who went as far as buying Apple power supplies, cutting of the magnetic plug and using them. Apple sued them and since they didn't have the money to defend themselves they stopped making them.

Steve Jobs was no saint. If he gets credit for the good things he did he also should get the blame when he does bad things. Even his philanthropy record is thin at best. He was a very good business man who make crap loads of money for himself and his shareholders.

If you're going to be post stuff that is easily checked out you should get your facts right. The members of Congress get the same health care deal as all other Federal employees, no more no less. Congressional pensions are not as you say. To quote my cite: "For example, a member of Congress who worked for 22 years and had a top three-year average salary of $153,900 would be eligible for a pension payment of $84,645 per year." I'll give you the sexual harassment one. The only members of Congress I'm aware of that get publicly funded jet rides for normal travel are the Vice President (as presiding officer of the Senate) and the Speaker of the House who is 2nd in line for the Presidency and that is at the insistence of the Secret Service. All regular members of Congress such as my Oregon Senators and Representatives take commercial jets to travel between here and DC.

Ok, Let's start with the health care deal. Check out http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/23/opinion/main6324480.shtml . You can bet, if they get it, others will too. The point is, if it is so wonderful, why the exemption. Perhaps all of those articles out there about this are just wrong? We would know if Obama really was as transparent about these things as he said he would be. Instead just yesterday I found out a couple of Congressmen want to introduce legislation to hide his stuff for many years. Used to be done with an exec order. Probably Way TMI for this discussion.
Now, for the pension bit. Look at the article you cite. It says to take the top earning three years and average it. Then the formula. Then give the example for a typical career politician, which is actually a lot closer to a typical government worker. Same text I saw in a recent class about that. That third year for a Representative would be a zero. If you want the gory details and have a beer or two, here it is http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/retirement.pdf . I called up my source on that. Turns out he was just wrong. Here's a better citation -http://www.senate.gov/reference/common/faq/retirement_for_members.shtml . You're right, I should have checked that one out better.
The one I had in mind for the flights was Peleosi. It was quite a bill. As for a security issue, that's hog wash. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/11/john-boehner-says-hell-fly-com.html . She abused it and she knows it. She also doesn't care. They are attacking General Aviation as a rich thing. It isn't. It's economical for time as well as tends to keep company secrets secret. Nothing can be done on a commercial jet other than as an executive mailing tube. You never know who is sitting next to you. Like the yatch industry they killed a number of years ago, they will probably do the same thing to the aviation industry. Remember the Yatch bit? You know, only "rich" people have them. Tax it. Rich people stopped buying them cold. BTW, according to recent stuff it seems that they may define "rich" as anyone making over $80,000. In Clinton's time I was able to defend the statement that "Rich" was making over $40,000. That was in 1993 dollars.

That would make all kinds of sense except that the Tea Party, currently a major part of the GOP support is NOT largely made up of social conservatives just fiscal.

"They are mostly social conservatives, not libertarians on social issues. Nearly two-thirds (63%) say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, and less than 1-in-5 (18%) support allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry."

46% of Tea Party adherents cite religion as the prime influence on their abortion views, compared to 40% of Republicans.

The current lead candidate in the GOP primary race is a Mormon, not even recognized as a Christian by the traditional Moral Majority Zelots.

Tied at just 21% (as of yesterday) isn't a particularly strong endorsement. Meanwhile just about every explicitly tea party candidate in any race has been a Christian conservative.

That doesn't sound very physically secure.

A good question. Relevant reading below. From my own slight experience, quite a while back, these buildings are often much more secure than they appear on the outside. They are purposely nondescript. Sometimes there are fake fronts and such, and even sometimes a smallish building on the surface connects to a large underground complex. Putting them in relatively high traffic areas makes it easier to hide the traffic of workers going in and out.

Back in the day I saw a few in DC suburbs (Tyson's Corner VA) that had no windows and only one door, and walls that were blast-resistant and incorporated Faraday cages to prevent electronic leakage. That was the old-school way, I don't know to what extent that is still the case but I assume that is mostly still true, just as a starter. It depends on the type and quality of information.

