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2. Prostitution is *heavily* associated with human trafficking, along with other behaviors that boil down to a girl being forced to sell her body, rather than wanting to. This is the reason that really matters.

Actual human trafficking is barely a blip on the radar. Almost all of the "it's a serious problem" statistics are complete fictions, particularly in most of the developed countries like the United States. As is true for quite a few of the "well knowns" related in any way to prostitution. The "association" is outright misleading.

Here are some of the details. Quite a bit about human trafficking there, but also additional information, with references, related to the numerous false narratives promulgated WRT prostitution.

"Human trafficking" isn't so much the "reason that really matters" as it is the "nonsense that most powerfully misinforms and misleads the public."

--fyngyrz*

* Posting anon due to mod points - c'mon slashdot, there's no good reason for that, and never has been.

It's hard to concisely explain their business model anymore which is usually a bad sign for a company.

Their business model is evidently asshattery indistinguishable from malware, which is an even worse sign for a company.

short sf2rand(void) {
int x = (g.randSeed1 x *= 3;
x = x >> 8;
g.randSeed2 += x;
g.randSeed1 = x;
return g.randSeed2;
}

We got civilian, and eventually commercial spaceflight primarily because we were spending a million tons of money getting ready to nuke our enemies

Dennis Wingo described in one of his articles at https://denniswingo.wordpress.... (I cannot find that specific one right now), it showed a chart of expenditures on rockets in late 50s/early 60s. The amounts were staggering, i.e. $40 billion on developing Atlas (and this was 1960 dollars!), $30B on Titan, etc. These are not actual quotes but were these magnitudes. Besides development and testing (lots of activities at facilities like in Huntsville, Edwards RPL, and Santa Susana), they were cranking out these ICBMs like sausages. Of course a few were used for launching men into orbit.

Down, but certainly not out - and definitely not out as fast as it would have been with continued nuclear use and development.

https://carboncounter.wordpres...

http://www.greenbiz.com/articl...

http://www.gtai.de/GTAI/Naviga...

https://eu.boell.org/sites/def...

The Israeli company that does billing for all the telcos still gets the Call Detail Record data from them and so has all the data that NSA used to collect except cell tower location meta-data.

Israelis and NSA share, so nothing has changed.
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress...

> Uranium fueled reactors are the result of a premature optimization.

Ehm, not really. The early pioneers in nuclear technology weren't dumb. https://daryanenergyblog.wordp...

> so you end up having to do all sorts of engineering to try to keep it from oxidizing, whilst only a small barrier away from water. It was never a good idea.

Every problem in engineering is a trade-off. To say that a particular solution is a 'bad idea' is meaningless; you have to compare it to other solutions.

LFTR is a particularly bad idea, far worse than PWR. For a number of reasons, including cost, materials longevity, and amount of low-level nuclear waste produced. LFTR advocates typically try to push the point that LFTR produces less high-level waste, which may or may not be true, but it's definitely true that LFTR produces vast amounts of low-level nuclear waste, far in excess of the PWR design.

I think the main reason that nuclear power, whether fusion or fission, is never going to be a major source of power is just pure economics.

The US Department of Energy forecast fission and fusion plants costing more than alternatives, including solar/wind.

Citation: http://web.ornl.gov/~webworks/...

Also, there are people who have argued that *just the steam conversion to electricity* part of a nuclear plant (either fission or fusion) is going to push the cost up over any direct conversion technology (wind, solar, hydro, natural gas turbine). Even if the fission/fusion plant were to be free, the argument goes, the steam generator would, by itself, cost more than the same MW generating capacity of solar/wind/hydro/natural gas.

Citation:
https://matter2energy.wordpres...

Give links, man. Let everybody see what you're talking about so they can understand your commitment to ethics in journalism.

The zoe post vs what the media reports.

Common knowledge is quite uncommon.

Really? You should let the courts know asap. My theory that the sky is actually puce in colour should go over well then.

You cannot help people being suspicious with the scope of systemd. As you put it out, there is some good in rewriting software, drop antique flaws. But if you consider the many things systemd is actually replacing, it is kind of off putting.

