Slashdot Mirror

Congratulations to Boeing. Obama couldn't resist giving more money to his crony Elon Musk who specializes in ripping off the taxpayer.

I'll just leave this right here. Seems relevant before we get more stupid than we already are.

There is a reason why even the religious nut-balls realized that judgment must be deferred in most cases: Everybody does smaller and larger sins all the time. Prosecute them all and society collapses. (See also "You Commit Three Felonies a Day" http://online.wsj.com/articles...)

I was there at the hearing, and I think the summary is pretty far from the true situation.

First, Prof. Gabrynowicz is in the minority in the legal community on this (her response is also to work for international consensus on these issues, which is not going to happen.

Second, the Asteroid Act has been vetted by the State Department (and by a whole bunch of interested parties) and it certainly is in agreement with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 (even Prof. Gabrynowicz didn't claim otherwise).

Third, all of the space powers appear to be in agreement with the basic principle expressed by the Asteroid Act - that space mining is a lot like deep sea fishing - you can't claim your fishing hole, but you get to keep what you take.

For a more balanced explanation as to why the Act is needed as a US instantiation of the '67 Outer Space Treaty to clarify the rules for US Corporations, see Dean Larson's WSJ Op Ed (or my own take on it).

Yes, because in the U.S. you'd never have for-profit prisons, civil forfeiture, or even outright cops stealing cash under the pretence of fighting crime.

The U.S. certainly wouldn't have issues with police beating minorities or killing them, leading to riots. They wouldn't have a growing number of cases of false imprisonment, or police militarization

There is certainly no sustained increase in coal usage in Germany.

That is not what I am reading about Germany. Despite the much hyped gains in renewables, those gains have been offset by the reduction in nuclear and the rise of coal use

And I doubt there is any in Japan either. Japan used oil plants as fall back in power production, not coal plants.

And that is not what I am reading about in Japan either where there are "Plans by Japanese companies to spend billions of dollars on new coal-fired plants"

If the plans all come to fruition, Japan's coal-fired power capacity would increase to around 47 gigawatts over the next decade or so, up 21% from the time right before the Fukushima accident.

So, we have increases in coal in Japan and Germany. China is still using coal like gang busters to power the largest industrial economy in the world, but to their credit they are also making a big investments in nuclear, solar, hydro and wind. The US is basically shifting to more natural gas which is better than coal, but nuclear is pretty much stalled and solar and wind are growing at a fast pace relative to their relatively low percentage of the energy mix, but isn't going to make a real dent in CO2 anytime soon unless those renewable growth rates are sustainable... but those growth rates aren't sustainable because all the easier locations for solar and wind are being built out first which should result in a slowdown in the adoption curve in future years unless solar panel prices really plummet and then the economics of it really changes.

Also, I noticed in one of those articles that Japan was promoting coal for developing economies, which would put us even further into a CO2 hole and undermine progress being made elsewhere as developing economies embrace coal as the lowest cost alternative. If the highly stable and developed economies are embracing coal, the developing world is embracing coal, then the current efforts for renewables look like little more than window dressing on the fact that Global Climate change is really being considered as a fait accompli by the world's decision makers.

I take Climate change seriously. I would rather not have the world experience the worst case scenarios, but I think that if we are going to avoid that worst case scenarios, then most environmentalists need to stop opposing nuclear or we might as well just do nothing now and pray for a technological miracle sometime before it is too late. Personally I would rather put forward a viable plan now that includes government subsidies and incentives for big increases in solar and wind, big increases in nuclear and maybe natural gas for the remaining 20% of the mix. I think that moving away from oil and coal and eventually most natural gas is doable. But not if you think that solar panels and wind turbines are going to provide for all our energy needs alone, not at anywhere near these population levels they won't.

Temperature is not increasing by one degree per doubled CO2 level. It increases roughly by one degree per 200ppm share.
I don't get why you claim the "warming" had stopped recent years. Is that an american thing? I saw that often on /. It got debunked already hundreds of times, why repeat such a bullshit myth?

The supposed pause in global warming is described in the Wall Street Journal article

  "Whatever Happened to Global Warming?"

I wouldn't say it's the climate scientists are the ones promoting the consensus argument. Scientists don't waste much time thinking about consensus.

Good scientists don't worry much about the consensus, I agree with you. These guys, however, spent an entire article doing that, although combined with an ad homenim attack.

#2, Silver Mining. It turns out mountains don't come labelled as "gold" and "silver-only". As world affluence increases, demand for gold and silver increases. Today, affluent trapped from filters at gold mines produces more mercury than mercury mines. But the only mines "trapping" any mercury are in regulated western economies... most gold mining is in unregulated forests.

