I don't know why it doesn't hold true in Canada as well. Perhaps Canada just has fewer people who are convinced that their country is unquestionably the best in the world. I should have listed nationalism as a third component of the US's issue as well. Possibly stronger than the other two. Maybe Canada's media is also a little bit better?
As far as examples within states, it's usually a little more complicated. The health care example for instance, yes Romney did do essentially the same plan before. The fury over Obama's implementation came from two driving forces, purely political (which is what prompted Palin to say death panels) and business. The health insurance industry wanted to try to stop reform if they could, but if they couldn't they wanted the version we got. Thus, almost the entire right wing made an effort to mitigate as much as possible the fact that there WAS an example in the US.
Meanwhile, the left had their own political reasons for ignoring Romney's example: it was going to be a victory for Obama, giving credit to the right would be a loss. Liberal voters needed to be convinced that Obama was their champion and had defeated the opposition, rather than a centrist who caved on reform and implemented a health care plan that not only was first done by a republican but was essentially a republican plan all along. Remember that the mandate was proposed by Gingrich's republicans in the Clinton era to defeat Clinton's actual health care reform.
So both sides of the political spectrum had reasons to pretend Romneycare wasn't the same thing. Romney in retrospect probably would have been better off standing up for his plan during the Obamacare process, telling republicans and democrats that it was a conservative plan, but at the time he probably thought he would be better off ignoring it, so Romney didn't speak up for it either.
That's why it was ignored as much as possible, but it was definitely mentioned among the open-minded Americans, who do exist. We're just quieter than the Fox News crowd.
That's actually more relevant than you think: if someone found that ONLY buying low and selling high was important to success, then that would actually be surprising since it seems to me that success has more to do with convincing people to give you their money to invest.
Likewise, TFA points out that impact factor matters less than number, which IS surprising.
Their analysis incorporated more than 200 variables, from the global rank of a scientist’s university, to the total number of papers, citations to those papers, and the impact factor of the journals in which they appeared. One revelation: The first few years of papers are enough to predict who will become a PI. Another is that impact factor isn't everything. At least later in a career, a large number of publications in low-ranking journals can be just as good as a few in the big ones. That’s “perhaps the most interesting finding,” says Sam Gershman, a computational neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
That goes contrary to conventional wisdom in biomedical research that you need to publish in a glamor journal in order to get hired as a PI.
Or rather, it could indicate that long term SUCCESS as a scientist has little to do with those big name journals, thus hiring committees which are focusing number of Nature or Science publications, aren't hiring the best scientists, they're just hiring scientists who happened to get lucky.
Also:
The prestige of journals is still too strong of a determinant of career destiny, Gershman argues. “If impact factor eventually becomes less important than the number of citations, our relationship to journal publishers will profoundly change,” he hopes. “We might no longer need publication in prestigious journals to further our careers, as long as our publications are highly cited. For now, however, "impact factor is still the strongest predictor of becoming a PI.”
With print-only journals, you had a lot of scientists who only skimmed the big name journals for interesting articles since you can only pick up so many physical magazines at one time before you die of papercuts. With online publication, that's an idiotic approach. Between RSS feeds, google scholar, F1000, arvix, and a bunch of other services, it matters far less where it's published, people are going to see it and cite it. There's still a bias in favor of the big name journals, but part of that is old professors who still don't know what RSS is, and I get the sense that glamor journals are (slowly) beginning to diminish in importance.
The article suggests that will not be disruptive: we already overvalue those big name journals.
I think part of that has to do with how big and physically isolated America is, and the other half is due to propaganda. Either individually wouldn't be very effective.
Since many Americans never venture beyond our borders, every country besides Canada seems exotic to many Americans and by extension, can't really teach us much. "They did this in France and it worked out just fine" would get you the knee jerk response of "Yeah, but France is totally different." You may as well be trying to use Harry Potter's universe as an example for economic policy.