If you hit a problem, then you'll have to debug it. And debugging issues with systemd provided tools looked to me as annoying as handle MS Windows crash.

Aside from bugs, obviously some regressions are to be expected. But they should be limited. If not, the software should not even be put in production. NetworkManager was a nightmare (cf. https://yeupou.wordpress.com/2... ). /etc/dhcp/dhclient-*-hooks.d/ were ignored. NetworkManager proposed it's own /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/ . But to have something portable (ie working without NetworkManager), the only option was to write such hooks in /etc/network/if-up.d and /etc/network/if-down.d. But even these were not properly handled by NetworkManager calling themselves from a script in /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/
What does it have to do with systemd? Well, systemd-networkd was put in production without ifup/ifdown http://xmodulo.com/switch-from...
Add to that "Predictable Network Interface Names" http://www.freedesktop.org/wik... and you get the feeling that someone is toying with your system. Silently, suddenly I no longer had some eth0 and eth1. Because they felt I could have problem "it might very well happen that 'eth0' on one boot ends up being 'eth1' on the next. This can have serious security implications, for example in firewall rules which are coded for certain naming schemes, and which are hence very sensitive to unpredictable changing names.". To avoid that, I lost eth0 and eth1, as if this did not have serious implications either. They decided "the classic naming scheme for network interfaces applied by the kernel" is no good for them and changed it. They have plenty of good ideas.

That one example among other. I repeat myself , you cannot help people being suspicious with the scope of systemd. We can see they thought about a lot of stuff and have lot of good ideas. Nonetheless, the amount of changes they are implementing is overwhelming. And they change many things that are not broke in first place.
There is absolutely no middle ground. Right now, it is with systemd and all it claims as it's territory or completely without. It is bound to divide.

For the average user, don't worry about the difference. ;)

The average user is happy with Windows, let's be honest.

Also, if you read the article, you absolutely do not need the systemd init system to use the new features.

I don't know what article you're talking about specifically, but it looks like to get it to work, you need to use an older version of uPower. And it isn't a new feature, it's a feature that's been there for a while a long time, but now depends on systemd.

using non-init parts of systemd to allow the desktop environment to monitor the user inputs

The non-init parts of systemd aren't separable from the init parts. I discussed part of the issue here.

As many skilled people as possible need to start thinking about the init problem, so we end up with something good.

Yeah and no. As pointed out in the article, the culprit is upower. But upower is mandatory for KDE power management. So it does not really matter whether it is Powerdevil that requires systemd or upower. ConsoleKit2 recently gained support? Was ConsoleKit2 actually been packaged? Does upower supporting ConsoleKit2 been packaged? If not, user experience wise, that is not palatable. And moreover, what to expect from upower? Did they not purposefully removed pm-utils support, that worked until then, in favor of systemd? Why removing support for a working solution (pm-utils) and, later, much later, adding support for some ConsoleKit2? What is the exact plan of ConsoleKit2? Providing some systemd-like interface without being systemd? Is that what ConsoleKit2 offers that pm-utils could not? If so, wow long will it work, to attempt to write a parallel to systemd, in order to make sure that all the software that in the past worked without systemd can now work with the systemd alternative? Just as a reminder, ConsoleKit2 exists "because there isnâ(TM)t currently a standard for system actions like suspend/hibernate anymore. We use these features in Xfce and it would be nice to keep the session manager and power manager in sync (i.e. you inhibit something and the session manager doesnâ(TM)t see it). Obviously thereâ(TM)s systembsd in the works, so this is a stop gap until that matures (however long that may be). But Iâ(TM)ll happily continue to maintain and support ConsoleKit2 as long as someone finds it useful". https://erickoegel.wordpress.c... The acknowledged benefit of systemd, as pointed out by Edmunson (link in the article) was to drop code. If ConsoleKit2 and al needs to write code to compensate from all the dropped code, following systemd, that unlikely sustainable. The stop gap project won't do. And it is really the funny thing now with systemd: if you dont want it, you need to write everything that it does because all the anterior/historical parts, good or bad, are getting deprecated and removed. So in order not to use systemd, you need to clone it. Bonkers. Hence the question: will KDE be still usable in 2016 without systemd.