Lamps, by the way, have jackshit mercury, less than a fraction of what they had when lamp recycling got started. Billions of dollars are being spent "recycling" lamps which have barely any mercury in them.

At least the recycled mercury saves the environment, right? Oh. Nope. Read the great journalist John Fialka on WSJ 2006. Most of the mercury recovered from the recycling went to alluvial gold mining in Amazon and Congo river basins. http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

I'm an environmentalist, but environmentalists 3.0 need to recognize past mistakes, and correct them, the same as engineers and software coders are expected to do.

U.S. Hikes Fee To Renounce Citizenship By 422%

To leave America, you generally must prove 5 years of U.S. tax compliance. If you have a net worth greater than $2 million or average annual net income tax for the 5 previous years of $157,000 or more for 2014 (thatâ(TM)s tax, not income), you pay an exit tax. It is a capital gain tax as if you sold your property when you left. At least thereâ(TM)s an exemption of $680,000 for 2014. Long-term residents giving up a Green Card can be required to pay the tax too.

Now, the State Department interim rule just raised the fee for renunciation of U.S. citizenship to $2,350 from $450. Critics note that itâ(TM)s more than twenty times the average level in other high-income countries. The State Department says itâ(TM)s about demand on their services and all the extra workload they have to process people who are on their way out.

You are no longer born a free person, you are born into slavery. You have to buy your freedom and the price will keep going up. At $450 the price was already 4.5 times higher than in most other countries. Now it will be nearly 24 times more than for other countries.

You should be able to renounce your citizenship and leave for free, instead you are going to be prevented from leaving at all eventually, they'll jack up the price to the share of your national debt that you are born into and that is borrowed on your behalf by your government and only the wealthiest slaves will be able to get out. They will definitely prevent you from leaving eventually if you have any debts at all, including your student debt. The 2350USD change is starting on the 12th of September 2014, you can still get out at a low low price of 450USD.

Those walls they are building on your borders, they are not there to keep others out, they are there to keep you in. IRS is part of that system.

3-prevent Nato from having military bases on his border(national defence).

Oh, that one goes really well:
Estonian President Calls For Permanent NATO Base in Country

The problem is that these data compromises are going to happen and that the current magnetic strip technology is laughably obsolete and insecure. Chip + PIN effectively mitigates the weakness in magnetic strip data by embedding a chip (physical, something you have) and a pin (something you know) into the transaction process, plus many other security enhancements. Current magnetic strip cards are authenticated purely by a string of digits (something you know) and are easily copied and reproduced.

Read all about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Chip + pin WILL be happening in America. http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate...

NFC-based payment system may have a chance to become popular in the mean time.

Haha "I hope NOW you understand that." Are you out on the internet just to argue?

No diet, regardless of exercise would ever be healthy in any sense of the word if you ate 12k calories of Pizza.

Balanced diets and regular exercise is important and these food types are not normal.

And you are remembering his diet wrong....he never ate anything like that.
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/20...

He ate a variety of foods and even those aren't healthy.

Also see:
"But these kinds of calculators donâ(TM)t really apply to a someone like Phelps, who exercises way more vigorously than the typical person, says Kathleen Laquale, an athletic trainer and nutritionist who teaches at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts. Even by athletic standards, Phelps is in his own league."

So he isn't exercising normally/properly. He's way off the chart in the extremes that most people's bodies would need years to condition to without damage.

Look at what Michael Phelps ate. Something like three pizzas a day or something. And he was in great health at the time. Won Olympic gold medals and everything.

Why Runners Can't Eat Whatever They Want
Studies Show There Are Heart Risks to Devil-May-Care Dietsâ"No Matter How Much You Run

As a 10-mile-a-day runner, Dave McGillivray thought he could eat whatever he wanted without worrying about his heart. "I figured if the furnace was hot enough, it would burn everything," said McGillivray, who is 59.

But a diagnosis six months ago of coronary artery disease shocked McGillivray, a finisher of 130 marathons and several Ironman-distance triathlons. Suddenly he regretted including a chocolate-chip-cookie recipe in his memoir about endurance athletics.

TLDR: Being in insanely good shape can mask (but not prevent) the health consequences of eating three pizzas a day for years.

People who avoid carbohydrates and eat more fat, even saturated fat, lose more body fat and have fewer cardiovascular risks than people who follow the low-fat diet that health authorities have favored for decades [emphasis mine -mi], a major new study shows.

A person can choose to eat this or that and it is his own responsibility. But, when the government decides, what's good for you (based on some "settled" science), it not only affects citizenry's opinion and makes us less responsible for ourselves, it also leaves millions directly controlled by the government — such as pupils in government schools — without choices at all.

Now, I don't doubt, that some of the stuff removed from schools by our omni-scient and caring Congressmen will never be considered good for anyone again. But they still force fat-free chocolate milk on kids, for example, in seeming contradiction to this new study. Maybe, both ought to be available — and parents, rather than the Federal government, be allowed to control the children's nutrition?

