I guess the conclusion would be that if I don't want to die in agony on a gurney, probably a good idea not to be a murderer.
Personally, I don't understand why they don't just push them off a tall building. Gravity is free, nearly 100% guaranteed to work, and they have a few private moments then to reflect on their lives while they plummet. Plus on the faint chance it didn't work, trying again is free too. And then crows get to eat afterward, so it's "green" as well.
Oh, and "sciencehabit also points out a study indicating that around 4% of death row inmates in the U.S. are likely innocent." let's be careful with our use of language here. This is not 'random innocent people being dragged off the street, convicted of a capital crime, and being sentenced to death." This is generally "lifetime criminal ne'er-do-well scumbag who has caused incalculable misery in his* life and a rap sheet 10s of pages long if not hundreds, being *finally* convicted of something and then, after decades of appeals and 00s of 000s of $, finally executed".
*his, because it's generally a man. Evidence of sexism in the criminal justice system? (Obviously not, but I highlight it to preemptively mock the people that assume that disproportional racial convictions are likewise "proof" of racism in the system.)
I love it when some utopian statist poses such a question - "should the government take over X for the benefit of all?" - as if government is a neutral, rational entity that has the best interest of the public at heart.
Local governments (still, one might put it, "within arm's reach of the voter")? Very likely so. I know lots of people at the local government levels that work their asses off to do the right thing and the best thing for their communities.
But what has been abundantly proven over and over from the food industry to the car industry to the power industry to the cable tv industry is that larger scales of government are ever-more corrupted/corruptable to the point that at the highest, federal level, it's lobbyists, private interests, and power-brokers all the way through.
I used to be a starry-eyed idealist, and was insulted when Jackie Chan commented to a Chinese paper that "America is more corrupt than China". I still think he's wrong in an absolute sense, but the more I try to look clearly and skeptically at my own country and government, the more I'm repulsed by the greed and nepotism at the highest levels and am, perhaps finally, beginning to admit that it may not be fixable.
....but it's clear to me, having been born in 1967, that the 'obesity epidemic' largely coincided with the obsession to eliminate fat from our lives.
In particular, for Americans who eat a significant amount of meals outside the home, when restaurants were compelled (I don't know if it had the force of law, or just lots of government pressure) to abandon animal fats in cooking in favor of the hydrogenated vegetable oils. That's where I really personally remember thinking "wow, was everyone really this fat before?"
Personally, I try to eat a moderate amount of all sorts of 'unhealthy' foods according to the government - eggs, coffee, bacon, and use lard for cooking - and I personally don't have a weight problem. Coincidence or genetics could surely be the answer, of course; then again, it might not.
How is this different than French judges insisting that the internet use French, German judges trying to ban Nazi logos in global games hosted elsewhere, etc?
I mean seriously, there's like a story a week about some dumbass judge thinking he can tell the internet what it can and cannot do?
It's about the "stupid", not the "America". Although those are often enough synonymous, I admit.
Is that really 'admission' rates? I mean, technically, semantically, I guess you could call it admission rates because it's literally the number of people of people entering the program because there are so few seats.
But really, in the vernacular, 'admission rates' have to do with the filtering process of who is allowed to enter based on qualifications, not if there's a seat available. Saying there's a low admission rate to me implies that their standards are too high, overfiltering applicants so that too few people are participating in the programs.
I guess I would have titled this article entirely differently, citing a lack of CAPACITY, not a low admission rate.
...ok this is probably a stupid question, but why would such a spill be the US's responsibility any more than say, a spill off Madagascar?
Yes, certainly, if it's within the small share of US waters off Alaska, but if you look at territorial claims on the arctic it's a relatively small sliver that the US even optimistically claims. A far, far larger share of arctic waters would be the responsibility of Canada, Russia, and/or Norway - let them sort it out.
And please don't ASSume that we live in some sort of binary world where criticizing Obama means I think Bush 2 was any less of a piece of crap. However, I don't recall Bush 2's election(s) being accompanied with the sort of priapic panegyrics about how "everything was going to be different" and the administration was going to be "lobbyist-free", either.
I'll "get over it" if you "get on with it", how about that?