Right, but the same applies to Russia too. Russia is pretending to bomb ISIS "terrorists" in Syria, and yet for every hundred bombing raids it's done only one has actually been against ISIS and ISIS territory. The other strikes have hit everything from al Qaeda off-shoots, which we'd probably agree is fair play, through to Kurds and Turkmenis who just want to be left the fuck alone in their particular pocket of Syria just because they also oppose Assad.

AFAIK the Russians never bombed the Kurds, Turkey however did, Turkey also closed the border for Kurds when Kobani was under ISIS attack. There is an interesting analysis about why ISIS survives. Short version: Because the Turks support them in many ways.

Are you sick of millions of non-whites flooding into every white country on Earth?

And some are sick of whites flooding into Indian country. ("Indian" here refers not to India but to Mescalero Inde, meaning "the people".) Others are sick of whites flooding into Aboriginal country.

"Go back to..."
"I'll help you pack."

Are you sick of millions of non-whites flooding into every white country on Earth?

And some are sick of whites flooding into Indian country. ("Indian" here refers not to India but to Mescalero Inde, meaning "the people".) Others are sick of whites flooding into Aboriginal country.

"Go back to..."
"I'll help you pack."

No doubt US is investing way more into space that other nations, and that is great, I wish more nations done the same (note US is not the biggest investor by % of GDP International Space Spending).

I often feel that their focus is in the wrong place though. They are behaving like typical research facility, where innovation and progress is foremost importance and money are thrown on newest, coolest and best stuff. However when for normal research facilities there are companies that can pick up the research, refine it and make it commercially viable, we didn't have it in space for decades now.

Only today we start seeing some private companies testing the waters. I think NASA should have focused at least half of their efforts on reducing price of space exploration, not just on pushing technical boundaries.

Through it may be too late for them now, seems like private industry may fill in the void.

Aside from the obvious logical fallacy you're engaging in (i.e. pointing out that someone, such as a third-world nation, does something does not mean that the something is unique to them), your insinuation isn't even backed up by the facts of the matter, since meat exports are largely the domain of developed nations. To use your own examples...

Countries ordered by rank:
Beef Exports: Brazil, Australia, the US, New Zealand, Canada, and the EU account for almost 60%
Chicken Exports: Netherlands, Germany, France, the Czech Republic, Belgium, and the US account for about 65%
Pork Exports: The EU, the US, Canada, Brazil, China, and Australia account for almost 95%

In all three cases, you can account for over 50% of the annual global exports market just by looking at the developed nations in the top 10 rankings. No need to even consider the long tail on the graph (I didn't; I listed no nations beyond the top 10). I included Brazil in my lists, since by your own admission it's not a third-world country (even though it actually is, if we're going by the strict definition for what a third-world country is), but if you want to exclude it, the only list it would significantly impact would be beef, since it accounts for roughly 20% of the world's supply.

Sources:
http://beef2live.com/story-wor...
http://www.indexmundi.com/agri...
https://rankingamerica.wordpre...
http://www.indexmundi.com/agri...

Hello,

    I have a lot of sympathy for what you're saying. The electrical grid badly needs to be made robust to EMP/solar flares, because even if no one detonates a nuke in orbit, eventually there will be a solar flare that will be powerful enough to have the same effect. Or some sort of cascading failure. Smaller modular grids are inherently more robust, on that you cannot be disputed.

    You are also right that nuclear has much less of a carbon footprint than burning coal or any other fossil fuel. What I'm not confident of is that nuclear power of any sort can be competitive, economically, with alternatives.

    Don't get me wrong, I like nuclear power in principle, but when it comes down to money, people have argued, pretty convincingly, that the fact that you have to generate heat and then convert it to power incurs so much capital expense that direct electrical generation will always be cheaper.