To speculate more, the segment of the population most convinced of American exceptionalism is also the segment most likely to be getting their information entirely from corporate propaganda sources. Health care, gun laws, and wages all are issues which buisiness interests dictate to such people. Health insurance companies ran an effective FUD campaign leading to health care reform that gave them nearly everything they wanted, there was barely a whisper of "public option." The gun industry has gotten people to believe that firearms are an important part of their culture that is under attack by some nefarious conspiracy, and it somehow equates to their freedom, leading to the NRA being the unstoppable juggernaut that it is. Walmart and other employers didn't have to work very hard because they have an army that already listens entirely to them and has no real-world experience which could contradict their narrative.
It's not about meddling with sovereignty, it's about PR. None of the European countries are trying to turn the US into a colony. That's idiotic. You're drinking way too much of the far-right wing conspiracy koolaid if you can type that out.
Europeans see the death penalty as barbaric. Which, given our fellow executors, is accurate. Companies who make drugs obviously don't care about criminals dying versus the profit they'd make directly, they just don't want to face an outrcry from their European customers by being associated with that.
In the same way, liberals opposed to the death penalty aren't really concerned with stealing red state power. It's more that we don't want to be associated with people who insist that beheading is justice.
My smartphone reboots itself regularly for no obvious reason.
That's probably not AT&T or verizon's fault though.
I used to be able to run a phone on full batteries for 2 days without a recharge. (Yes, phones "do more", but I don't bloody well want most of the more and the bits I do want aren't any bloody good! That is NOT a good exchange for 1/12th the uptime and nobody sells low-consumption phones any more.)
I can't remember the last free phone upgrade offered.
Did phone companies ever offer you a phone that was worth more than $20 without a contract?
The first part of your post makes sense I think but asking AT&T to give you a free portable computer that has no software problems and doesn't occasionally need energy is a bit unrealistic.
If it really meant anything, this bill would have contained a passage giving Snowden immunity, as long as he testifies against everyone else inside the Govt that violated the constitution with respect to their illegal activities.
I think there's a bit of false dichotomy there.
They know everything about you; all it takes is a "gentle reminder" and this bill is turned into a termite-eaten stack of drivel. I didn't expect any different, It just means they had enough on enough people to effectively gut it before it was passed. We really knew that already...
The thing with cynicism in politics is that you get zero points for being right about how terrible things are or will be, and it just makes you feel even less like trying to change anything. So lets not say things like that out loud, please?
Not true! Not everything politicians do is about elections!
It's also to get everyone to forget about it sooner so the politicians can focus on catering to special interests. "The NSA spying? We took care of that. Now let me explain why we need to deregulate credit card companies."
Careful there, they're recording the metadata on that clap, and if you're in the Bahamas or one other unnamed country, they'll keep the sound on file up to a month!
(I hope my joke doesn't seem like I'm trivializing it. I'll give $20 to the EFF in penance the next time I have $20 to spare)
... and lock users into their platform by not allowing downloads of videos
Wait, you mean youtube is not my personal hard drive to upload and then download all my videos using up their servers and bandwidth? So that if I upload something to youtube and then delete the file off of my hard drive, it's like I deleted it off my hard drive? And they tell me in advance if I bother to ask anyone anywhere that I can't turn around and pull my video back to my hard drive unless I use third party services? And that I'd have to use google drive, which is also offered to me free, for that purpose? THOSE EVIL BASTARDS!!!
... and suck personal info out of your users by coupling the platform to google+
Well then pay to host your own fucking videos and pay for advertising. Jesus fucking Christ, what is it about the internet that makes people think anyone who does something nice must be a completely selfless saint or they're the devil? If Google had the motto "Be evil, cause fuck you all" and charged an arm and a leg for youtube, no one would be pointing out shit like this.
The primaries are not totally egalitarian, sure. Money buys speech, there are endorsements which carry a lot more weight than they should, and the media certainly seemed bent on ignoring Ron Paul, but it's a far cry from an elite class dictating what choices we have. Recall that the GOP "elites" were very frustrated by such extremist candidates distorting the field. The tea party candidates made the whole party look insane.
Furthermore, again, seventeen fucking percent turnout. Your assertion that the two candidates are chosen for us is true because we've decided NOT to choose, not because we CAN'T choose.