Sadly, the movement seems to be in the wrong direction. Some parents are already being punished for children eating incorrectly. And though in this case (200+ pound 8 year old), it is fairly obvious, that the parents are, indeed, screwy, it is likely to be a "poster-boy" for future interventions in cases less and less obvious.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-mar...

China is not likely to roll over as easy as the US did after Microsoft cranked up the brib^h^h^h^hcampaign donations in the way of the US antitrust case.

I'm not going to run my career based on the advice of a free-market ideologue, who doesn't even know what I do.

The conservatives don't care about principles or logic. If they can pack the Supreme Court, and legislate from the bench, they'll do it. If they can contract with their employees for retirement income, and break the contract, they'll do it.

We can't reason with these people. The only thing they understand is power. All we can do is organize to get the votes to make a better society. In New York City we've got the votes, at least to accomplish some things, such as affordable housing for as many people as we can. If we could throw out the conservatives, we could have housing for everybody.

I was living in a city where, when people couldn't afford housing, they threw them out on the streets to die. We organized, went to court and stopped it. http://www.coalitionforthehome... (I worked on that lawsuit.)

I don't want to live in a world where, when people get sick, and can't afford to pay for health care, the hospitals throw them out in the street to die. http://online.wsj.com/news/art... We don't do that in New York City.

In the low-cost places to live around the country, they throw the poor out in the street to die. I don't want to live in that world. And I don't think they're good for business either.

Sigh.. I know you are trolling but seriously, if any of that was true and illegal, all you would have to do is go see an employment lawyer and it wouldn't happen much longer.

In the last 2 years, I've had approximately 40 hours worth of wages stolen from me by my employer, who refuses to pay them back.

You see, laws were used against Walmart when employees were classified in ways to avoid paying overtime when the law said they deserved it and managers were changing employee time sheets in order to avoid paying overtime and deducting for lunch breaks even though they didn't get them.

My employer refuses to pay his staff for our public holidays, even though the contract and law says he must.

If it is the law, see above, If it is a contract, see above. There are remedies available without necessitating a Union. If you actually have a case, most laws provide that your legal fees be covered as part of the judgement or settlement.

If I had a union none of that would have happened, and he would be facing criminal charges for the wages theft and civil charges for the lack of breaks, mandatory unpaid overtime, and so forth.

Actually, you would likely be in the same boat you are in right now. Either with a fictitious claim or not pursuing any of it until its way too late like you appear to have done already. You not speaking up, you not looking for the right answers is the reason he got away with it. A union is not likely to change that.

As it stands, if I do anything about it by myself, I will find myself unemployable after he puts the bad word out on me, so don't you put that "unions are evil" shit out there without seeing how the world is when they're not around.

And your lawyer simply has someone he does business with check for an employment reference and when it comes back negative, your old employer pays your wages while you look for a new job and cannot find one.

This isn't something new.. It's happened to lots of people and they did something about it. They did it with and without a union.

http://online.wsj.com/articles...

A few companies, such as Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, have formed with the goal of mining asteroids. Why asteroids? Because it currently costs several thousand dollars per pound to put anything from Earth into low-earth orbit. Asteroids are probably made of all the ingredients necessary to live in space, including water. These companies intend to supply the raw materials to support an entirely new space economy.

Water will be particularly important. Beyond sustaining human life, water can shield people from harmful radiation and serve as fuel for spacecraft. It can be separated into its two components to generate energy or be heated with focused energy from the sun.

These infant asteroid-mining companies and their investors are taking on enormous risks to develop technologies to extract usable resources in space. The hitch? There is currently no legal guarantee they will be able to profit from the resources they mine. The ownership of resources mined in space is legally murky.

http://www.spacedaily.com/repo...

Full quote, for context:

> No doubt, history is filled with all kinds of evil misogyny, racism, and homophobia...and large swaths of the planet still have those problems, especially in the islamic world.

1) sadly, most dark skinned folk in the US are affected by thug culture - this causes all kinds of poor outcomes, including lifespan and prison representation;
2) http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

Freedom to choose thug culture, or non-boardroom careers, or lower wage careers does not mean the rest of the world is imposing these decisions upon others.

1) it's not a given that officer discretion is gone. the same argument was said about dash cams in squad cars, but was just as invalid there. It's up to department policy. Very few departments I know of would even contemplate removing officer discretion, let alone actually do it.

2) No more so than dash cams, or the millions of cameras in peoples pockets already, uploading tons of background to youtube. Public spaces and all that. Plus, it's not terribly difficult to write laws or policies regarding handling of actual privacy data. There's many laws already on the books, it's not an unknown new preoblem, but rather a previously encountered and solved one.

