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Period

Hacking is relatively benign compared to the damage a prosecutor with an agenda can do. The latest round of these travesties is now going on in Wisconsin http://www.wsj.com/articles/ri... , It seems we get these popping up about once a year lately and it's been accelerating.

Georgia actually has its own water issues.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

Whoosh?

They didn't stop telecoms from merging either.

U.S. Moves to Block Merger Between AT&T and T-Mobile
T-Mobile Antitrust Challenge Gives AT&T Little Recourse

They didn't stop any of the airline or bank mergers that we have seen since 2009.

US government seeks to block American-US Airways merger
U.S., Filing Suit, Moves to Block Airline Merger

They didn't reign in the massive control that the insurance industry has over the consumer (indeed they gave the industry more power)

BLUE CROSS BLUE SHIELD OF MICHIGAN AND PHYSICIANS HEALTH PLAN OF MID-MICHIGAN ABANDON MERGER PLANS: Decision to Abandon Deal Follows Justice Department's Decision to Challenge the Acquisition
The Minimum Standards all Health Insurance Plans Sold on and Off the Exchange
Federal Insurance Office Act"
the 2010 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

This seems highly unlikely given the pro-monopoly stance that...

U.S. Moves to Block Merger of 2 Theater Ad Companies
FTC Sues To Block Sysco-US Foods Merger
U.S. Sues to Block Big Beer Merger
3M Drops Avery Dennison Unit Buyout Amid Antitrust Worry

etc

No, there are still plenty of men working middle-tier jobs in other fields, teaching isn't a special case when it comes to effort vs reward. Where it is a special case is the way it opens men up to gender-based discrimination (because if a man likes kids he's obviously a pedophile! Only women can like kids without it being sexual!) and that living under the constant threat of a single student's unsubstantiated and untrue claim of misconduct can and will cost you your career, your marriage, your friends, and possibly even your freedom.

Men have been teaching kids since teaching became a thing. We didn't just decide last week that we don't want to be teachers any more, we weigh the benefits against the risks and at some point it's just not worth it.

A few articles you may appreciate:
http://www.wsj.com/news/articl...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/edu...

Also, a candid discussion between male teachers:

http://www.reddit.com/r/teachi...

1. Investigation may change if they get some actual evidence from the Executive branch vice stonewalling. But since you seem just fine with American citizens dying for her ineptness, oh well.

2. Yes, Bush alone. Kinda like religion. http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/...

3. Hope her husband never rapes one of your relatives. That's at least 20 years of people blaming the victim per rape.

Cruz, Paul, and Walker are political babies compared to Hilary Clinton.

Nope, I'm going to vote for Hillary because unlike most other person running, she isn't overly corrupt and she's not bat shit crazy. She may not be perfect, but I have more faith in her ability to lead this nation then any other candidate currently.

BWAAAA HAAA HAAA!!!

Foreign Government Gifts to Clinton Foundation on the Rise

Her ability to lead? Yeah, sure. Name any of her accomplishments outside of "married Bill". The fact that she would have been a better person to answer that phone at 3 AM than Obama has been is more an indictment of Obama than anything else. (Don't think Obama's a clown? Name another leader from a country with nuclear weapons that the crazy religious leadership of Iran can credibly call a liar.)

Leadership? That's why this announcement come out late? What the hell, she's been planning this for YEARS and she does it LATE? You sir have low standards for "leadership", that's for sure.

Ask her why her pay disparity between men and women is larger than the national average.

BWAA HAA!

Oh, sorry. You were joking, your sarcasm was too subtle, and I shouldn't have mocked you.

You're both right, but you managed to shift the goalposts with an incredibly misleading statement.

What is true is that the population of women, on average, makes 80% of what the population of men makes. The reason this is INCREDIBLY misleading is it does not look at "pay for equal work"; it utterly disregards what industries men and women respectively tend to be in and just assumes that all women are in the same industries as all men and thus that 80% figure is indicating sexism.

This 80% number is so notorious that it has been widely slammed, by such publications as Politifact, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Slate. That is, its SUCH a misleading statement that it is derided by publications ranging from neutral to liberal to conservative.