Even back in the late 1970s and early 1980s technical equipment intended for some government agencies had to pass the TEMPEST EMI test, which has no published spec - they test it and tell you only whether it passed. If it didn't, you were not given any clues as to what needed fixing.

Top Secret America portal article.

Another article, excerpted from the book: "Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State".

This article, adapted from a chapter of the newly released “Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State,” by Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, chronicles JSOC’s spectacular rise, much of which has not been publicly disclosed before. Two presidents and three secretaries of defense routinely have asked JSOC to mount intelligence-gathering missions and lethal raids, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in countries with which the United States was not at war, including Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, the Philippines, Nigeria and Syria.

“The CIA doesn’t have the size or the authority to do some of the things we can do,” said one JSOC operator.

The president has given JSOC the rare authority to select individuals for its kill list — and then to kill, rather than capture, them. Critics charge that this individual man-hunting mission amounts to assassination, a practice prohibited by U.S. law. JSOC’s list is not usually coordinated with the CIA, which maintains a similar but shorter roster of names.

That doesn't sound very physically secure.

A good question. Relevant reading below. From my own slight experience, quite a while back, these buildings are often much more secure than they appear on the outside. They are purposely nondescript. Sometimes there are fake fronts and such, and even sometimes a smallish building on the surface connects to a large underground complex. Putting them in relatively high traffic areas makes it easier to hide the traffic of workers going in and out.

Back in the day I saw a few in DC suburbs (Tyson's Corner VA) that had no windows and only one door, and walls that were blast-resistant and incorporated Faraday cages to prevent electronic leakage. That was the old-school way, I don't know to what extent that is still the case but I assume that is mostly still true, just as a starter. It depends on the type and quality of information.

Even back in the late 1970s and early 1980s technical equipment intended for some government agencies had to pass the TEMPEST EMI test, which has no published spec - they test it and tell you only whether it passed. If it didn't, you were not given any clues as to what needed fixing.

Top Secret America portal article.

Another article, excerpted from the book: "Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State".

This article, adapted from a chapter of the newly released “Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State,” by Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, chronicles JSOC’s spectacular rise, much of which has not been publicly disclosed before. Two presidents and three secretaries of defense routinely have asked JSOC to mount intelligence-gathering missions and lethal raids, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in countries with which the United States was not at war, including Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, the Philippines, Nigeria and Syria.

“The CIA doesn’t have the size or the authority to do some of the things we can do,” said one JSOC operator.

The president has given JSOC the rare authority to select individuals for its kill list — and then to kill, rather than capture, them. Critics charge that this individual man-hunting mission amounts to assassination, a practice prohibited by U.S. law. JSOC’s list is not usually coordinated with the CIA, which maintains a similar but shorter roster of names.

Wen Ho Lee.

A lot of the OWS folks are mad about the college debt. Occupy Wall Street and Student Loans by Josh Barro for The National Review. At Occupy Wall Street protests, student loan frustration by Jenna Johnson for The Washington Post Blog. Here's a demand: forgive student loan debt by Robert Applebaum for The Guardian. You're welcome.

They call themselves the 99%, but they're a bunch of fringe stragglers with no motivation, no agenda, no goal, no organization, no nothing. They're nothing but a joke, the clearest and most representative expression of leftist thought in America.

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1372233

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post_now/post/air-and-space-museum-closes-after-guards-clash-with-protesters/2011/10/08/gIQAx0x2VL_blog.html?hpid=z2\

http://reason.com/blog/2011/10/08/danny-cline-occupy-wall-street\

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/10/09/occupy-atlanta-gives-john-lewis-the-cold-shoulder/

So the rest of the writers will just have to get by with less, like most of us?

The real enemy of authors is not 1 buck/download.

The real enemy of authors is obscurity. If people don't know that your work exists, they are unlikely to buy it no matter how good it is.

You could be the greatest author in the world as judged by all the book critics, so what?

It's been proven that hardly anyone cares if a great violinist busks in the subway, he'll get 30 bucks or so[1]. Whereas if Justin Bieber did a little song and dance in a subway there'd be chaos from all the screaming fans.