Reading through his recent comments, it does look like he's conservative, but you're presenting a false dichotomy. Saying "The Obama administration is doing this" doesn't mean "You should have voted for McCain and Romney."
It's worth pointing out that McCain seems to be more critical of the NSA than Obama does. I don't doubt that if McCain got elected president, the roles would be reversed, but Obama IS standing up more for the NSA spying program than McCain is, that much is clear.
I agree with you that both parties are to blame, but I think "fuck them both" isn't the only way out of this situation. I personally think that if we all bothered to vote in the primaries, in EITHER primary, many political problems attributed to the two party system would vanish quickly. SEVENTEEN PERCENT of eligible voters nominated the candidates last time. For some reason, it's only the whackos that bother voting in the primaries. The tea partiers are the only ones participating, and then the rest of us can't figure out why they're being taken seriously by washington. It's certainly not because they have such good ideas, it's because they vote in the primaries. The anti-NSA crowd could and should do the same thing. Vote in the primaries, nominate candidates to both parties who oppose the NSA. It's not genetically encoded into either party to be in favor of big brother.
If you're suggesting people are going to make money off of climate change then... no shit. It's not like fossil fuels are given away through charities.
"screwing over developing nations, under the guise of "helping" them." is pretty much anything the developed world does to the developing world as well. At least this screwing over has a reason: carbon dumped into the atmosphere is an externalized cost that affects them as well. Plus, look at any OPEC country. Tell me that the number of people who benefit from fossil fuel production is greater than the number of people who would be screwed over by climate change.
If we're smart, the next target will be making sure tax revenue and spending (like on police forces) must match so that locales don't do annoying, ineffective things like writing much more tickets to make up the difference.
If we're about as dumb as we always have been, more tickets for jaywalking, more sales taxes (which are politically okay because they affect poor people a lot more than rich people), and cutting spending (on poor people obviously).
Why mandate it though? I'm generally much more pro-gun control than your average slashdotter, but I don't see a point. Most gun deaths are suicide, which smart guns won't prevent.
According to this webpage (maybe not the best source) most guns possessed by criminals appear to be handguns from friends or family. The fingerprint method, if it can't be reset, might be able to make a dent in those if it couldn't be easily disabled or updated, but that doesn't seem likely. The watch version (where a wristband needs to be close to the gun to fire) would of course be totally useless for that, they'd just hand the watch over with the gun. I assume the watch method would probably the more preferred by most gun makers and owners, a fingerprint scanner seems more expensive and more finicky (especially with sweaty fingers).
Smart guns seem mostly useful for preventing someone from grabbing your gun from you and using it against you. That seems to happen a lot in movies and extremely rarely in real life. So I see very little reason to mandate it aside from "Gun makers want to sell you new, more expensive guns." And maybe to try to pacify gun-control advocates without actually giving them anything.
It would be nice if some government somewhere would for once in human history err on the side of too much transparency as policy. Maybe, getting really crazy, we as a people could demand that all government meetings always be open within a year no matter what. Sure, it would cause problems, but the other way does too, and frankly I'm sick and tired of those problems.
Amateur stuff man. For real "professional" style, you'd say these protesters were "violent."
What's that? They weren't actually violent? LOL. You should have paid people to walk into the crowd with masks on who would then start throwing rocks at windows. No professional journalist is going to question use of force against (shudder) ROCK THROWERS!
Wait, back up, I'm sorry. Nevermind about the agent provokateurs. Just say they were violent. No professional journalist is going to question...
Wait, again, so sorry. Lets just go with "No professional journalist is going to question" and leave it with that.
No, again, you're confusing cynicism with wisdom. We are often left with only two bad choices because of voter apathy. The primaries are open. They would be democratic if anyone bothered voting.. Tweedledee and Tweedledum can't endorse something massively unpopular and still get the nomination no matter how much corporations would love it, and if they did, there would be third parties.
The trial vegetable farm was set up in a clean room of a renovated semiconductor fabrication plant and is totally free of chemicals.
How the hell are they growing anything without chemicals such as oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water?!?