Indeed, The Washington Post notes,

June O’Neill, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who has been a critic of the 77-cent statistic, has noted that the wage gap is affected by a number of factors, including that the average woman has less work experience than the average man and that more of the weeks worked by women are part-time rather than full-time. Women also tend to leave the work force for periods in order to raise children, seek jobs that may have more flexible hours but lower pay and choose careers that tend to have lower pay.

Indeed, BLS data show that women who do not get married have virtually no wage gap; they earn 96 cents for every dollar a man makes.

They [economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis ] noted that women may prefer to accept jobs with lower wages but greater benefits (more flexible parental leave) so excluding such fringe benefits from the calculations will exaggerate the wage disparity.

So yes: Technically, 77 cents on the dollar. That is, if you're attempting to push a political agenda by boiling down a really complex comparison to an inflated and highly controversial figure.

http://content.time.com/time/b...
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
http://www.consad.com/content/...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/th...
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2014/...

I have a solution for your CA home water issues.

Ready? Stop voting for Democrat environmentalists.

The science is in. If you divert millions of acre-feet of water to fulfill environmental regulations, you can't use that water for other stuff. If you stop building reservoirs and dams to store water while increasing water usage, you won't have enough water. If agriculture water prices went up enough that the agribusinesses used 12.5% less water, then every residential and industrial user in CA could use 50% more water.

Oh seriously, have you been living under a rock for the past 50 years ?

Rachel Carson and DDT ? http://www.21stcenturysciencet...

Paul Ehrlich and the population bomb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Hows your soylent green today ?

Endless peak oil doom ? http://www.wsj.com/articles/wh...
BTW the first were out of oil doom, dates from the early 1900s

Yes, the methodology by which the statistics are gathered is suspect. That's because there isn't a gallup poll; it's a criminal activity and people don't answer the phone and say "Yes, I traffic in women."

"It's a really big problem, I watched Netflix and heard some stories." A similar thing occurred with D&D and a fear campaign around satanic crap. Do you have anything better than a "trust me it's a big problem"?

Yes, there are people who just decide to go into prostitution for economic reasons and are psychologically healthy about it. They of course defend their profession from statistics that show a lot of young women are not voluntarily in the trade, and a lot of them aren't even going to understand that

"There are people in an industry that I don't work in, but that I have watched some completely unbiased shows on (trust me), and they don't know what they're talking about!"

and a lot of them aren't even going to understand that some young women they think are their voluntarily have been effectively brainwashed by someone who collects all of their profits and buys them an ice cream cone and says that they care.

This comes off much like a "think of the children". You used girl elsewhere, however, young women are by their very definition a woman, for woman to apply that would mean at least 18 (an adult). This continues the line of thinking that women are children and cannot make decisions on their own behalf. Let's not forget that girls mature faster than boys, and they're taught about people touching them - something boys aren't. Not to mention there are "a lot" (another weasel word, see how that works?) of 18yo males who enlist and deploy and are maimed or meet an untimely end. Take a story in the paper if it was about a young man, they'd drop the young part and just refer to him as a man. There's an effort here to paint this in a particular light. Why would that be?

More and more girls who are younger and younger. The average age has gone down over the years--you used to every once in a while see a girl who was underage. Now it's all the time. Girls who are underage cannot consent.

Is it so, or could it be that it's easier to share things nowadays? Look at all the (disproportionately female) teachers raping students, is this a new phenomenon? Or is it something that's occurring with the same frequency and just broadcast further and faster? Another example is how people are worried about sending their children outside when crime is following a 40 year trend downwards.

Since you're fond of think of the children angle how about a present scandal occurring at this very moment. Human trafficking involving Chinese citizens coming over and having anchor babies. I've seen this with my own eyes, too. People who pay tens of thousands of dollars to come here and have a child on our dime by claiming to be destitute when at the Hospital. Getting back to the original issue, as far as these picture websites, your stance is that there isn't enough laws on the books to address these sites? That's rich.

All we had to do was LITERALLY NOTHING

But then, what's going to be his legacy? Not Obamacare, not peaceful Iraq (or Libya), not economic recovery, not lower unemployment, not reductions in income disparity.

Liberalization of marijuana? But that's individual States' achievement...

Being able to claim to have "normalized relationship" with Iran (and Cuba) will — for generations — be trumpeted as "success" by sympathetic historians. Or so he hopes...