Go figure.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

Voting the idiots out is the only option (unless the day dreams of Bev Perdue become reality)

As I poorly stated previously, I don't advocate violence over a discussion. Much less over a law imposing a certain view of how one ought to behave on the Inter-webs.

But you must admit its a disturbing precedence for the government at the higher levels deciding formally (with the threat of fines, guns, prison, and all the force government entails) what really only needs informal discussion between neighbors and parents.

The Washington post gives some recent examples where spikes in global food prices, driven mainly by recent droughts and floods, are leading to violence: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/political-economy/2011/01/spike_in_global_food_prices_tr.html

The state of emergency in Tunisia has economists worried that we may be seeing the beginnings of a second wave of global food riots. Battered by bad weather and increasing demand from the developing world, the global food supply system is buckling under the strain.

This month, the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) reported that its food price index jumped 32 percent in the second half of 2010 — surpassing the previous record, set in the early summer of 2008, when deadly clashes over food broke out around the world, from Haiti to Somalia

The price of grains began to rise last fall after fires in Russia wiped out hundreds of thousands of acres of grains and heavy rain destroyed much of Canada’s wheat crop. The problems were followed by hot, dry weather in Argentina that devastated the soybean crop of the key exporter. This month, floods in Australia destroyed much of the country’s wheat crop.

Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali on Thursday vowed to reduce the price of staples such as sugar, milk and bread ,but the pledge wasn’t enough to placate the thousands of protesters who mobbed the capital, Tunis, on Friday to demand his ouster. The country’s prime minister, Mohammed Ghannouchi, has appeared on state TV to announce he is assuming power.

(back in 1995 or so you were still noted as an archer: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/sports/olympics/longterm/archery/archfact.htm and had been for quite a while -- photo here: http://www.archeryhistory.com/archers/pics/shatner.jpg )

If so, how often, using what equipment? Still using a compound or have you gone back to using a recurve or longbow?

If you do still shoot, do you travel w/ your archery gear? Any issues in doing so? Or amusing anecdotes?

William

We are not better than them if we execute people without trial. We are then exactly the same as them.

Our Justice Department went over it, and concluded that it was legal to do so. A trial not needed. Still doesn't change the fact that if he surrendered, he would have received a trial.

I wonder if you could "surrender" to Al Qaeda and get a trial, or if they'd have their legal team debate and research if it's legal and ethical to execute you...

There are two logical fallacies in your argument. First, you are presenting a false dichotomy. Second, you are comparing a worst-case scenario (terrorist takes down an airplane, killing hundreds or thousands of people) to a best-case, or nearly best-case, scenario (innocent passenger gets their luggage swabbed).

What we are talking about is risk management. Risk management is not just a matter of comparing scenarios; it is a matter of multiplying risk probabilities to risk weight (i.e., the severity of that risk), then summing all of the results of that operation. For example, a hijacker crashing an airplane into a building is a very severe risk -- it killed over three thousand people ten years ago -- but it has only happened *ONCE* (okay, four flights) in what...fifty? sixty?...years of airline service. That's a really, REALLY low probability times a really, really severe risk weight, which I'd argue results in a moderately low OVERALL risk. There is also the possibility of a hijacker murdering individual passengers until his (her) demands are met. That's happened significantly more often than a 9/11 hijacking (although still rare, in terms of number of hijacked flights vs. number of uneventful flights), but it directly affects (comparatively) fewer people. However, because it is more common, I'd argue that this scenario results in roughly the same OVERALL risk. Then there is the risk of an unruly passenger. That's much more common than the other two risks, but the risk weight is comparatively minor, which again results in an overall low risk.

As far as scenarios you are comparing...if all that happens is a false positive gets the luggage swabbed, then I really couldn't care less. If a false positive gets removed from an airplane, cuffed, locked into a cell, strip-searched and interrogated before finally being determined to be a false positive and released then I have a MAJOR problem with it. Consider it this way: if there were 520 people detained in Gitmo and the error rate for false positives (as assumed in the above thread) is 1%, then that means there were likely at least 5 innocent people detained at Gitmo. THAT is what I meant by "wrecked", and I maintain that's an accurate description. Ms. Hebshi's life may not have been wrecked, but I'd say that it has been severely and negatively impacted.