    Direct electrical generation means that the fuel directly spins a turbine or generates electricity, examples of direct conversion:
hydropower
solar
natural gas fired turbines (the burning gas turns the turbine directly)

All flavors of nuclear power (except possibly aneutronic fusion) heat water which is converted to steam which turns turbines which generates electricity.

Here's the link that goes into the argument more thoroughly:

https://matter2energy.wordpres...

You speak of laws as if the United States government follows them.

Snowden tried to go though proper channels to report government violations of United States citizens constitutional rights. He was shut down. The United States also made an example of Thomas Drake for whisleblowing.

A counter-example is Scooter Libby. He actually put a CIA field agent in danger, possibly under the orders of his superiors, but his sentence was commuted by President Bush. The information that the discredited agent Valerie Plame had would have stopped the invasion of Iraq and saved millions of lives.

When the United States violates citizens' constitutional rights, can they keep it a secret? The secret is that government employees broke the law. ISP's and websites were even under a gag order which prevented them from consulting with their attorneys.

Revealing illegal government spying on innocent citizens is not the same as leaking F-35 plans. When Snowden comes back, he deserves a parade.

that has made more progress (in terms of particle energy * confinement time) in the last 5 years on a few million bucks than ITER has in 8 with billions.

So would a teenager working in his garage on a Farnsworth fusor, tweaking his design. That doesn't mean anything. What matters is what the scientific community thinks of the scaleability. Do you have a published comparative metastudy of the literature on the prospects of focus fusion vs. tokamaks to back that? Heck, has Lerner even demonstrated getting past the limitations set forth by Rider on non-maxwellian plasma fusion yet (since his device, contrary to his claims, is not based on confined thermal plasmas and really not functionally different from earlier pinch experiments)? Or is he too busy trying to argue that the Big Bang never happened?

Both approaches are a lot smaller than the aircraft-carrier sized reactor (no, not sized for an aircraft carrier, as big as an aircraft carrier) that tokamak designs predict will be useful ;

Note that advancements in increasing achievable/affordable torus field strength (which we absolutely are seeing) have dramatic scale-down effects on the required size needed to make a viable tokamak-based power plant.

I really don't know whether tokamaks will prove commercially competitive within a few decades. But the possibility does exist. There are other types of fusion - lots and lots of them - which are also worth watching. I'm kind of fond of some of the "hybrid" approaches that mix various "traditional" forms of fusion together, such as combining pinches, laser compression pulses, laser heating pulses, etc. But the pulsed methods all face commercialization challenges on achieving rapid firing rates, particularly those compressing holraums (remember that we're dealing with tiny, tiny objects that need to be precisely struck), and going from high power, slow-firing gas lasers to their equivalent power in diode lasers (which can fire much faster) is not going to happen overnight. But there's enough different possibilities out there that I wouldn't be surprised at all to see one succeed eventually. Tokamaks at least seem to have the fewest technical barriers in front of them.

John 1 1 from the King James Bible says that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” So if the word was god, then it stands to reason that god was --and is-- the word--god is the word of god, which is contained in the bible...the bible contains the word of god, and so therefore the bible contains god, and so as long as the bible is in existence, or as long as a human brain contains the word of god, God lives. Word is writing, and as writing, then god is information, because writing is information. And so God dies when the information that is him is destroyed beyond retrieval...so maintain the word of god inside you. Guard the word inside you. Store it in your brain with the rest of your memories. Your memories of the word of god inside you is god inside of you. Keep the word of god inside you always, and it will give you eternal life as long as it exists inside you. God lives through you. God sees through you. As long as god lives in you, meaning the word is stored inside your brain, then the memories and other information that make you YOU are also there as well. And so you will live by preservation of YOUR information, just as god lives through preservation of HIS information. God made man in HIS image. God is information. Therefore WE are also information. Preserve your information in your brain for all time. The only way to preserve your soul and the word of god inside you is cryonics. See more at the better resurrection church blog... https://betterresurrectionchur...

Nope. The only study that showed net benefits up to 1C warming had errors. Here's how it looks corrected: https://andthentheresphysics.w... . Say, why not answer the question? what is the economic cost of the projected sea level rise for Miami alone?