When we had that 90% tax rate, the tax code was nothing but loopholes. It's important to remember that the more you make, the more flexibility you have in how, where, and when you get compensated. Remember the Maryland millionaires tax? One year later, 1/3 of the people in that bracket went missing. If you own houses in two states, how hard is it to change your residency? France has a problem today with people leaving to avoid their recent high rates (also a 90% top rate IIRC).

But you're talking about an income tax, not a wealth tax. When it comes to non-property wealth, it takes a very small tax indeed to totally change the game, and create a huge disincentive to to business here (or at least to find some way to own US stocks from elsewhere, I guess). Large investment firms move will their assets around immediately for a 0.1% better guaranteed annual return. A 1% difference in property tax rates makes a big difference in affording a new house (and in a regressive way).

Maybe people are confused about how much overall property (wealth or otherwise) there is to begin with?

Neither side has presented any convincing evidence. This is just going to keep happening because it's so hard to accurately trace cyber attacks.

Yep, so hard to accurately trace cyber attacks. But if you had read anything at all on this particular attack:

Mikko Hyponen, the chief research officer of cybersecurity firm F-Secure, said the attack was likely to have involved Chinese authorities because the hackers were able to manipulate Web traffic at a high level of China’s Internet infrastructure. It appeared to be a new type for China, he added. “It had to be someone who had the ability to tamper with all the Internet traffic coming into China.” he said.

Though Baidu is the largest search engine in China by several measures, the attack appeared to use traffic from its users outside the country, security experts said. When a user navigated to the Baidu search engine, they said, a code was activated that sent continuous requests for data from the user’s computer to GitHub. By tapping overseas users, the hackers made the attack harder to block, because the requests to GitHub came from all over the world and looked like typical requests for information.

And also the motive is very clear for China to attack Github. Not so clear for anyone else.

I don't know if you're the same Microsoft supporter as before, but in case you aren't, I'll repeat that we are talking about "designed for Windows 10" machines which aren't for sale yet.

So when you said this "That's not true any more.", you were lying and in fact even "designed for Windows 10" machines will not necessarily change anything. I am not a Microsoft supporter at all. I dont like Microsoft but I am not going to blame them for something that is clearly and objectively *not* their responsibility.

No, because that would prevent the user from buying copies of future versions of Microsoft Windows.

Windows has provided upgrades rather than clean installs that require access to the BIOS for a long time. So actually the answer is "yes" you just aren't very imaginative.

Because the OEMs are known not to care about letting the users fiddle with advanced boot options.

Aboslute 100% rubbish! There is *no* basis for that whatsoever, stop talking out of your ass. I have *never* had a machine that didn't let me adjust advanced boot options despite the fact that nobody forces the OEM to allow it, stop lying!

They are also known to make firmware that, for example, will crash the machine from SMM when running a non-Windows OS: I've owned such PCs (that bug was meant to be a fix to make Windows 2000 run on that hardware).

Who is "they"? All OEMs? No, you are talking about an isolated case.

If the machines they make don't boot Linux, it's because they don't care, or haven't the resources to support Linux, not because of malice.

So vote with your wallet! They don't have to make machines that do what you want and you don't have to buy machines that don't do what you want, stop being such an entitlist cockbag.

But it's Microsoft who put these hurdles for them (and the users) to overcome.

Just more baseless bullshit.

It's their decision that will lock people out of their own PCs, not the disinterest of the OEMs, which has always been there and is not changing.

No, as stated in the presentation it is the OEM's decision, are you mentally defective? Do you not understand basic English?

Yes of course. That's where I usually lose most of my karma points.

And that loss of karma points isn't giving you the hint yet that you're wrong?

You've just admitted that there's "overhead" in the overall process of the OEM to add an option that disables the so-called Secure Boot. Hence, OEMs that want to get rid of this "overhead" WILL remove the option. Thanks for proving my point.

No, I didn't say "overall process", I said "certification process" learn how to read what is written instead of inferring something else, I suspect this problem of language comprehension is also what you gives you the false impression that OEMs are not responsible for the secureboot switch. Not including it in their firmware would prevent the sale of their Linux systems.

That is, to keep Linux out of of the users' PC as I've been stating from the beginning!

Wrong. If they wanted to do that they would make it so that OEMs couldn't turn SecureBoot off, the fact that they give them an option means you are wrong, it is the total opposite of what you are saying.

My friend, in this world pressures against OEMs are the norm, not an exception.