So, yeah. I do think that the worse error is false positives because the risk probability is significantly higher, and the risk impact is moderate to severe as well, which leads to a much, much greater overall risk than a one-in-twenty-million probability of 9/11, even when multiplied by the impact of the death of 3,000+ people.

Or maybe he just recently read about predator drones being used to target U.S. citizens and considered how helpful the drones might find facial recognition technology.

Depends what the inconvenience is. If it's a quick background check with no lasting effects (i.e. not being added to a do-no-fly list or terrorist watch list or your record or subjecting you to public humiliation or arrest), then perhaps...if we start applying this tech to the population at large, we had better be certain that the consequences of a false match WHEN IT HAPPENS are acceptable, legally, ethically, and morally, or we shouldn't do it at all, IMHOP.

Not to get on my political soapbox, but have you been living under a rock for the last ten years -- or at least the last one year? You don't think being felt up by TSA at the airport is "subjecting you to public humiliation"? How about this woman who was removed from a Frontier Airlines flight, cuffed, detained, strip-searched, interrogated and finally released? Her crime was nothing more nefarious than sitting next to two men of Indian (the country, not Native American) descent, one of whom was suffering from, ahem, "digestive maladies", and consequently was making frequent and lengthy trips to the restroom, because clearly, three brown-skinned people (her heritage is half Jewish, half Saudi Arabian) sitting together on an airliner making frequent trips to the loo are up to no good </sarc explanation="just in case it wasn't blatantly obvious">

Personally, I agree with your concerns -- even a 1% false positive rate would be "a horrible perversion of justice." As Plato said, "It is better that a hundred guilty men go free than for even one innocent man to be punished unjustly." Unfortunately, in post-9/11 U.S.A., the majority has apparently -- and wrongfully, IMHO -- decided that it's better that one hundred innocent men (and women) be punished unjustly than even one guilty man go free :/ So while I agree that what you described is the way it should be, I think you are very, very mistaken if you think that is the way it IS .

Link's in my sig, Toadly one. Check the cites from there - it's actually based on absurdly optimistic numbers, IIRC, because it assumes that Medicare will pay doctors 20% less than it actually pays (the doc fix problem), but you should check the details yourself if you are skeptical.

But the liability would still be impossible to meet at 1/2 the projected size, or 1/3. We're really far away from funding Medicare properly, and we're so vastly overspending the federal income in the first place that we just have to spend less going forward - there's simply no more "more" to be had.

Just looking at the old data will prove nothing from the old MINOS experiment because it suggests that CERN did it right with the OPERA experiment. The problem before is the margin of error on the MINOS test is far too high causing the measured speed to be faster then the speed of light with a margin of error overlapping the speed of light. They need to do a slight upgrade and redo the tests to get the Margin of Error down.

Medicare's overhead is 3% because they don't pay anyone (relatively speaking anyway) to investigate and then deny false claims.

Fewer than 5% of Meidcare claims are audited.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/12/AR2008061203915.html

I have to wonder.... Did they account for the rotation of the earth.

According to one of the early articles I read, yes, the earth's rotation was corrected for. Let's see....

Gad, I can't believe I read it in a Washington Post article, but I think this is it. A perfunctory googling doesn't come up with any other sources without more digging. (IOW, I'm lazy.)

"Africa is both the epicenter for the disease, and is a poverty-stricken continent where people need to have families, and relatively large ones at that, in order to be taken care of in their old age. These features are sufficient to explain the sustained high infection rate without resorting to the racist twaddle you're apparently peddling. "

Oh boy, you're so full of bullshit.

"Medical experts have shown a clear association between HIV exposure and coerced sex. Wives who suffer violence if they request condom use or faithfulness are at higher risk of AIDS than unmarried women and girls. That is why defeating the AIDS pandemic requires a second radical proposition: that African women and girls have the right to protection under their own countries' laws.