3) No. Absolutely not. Pure absurdity and stupidity.

4) You just cited the "technicality myth". Even more invalid than the slippery slope. It basically only exists on TV. (Myth #6 on http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... ). It rarely happens in real life. But when it does, what you call a "technicality" is when the state somehonw violated your (or specifically the defenedant's) rights in its pursuit of justice. When rights only matter for "law abiding citizens", but can be tosed out the window for anyone accused of a crime...that's not law, that's a charade. You should be happy that in enforcing the law is willing to make its own job harder and more difficult, and even toss it's own victories, in the name of protecting your rights should you be accused.

5) That's the whole point. In the cities where this has been done, YES INTERACTIONS CHANGED. Specifically, accusations of brutality or misconduct decreased to tremendously. Wearing the camera protects BOTH THE OFFICER AND THE CITIZEN. An impartial observer to the complete interaction is in everyones' interests: the cop's, the citizen's, and society's in general. Cops have a job to do. That job entails making decisions on a daily basis in regards to enforcing law and interacting with everyday citizens. If you dont have the gumptions or confidence to do that and face potential review at a later date, maybe you shouldnt enter that sort of occupation. Course, that applies to every job.

Traffic cameras, police car dash cams, and officer worn cams have all been tremendous success stories in terms of providing an impartial official record of what actually happened. When actual video exists of an entire encounter, rather than relying on notoriously unreliable "eyewitnesses" or hoping some passerby caught it on camera, it becomes clear exactly what happened. Also, we can once again turn to other countries, as this isn't a new thing being encountered for the time ever. It's been common in Europe and UK for close to 10 years now. Also tremendously successful over there.

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
http://online.wsj.com/articles...

Nor would it change the fact that people would still bring (founded and unfounded) lawsuits against the police.

This is flat out wrong. All the evidence to date shows that cop-cams result in a dramatic reduction in complaints, for two reasons:
1. Since there is a recording, there are far fewer false allegations
2. Since they are being recorded, the cops behave better, so there are fewer incidents that result in valid allegations.

Here is a typical result:

THE Rialto study began in February 2012 and will run until this July. The results from the first 12 months are striking. Even with only half of the 54 uniformed patrol officers wearing cameras at any given time, the department over all had an 88 percent decline in the number of complaints filed against officers, compared with the 12 months before the study, to 3 from 24.

But body cameras will solve all that, right?

In the case of Michael Brown, YES, a camera likely would have prevented the riots. The riots didn't occur because a white cop killed a black kid, but because there was a perception that it was unjustified and the cop "got away with it". If there was a camera, there would be much less dispute about what happened. The camera would either show that the shooting was justified, or it would show that it was not and the cop would be charged with murder. In either case, I don't think there would be a riot.

Thats all very nice idealism. Too bad reality says, fuck you and your cameras.

The tragic irony is that police in Ferguson have a stock of body-worn cameras, but have yet to deploy them to officers.

Worry less about deploying them WSJ. Worry more about the people in control of them.

I had not heard that the tax rate on the wealth is dropping. I did a quick google search for "United States Tax Rate Wealthy" and the first hit seems to be an informative WSJ article pointing out that the tax rate on the wealthy is increasing.

Best selfie a macaque ever took! http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2014/...

Pretty soon Amazon will able to just save me time by ordering the things I would have ordered based on ads that they themselves have placed.

Submitter might have thought that was a joke, but Amazon already has applied for a patent on that.

Reed & Netflix is FOS when it comes to Net Neutrality, when you truly don't believe in something, you don't compromise your values for cash like they did with Comcast.

http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

How can we have a world free from NN, when one of the worlds biggest websites by bandwidth usage, pay's off an ISP for "premium" access to their network.

How about you practice what you preach Netflix, instead of whining when the cost is to much for your shareholders to bear. Pussy's.

From the story:

Research shows that sticking to the speed limit when other cars are going much faster actually can be dangerous, Dolgov says, so its autonomous car can go up to 10 mph (16 kph) above the speed limit when traffic conditions warrant.

Anyone know what "research" Dolgov is referring to? It's always been self evident to me that a car travelling slower than the flow of speeding traffic is a danger, but actual evidence would be nice.

Not that it matters. We don't really prioritize safety. We pay lip service to safety and then pursue other agenda. If safety was our first priority small cars wouldn't be allowed on roads; mortality and injury severity is substantially higher for light vehicles. And no, it's not because SUVs are slaughtering Prius owners. It's physics; all else being equal a small, light vehicle will more often kill or more severely injure you in a crash.