No, they just couldn't get certification from Microsoft or Google's blessing because it didn't meet the requirements, again, read the article instead of just making up something that clearly is not there.

I'm not denying that Linux users are a minority.

Absolute, 100% rubbish! Show me an OEM that does not provide the ability to turn secure boot off.

I don't know if you're the same Microsoft supporter as before, but in case you aren't, I'll repeat that we are talking about "designed for Windows 10" machines which aren't for sale yet.

Impossible, no machine could ever be sold without the capability to boot from an external device, as this would prevent installing Microsoft Windows on it.

Wrong again, they can easily install it and then lock you out of the BIOS.

No, because that would prevent the user from buying copies of future versions of Microsoft Windows.

Bullshit. The OEMs should be held accountable if they make the choice to produce a product that doesn't allow secureboot to be turned off. Why are you so desperate to defend the OEMs as some blameless, unaccountable entity?

Because the OEMs are known not to care about letting the users fiddle with advanced boot options. They are also known to make firmware that, for example, will crash the machine from SMM when running a non-Windows OS: I've owned such PCs (that bug was meant to be a fix to make Windows 2000 run on that hardware). If the machines they make don't boot Linux, it's because they don't care, or haven't the resources to support Linux, not because of malice. But it's Microsoft who put these hurdles for them (and the users) to overcome. It's their decision that will lock people out of their own PCs, not the disinterest of the OEMs, which has always been there and is not changing.

Do you also blame Google for not forcing everybody who makes Android devices to provide an unlocked bootloader and root-level access on phones?

Yes of course. That's where I usually lose most of my karma points.

can you give a non-malicious explanation about why the requirement of being able to disable the so-called Secure Boot is being lifted now?

Less overhead in the certification process perhaps

You've just admitted that there's "overhead" in the overall process of the OEM to add an option that disables the so-called Secure Boot. Hence, OEMs that want to get rid of this "overhead" WILL remove the option. Thanks for proving my point.

but likely pushed by the OEMs as a way to try and sell both their Windows and Linux offerings separately rather than just one and have the user dual-boot it.

That is, to keep Linux out of of the users' PC as I've been stating from the beginning!

If MS wanted to stop Linux they would be offering huge discounts to OEMs to not ship Linux (and Android) devices and to only ship Windows.

My friend, in this world pressures against OEMs are the norm, not an exception.

In recent years despite Linux on the desktop being offered pre-installed from big box retailers, available in the form of ChromeOS, available pre-installed systems from Dell, HP, Lenovo and others, free of charge, easy to install and even with the ability to try *without* installing the desktop PC userbase has *still* rejected it, it hasnt made any gains at all.

I'm not denying that Linux users are a minority. I'm stating that they risk to become zero thanks to these dirty tricks. And this will harm the market of Linux on the servers, too, because of the way how people become Linux contributors. And I'm stating this in a comment which, if you bother to read, was meant as a response to someone who said "Microsoft supports Linux now".

If they really wanted to lock out alternative operating systems they would have done it decades ago when they actually saw Linux on the desktop as a threat.

They have been doing stuff like this endlessly for decades. Remember Bill Gates' "we should make ACPI Windows-only" in the 90s?

http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-...

The school had a multi-million-dollar advertising and legal budget, and created a chilling effect. At one point, they even got government websites warning about the school censored.

Maheshwar Peri and other journalists who went up against them took a tremendous personal financial risk. As the Newsweek article makes clear, they were sued repeatedly, and had to defend each case. See also Siddhartha Deb's story: Siddhartha Deb’s Publishing Odyssey, ‘Why I Took On Arindam Chaudhuri’.

The stark truth is that Wikipedia was part of the problem here, not the solution. This is in part due to Wikipedia's own chilling atmosphere towards critics, a topic discussed right now on Jimmy Wales' talk page.

Whistle-blowers taking on an admin run a significant risk of being sanctioned themselves under some pretext like "battlefield conduct" or "incivility".

Page one of Google search for "Apple Church" throws up The church of Apple. No shit. And a parody Apple news site. I like this one. Plus a couple of serious articles full of worlds like devotion, mecca, evangelical fervor, reverence... you get the idea.

http://blogs.wsj.com/numbers/m...

...given the expected shortage of coders , CEOs of most importan IT companies are lobbying the government to have more people sent to prison.