Those aren't arbitrary numbers. I've done the math a dozen different ways.

But WTF is the graph showing? Looks entirely made-up to me. Well, the current tax rates might be right. You're advocating eliminating payroll tax, going with a flat income tax rate for everyone, and increasing the wealth inequality?

Bulk labor is trying to get $15/hr; machines cost $12. We tax the middle-class worker a third of his paycheck.

What if we resolved the taxes in such a way that we didn't need to raise taxes on anyone (least not by more than, say, 3%, worst case, maybe less), and the $45k worker effectively brought home about $40k? We could stop paying people $60k and start paying them $15k less, and they'd come home with $500/year more. For every 4 employees at that income level, you could hire 5 and still spend the same on wages.

What if we got rid of that OASDI payroll tax, instead covering it with a level income tax? Instead of hiring a $60k worker and paying $3,750 in taxes, you'd just pay the $60k worker. Put that above and those $45k workers are $2,800 cheaper than they'd normally be, closer to an actual $45k, and still taking home the same money at the end of the day.

Those aren't arbitrary numbers. I've done the math a dozen different ways.

The larger problem is distorted thinking. People are angry, claiming they don't get paid enough, that corporations and rich people have too much, and that we need to "make them pay" somehow--you'll notice no solutions, just vengeance. They ignore real solutions because they don't tickle their genetalia the right way.

The minimum wage push is a big one right now. That was a decent strategy in the 1900s, with good return for its costs; but now it's crap. What we need, today, is *cheap* labor. We need to reduce labor costs, which means new strategies for managing standard-of-living. We can't just hand out high wages and public aid and expect the economy to function; it'll just throw out the laborers in favor of machines, H1-B cheap import labor, and new management structures which cost 30% more in overhead but eliminate 40% of the labor cost--which is significant when labor in total costs 3/4 as much as management.

We need new ways of doing things. We need to cut back on labor pricing. Nobody wants to do that because it doesn't feel good to them if they don't stab the knife into the purse of their corporate overlords; they don't care about a better standard-of-living for themselves, but rather for a worse one for those they've focused their anger upon.

The larger problem is distorted thinking. People are angry, claiming they don't get paid enough, that corporations and rich people have too much, and that we need to "make them pay" somehow--you'll notice no solutions, just vengeance. They ignore real solutions because they don't tickle their genetalia the right way.

The minimum wage push is a big one right now. That was a decent strategy in the 1900s, with good return for its costs; but now it's crap. What we need, today, is *cheap* labor. We need to reduce labor costs, which means new strategies for managing standard-of-living. We can't just hand out high wages and public aid and expect the economy to function; it'll just throw out the laborers in favor of machines, H1-B cheap import labor, and new management structures which cost 30% more in overhead but eliminate 40% of the labor cost--which is significant when labor in total costs 3/4 as much as management.

We need new ways of doing things. We need to cut back on labor pricing. Nobody wants to do that because it doesn't feel good to them if they don't stab the knife into the purse of their corporate overlords; they don't care about a better standard-of-living for themselves, but rather for a worse one for those they've focused their anger upon.

... Washington State can offer its consulting services for authentic bridge collapses.

Always happy to share our vast quantity of experiences.

No, but unfortunately it's no longer wrong.

It has never been wrong. The use of "they" like that isn't a new construct, was never wrong.

In fact, it's been correct for a very long time.

But you're just making a fool of yourself when you go around telling users of singular they that theyâ(TM)re wrong, because theyâ(TM)re not.

That you don't know it was already correct is your damned problem.

All those articles mentioned are actually just blog posts. The article hopes you will lose interest and not actually look those papers up in your closest university library. Because they will not be there.

The link you posted has been analyzed and shredded to pieces already, so please update your bookmarks:

https://greenfyre.wordpress.co...

Here is a photo of Hedy Lamarr. Naked.

https://jnpickens.files.wordpr...

Here is a photo of Phil Zimmerman. Fully clothed.

http://cdn.androidbeat.com/wp-...