Some counterpoints to your trolling.... (found simply by searching "blackberry ltd" on Google News):

• Blackberry Handset Sales Rising
• Blackberry in Catbird Seat as Encrypted Messaging Enters Mainstream
• BlackBerry Wins Gold in Best in Biz Awards 2014 International
• Blackberry Q2 Sales Rising
• Blackberry shares lead TSX
• BlackBerry nabs ‘perfect match’ in Germany’s Secusmart, burnishing anti-spying security credentials
• Blackberry Receives DISA Approval for Multi-Platform Management
• The top bullish move of Wynnefield Capital was boosting stake in BlackBerry Ltd. (NASDAQ:BBRY) by over 60%

I've learned the hard way over the years. Never let Windows Update install a driver of any kind. Ever.

That's a good strategy, but one of the offending patches was a change to include the new symbol for ruble. It wasn't a driver update.

US military spending remains outrageous, at about the level of the rest of the world put together.

That is irrelevant to the question regarding the US defense budget rising or falling.

I assume you mean the 2013 cuts -- those have been matched, basically dollar for dollar, by increasing the "temporary" budget for Afghanistan.

Sorry, but no. US defense spending has been falling since 2010. For 2015 it will probably end up being about $120 billion less than 2010.

Major personnel cuts are happening too.

Pentagon Set to Slash Military to Pre-World War II Levels

Fundamentalism is a part of it, yes, but would never amount to anything like what we've seen were it not for widespread anti-US sentiments stemming from more pragmatic reasons

Islamist insurrections have been on-going since at least the 1950s (ignoring the earlier ones) and have been aimed at taking control of the local nation. They have nothing to do with the US. You don't know what you are talking about.

Coming from someone who apparently still believes the Iraq war had anything to do with 911 ...

Please provide some evidence for this. You are simply engaging in cheap, misleading rhetoric.

somehow still manages to delude himself that anti-American sentiment somehow thrives in complete isolation of its international posturing

Enjoy your illusions while you still can.

Intelligence Report: Number of Islamists in Germany Grows
Germany: Islamists Infiltrating Schools in Hamburg

German interior minister warns of threat of lethal attacks by Islamists

On Wednesday, German interior minister Thomas de Maizière (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) warned of an imminent threat of terrorist attacks by Islamist “religious warriors” in Germany and throughout Europe.

“An abstract danger has become a concrete, lethal threat in Europe, with an impact on Germany,” the interior minister said at the presentation of the domestic intelligence agency’s 2013 report in Berlin. The attack at the Jewish museum in Brussels, where four people were killed by a jihadi at the end of May, had “made clear that the possibility of an attack by such forces returning from Syria has become a deadly reality,” de Maizière explained.

Domestic intelligence chief Hans-Georg Maaßen added, “Islamist terrorism represents the greatest threat to society. Germany is not far from terrorism. We continue to be a target for the planning of attacks.”

Officials Say Islamic Terrorism Is Germany's Big Domestic Security Risk

Because if I use a firm who charges 0.05% and gives me a 3% return, that's better than a firm that charges 1% and gives me a 10% return.

Funds that charge higher fees DO NOT give better returns.

Higher Fees Don't Mean Higher Returns, Study Finds 24% of Active Mutual Fund Managers Outperform the Market In every single time period and data point tested, low-cost funds beat high-cost funds Morningstar Study Says High Fees Are Bad for Investment Performance

Anybody that thinks that high fees are buying high performance is delusional.

A reasonable point. Often (as is evidenced by the links you provided), higher fees are associated with organizations which maximize their profits at their customers' expense. My point was most certainly not "you should find a money manager who charges you more! They're the ones who will make you the most money!" My point was that money managers who charge a percentage of money under management (regardless of what that percentage might be) have a strong incentive to maximize your returns, as it maximizes their profits as well.

That said, my point about returns is still valid. If (and, as you correctly point out, that's a big if) you are being charged a certain percentage and are receiving a certain return, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's impossible for someone to pay a higher fee and get an even higher return. How does that disclaimer go again? "Past performance is no guarantee of future performance."

The truth is that regardless of how someone manages (or pays someone else to manage) their assets, they should keep a close eye on them and make sure they are maximizing their returns. Making the point that, in the aggregate, higher fees don't necessarily translate into higher returns, is useful and should be factored into investment decisions.

However, each person needs to make their own decisions and those decisions may or may not track with the graph. It's in that decision space that the aphorism generally (and incorrectly) attributed to PT Barnum is proven correct every single day.

Because if I use a firm who charges 0.05% and gives me a 3% return, that's better than a firm that charges 1% and gives me a 10% return.

Funds that charge higher fees DO NOT give better returns.

Higher Fees Don't Mean Higher Returns, Study Finds
24% of Active Mutual Fund Managers Outperform the Market
In every single time period and data point tested, low-cost funds beat high-cost funds
Morningstar Study Says High Fees Are Bad for Investment Performance

Anybody that thinks that high fees are buying high performance is delusional.