Serious answer: the article mentions the low potassium as good for people with chronic kidney disease. Nitrate free means less bitter. But if you need such expensive facilities to do so, then it's kind of stupid marketing. It doesn't sound like growing plants without nitrates or potassium is shocking scientifically.
That would be ironic, but considering prisons are in many cases taxpayer-supported higher education for turning minor drug offenders into hardened criminals, that's a relatively minor irony.
I don't think anyone was suggesting it was going to be total devastation since before "Waterworld" came out, but you should be asking "How much of my tax dollars are going to be spent on things like disaster relief after more levees and such break" or "How much more expensive is food going to get because all the good farmland is in floodplains that are now going to have higher insurance premiums for flooding?" Because the answer is going to be more than you want even if you're smug that your house is more than a few inches above sea level.
They're still elected with votes, and elections aren't outright frauds in this country at this point. Special interests play a game of FUD to keep voter apathy high enough to keep their guys in. If they mess up and more voters actually care to vote their politicians out, no amount of lobbying or campaign contributions can stop that.
They would have to mess up spectacularly to get your average voter to care about it, but that's precisely what the example Billy came up with. I think people would be outraged if they had to pay a $200 cable bill in order to get internet, to the point where they WOULD vote to change it finally.
Unless you're suggesting that ISPs are SO powerful that they'd declare a military junta rather than allow internet service to be nationalized.
1. I'm not sure Mark_reh WAS holding the US up as a good example of justice, just making the observation that in the US, this would be handled differently.
2. You can cherry pick bad examples of any group of people of sufficient size. The Assange case seems to me to be Sweden following the US. So I don't think cherrypicking is a good way to judge a justice system, and in this case it wouldn't be a very useful approach: the Swedish and the American justice system would be essentially the same.
It's extremely effective at fucking with robbers named Doug. "Holy shit! HE KNEW! I better run."
But that wouldn't be useful for robbers not named Doug... maybe buy a "beware of X" sign for all names and hang them up over all your electronics, that would cover your bases.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why it doesn't hold true in Canada as well. Perhaps Canada just has fewer people who are convinced that their country is unquestionably the best in the world. I should have listed nationalism as a third component of the US's issue as well. Possibly stronger than the other two. Maybe Canada's media is also a little bit better?
As far as examples within states, it's usually a little more complicated. The health care example for instance, yes Romney did do essentially the same plan before. The fury over Obama's implementation came from two driving forces, purely political (which is what prompted Palin to say death panels) and business. The health insurance industry wanted to try to stop reform if they could, but if they couldn't they wanted the version we got. Thus, almost the entire right wing made an effort to mitigate as much as possible the fact that there WAS an example in the US.
Meanwhile, the left had their own political reasons for ignoring Romney's example: it was going to be a victory for Obama, giving credit to the right would be a loss. Liberal voters needed to be convinced that Obama was their champion and had defeated the opposition, rather than a centrist who caved on reform and implemented a health care plan that not only was first done by a republican but was essentially a republican plan all along. Remember that the mandate was proposed by Gingrich's republicans in the Clinton era to defeat Clinton's actual health care reform.
So both sides of the political spectrum had reasons to pretend Romneycare wasn't the same thing. Romney in retrospect probably would have been better off standing up for his plan during the Obamacare process, telling republicans and democrats that it was a conservative plan, but at the time he probably thought he would be better off ignoring it, so Romney didn't speak up for it either.
That's why it was ignored as much as possible, but it was definitely mentioned among the open-minded Americans, who do exist. We're just quieter than the Fox News crowd.
Likewise, TFA points out that impact factor matters less than number, which IS surprising.
Their analysis incorporated more than 200 variables, from the global rank of a scientist’s university, to the total number of papers, citations to those papers, and the impact factor of the journals in which they appeared. One revelation: The first few years of papers are enough to predict who will become a PI. Another is that impact factor isn't everything. At least later in a career, a large number of publications in low-ranking journals can be just as good as a few in the big ones. That’s “perhaps the most interesting finding,” says Sam Gershman, a computational neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
That goes contrary to conventional wisdom in biomedical research that you need to publish in a glamor journal in order to get hired as a PI.