Now who wants to argue that there shouldn't be more women in tech?

If even the staunchly illiberal publications like New York Times and The Atlantic complain about there being too many grievances, it must, indeed, be a real problem.

A problem, they helped facilitate, I might add. Because, when people are simply pursuing happiness, one can get a (sorely mistaken!!) impression, everything is right in the land of Capitalism — so, if causes for real complaints are gone, we must dig deeper to rouse up new ones. Somebody complimented your demeanour? They must be RACIST!.. Girls learn belly-dancing — to stay fit and please their boyfriends? They are appropriating! And so on.

https://jewelsfromjulian.wordp...

Later if the person gets stopped for a traffic violation and isn't wearing their spaghetti strainer, that should be grounds to investigate and charge them with fraud if it were a sham.

And why is this? Why should the DMV care, why should the police be on the lookout for this, and why should society embroil someone's life in the legal system over something that has no effect on anyone, whatsoever?

People seem to think that we need to uphold some sort of justice against the *intent* of some rule or another(*).

Why bother? Can't we just let little things go?

(*) The one that comes to mind first is the "If you can't be bothered to vote, you can't comment on the voting proceedings", but there are others. People seem caught up in enforcing some sort of "just universe", and take it to absurd extremes.

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/11...

The article they refer to is this one:

https://azelin.files.wordpress...

Didn't have the stomach to read it in one go. It's written from a revanchist religious point of view and it lays every single failure since the fall of the Ottoman empire of the Islamic world to get its house in order and rise from a violently squabbling mob at the West's door. Apparently we have been doing Satan's work on them.

Their preferred response is "savagery", according to the author of that pamphlet. I think we can see what he means..

Somehow I don't see us working out our differences with them through reasoned debate.

It's a religious sect writ large, and it's one huge pitcher of cool-aid they've got there.

The only good news seems to be that this little masterpiece doesn't seem to base itself on the authority of Islamic texts per se. As far as I can see, it's based on an interpretation of Islam that's driven by an revanchist view of history.

That ought to give us something to work with when dealing with radicalising youths (their main supply of manpower).

Revanchism and envy are probably easier to deal with than straight-up religion.

I am a software/technology business owner and I have been in Baltimore since the mid 90's.

I can say that the tech industry is growing and maturing in the area and the cost of living is quite low for the proximity to urban lifestyles.

A nice summary is here: https://michaelochurch.wordpre...

Saddam's support for Radical Islam and connections to AQ is fairly well documented

Again, we shall not mix all muslims with specific radical groups. The Hitler's army had on the buckles the text in German: "Gott mit uns." It means in English: "God is with is": https://padresteve.files.wordp...

But it does not mean, of course, that it was the case. Actors in a political theater use whatever is popular at the moment.

NO ending the extensions

I don't know where this idea comes from. The concerns about the add on API changes are largely groundless. The only real concern is that a new API means making changes to get an add on working in the new environment, but that's true of any new API.

Is it that you feel threatened because you think you can't compete in the job market? Are you afraid of interacting women and minorities?

Sadly, the answer to both of these is "yes". At the more extreme end you have the "red pill" people, who honestly seem to think that all women and minorities are out to get them. In their minds they are just waiting for an opportunity to make a false rape or racism accusation, to drive the white man out. All women and minorities in anything but menial or "traditional" jobs are just diversity hires who stole jobs from white guys.

Seriously, this is how those guys think:

https://manboobz.files.wordpre...
https://hailtothegynocracy.fil...

Do you think that by elevating atheists we necessarily hurt the religious?

Yes, because they consider not being able to inflict their personal beliefs on others to be harm. Being forced not to discriminate against gay people, for example, is oppression to them. To be fair it's true that they are not allowed to enact their bigotry in certain situations, it's just that they fail to realise that the same rules protect them too. They have privilege, so they don't see the value of those rules because they don't need to rely on them.

Is it that you feel threatened because you think you can't compete in the job market? Are you afraid of interacting women and minorities?