Why is this concept radical? Because public justice systems in many AIDS-burdened countries are broken or virtually inaccessible to poor girls and women. Rape and beatings are simply the norm, and deterrence and accountability for these crimes in Africa is as rare as AIDS drugs used to be."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/13/AR2006081300716.html

"Rape, including child rape, is increasing at shocking rates in South Africa. Sexual violence against children, including the raping of infants, has increased 400% over the past decade (Dempster, 2002). According to a report by BBC news, a female born in South Africa has a greater chance of being raped in her lifetime than learning how to read (Dempster, 2002). When South Africa became a democracy in 1994, there were already 18,801 cases of rape per year, but by 2001 there were 24,892 (Dempster, 2002). Numbers vary by different institutions, but are nevertheless extremely troubling. The Institute of Race Relations found that more than 52,000 rapes were reported in 2000, and 40% of the victims were under age 18 (du Venage, 2002). The University of South Africa reports that 1 million women and children are raped there each year (South Africa: Focus on the Virgin Myth, 2002)."

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/444213
http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2002/april/virgin.htm

Also, big families don't cause rape, you can't catch an infection from a clean partner no matter how many times you have sex.

I agree that this probably won't create a significant amount of ozone. However, regarding ozone not being a problem in the lower atmosphere, that's not what I've read. I've read the ozone can be found in harmful levels anywhere that smog is a problem (e.g California, New England, DC):

http://www.epa.gov/region1/airquality/
http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/23c.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/report-finds-that-washington-baltimore-among-smoggiest-cities-in-the-country/2011/09/21/gIQAYqv8kK_story.html

If you Google it, you can probably find a bunch more.

This bill is dead on arrival

What bill?

The Al Jezeera "news" article is about what Obama is expected to announce today:

Barack Obama, the US president, is expected to seek a new minimum tax rate for the wealthy to ensure they pay at least the same percentage as middle-income taxpayers. ... A White House official, who declined to be named because the plan has not been officially announced, said the new rate is part of Obama's proposal for long-term deficit reduction that he will announce on Monday.

The AP article is about the American Jobs Act proposal that President Obama sent to Congress on September 12, 2011:

It would let Bush-era tax cuts for upper income earners expire, limit deductions for wealthier filers and close loopholes and end some corporate tax breaks.

I recognized one of the loopholes (the classification of investment management compensation as capital gains) as an issue complained about here on Slashdot.

The Whitehouse.gov site has no new announcements, statements, or releases about changes or addenda to the American Jobs Act posted today. However, it does have a statement and report from the Office of Management and Budget about the American Jobs Act. But no proposals of new tax brackets.

There have been a number of proposals regarding the taxing of incomes over $1 million as Ezra Klein has noted. But none from President Obama. (Regarding new marginal tax rates, I find House Representative Jan Schakowsky's proposal the most straight forward and reasonable, assuming that the government favors increasing taxes on incomes over $1 million.)

So what are we discussing? I suspect the conversation has merged the separate issues and stories into an incomprehensible clusterfuck to the disservice of everyone engaged.

Oh really?

Nonsense, is it?

Nonsense?

Nonsense?

What about clear violation of their very policies on SAFETY? Nonsense?

But if you worked in "health insurance industry", you'd never want FDA to stop doing what they do, after all, any government involvement is beneficial for large corporations, who gain monopoly/oligopoly power by restricting access of small competitors, by forcing any innovator to seek sponsorship of large pharma company, by having government money in insurance, which is the reason that insurance premiums are as high as they are and climbing, having insurance attached to people's jobs, which is the reason there is a problem of "preexisting-conditions" in the first place, because once you change your job and if you have a "condition", it's that much harder to get coverage again.

In a free market an American would have been able to buy health insurance privately from any provider from ANYWHERE in the world.

Why can't an American buy health insurance from Singapore?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/judge-grants-students-request-to-delay-his-case-against-fbi-for-putting-gps-on-his-car/2011/09/12/gIQAbu2qNK_story.html

You we're saying?...

Unless something's changed in the last week or two, they've already lost Starz (The Washington Post, CNN Money).

Governments funding of projects, any projects, is mis-allocation of resources. If the project in question has any reason to exist, then there would be private funding for it, private lending, private interest.

Government can push agenda, but they can't make it work nor should they try.