You are correct. You do not know what does. You do not know what does are few a few grammar fundamentals as well. Perhaps you might want to do a simple Internet search before ranting online. Here's a quote from the World Health Organization:

The benefits of circumcision that accrue during childhood include a marked reduction in urinary-tract infections, which affect one in 100 uncircumcised boys, mainly during the first two years of life, and inflammation or infection under the foreskin, which affects around 17 in 100 uncircumcised boys before the age of 8. Circumcision reduces the risk of these problems by around 60%. In adulthood, circumcision has been shown to reduce the risk of HIV infection in men by 50% to 60%, and is now recommended by the World Health Organization as an HIV prevention strategy.(Goldman. (2013). Do the Health Benefits of Neonatal Circumcision Outweigh the Risks? wsj.com)

So yeah, not mutilation. Nothing wrong with being uncircumcised of course though I have to say that dealing with SMEGMA as an adult male sounds pretty gross.

Clinton, at news conference in New York, said the email server that she used had been set up for former President Bill Clinton.

Complete BS. Bill Clinton is on the record as having sent two emails his entire life:

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/...

Quite a bit of work setting up an email system for someone who doesn't use it.

Well, it turns out that the protesters were 100% right on that one.

It only "turns out" that way, because those same people, who protested it back then, also run major media outlets. Do you suppose, that Time-magazine's reporter could've written: "We were all morons doing the bidding of America's enemies"?

No, the most you could get 10 years after he went protesting, was to admit, their protest was coordinated — though it is unclear by who...

Bush II and the neo-con war criminals

Please, what "war crimes" are you talking about? Saddam Hussein violated the cease-fire agreement of 1992 so many times, Clinton should've resumed shooting in his time. No, it was no "war crime". But let's not get too side-tracked...

much trouble beating Vladimir Putin in a global popularity contest

Every little bit counts. Like I said, Putin does not need a "win" — a "tie" would be sufficient. And Westerners have always been gullible — the generation calling Bush "war criminal" was raised by morons seriously equating Joseph McCarthy to Lavrenty Beria...

Or is it that invading a distant nation for its oil wealth

Ah, I should have known... Where there are "war crimes", "war for oil" can not be far behind — like Moon-landing denials it just would not die. For 10 years Saddam Hussein was prevented from selling his oil. All we had to do to get it was to agree to lifting the sanctions — which would've been much cheaper than war. Instead, we went after oil-tycoons for breaking the embargo.

Of course, it was "better" — for we didn't annex anything. But see, win an argument, just use a (false) tu quoque to tie your opponent. And you are now doing (or trying to do) the same to me...

peninsula that was recently part of Russia

Score another one for Kremlin! Last time Crimea was part of Russia was 1954 — or 60 years ago. Before that, in 1918, it was part of Ukraine (36 years earlier). So, which one was "recent"?

and is still full of Russians

It is just as full of ethnic Ukrainians now, but, more importantly, achieving that nice White appearance required ethnic cleansing it off Crimean Tatars, who were only allowed to return by the newly-independent Ukraine in 1990-ies. They are now in trouble again — suspected by the occupiers for their loyalty to Ukraine.

So what if it is "full of Russians"? Texas, Arizona, and California are full of Mexicans — would some new Santa Anna be justified invading those states and organizing a referendum?

Khrushchev should never have given it to Ukraine.

Yes, and Romanov should not have sold Alaska — did you just pre-emptively justify Russian invasion into US? Can Japan now use the example to take back Kuril Islands? Japanese special forces may be just as "polite" as Russians were in Crimea and, once the occupation succeeds, arranging a "referendum" i

I thought you were on to something, but you revealed yourself when you started to blame feminists for mob violence and male suicides.

It's true that India has a rate of reported rapes in the two per hundred thousand range. But, given how your post drips with hypocritical spin, I wasn't surprised to find out these mitigating facts:

(1) Marital rape is not a crime in india, but 2/3rds of married women surveyed reported at least one instance of marital rape.
(2) Buy one measure, 90% of rapes in India go unreported.

So then I realized you are just another butthurt man who spins everything he can to justify his own bigotry and has learned to mimic the language of the disempowered to do it. Congrats on that +5 mod, I'm sure you and all your social injustice warrior buddies are feeling pretty good about 'winning' that battle.

Some quick links I found covering the issue.