I think you're really a special kind of stupid.

I think we'll let others decide that.

First of all, a company doing business in a country must respect and obey the laws of said country. That goes without even saying, moron. Apple has registered subsidiaries in China, nevermind their huge manufacturing sourcing business in mainland.

Show me where there is a law saying that Apple must store its encryption keys on-shore. Guess what? There isn't one. See, Apple isn't breaking the law because it isn't IN China, it just does business there. But there's more to this... very much more.

As for "gradually been bringing its manufacturing back home" this means you are too stupid to cross the street. No consumer IT / electronics company in the US, Apple included, can bring manufacturing back to the US

Yeah? How about this? And this? And this? And this?

And many, many more. Hmmm. It seems just maybe I knew a bit more about it than you, eh?

Anyway, "being on welfare" doesn't mean "no income to garnish." In fact, statistically most people on welfare are working anywhere between 30-50 hours a week, albeit at one or more part-time jobs.

There are restrictions on what can be garnished legally;

Those restrictions are based on arbitrary government calculations (the same calculations that say a person with a $40K/yr job can afford $800/mo student loan payments, because they fail to take any expenses into account), and can be overruled by a judge.

They may also avoid garnishment by switching jobs, and ensuring the party holding judgement does not know and cannot discover their employment, or being employed in a cash payment business. For example: waiters/waitresses commonly receive direct payments as tips, which the employer doesn't have access to, therefore is incapable of garnishing.

Instead of refuting point-by-point, I'm just going to leave this here.

Do you have a source for that "over 50% on welfare" claim? Because it sounds either dubious, or like a gross misinterpretation of facts.

Number of the Week: Half of U.S. Lives in Household Getting Benefits

rt.com:

More than half of the US population – 165 million of 308 million Americans – is now dependent on the state in some form. Of these, 107 million Americans rely on government welfare, 46 million seniors collect Medicare and there are 22 million government employees.

The number of Americans on welfare have increased from 97 million to 107 million since President Obama took office, according to research by Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee Jeff Sessions. The number of Americans on food stamps during the president’s term has risen by more than 14 million.

So, gross misinterpretation of facts, then. Or rather, conflating the terms "government assistance" and "welfare."

FWIW, tax credits are technically "government assistance."

Anyway, "being on welfare" doesn't mean "no income to garnish." In fact, statistically most people on welfare are working anywhere between 30-50 hours a week, albeit at one or more part-time jobs.

There are restrictions on what can be garnished legally; for example, a minimum wage employee cannot be garnished --- an employee paid more than the minimum wage can only be garnished some fraction, and it will essentially never be sufficient to repay the bill with interest. If these people are at the poverty line, it is likely that all of their wages will be excluded and they be incapable of being garnished, if not all their wages, then perhaps 95% or so, due to claims of financial hardship this would cause.

They may also avoid garnishment by switching jobs, and ensuring the party holding judgement does not know and cannot discover their employment, or being employed in a cash payment business. For example: waiters/waitresses commonly receive direct payments as tips, which the employer doesn't have access to, therefore is incapable of garnishing.

Do you have a source for that "over 50% on welfare" claim? Because it sounds either dubious, or like a gross misinterpretation of facts.

Number of the Week: Half of U.S. Lives in Household Getting Benefits

rt.com:

More than half of the US population – 165 million of 308 million Americans – is now dependent on the state in some form. Of these, 107 million Americans rely on government welfare, 46 million seniors collect Medicare and there are 22 million government employees.

The number of Americans on welfare have increased from 97 million to 107 million since President Obama took office, according to research by Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee Jeff Sessions. The number of Americans on food stamps during the president’s term has risen by more than 14 million.

So what? You're not arguing that California is not the number one state for manufacturing, you're just explaining one reason why it is.

It's still not manufacturing if the actual manufacturing was done in another country. It's just assembly. We have both, and both are counted as manufacturing. It's disingenuous.

You forgot to add the citation for that claim.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jo...
http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate...
http://www.epa.gov/ttn/ecas/re...

There is still quite a bit of actual heavy industry in the state, but given its size and population the claim that it's particularly friendly is nonsense.

You also forgot to cite that one.

In fact, the numbers are probably far worse by now. That's how it was over a decade ago. I know you're not too young too remember...

By the way, after I wrote my comment, I did some searching. Until now, I was not aware of how "customized textbook editions" for specific universities has apparently become a thing in some places.

Needless to say, I'm appalled by this if it involves professors getting a kickback for including a chapter of their own in the "customized" edition. In my field, to my knowledge the standard intro textbooks have never come in any sort of "customized edition," so I didn't even know this was possible.