Or rather, it could indicate that long term SUCCESS as a scientist has little to do with those big name journals, thus hiring committees which are focusing number of Nature or Science publications, aren't hiring the best scientists, they're just hiring scientists who happened to get lucky.
Also:
The prestige of journals is still too strong of a determinant of career destiny, Gershman argues. “If impact factor eventually becomes less important than the number of citations, our relationship to journal publishers will profoundly change,” he hopes. “We might no longer need publication in prestigious journals to further our careers, as long as our publications are highly cited. For now, however, "impact factor is still the strongest predictor of becoming a PI.”
With print-only journals, you had a lot of scientists who only skimmed the big name journals for interesting articles since you can only pick up so many physical magazines at one time before you die of papercuts. With online publication, that's an idiotic approach. Between RSS feeds, google scholar, F1000, arvix, and a bunch of other services, it matters far less where it's published, people are going to see it and cite it. There's still a bias in favor of the big name journals, but part of that is old professors who still don't know what RSS is, and I get the sense that glamor journals are (slowly) beginning to diminish in importance.
The article suggests that will not be disruptive: we already overvalue those big name journals.
I think part of that has to do with how big and physically isolated America is, and the other half is due to propaganda. Either individually wouldn't be very effective.
Since many Americans never venture beyond our borders, every country besides Canada seems exotic to many Americans and by extension, can't really teach us much. "They did this in France and it worked out just fine" would get you the knee jerk response of "Yeah, but France is totally different." You may as well be trying to use Harry Potter's universe as an example for economic policy.
To speculate more, the segment of the population most convinced of American exceptionalism is also the segment most likely to be getting their information entirely from corporate propaganda sources. Health care, gun laws, and wages all are issues which buisiness interests dictate to such people. Health insurance companies ran an effective FUD campaign leading to health care reform that gave them nearly everything they wanted, there was barely a whisper of "public option." The gun industry has gotten people to believe that firearms are an important part of their culture that is under attack by some nefarious conspiracy, and it somehow equates to their freedom, leading to the NRA being the unstoppable juggernaut that it is. Walmart and other employers didn't have to work very hard because they have an army that already listens entirely to them and has no real-world experience which could contradict their narrative.
That would be an example of a false dichotomy there.
It's not about meddling with sovereignty, it's about PR. None of the European countries are trying to turn the US into a colony. That's idiotic. You're drinking way too much of the far-right wing conspiracy koolaid if you can type that out.
Europeans see the death penalty as barbaric. Which, given our fellow executors, is accurate. Companies who make drugs obviously don't care about criminals dying versus the profit they'd make directly, they just don't want to face an outrcry from their European customers by being associated with that.
In the same way, liberals opposed to the death penalty aren't really concerned with stealing red state power. It's more that we don't want to be associated with people who insist that beheading is justice.
My smartphone reboots itself regularly for no obvious reason.
That's probably not AT&T or verizon's fault though.
I used to be able to run a phone on full batteries for 2 days without a recharge. (Yes, phones "do more", but I don't bloody well want most of the more and the bits I do want aren't any bloody good! That is NOT a good exchange for 1/12th the uptime and nobody sells low-consumption phones any more.)
Well then go back to a dumb phone. 38 days of battery life on the nokia 515. Or buy an expanded battery. Plus, again, how is that your carrier's fault?
I can't remember the last free phone upgrade offered.
Did phone companies ever offer you a phone that was worth more than $20 without a contract?
The first part of your post makes sense I think but asking AT&T to give you a free portable computer that has no software problems and doesn't occasionally need energy is a bit unrealistic.
If it really meant anything, this bill would have contained a passage giving Snowden immunity, as long as he testifies against everyone else inside the Govt that violated the constitution with respect to their illegal activities.
I think there's a bit of false dichotomy there.
They know everything about you; all it takes is a "gentle reminder" and this bill is turned into a termite-eaten stack of drivel. I didn't expect any different, It just means they had enough on enough people to effectively gut it before it was passed. We really knew that already...
The thing with cynicism in politics is that you get zero points for being right about how terrible things are or will be, and it just makes you feel even less like trying to change anything. So lets not say things like that out loud, please?