Either there is a reason for something to exist in the market or there isn't. Government commanding reasons does not work.

It is neither overwhelmingly verified nor agreed upon

Actually, yes it is. 98% of climate scientists agree that not only is global warming happening, but that it is being influenced by humans. So, out f the people that have the training and dedication to be fully educated on the matter there is overwhelming consensus. The facts have been looked at and the theories have been gone over and everyone says the conclusions are on pretty solid ground. Yes, I know that the link is a mainstream media blog, but it does include links to pdfs of the original studies, so a pretty decent source.

If 98% of all mechanics said your car had a problem you would be crazy to ignore them, no matter how inconvenient it was going to be for you. If 98% of doctors thought you had a heath problem it would be something that you would need to deal with, despite any unfortunate costs involved.

To the best of our understanding, global warming is happening. To act on any other assumption is to ignore the most likely reality.

Late in the morning of the Tuesday that changed everything, Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney was on a runway at Andrews Air Force Base and ready to fly. She had her hand on the throttle of an F-16 and she had her orders: Bring down United Airlines Flight 93. The day’s fourth hijacked airliner seemed to be hurtling toward Washington. Penney, one of the first two combat pilots in the air that morning, was told to stop it.

The one thing she didn’t have as she roared into the crystalline sky was live ammunition. Or missiles. Or anything at all to throw at a hostile aircraft.

Except her own plane. So that was the plan.

Because the surprise attacks were unfolding, in that innocent age, faster than they could arm war planes, Penney and her commanding officer went up to fly their jets straight into a Boeing 757.

“We wouldn’t be shooting it down. We’d be ramming the aircraft,” Penney recalls of her charge that day. “I would essentially be a kamikaze pilot.”

We have plenty of oil here we're not allowed to get

No we don't.

and we're rapidly developing technology to reduce our need for it.

Yes we are.

Get the government out of the way and we can cut our demand to quarter of it's current amount in the foreseeable future.

No we can't. I run the tech for an energy management equipment/network/software/support company in NYC that cuts energy consumption an average of 20%, mostly in heating oil/gas. The notoriously greedy building owners never pay the upfront costs, even when it pays back in under a year - that's close to 100% ROI, and rising with energy costs. The only way they do it is when there's government money and/or requirements to do it. Until NYC's law kicked in this year, building owners refused to even measure their energy consumption, let alone reduce it. This is the reality, not the "Mayor of Sim City" Ron Paul LARPing Ayn Rand.

The right thing would have been an "Apollo programme" for energy efficiency/alternatives to get our money, and the troops that always follow it, out of the Mideast. By now, a decade later, we could have cut our energy consumption by at least 30%, maybe more, and set trade policies to get all of our oil/gas from our biggest sources: Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean (and some gas from the Pacific). Instead we invaded Iraq, sending oil to $100:bbl for most of a decade, while promoting SUVs and even Hummers that get 1/3 the mileage we should require from cars. We could have interconnected regional and commuter rail, built more cargo and passenger interlinks. The $3 TRILLION we spent in Iraq so far could have bought us an energy, transit and building infrastructure that got the Mideast and much of the global corruption out of our hair permanently. Instead we spent the time, money and lives making things worse.

We don't need to do wild science fiction to solve our core economic/political problems. We need to do straightforward science and engineering. Which should be the easiest politics of all. Instead, we wanted a flight suit, a megaphone, and blood. We sure got it.

We've often discussed the consequences of the attack

The main consequence of the attack was that Bush/Cheney invaded Iraq. It's now over 8 years later, and we're still at war in Iraq. No WMD, no Binladen connection, or any of Bush/Cheney's other lies were ever proven anything but lies. Like "the war will pay for itself". The Iraq War has cost us well over $3 TRILLION. It has cost us almost 5000 dead Americans, over 100,000 wounded Americans, and hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded Iraqis. Not to mention the severe costs of Americans torturing so many people.

We'll memorialize 9/11/2001 for a long time. But 3/19/03? What's that? It's the date the US invaded Iraq. Nobody wants to talk about that, so the war never ends.

I am surprised that the utilities have not worked closely with USPS to get them electric trucks.