I could possibly see the justification for customizing a book to suit a particular syllabus, and as I could see how that might be useful. But if my department were getting a kickback for that, I'd feel very weird about that. And I probably wouldn't do that myself, because I have actually been rather sensitive to book prices in my classes and wouldn't want to prevent students from buying a used copy or selling theirs if they wanted to. (I'd rather prepare my own supplements anyway.)

Also, I do know there was a federal law passed a few years ago that required disclosure of textbook requirements from colleges ahead of time, so students would know what is actually required and there could be better monitoring of textbook abuses... I just had no idea things were this crazy.

Scanning travel documents for hits in criminal (or other databases) is yet another case of data being re-purposed for uses other than the original intent. It is the same problem I have with things like Visa selling lists of what people pay for using a Visa card, Verizon selling a list of what addresses I travel to and what websites I browse and my pharmacy selling my prescription information.
 
Repurposing of data for unrelated uses is deeply corrosive to the trust that society needs to function. It keeps us all metaphorically looking over our shoulders, wondering in the back of our heads just how this information generated by going about our normal every-day lives might end up harming us. Even if one in a million times it helps catch a pedo, that still doesn't justify the damage it does to a free society.
 
There will always be crime, even in the most authoritarian of countries. But copious amounts of dignity and privacy are necessary for a healthy society - when you constantly have to second guess yourself it makes you less willing to be open and honest with others, makes you less willing to take risks, to be unconventional. Just compare the amount of creative development in the west to that of the USSR in the same time frame, or even North Korea now. Every time a database is repurposed, our society gets a little bit less robust.

> (Voice of Steve Jobs): Ah shit. You fucked it up.

"Steve was a wartime CEO, while Tim is a peacetime CEO,"

Because the American phone manufacturers don't do the same thing?
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

Don't trust any company with your personal information - or accept that it's going to be shared with whoever has the money to pay for it, or the power to grab it.

I am not against unions that do not derive their power from government, so if you want to start your own union, you should be able to, however as an employer, I should not be compelled to work with a union, so I should be able to fire all people in the union, it's my discretion. Agreement between two companies not to hire employees from each other is suboptimal, but nowhere near the scale of damage that government causes with rules and regulations and taxation and inflation. As I said, the problem here is not that Apple and Google decided to agree not to hire from each other, the problem is that there are so few companies in the first place that such agreements can even be noticed.

How small and pathetic is the true state of USA economy when such irrelevant to the larger picture agreements become items of discussion? I will tell you how sad, small and pathetic the true state of USA economy is.

34% of American households feel they are worse off now than in 2008. So more than a third of American households feel that during today's so called "recovery" they are worse off than during the year 2008, the year when the economic crisis hit USA.

Again, the problem is so few employers are out there and unamerican unconstitutional decisions like this one by this court will not help at all, not even a little, it only makes it worse.

---
Anyway, enjoy my last comment here, I had to use my backup account to leave this one. The moderators are already in full swing right now all over my comments, as they often are, making sure that I cannot participate in this discussion. Once they push the 'karma' low enough, I'll not be able to continue leave comments for a while, which is the point I take it, to ensure that the echo-chamber is unchallenged.

Not if places take New York city's approach - when the number of jaywalkers killed on a road gets to be what local politicians deem "excessive", they have either:
1 - The speed limit reduced
2 - A traffic lane converted to either parking or a bicycle lane
3 - Fences installed in the middle of the roadway, such that the jaywalkers now spend more time in the roadway walking around the fence

Recently they successfully managed to get the state to allow the city's "default" (unposted) speed limit to become 25 instead of the statewide minimum default of 30. In light traffic most cars go 40.

Wouldn't it be great if you could change the focus of that class to the fundamental math functions you'll be using frequently in your future career and avoid the bits of the class that will have nothing to do with your profession?

You do understand the idea of a liberal arts education, right? There's a very good argument to look at coding as a trade, but that's not what universities are for. If you want to be educated like a plumber, go to a trade school.

As another researcher in the pharma industry: reread your post. Your entire post is only highlighting how poor of a job pharmaceutical companies do at effectively bringing drugs to market, all while adding the inefficiency of a 20% profit margin.

Emphasis added

Notice that said "bringing drugs to markets," not the basic funding for preliminary basic research into the actual discovery and isolation of the basic drug and/or drug interaction, which continues to be funded (95+%) by the federal governments of the G8 nations.

Then being granted a 18 or 20-years monopoly (from patent file date admittedly, not marketing approval date), if you successfully complete the marketing research without killing too many test participants. Although for any "successful" to "blockbuster" drug the entire pre-approval expense including administration and marketing is more than recouped by double in the first year of sales.*

The cited book ($800 Million Pill) is not the only ones to criticize and rebut the $800 million dollar figure which is oft-touted in the media, actually comes from the DiMasi's 2001 paper The price of innovation: new estimates of drug development costs.. Thought even the Wall Street Journal notes "[f]or instance, only $403 million of Dr. DiMasi's $802 million total are actual out-of-pocket expenses. The rest is an estimated cost of capital -- or the return that investing the money at an 11% rate of return would have earned over time." Non-executives-types would call it fudging the numbers.