Sadly, the answer to both of these is "yes". At the more extreme end you have the "red pill" people, who honestly seem to think that all women and minorities are out to get them. In their minds they are just waiting for an opportunity to make a false rape or racism accusation, to drive the white man out. All women and minorities in anything but menial or "traditional" jobs are just diversity hires who stole jobs from white guys.

Seriously, this is how those guys think:

https://manboobz.files.wordpre...
https://hailtothegynocracy.fil...

Do you think that by elevating atheists we necessarily hurt the religious?

Yes, because they consider not being able to inflict their personal beliefs on others to be harm. Being forced not to discriminate against gay people, for example, is oppression to them. To be fair it's true that they are not allowed to enact their bigotry in certain situations, it's just that they fail to realise that the same rules protect them too. They have privilege, so they don't see the value of those rules because they don't need to rely on them.

For what it's worth, that's been discussed here:

https://billmccloskey.wordpres...

Although the official response seems to be along the lines of -- well, we'll add an API that would kinda allow the same thing, more or less. Whether or not that actually encourages a dev to rewrite their entire, very mature, extension from scratch again remains to be seen. My guess on the latter is that it won't happen :(

Just to clarify:
ProtonMail were *forced* to pay the ransom, it wasn't entirely their choice.

"At this point, we were placed under a lot of pressure by third parties to just pay the ransom"
due to... "hundreds of thousands of Swiss Francs in damages suffered by other companies caught up in the attack against us"

And no doubt, this is the start of a series of attacks against them, by the likes of the terrorists at the NSA/GCHQ.

Neither the Arctic ice extent (area), nor volume, is roughly equal to the mean of the last few decades.
I really don't get what either of you is arguing, you're both making false claims.

The infamous death spiral graph, showing monthly volume from 1979 to 2015:
http://skepticalscience.com//p...

Summer ice extent from July to September (the minimum period) from 1870 to 2014 (as mention above, 2015 is the 4th lowest extent, in between 2011 and 2008):
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-i...

Average monthly extent from 1979 to 2015:
https://polarbearscience.files...

ice volume trend graph 1979-2014:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/...

Yeah, that can happen.

Originally, I speculated that switching from broadcast to unicast would kill the Internet. Broadcast pipes use a single frequency range carrying a single stream of content through repeaters down to all viewers; whereas Internet carries the same content on-demand, again and again. A million users thus becomes the same data repeated a million times in parallel, rather than sent once. You'll notice the same cable carries that data when you're getting Comcast high-speed internet.

What actually happened was it killed the Internet by cost. Netflix et al have caching repeaters in Comcast data centers: the same strategy as broadcast helped avoid all those high peering costs, serving streaming media from the last mile. Unfortunately, it still sends a lot of data down that last mile to the customer, putting demands on their infrastructure--hence DOCSIS 2, DOCSIS 3, DOCSIS 4, raising the amount of data carried down by using 4 and 8 and 16 channel data transmission.

In theory, such mitigations help slow and spread the cost until the market catches up--in this case, by cheaper technology standards (DOCSIS 3 isn't more expensive; it's more efficient, in that providing 8 channels and so much bandwidth costs as much as it cost to supply 1 channel in 1998). In practice, this sadly doesn't always happen: you eventually need to change practice anyway.

That's also an inconvenient issue with my observation of our need to change from a minimum-wage-and-welfare system to a Citizen's Dividend: Minimum wage will eventually push employment costs rapidly above automation costs while slowing the creation of new employment and increasing the cost of living; while public aid increases in tax-dollar costs. A Citizen's Dividend arrests that movement: labor costs (wages) no longer need to increase to ensure a correctly-adjusted minimum standard of living (increases with the wealth of the economy); and so the cost of automation must come down to make labor reduction profitable; and so you have a wide spread between the early adopters, the strategic adopters (keep paying for expensive labor because cheap automation will be even cheaper, and a delay will make us even more money in the end), and the traditionalists; all while keeping labor prices low so labor is a more viable option for jobs in which automation costs more, thus encouraging more employment. Just as with the Netflix strategy, this assumes the improvement is *enough* of an improvement to offset the damage done by the changing economy; if not, then the system collapses anyway.