Americans Living Abroad Becoming Trapped by Citizenship Based Tax Rules
Mayor Of London Boris Johnson Announces He'll Renounce U.S. Citizenship
When American Expats Donâ(TM)t Want Their Kids to Have U.S. Citizenship
Meet the 'accidental American' with a big tax bill
PwC suggests a check to see if you're an 'accidental American'
âAccidentalâ(TM) Americans Still Owe Income Tax

Oh, looks like I skimmed some other summary of this WSJ article from 3/1 that made it sound more definite
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hi...

Consider that in the last 30 years, the only two periods when c wasn't #1 was when c++ demoted it to #2 (1995) and java demoted it to #2 (2010).

As for the horrible gui, neither c, c++, nor objective c has a native gui (cocoa is just a library).

Is java dying? At #2, I think not.

Now, I much prefer c to java - java is over-verbose - but there are ways around that as well.

And there's the fact that Minecraft was developed in Java and it was sold for $2.5 billion. There's still big money in using the #2 language.

the oft discussed "fast lane" has yet to actually happen

Tell that to Sprint and T-Mobile and AT&T and the other carriers who announced plans to do exactly that, not to mention the numerous examples already in effect worldwide.

Only exist on paper? What the fuck. I seriously don't know what rock you're living under.

Humans don’t want accuracy; they want reassurance. The Nobel laureate and retired Stanford University economist Kenneth Arrow did a tour of duty as a weather forecaster for the U.S. Air Force during World War II. Ordered to evaluate mathematical models for predicting the weather one month ahead, he found that they were worthless. Informed of that, his superiors sent back another order: “The Commanding General is well aware that the forecasts are no good. However, he needs them for planning purposes.” Source: JASON ZWEIG, WSJ http://www.wsj.com/articles/le...

Funny how changing one word (cost -> value) can change the whole intention of your post, isn't it?

Not at all. Because the intention of my post was to expose yet another bit of an orchestrated campaign in support of mass immigration.

And not by people like myself, who are attracted by Americans' freedoms and seek to escape oppressive regimes at home. No, those folks are rather inconvenient — for they tend to argue and fight for preservation of those freedoms that they found so attractive in the first place.

No, our overlords in Washington (one party only slight more so than the other) are happy with docile people from poor countries coming here for purely economic reasons. These immigrants don't love America (some outright hate it), they root for foreign sports-teams and can not be trusted to defend the country.

But they come from corrupt poor countries, where government is the primary source of wealth, and are not bothered by the same becoming the accepted state of affairs here. Which suits our prosperous elites perfectly...

First, the 19th century is the years between 1800 and 1899. In the 19th century, they had no effective medicine. They were still bloodletting. They could amputate limbs, although the patients often died of infection. I think you mean the 20th century, which is the years between 1900 and 1999. We are now in the 21st century.

Second, America never had a cheap, accessible free market capitalist system. I don't know where you get your ideas from. I live here, I work in the health care system, and I know the history and problems with the American health care system.

At the beginning of the 20th century, doctors couldn't do much. If you were shot in the leg, and the leg was infected, they could cut it off, and your chance of survival would go up from zero to maybe 50%. If you had heart disease, they couldn't do much to extend your life. If you had cancer they could give you morphine.

Things were going along like that without much progress until WWII, where the U.S. government (not free market capitalism) systematically studied the problems and came up with innovative new ways of handling surgery. Penicillin (from Alexander Flemming in England, an academic researcher) was a big breakthrough. Adriamycin, the first cancer drug, was discovered on -- guess where -- the Adriatic sea, by Italians.

The U.S. was a center of tremendous innovation after WWII, not because of free market capitalism, but because the U.S. government funded academic researchers, who provided a lot of the basic research that the private drug companies took and made money out of. The area with the most dramatic progress was heart disease, and much of the important research was done by the U.S. government's Veterans Affairs hospitals.

After WWII, there were private doctors, but people who couldn't afford their prices went to government hospitals, which were scattered around the country. What reason would capitalist doctors have to treat people who can't afford to pay a lot of money? By the 1980s, when doctors could finally do something useful, they got very expensive. People who can't afford health care are left to die http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

Yeah, I was just talking to an Italian girl who broke her wrist in the U.S. An American hospital charged her $1,000 for an x-ray that would have cost $20 in Italy.