* The $800 million pill book by Merrill Goozner.

It's ad hoc tyranny.

At least with legislative actions - LAWS - the voting population can theory hold elected government officials accountable.

But regulations that are effectively edicts from unelected bureaucrats?

Apropos, although in TFA the unelected bureaucrat is the Librarian of Congress:

Book Review: 'Is Administrative Law Unlawful?' by Philip Hamburger

The separation of powers broke down in the 20th century thanks to progressives who believed commissions could quickly improve society.

U.S. companies are worth more to foreign companies than to other U.S. companies because foreign companies pay lower income taxes. A U.S. company, Emerson, lost a bid to a French company, Schneider, for APC for that reason. As the WSJ states (free access to the paywalled article via FaceBook):

In 2006, Emerson sought to acquire a company called American Power Conversion (APC). This was a Rhode Island-based company that made more than half of its earnings outside the U.S. Unfortunately, Emerson competed against Schneider Electric, a French company, to acquire APC. Emerson offered more than $5 billion, but ultimately Schneider acquired APC by offering a bid in excess of $6 billion.

Why was Schneider willing to offer more? Schneider outbid us because France's tax code—typical of most OECD countries—exempts 95% of foreign-source income from taxation, while the U.S. tax code fully taxes such income. APC's profits were worth more to Schneider because, once absorbed, APC's global profits (net of the taxes paid in the countries where those profits were earned) could be repatriated to Schneider's headquarters in France, where they would be taxed at less than 2%.

In contrast, earnings repatriated to the U.S. are subject to a tax rate of nearly 40%, with a credit for taxes paid abroad on that income. That dramatic difference made it possible for Schneider to offer more for APC. So what had once been an American company became French.

Over at the Wall Street Journal Bret Stephens questions the claim that as many as 1,023 Palestinian lives have been lost in the conflict. The column is paywalled but can be accessed for free via the WSJ Opinion Facebook Page.

Consider the media obsession with the body count. According to a daily tally in the New York Times, NYT -6.42% as of July 27 the war in Gaza had claimed 1,023 Palestinian lives as against 46 Israelis. How does the Times keep such an accurate count of Palestinian deaths? A footnote discloses "Palestinian death tallies are provided by the Palestinian Health Ministry and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs."

OK. So who runs the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza? Hamas does. As for the U.N., it gets its data mainly from two Palestinian agitprop NGOs, one of which, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, offers the remarkably precise statistic that, as of July 27, exactly 82% of deaths in Gaza have been civilians. Curiously, during the 2008-09 Gaza war, the center also reported an 82% civilian casualty rate.

When minutely exact statistics are provided in chaotic circumstances, it suggests the statistics are garbage. When a news organization relies—without clarification—on data provided by a bureaucratic organ of a terrorist organization, there's something wrong there, too.

Not sure where this rant came from, but...

Coke and Pepsi both have sold mini-cans, about 8oz, for quite a few years. It's up to the convenience stores you visit to choose to stock them, or not. And if they determine that they can't make a profit on them, they shouldn't stock what YOU happen to want.

http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

Of course you also have the option of throwing an ice chest in your car, stocked with whatever sizes of soda you prefer. You could save tons of money, and entirely eliminate waste, by buying 3 litre bottles of generic sodas for $1, and using whatever size cup/bottle you prefer.

Or you could just drink water... Cold water and crushed/cubed ice in the door of my refrigerator, with a 5 year filter to eliminate the bad chlorine taste, is easily the best and most convenient option for drinking I've found.

For some flavor, drink powders (iced-tea, lemonade, hawaiian punch, tang, gatorade, etc.) are far cheaper than buying water that's been trucked across the country, and can be mixed into drinks in whatever sizes or strengths you happen to prefer. They even sell "stick" packs to be dumped into bottles of water, though you're far better off if you reuse and refill any water bottles you buy.

You are not buying stuff at the same price as 6 years ago, maybe you should actually pay attention to the receipts.

beef, pork, avocado, fruits, veggies, almonds, pinenuts, walnuts, mozarella, cheddar, other cheeses, seafood, grains, soy, soy, palm oil, milk, gasoline, beer and more beer, limes, canadian bacon, barley, restaurants, restaurants, restaurants,electrical energy, car rentals, hotel rooms, cab fairs,

air travel and air travel gets more expensive in many other ways, various extra fees, less room, more seats on planes

aluminium,