NASA pronouncements about manned spaceflight haven't really meant shit since the 1970s. Well, aside from delays and cancellations. They've almost always been in earnest.
But everything else has been political window dressing for one president or another (both parties, thanks very much) to make some bold pronouncement that he either KNEW wasn't going to make it through an enemy congress (and thus he could blame on them) or that he quietly de-prioritized and let wither on the vine.
This data's barely 50 years old, of extremely high value (thus worth the extraordinary effort), and relatively low Size. We're talking about a couple of thousand high-resolution pictures, so what, each is perhaps what, 10 megabytes (they're all b&w)? So total of 20 gigs of images?
I know people that take more picture data than that in a single 1st birthday party.
It's impossible for me to talk to committed vegans (not to mention the proselytizing ones) without constantly being reminded that 18th and 19th century missionaries were LIKEWISE absolutely convinced that they were doing the "right thing" for these people's immortal souls by bringing them into Christianity and for their lives by bringing them the modern world.
Ironically, usually, these are precisely the sort of zealots that are mocked by the kind of people that are 'evangelical' vegans today.
What happens when alleged game designers (and/or producers, etc) get bogged down arguing about the minutiae of the actions/responses of doors, to the point that it takes more than 30 seconds to resolve 'challenging' questions like: Do all players need to be able to operate the door? Does it lock behind a player? Must they all see the door open/closed? Can the door be optional DLC?"?
Answer, you shouldn't be surprised that your project can't meet its deadlines or budget.
People can't be bothered to take moderate, reasonable precautions with their own LIFE-PRESERVING behaviors, you think that they're going to be motivated to change their behaviors because some tech has to fart around with their laptop for 3 days re-imaging it?
Seriously, people need to stop assuming that humans aren't just hairless primates with a knack for tools and language.
"You think my boss works? Of course not. He comes in when he pleases maybe 4 or 5 hours a day. Takes whatever day off he pleases. Takes multiple vacations per year for one or two weeks at a time. " Typical bitching from the cheap seats.
I run a business. I'm THERE maybe 4-5 hours a day...because I can work from my home when I get up at 6 am, eat breakfast while I do emails until a lull at perhaps 9-10 (when Europe stops working) and THEN waste minimal time commuting since the wage-drones have all gotten off the road. Then I'm out at 3pm, to go pick up the kids (since my wife works), home, and doing emails/work until probably 7pm. Oh yeah, and when I have a pissed off customer or emergency? They call me at 9pm, 11pm, 3 am - not the fucking desk-drones who don't answer before 8 or after 5. When the government raises healthcare requirement or there are tax issues, it's *me* laying awake at night, agonizing over how we can cut corners to keep production running, and not lay anyone off, despite costs suddenly climbing 20% in a year. I'm the one sitting at a 6th grade band concert (if I'm able to go) sweating mentally over balance sheets and payroll, not chugging beers at Bennigans with my poor oppressed comrades. I "get" to travel all over the world, because that's where my customers are. Which means I've missed all the important 'firsts' of my kids, and make enough to allow my wife to be part-time and be the true parent. I'll remember how awesome I have it next time I'm driving some shitty rental car in the rain at 2am because my flight was late, trying to navigate the Escher-like streets of urban NJ trying to find a hotel so I can get up at 6 to *hopefully* have enough time to cover the emergency emails overnight, to make it to customer meetings at 0730.
Oh, and if wage-drone makes a mistake, it might cost us a few $00 or at worst couple $000 on a transaction. I make a mistake? It could cost the company 00's of 000's and the whole branch closes, costing me and worse, 16 of those poor buggers their jobs.
Look, I'm not going to lie; it's hella better to be doing this making $150k than to be slaving away in some shitty clerk job as a $30k wage-slave. But just because he doesn't break a sweat in front of you doesn't mean your boss isn't working.
Animal rights activists release 000's of animals into the wild, regardless that none are actually adapted or can cope, quickly being killed by traffic or predators.
Rarely are they sensible about what are rather complicated moral issues. Humans are omnivores, and are natural meat eaters. If eating some 'higher' creature that is the result of "millions of years of evolution" is inherently cruel, isn't eating corn pretty much the same thing? Worse, because with corn not only are you eating the product of millions of years of evolution - you're eating their BABIES. Furthermore, I don't understand the problem vegans have with EGGS. These are - to the chicken, when unfertilized - essentially WASTE, and incredibly nutritious.