She said what the Europeans always say about American medical prices: You have to be kidding.

The New York Times had a series on American health care by Elisabeth Rosenthal. A guy went to France to get a year's supply of asthma inhalers, and the saving paid for the cost of his trip.

It's true about people getting rejected from hospitals because they can't pay. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

I'm sure FedEx consulted their lawyers and aren't making an arbitrary judgement call. Just look at what happened when they handled Canadian drug shipments as a common carrier. It sounds like they have 1.6 billion reasons to be extremely careful if you ask me.

Heh, I get your point, but the google search on "Fareed Zakaria oil" is pure comedy...

Zakaria: Why oil prices will stay high – Global Public Square ...
globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/.../zakaria-why-oil...
Fareed Zakaria GPS
Jan 15, 2012 - By Fareed Zakaria, CNN The next time you pay $3.50 dollars for a ... So why is oil trading high at $113 a barrel, more than twice the price it was ...

Zakaria: 2015 the year of America? - CNN.com
www.cnn.com/2015/01/05/opinion/zakaria-year-america/
CNN
Jan 5, 2015 - Falling oil prices and a vibrant society could help make 2015 America's year, says Fareed Zakaria.

There are some good graphs of US production vs. imports at: http://cassandralegacy.blogspo... ... but having trouble finding a good graph showing that US oil consumption also fell due to the recession, and that's just as much responsible for the reduction in US imports as the increase in US production.

Anyway, by all reports, US gas consumption will shoot up again since everyone's been out buying gas-guzzling these past couple of months:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/oi...

When I was researching my earlier answer, even those Korea is stated as an exception to our policy, I read:

The US does not maintain any minefields globally after removing its mines from around Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba from 1996-1999.

I took that statement to mean that the US had probably turned over management of those minefields to the Koreans. This blog on the wsj says the same thing, but doesn't give sources.

So, yes, actually. It looks like those minefields are maintained by the Korean forces - they manufacture their own mines now, and we no longer manufacture nor export them. It could very well be that it's just a convenient technicality so the US can make such a statement, of course.

The South Koreans have a bat-shit-insane northern neighbor that still occasionally declares to the world that it's going to conquer them, so I don't think South Korea cares much about what the world thinks of landmines. It's sort of hard to blame them, honestly.

Airlines are supported in several ways. One is that they pay less fuel tax. Then there are the bailouts that they get every now and then. The tax breaks that they give to airports. Not to mention incentives, grants, funding, etc to airports.

wow, you have no clue how credit/debit card fraud really works do you ? The MERCHANT is liable for the fraud and has to repay any income acquired related to fraudulent use of said card. As someone that has worked full times at 2 banks and contracted for many more including some fortune 200's, most good banks (regardless of size) have monitoring systems in place and usually catch the fraudulent activity before the card holder does.

While we are behind compared to Europe, where chip and pin is pretty much the standard, we are working on rolling it out here, the problem (supposedly) has been figuring out whether merchants or card issuers should bear the cost of replacing all of the legacy equipment (remember, we still have people using dial up to charge cards). Although, there were multiple reasons for the delay, most of this falling on Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express, failing to dictate and enforce new rules for liability determination. The banks can only issue what the card companies support after all.

Additionally, the FTC says you're only liable for up to $50 for reporting lost/stolen debit/credit cards within 2 days of loss, and that's only if it was used prior to being reported. If it was not used, you are liable for $0. Waiting more than 48 hours exposes you to significantly higher liability ($500), but, this only applies if the physical card has been lost or stolen; If you still have the card, you are liable for $0 as long as it's reported within 60days of the statement date containing the fraudulent transaction(s).

The laws governing this were enacted in 1974, yes, 41 years ago.

In many states, the overwhelming majority of the money collected from gas taxes goes to pay interest on debt. Very little of it it used for road construction and maintenance. If we stopped borrowing to build bridges to nowhere, we'd have plenty of money for maintenance and new roads as needed.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/st...

In a way the differing ever changing advice regarding nutrition is no surprise. Conducting studies on people who you can't really control poses lots of problems when collecting and analysing the data. This can create a situation where different studies seem to come up with different results and then journalists or people with a vested interest can run away with the results they favour, over blowing the facts to fit their agenda.