These things happen. Granted, a collapsing economy worries me more than a change in ISP business model, and the form and factors are much different; but the principle is the same: "Better" doesn't mean "Good enough to survive".

https://tamino.files.wordpress...

https://tamino.files.wordpress...

I can't get this image out of my head.

Which is strange, since he invented something with no economic value.

BitCoin is only useful for trading to other currency--it's a currency at best--and thus for speculation. BitCoin has spawned speculation and BitCoin production, two operations which consume labor to produce nothing but the ability to transfer money from others to yourself. That's equivalent to a Government jobs bill which mandates you get taxpayer money for digging holes and filling them in again: you could get paid to stay home and do nothing and we'd have the same result (nothing useful produced).

It's not a great amount of labor, fortunately. A tiny, tiny fraction of available labor has sunk into waste production--essentially the building of trash nobody is going to use. It's still just waste, economically.

Economics is strange. Classical economic theory--what we operate on now--is all about determining "value", which has about a dozen different definitions all used interchangeably (making the entire theory of economics one enormous fallacy of equivocation). Basically, they try to determine the "correct" price of goods and services. Meanwhile I've rewritten macroeconomics from scratch based on "wealth theory", which has lead to a lot of understanding of how nations become wealthy, how this impacts day-to-day standard of living, where welfare systems come from, how income inequality happens, what advantages income inequality provides (progressive tax systems!), cost of labor considerations, and so forth.

This leads to interesting conclusions: expense of labor in non-productive ways is actively harmful, yet the effects of welfare are complex and useful--and the current optimal system really is just sending people money for nothing, without consuming their labor time for no economic benefit. (Of course, this is *extremely* unstable if not financed in such a way as to align with the well-understood basic economic behaviors discovered through wealth theories of economics; and it's only become the better system recently, since our current system will eventually collapse the economy in ways even modern economists recognize openly.)

I've actually been working on a lengthy explanation of economics based in the generation of wealthy economic systems--wealthy nations. The problem is all existing economics are basically merchant and accountant shit: they try to predict prices, and call that economics. Nobody really has theories about the cost of labor, the market impact of cyclical improvement, what inflation actually is, why we can have welfare and what determines what kind of welfare system we have, or even what causes scarcity and supply-and-demand.

Economists say things like "goods become scarce" without figuring out things like "at a point, it's technically possible to produce more of a good to meet demand; however, each additional unit of that good requires a larger investment of total human labor time than previous unit good, thus holding a higher cost, and requiring a higher price, increasing the cost of living until the consumer is priced out of the market, thus producing the range of supply-and-demand economics called 'scarcity'." They also fail to realize that "supply" is unlimited up to the point where that changes in some way, including up to a point where an entity controlling the means to production at current costs decides to restrict supply (if similar means to production are claimed by competitors, you get competition; if DeBeers owns all the good diamond mines, you get monopoly price inflation), and so get confused about demand not increasing price sometimes and price increasing with reduced demand other times.

Mind you, I'm the guy who ran through the government's finances since 1950, drew up tax theories and market theories, and explained why we need to change our economic policies at this point, but not e.g. in 2010. I'm a bit obsessive.

... no one ever looks at corporations and the rich. Someone should do a study on them because they are the ones who cause violence in the world.

From war is a racket:

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil intersts in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."[p. 10]

"War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23]
"The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24]

General Butler is especially trenchant when he looks at post-war casualties. He writes with great emotion about the thousands of tramautized soldiers, many of who lose their minds and are penned like animals until they die, and he notes that in his time, returning veterans are three times more likely to die prematurely than those who stayed home.

http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865/

US distribution of wealth

https://imgur.com/a/FShfb

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

The Centre for Investigative Journalism

http://www.tcij.org/

Some history on US imperialism by us corporations.

https://kurukshetra1.wordpress.com/2015/09/27/a-brief-history-of-imperialism-and-state-violence-in-colombia/