Anyway, ask yourself this: if one mourns the millions of dead animals slain to satisfy the meat industry...how many pigs or cows would there ever have been, if we couldn't eat them? I'd wager 99%+ of them would never have existed, but for their tastiness.
...whether Cold War-flavored (so very 1980s) or terrorist-flavored (so very 9/11), wouldn't these relatively straightforward precautions LIKEWISE buffer us against the effects of the sorts of solar activity that randomly seems to popup every 100 years or so?
It seems that as our society becomes more and more DEPENDENT on the interwebs, we'd want to invest a little to protect that. (Then again, one might assume that because our entire economy runs on the roadways, we'd want to invest in them too...)
Yet the Republicans are too wedded to utter prohibition on taxation, and the Democrats are too busy taking the tax revenues we do get and pouring great gobs of cash onto various interest groups for either of them give a shit about the ACTUAL public weal.
As the game in the US has lost much of its elitist, exclusionary atmosphere and the ACLU has stormed the membership barricades, the white, old-money folks are no longer willing to pay ridiculous membership fees to belong to exclusive-clubs-that-are-no-longer-really-exclusive-in-any-way.
Congratulations PGA: you wanted to 'democratize' and 'universalize' golf. Now you have a crapton of Happy Gilmores on the course, the people who used to play are no longer interested in your 'country clubs'.
It's a little old thing called supply and demand. Unfortunately for you, not all demand is equal. Is it better to have 200 shlubs whacking away with a $100 set of wal-mart clubs every weekend, or to have 20 millionaires who'll be interested in bringing their wealthy friends there, pay ridiculous green fees without batting an eye, and even donate $000's for the new water hazard near the 14th green to 'liven things up a little'?
White House counterterrorism and Homeland Security adviser Lisa Monaco gave a speech this week in which she urged parents to watch their children for signs of "confrontational" behavior which could be an indication of them becoming terrorists. During the speech at at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government on Tuesday night, Monaco, who replaced John Brennan last year in overseeing the executive branch's homeland-security activities, said that parents need to be suspicious of "sudden personality changes in their children at home." "What kinds of behaviors are we talking about?â she asked. "For the most part, they're not related directly to plotting attacks. They're more subtle. For instance, parents might see sudden personality changes in their children at homeâ"becoming confrontational."
...at least according to the summary, wasn't this a little histrionic?
"Without the tuned mass damper, LeMessurier calculated that a storm powerful enough to take out the building hit New York every 16 years." In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse."
No, the "lack of a tuned mass damper" was already presupposing that the POWER was out. The power doesn't go out in NYC all that often, and even if it did...Would it have been impossible to have, I dunno, 5 backup diesel generators tested in rotation every day to provide emergency power to the tuned mass damper in the event of a coincidental power outage AND storm?
...but I agree with the interpretation of the law.
IANAL, but if there is indeed an exemption section to the VA FOIA that states: "Data, records or information of a proprietary nature produced or collected by or for faculty or staff of public institutions of higher learningâ¦in the conduct of or as a result of study or research on medical, scientific, technical or scholarly issuesâ¦where such data, records or information has not been publicly released, published, copyrighted or patented."...then pretty clearly this data is very specifically exactly that, exempt from the FOIA.
*PERSONALLY* if the research was funded by public funds, I find such an exemption execrable, but it's the law and its authors that are at fault, nor Mann at all.
PS and tangential to the point of the OP: Slashdot, it's fucking 2014. Perhaps we could invest in modern posting tech that lets us paste things like biased quotes without getting crap codes like âoe ? Or maybe convert all postings to monotype courier, so we're reminded that slashdot's still only a handsbreath above a BBS?
My favorite question to Democrats is: Quick, tell me 5 things that George W Bush said that were commendable.
I can easily find 5 banal positive things that Obama, or Kerry, or Clinton said that I agree with, despite disagreeing with them politically. I don't find them evil, just ignorant or misprioritizing things, so it's simple to find basic human statements I agree with.
If you can't find 5 positive things to say about your opponent, you're a zealot, and any discussion you enter is a waste of time.