Now I will contradict myself and say that really nutrition advice hasn't changed, well at least science based nutrition. Eat a varied diet, avoid overly processed foods and simple carbohydrates, more importantly do lots of exercise. Only then worry about what number of eggs are optimal for health.

What really bugs me about nutrition is a new wave of "scientific based" advice which is contrarian to most other previous advice. A good example is the idea that saturated fats are good for you and carbohydrates and vegetable fats are bad. A number of highly moderated posts above link to the article The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease by Nina Teicholz. The article is a condensed version of her book which gets an absolute pasting The Big Fat Surprise: A Critical Review; Part 1. She accuses scientists of bad practice and hiding data, yet quote mines studies leaving out the conclusions which undermine her thesis.

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

The map you can no longer get from the UN
http://online.wsj.com/public/r...

But hey I see why you post AC on this.

The most damaging event in modern nutritional science has been the false correlation between fat consumption and heart disease. In 2014 the WSJ published a fascinating article about how that happened:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

Mary Enig's book Know Your Fats is an excellent place to learn what fats are so you correctly interpret the utter bullshit that people spout about particular fat types.

The most damaging event in modern nutritional science has been the false correlation between fat consumption and heart disease. In 2014 the WSJ published a fascinating article about how that happened:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

The part about tracking license plates at gun shows was one bad enough. The article also went on to say

"The Journal reported Monday that the DEA, an arm of the Justice Department, has been quietly building a database to monitor and store data about vehicles on major highways. Internal documents show the primary goal of the database is asset forfeiture, a controversial practice of seizing motorists’ possessions if police officers suspect they are criminal proceeds. Sometimes, those seizures take place without evidence of criminal wrongdoing."

http://www.wsj.com/articles/fe...

The problem with this theory is that Governments combined (fed/state/local) already make far more revenue per gallon of gas than the "big bad oil companies" do. Many people already make "big oil" into some greedy, mega rich entity that make what they consider 'too much' in profits. However most fail to realize that government profits on gas makes "big oil's" profits look like peanuts.

According to WSJ, Exxon makes about $0.07 per gallon of gas profit, while Government makes about $0.50 per gallon (varies by state/local area). If this is true, the government brings in over 6x the profit from gas as oil companies do already. They do not need more. If "Big Oil" is frowned upon because of it's profit, why does government need even more than they are currently getting? And why do people not demonize them for it in a similar manner?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

Roads: Gas taxes do not cover the cost of building and maintaining roads. Not to mention, corporations benefit when their employees can get to work.
Medical facilities: Corporations employ individuals.
Police: Are typically funded from the general fund, which includes property taxes, as well as sales taxes and other fees. The federal government also provides grants.

I'm amazed that you can be moderated up for that post. Fukushima's workers did everything they could to avert the distaster, including risking their own lives.
What caused Fukushima was the sea wall was too low (and that was already a know fact, even before the earthquake).
Also, the reactor had several critical design flaws:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

That's football. Right? Big guys? Helmets? Not much action?
Better things to do.

President Obama Announces Major Initiative to Spur Biofuels Industry and Enhance America's Energy Security

That's Big Government for you. Instead of various people acting as they see fit — some making mistakes and some not — we have a government, that's big enough to make a mistake for all of us at once...

Competing ideas? To each his own? Personal responsibility? No way, no how — citizen, the Science is Settled[TM] and you are blocking our progress towards the Common Good[TM].

Fat is bad for you — all of you! Until it is not. Except it still is...

Biofuels is about to become the latest example of this. As our benevolent and omniscient overlords in Washington jump from one trend to another, the whole country is supposed to rejig, retool, and reorient itself each time: from "low-fat" to "low-sugar", from growing biofuels to drilling oil. Because they "know" better — and they are 100% confident in that settled "knowledge" of theirs. Until it changes to the exact opposite like some kind of quantum particle — and only the confidence remains.

How about we — the subjects — make our own choices, huh? Leaving only the courts, police and military to you, our beloved government class? Yes, we — some of us — will be making the same mistakes. But, at least, they will be neither coercing nor outright forcing the others to repeat them.

My Panasonic TV was made in Japan,

Suuuuure

The closure of the Japanese electronics company's sole dedicated plasma-TV factory in China ... The company intends to move operations to another Chinese TV factory in the eastern province of Shandong, where it currently produces LCD television sets.

Oh, wait, you still have a CRT TV, right?