Not true! Not everything politicians do is about elections!
It's also to get everyone to forget about it sooner so the politicians can focus on catering to special interests. "The NSA spying? We took care of that. Now let me explain why we need to deregulate credit card companies."
Careful there, they're recording the metadata on that clap, and if you're in the Bahamas or one other unnamed country, they'll keep the sound on file up to a month!
(I hope my joke doesn't seem like I'm trivializing it. I'll give $20 to the EFF in penance the next time I have $20 to spare)
... and lock users into their platform by not allowing downloads of videos
Wait, you mean youtube is not my personal hard drive to upload and then download all my videos using up their servers and bandwidth? So that if I upload something to youtube and then delete the file off of my hard drive, it's like I deleted it off my hard drive? And they tell me in advance if I bother to ask anyone anywhere that I can't turn around and pull my video back to my hard drive unless I use third party services? And that I'd have to use google drive, which is also offered to me free, for that purpose? THOSE EVIL BASTARDS!!!
Well then pay to host your own fucking videos and pay for advertising. Jesus fucking Christ, what is it about the internet that makes people think anyone who does something nice must be a completely selfless saint or they're the devil? If Google had the motto "Be evil, cause fuck you all" and charged an arm and a leg for youtube, no one would be pointing out shit like this.
The primaries are not totally egalitarian, sure. Money buys speech, there are endorsements which carry a lot more weight than they should, and the media certainly seemed bent on ignoring Ron Paul, but it's a far cry from an elite class dictating what choices we have. Recall that the GOP "elites" were very frustrated by such extremist candidates distorting the field. The tea party candidates made the whole party look insane.
Furthermore, again, seventeen fucking percent turnout. Your assertion that the two candidates are chosen for us is true because we've decided NOT to choose, not because we CAN'T choose.
Reading through his recent comments, it does look like he's conservative, but you're presenting a false dichotomy. Saying "The Obama administration is doing this" doesn't mean "You should have voted for McCain and Romney."
It's worth pointing out that McCain seems to be more critical of the NSA than Obama does. I don't doubt that if McCain got elected president, the roles would be reversed, but Obama IS standing up more for the NSA spying program than McCain is, that much is clear.
I agree with you that both parties are to blame, but I think "fuck them both" isn't the only way out of this situation. I personally think that if we all bothered to vote in the primaries, in EITHER primary, many political problems attributed to the two party system would vanish quickly. SEVENTEEN PERCENT of eligible voters nominated the candidates last time. For some reason, it's only the whackos that bother voting in the primaries. The tea partiers are the only ones participating, and then the rest of us can't figure out why they're being taken seriously by washington. It's certainly not because they have such good ideas, it's because they vote in the primaries. The anti-NSA crowd could and should do the same thing. Vote in the primaries, nominate candidates to both parties who oppose the NSA. It's not genetically encoded into either party to be in favor of big brother.
"Larger reach?" "Controls more government bodies?" Citation needed. For such a vast powerful conspiracy that has the ear of so much government power the list of carbon neutral countries appears to be only a short list of small countries who are CLOSE to carbon neutrality.
If you're suggesting people are going to make money off of climate change then... no shit. It's not like fossil fuels are given away through charities.
"screwing over developing nations, under the guise of "helping" them." is pretty much anything the developed world does to the developing world as well. At least this screwing over has a reason: carbon dumped into the atmosphere is an externalized cost that affects them as well. Plus, look at any OPEC country. Tell me that the number of people who benefit from fossil fuel production is greater than the number of people who would be screwed over by climate change.
If we're smart, the next target will be making sure tax revenue and spending (like on police forces) must match so that locales don't do annoying, ineffective things like writing much more tickets to make up the difference.
If we're about as dumb as we always have been, more tickets for jaywalking, more sales taxes (which are politically okay because they affect poor people a lot more than rich people), and cutting spending (on poor people obviously).
Why mandate it though? I'm generally much more pro-gun control than your average slashdotter, but I don't see a point. Most gun deaths are suicide, which smart guns won't prevent.