I'll use Thomas Sowell's example: People like to live by water, on a shore. There is only X shoreline. There are two ways to apportion that shoreline. 1) money: let people buy and sell it, or 2) you can divide it up, and give a piece to everyone; of course, this results in uselessly small pieces (and you have to forbid transfers or you end up with #1), complications with inheritance (is it heritable? How do you deal with death? Marriage?)
The problem with #1 is that as the resource is finite, the prices will become very, very high.
San Francisco is a wonderful location but is extraordinarily geographically constrained. Which do you want: a dictatorship that controls everything and allocates places to people according to what they think is fair today, or a "free" market where prices skyrocket to their value and prevent any but the super-wealthy from living there? You can't have both, as I suspect that the inefficiencies of trying to chart a middle course make it the worst possible choice.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess the conclusion would be that if I don't want to die in agony on a gurney, probably a good idea not to be a murderer.
Personally, I don't understand why they don't just push them off a tall building. Gravity is free, nearly 100% guaranteed to work, and they have a few private moments then to reflect on their lives while they plummet. Plus on the faint chance it didn't work, trying again is free too. And then crows get to eat afterward, so it's "green" as well.
Oh, and "sciencehabit also points out a study indicating that around 4% of death row inmates in the U.S. are likely innocent." let's be careful with our use of language here. This is not 'random innocent people being dragged off the street, convicted of a capital crime, and being sentenced to death." This is generally "lifetime criminal ne'er-do-well scumbag who has caused incalculable misery in his* life and a rap sheet 10s of pages long if not hundreds, being *finally* convicted of something and then, after decades of appeals and 00s of 000s of $, finally executed".
*his, because it's generally a man. Evidence of sexism in the criminal justice system? (Obviously not, but I highlight it to preemptively mock the people that assume that disproportional racial convictions are likewise "proof" of racism in the system.)
I love it when some utopian statist poses such a question - "should the government take over X for the benefit of all?" - as if government is a neutral, rational entity that has the best interest of the public at heart.
Local governments (still, one might put it, "within arm's reach of the voter")? Very likely so. I know lots of people at the local government levels that work their asses off to do the right thing and the best thing for their communities.
But what has been abundantly proven over and over from the food industry to the car industry to the power industry to the cable tv industry is that larger scales of government are ever-more corrupted/corruptable to the point that at the highest, federal level, it's lobbyists, private interests, and power-brokers all the way through.
I used to be a starry-eyed idealist, and was insulted when Jackie Chan commented to a Chinese paper that "America is more corrupt than China". I still think he's wrong in an absolute sense, but the more I try to look clearly and skeptically at my own country and government, the more I'm repulsed by the greed and nepotism at the highest levels and am, perhaps finally, beginning to admit that it may not be fixable.
....but it's clear to me, having been born in 1967, that the 'obesity epidemic' largely coincided with the obsession to eliminate fat from our lives.
In particular, for Americans who eat a significant amount of meals outside the home, when restaurants were compelled (I don't know if it had the force of law, or just lots of government pressure) to abandon animal fats in cooking in favor of the hydrogenated vegetable oils. That's where I really personally remember thinking "wow, was everyone really this fat before?"
Personally, I try to eat a moderate amount of all sorts of 'unhealthy' foods according to the government - eggs, coffee, bacon, and use lard for cooking - and I personally don't have a weight problem. Coincidence or genetics could surely be the answer, of course; then again, it might not.
How is this different than French judges insisting that the internet use French, German judges trying to ban Nazi logos in global games hosted elsewhere, etc?
I mean seriously, there's like a story a week about some dumbass judge thinking he can tell the internet what it can and cannot do?
It's about the "stupid", not the "America". Although those are often enough synonymous, I admit.
Is hiring someone because they have a vagina any less sexist than NOT hiring them because they have one?
Is that really 'admission' rates? I mean, technically, semantically, I guess you could call it admission rates because it's literally the number of people of people entering the program because there are so few seats.
But really, in the vernacular, 'admission rates' have to do with the filtering process of who is allowed to enter based on qualifications, not if there's a seat available. Saying there's a low admission rate to me implies that their standards are too high, overfiltering applicants so that too few people are participating in the programs.