They're trying it. Buses too. Trains are being looked at for storage. There's a huge amount of different pilots being looked at around the world with some really cool ideas. BOMA doing large scale DR in Chicago. And on and on.

Here's the Consumer Reports article on hearing aids
http://www.consumerreports.org/health/healthy-living/home-medical-supplies/hearing/hearing-aids/overview/hearing-aids-ov.htm

and here's a Washington Post article about it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/22/AR2009062201623.html

Unfortunately it's 2 years old, and the ratings are behind a paywall (CR doesn't take ads, and they've got to pay the bills somehow).

Also unfortunately they only tested hearing aids selling for $1,800 to $6,800 per pair.

They said there's about a 100% markup, so there's room to negotiate.

What I was really looking for, and what I couldn't find, was an article from an audiology journal which rated the low-priced hearing aids. They said that there were $500 hearing aids that were quite adequate for most people.

Can anybody who follows this research help me out with some cites?

Link to article aja.asha.org

Link to blog talking about article: blog.starkeypro.com

Here's the Consumer Reports article on hearing aids
http://www.consumerreports.org/health/healthy-living/home-medical-supplies/hearing/hearing-aids/overview/hearing-aids-ov.htm

and here's a Washington Post article about it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/22/AR2009062201623.html

Unfortunately it's 2 years old, and the ratings are behind a paywall (CR doesn't take ads, and they've got to pay the bills somehow).

Also unfortunately they only tested hearing aids selling for $1,800 to $6,800 per pair.

They said there's about a 100% markup, so there's room to negotiate.

What I was really looking for, and what I couldn't find, was an article from an audiology journal which rated the low-priced hearing aids. They said that there were $500 hearing aids that were quite adequate for most people.

Can anybody who follows this research help me out with some cites?

Peacefully? In your dreams. Tea baggers are terrorists because they use scare tactics to get their way. Take health care town hall meetings of 2008. Retired tea baggers with drugged, crazy eyes yelling "Government hands off of my Medicare" and lunging at congressmen and opponents with their fists. Using these imbecile but scary tactics they managed to force many seniors to oppose health care reform even though most of those seniors already use government-provided Medicare.

It wasn't the Tea Party people that bit off someone's finger at a town hall. How about the SEIU beating up a black conservative in St Louis at a town hall meeting?

Do you have any actual examples of these "retired tea baggers with drugged, crazy eyes" commiting violence or are you just regurgitating rhetoric the way you happen to remember it?

Remember Alan Grayson talking about how the GOP plan is for everyone to die quickly? Or shots being fired at Eric Cantor's office?

Speaking of Medicare, the Democrats cut it by a half trillion dollars to fund ObamaCare, but when the Republicans came out with a reform package this summer, what did the Democrats do? ran an ad about how Republicans want to literally push grandma over a cliff."

So yeah, it's those Republicans pushing their scare tactics on their constituents, commiting acts of terror. Actual violence committed by Democrats? eh, that's not terror under the same definition because, well, they're on your side.

Want another one? Debt ceiling ÃoecrisisÃ, entirely manufactured by tea bagger faction. This was non-issue for decades, extended automatically. This year, tea baggers yelled hysterically for months about Ãoecountry going bankruptÃ, Ãoedollar becoming worthlessà and similar utter nonsense to scare many people into opposing raising the limit, which was tea bagger goal for ideological reasons.

Wasn't it Obama that said having to raise the debt ceiling was a "leadership failure" when he voted against it in 2006? Do you hold him to the same standards as you do Republicans, or is this another one of those my team good, your team bad things?

And the crisis WAS manufactured... by Obama. The US has enough revenue that it won't default on it's debts if the limit wasn't raised. We have enough revenue to fund all of the most critical portions of the federal government too. It was a scare tactic to get people to panic so Obama wouldn't have to think about fulfilling his campaign promise to actually cut back the waste in the federal government.

Thus, tea baggers use scare tactics to reach their political goals. That, by definition, means they are terrorists.

Nice to know that everyone that you don't agree with politically is a terrorist while you ignore the actual violence and threats perpetrated by your team. You do realize that you just repeated GWB's "you're either with us or against us" rhetoric, right?