According to this webpage (maybe not the best source) most guns possessed by criminals appear to be handguns from friends or family. The fingerprint method, if it can't be reset, might be able to make a dent in those if it couldn't be easily disabled or updated, but that doesn't seem likely. The watch version (where a wristband needs to be close to the gun to fire) would of course be totally useless for that, they'd just hand the watch over with the gun. I assume the watch method would probably the more preferred by most gun makers and owners, a fingerprint scanner seems more expensive and more finicky (especially with sweaty fingers).
Smart guns seem mostly useful for preventing someone from grabbing your gun from you and using it against you. That seems to happen a lot in movies and extremely rarely in real life. So I see very little reason to mandate it aside from "Gun makers want to sell you new, more expensive guns." And maybe to try to pacify gun-control advocates without actually giving them anything.
It would be nice if some government somewhere would for once in human history err on the side of too much transparency as policy. Maybe, getting really crazy, we as a people could demand that all government meetings always be open within a year no matter what. Sure, it would cause problems, but the other way does too, and frankly I'm sick and tired of those problems.
Amateur stuff man. For real "professional" style, you'd say these protesters were "violent."
What's that? They weren't actually violent? LOL. You should have paid people to walk into the crowd with masks on who would then start throwing rocks at windows. No professional journalist is going to question use of force against (shudder) ROCK THROWERS!
Wait, back up, I'm sorry. Nevermind about the agent provokateurs. Just say they were violent. No professional journalist is going to question...
Wait, again, so sorry. Lets just go with "No professional journalist is going to question" and leave it with that.
No, again, you're confusing cynicism with wisdom. We are often left with only two bad choices because of voter apathy. The primaries are open. They would be democratic if anyone bothered voting.. Tweedledee and Tweedledum can't endorse something massively unpopular and still get the nomination no matter how much corporations would love it, and if they did, there would be third parties.
The trial vegetable farm was set up in a clean room of a renovated semiconductor fabrication plant and is totally free of chemicals.
How the hell are they growing anything without chemicals such as oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water?!?
Serious answer: the article mentions the low potassium as good for people with chronic kidney disease. Nitrate free means less bitter. But if you need such expensive facilities to do so, then it's kind of stupid marketing. It doesn't sound like growing plants without nitrates or potassium is shocking scientifically.
That would be ironic, but considering prisons are in many cases taxpayer-supported higher education for turning minor drug offenders into hardened criminals, that's a relatively minor irony.
I don't think anyone was suggesting it was going to be total devastation since before "Waterworld" came out, but you should be asking "How much of my tax dollars are going to be spent on things like disaster relief after more levees and such break" or "How much more expensive is food going to get because all the good farmland is in floodplains that are now going to have higher insurance premiums for flooding?" Because the answer is going to be more than you want even if you're smug that your house is more than a few inches above sea level.
They're still elected with votes, and elections aren't outright frauds in this country at this point. Special interests play a game of FUD to keep voter apathy high enough to keep their guys in. If they mess up and more voters actually care to vote their politicians out, no amount of lobbying or campaign contributions can stop that.
They would have to mess up spectacularly to get your average voter to care about it, but that's precisely what the example Billy came up with. I think people would be outraged if they had to pay a $200 cable bill in order to get internet, to the point where they WOULD vote to change it finally.
Unless you're suggesting that ISPs are SO powerful that they'd declare a military junta rather than allow internet service to be nationalized.
If ISPs started forcing such deals on it and we failed to demand ISPs be deprivatized, then we'd kind of deserve to be screwed over like that.
1. I'm not sure Mark_reh WAS holding the US up as a good example of justice, just making the observation that in the US, this would be handled differently.
2. You can cherry pick bad examples of any group of people of sufficient size. The Assange case seems to me to be Sweden following the US. So I don't think cherrypicking is a good way to judge a justice system, and in this case it wouldn't be a very useful approach: the Swedish and the American justice system would be essentially the same.
It's extremely effective at fucking with robbers named Doug. "Holy shit! HE KNEW! I better run."
But that wouldn't be useful for robbers not named Doug... maybe buy a "beware of X" sign for all names and hang them up over all your electronics, that would cover your bases.