I guess I would have titled this article entirely differently, citing a lack of CAPACITY, not a low admission rate.
...ok this is probably a stupid question, but why would such a spill be the US's responsibility any more than say, a spill off Madagascar?
Yes, certainly, if it's within the small share of US waters off Alaska, but if you look at territorial claims on the arctic it's a relatively small sliver that the US even optimistically claims. A far, far larger share of arctic waters would be the responsibility of Canada, Russia, and/or Norway - let them sort it out.
One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.
"Hope"
"Change"
And please don't ASSume that we live in some sort of binary world where criticizing Obama means I think Bush 2 was any less of a piece of crap. However, I don't recall Bush 2's election(s) being accompanied with the sort of priapic panegyrics about how "everything was going to be different" and the administration was going to be "lobbyist-free", either.
I'll "get over it" if you "get on with it", how about that?
NASA pronouncements about manned spaceflight haven't really meant shit since the 1970s. Well, aside from delays and cancellations. They've almost always been in earnest.
But everything else has been political window dressing for one president or another (both parties, thanks very much) to make some bold pronouncement that he either KNEW wasn't going to make it through an enemy congress (and thus he could blame on them) or that he quietly de-prioritized and let wither on the vine.
...of what's to come.
This data's barely 50 years old, of extremely high value (thus worth the extraordinary effort), and relatively low Size.
We're talking about a couple of thousand high-resolution pictures, so what, each is perhaps what, 10 megabytes (they're all b&w)? So total of 20 gigs of images?
I know people that take more picture data than that in a single 1st birthday party.
And in 50 years, will it be gone?
It's impossible for me to talk to committed vegans (not to mention the proselytizing ones) without constantly being reminded that 18th and 19th century missionaries were LIKEWISE absolutely convinced that they were doing the "right thing" for these people's immortal souls by bringing them into Christianity and for their lives by bringing them the modern world.
Ironically, usually, these are precisely the sort of zealots that are mocked by the kind of people that are 'evangelical' vegans today.
Answer, you shouldn't be surprised that your project can't meet its deadlines or budget.
People can't be bothered to take moderate, reasonable precautions with their own LIFE-PRESERVING behaviors, you think that they're going to be motivated to change their behaviors because some tech has to fart around with their laptop for 3 days re-imaging it?
Seriously, people need to stop assuming that humans aren't just hairless primates with a knack for tools and language.
"You think my boss works? Of course not. He comes in when he pleases maybe 4 or 5 hours a day. Takes whatever day off he pleases. Takes multiple vacations per year for one or two weeks at a time. "
Typical bitching from the cheap seats.
I run a business. I'm THERE maybe 4-5 hours a day...because I can work from my home when I get up at 6 am, eat breakfast while I do emails until a lull at perhaps 9-10 (when Europe stops working) and THEN waste minimal time commuting since the wage-drones have all gotten off the road. Then I'm out at 3pm, to go pick up the kids (since my wife works), home, and doing emails/work until probably 7pm.
Oh yeah, and when I have a pissed off customer or emergency? They call me at 9pm, 11pm, 3 am - not the fucking desk-drones who don't answer before 8 or after 5. When the government raises healthcare requirement or there are tax issues, it's *me* laying awake at night, agonizing over how we can cut corners to keep production running, and not lay anyone off, despite costs suddenly climbing 20% in a year. I'm the one sitting at a 6th grade band concert (if I'm able to go) sweating mentally over balance sheets and payroll, not chugging beers at Bennigans with my poor oppressed comrades.
I "get" to travel all over the world, because that's where my customers are. Which means I've missed all the important 'firsts' of my kids, and make enough to allow my wife to be part-time and be the true parent. I'll remember how awesome I have it next time I'm driving some shitty rental car in the rain at 2am because my flight was late, trying to navigate the Escher-like streets of urban NJ trying to find a hotel so I can get up at 6 to *hopefully* have enough time to cover the emergency emails overnight, to make it to customer meetings at 0730.
Oh, and if wage-drone makes a mistake, it might cost us a few $00 or at worst couple $000 on a transaction. I make a mistake? It could cost the company 00's of 000's and the whole branch closes, costing me and worse, 16 of those poor buggers their jobs.