Source since you didn't provide one... Oh wait.. this contradicts your statement... http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/04/worlds_first_mac_botnet_hardly.html

The legal profession isn't paying as much as it used to anymore. Lots of lawyers graduate with tons of debt and end up barely struggling to make $40K/year. And now, it looks like fewer people are wanting to go to law school for that reason. I guess, on the bright side, that means that 20 years down the road there will be fewer lawyers, which can only be a good thing.

...we have too many of these types which skews the numbers by comparison:

"Vivek Wadhwa is a Visiting Scholar at the University of California-Berkley School of Information, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization, Exec in Residence at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering, Senior Research Associate at Harvard University’s Labor and Worklife Program, Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Emory University’s Halle Institute of Global Learning, and faculty member and advisor at Singularity University. He helps students prepare for the real world; lectures in class; and leads groundbreaking research projects. He is also an advisor to several startup companies, a columnist for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and a contributor to the popular tech blog TechCrunch. He also writes occasionally for several international publications. Prior to joining academia in 2005, Wadhwa founded two software companies. He holds an MBA from New York University and a B.A. in Computing Studies from the University of Canberra, in Australia."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/vivek-wadhwa/2011/05/28/AGtx1eFH_page.html

First of all, TFA makes it sound like a straightforward case of "don't advertise illegal crap". Google didn't outright take ads for vendors of illegal drugs, they took ads for entirely legal Canadian pharmacies.

Er, citation needed. There's a bit of a history here indicating that Google was taking ads from just about anybody ... People have been selling prescription medicine on the internet forever. How real it is or where it comes from, what does it matter? The fact is that you need a prescription for it for a reason and those people get it without one.

The FDA just doesn't like anyone cutting in on US pharmaceutical industry profits (even when the drugs come from those very same US companies).

That or they are attempting to do their job to regulate medicine.

Second, if merely accepting ads from unkosher sources commits a crime, then why the hell haven't the major broadcast networks gotten the smack-down for showing a non-stop string of crapvertisements from the likes of such blatant frauds as Enzyte and Head On?

Because Head On and Enzyte don't contain prescription drugs? They're largely over the counter drugs? It's when you get into scheduled drugs that the federal government gets upset. Here's an example of Adderall and Vicodin.

Oh. Right. "Online", the magic word that makes everything old new and illegal again.

No, but it makes it easier for you to appear legitimate, make quick semi-anonymous transactions of money and do it across a border so it's harder for law enforcement to track. "Online" increases our ability to communicate, it increases our commerce and it greatly improves our quality of life but it also amplifies the potential of illicit and illegal activities (for the same reasons I just listed). It's a double edged sword.

Google set aside $500 million for this a while ago. I'm not saying that that act alone implies guilt but it certainly indicates that they were preparing for this. If they thought these claims were bogus, I bet they would have put that money to better use. They have a history, I see news articles about these illegal prescription-less pharmacies and I'm guessing that you're just blindly defending Google for god only knows why.

Current empirical evidence looks like "stick to a single partner" is actually a more effective strategy to combat AIDS in Africa than "use condoms":

washington post article

Although its entry into the patent-war big leagues didn't start out very smoothly, perhaps Google is better off now with the IBM and Motorola portfolios than with the Nortel patents. It will certainly have more patents at its disposal now than if it had bid higher than Pi at the Nortel auction.

We can model pegged currency by assuming the US and China both use RMB, just in different denominations: 1 dollar is worth 6.4 yuan. As growth of export manufacturing expands, demand for export manufacturing labor will increase, which pushes wages up. Wages for non-export sectors will likewise increase to try to keep workers from defecting to export manufacturing. Wouldn't this lead to inflation of RMB within China?

Besides, RMB was unpegged from US currency back in 2005.

Actually weed is already known to be carcinogenic.

Nope:

Study Finds No Cancer-Marijuana Connection

Marijuana is carcinogenic

Study Finds No Cancer-Marijuana Connection

You've been lied to by the government... again. Smoking pot does increase your risk for COPD, but as the linked articl says, pot may actually help prevent cancer.