Look, I'm not going to lie; it's hella better to be doing this making $150k than to be slaving away in some shitty clerk job as a $30k wage-slave. But just because he doesn't break a sweat in front of you doesn't mean your boss isn't working.
...a utility that would go through my gazillion saved bookmarks from forever, and see if each still has something of value there. :\
I sometimes in an odd moment sift through the oldest, and easily 8/10 are dead links.
Animal rights activists release 000's of animals into the wild, regardless that none are actually adapted or can cope, quickly being killed by traffic or predators.
Rarely are they sensible about what are rather complicated moral issues. Humans are omnivores, and are natural meat eaters. If eating some 'higher' creature that is the result of "millions of years of evolution" is inherently cruel, isn't eating corn pretty much the same thing? Worse, because with corn not only are you eating the product of millions of years of evolution - you're eating their BABIES.
Furthermore, I don't understand the problem vegans have with EGGS. These are - to the chicken, when unfertilized - essentially WASTE, and incredibly nutritious.
Anyway, ask yourself this: if one mourns the millions of dead animals slain to satisfy the meat industry...how many pigs or cows would there ever have been, if we couldn't eat them? I'd wager 99%+ of them would never have existed, but for their tastiness.
Now this has made me hungry, brb burger.
Are the eggs viability all that different from "young egg" to "old egg"?
Isn't a huge factor simply the age of the mother?
Is planting a 'frozen young egg' in a relatively elderly 50 year old uterus really going to be that much more successful?
...whether Cold War-flavored (so very 1980s) or terrorist-flavored (so very 9/11), wouldn't these relatively straightforward precautions LIKEWISE buffer us against the effects of the sorts of solar activity that randomly seems to popup every 100 years or so?
It seems that as our society becomes more and more DEPENDENT on the interwebs, we'd want to invest a little to protect that.
(Then again, one might assume that because our entire economy runs on the roadways, we'd want to invest in them too...)
Yet the Republicans are too wedded to utter prohibition on taxation, and the Democrats are too busy taking the tax revenues we do get and pouring great gobs of cash onto various interest groups for either of them give a shit about the ACTUAL public weal.
Honestly, it's probably the opposite now.
As the game in the US has lost much of its elitist, exclusionary atmosphere and the ACLU has stormed the membership barricades, the white, old-money folks are no longer willing to pay ridiculous membership fees to belong to exclusive-clubs-that-are-no-longer-really-exclusive-in-any-way.
Congratulations PGA: you wanted to 'democratize' and 'universalize' golf.
Now you have a crapton of Happy Gilmores on the course, the people who used to play are no longer interested in your 'country clubs'.
It's a little old thing called supply and demand. Unfortunately for you, not all demand is equal. Is it better to have 200 shlubs whacking away with a $100 set of wal-mart clubs every weekend, or to have 20 millionaires who'll be interested in bringing their wealthy friends there, pay ridiculous green fees without batting an eye, and even donate $000's for the new water hazard near the 14th green to 'liven things up a little'?
You don't think there's a larger agenda here?
http://www.eutimes.net/2014/04...
...at least according to the summary, wasn't this a little histrionic?
"Without the tuned mass damper, LeMessurier calculated that a storm powerful enough to take out the building hit New York every 16 years." In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse."
No, the "lack of a tuned mass damper" was already presupposing that the POWER was out. The power doesn't go out in NYC all that often, and even if it did...Would it have been impossible to have, I dunno, 5 backup diesel generators tested in rotation every day to provide emergency power to the tuned mass damper in the event of a coincidental power outage AND storm?
...but I agree with the interpretation of the law.
IANAL, but if there is indeed an exemption section to the VA FOIA that states: ...then pretty clearly this data is very specifically exactly that, exempt from the FOIA.
"Data, records or information of a proprietary nature produced or collected by or for faculty or staff of public institutions of higher learningâ¦in the conduct of or as a result of study or research on medical, scientific, technical or scholarly issuesâ¦where such data, records or information has not been publicly released, published, copyrighted or patented."
*PERSONALLY* if the research was funded by public funds, I find such an exemption execrable, but it's the law and its authors that are at fault, nor Mann at all.
PS and tangential to the point of the OP: Slashdot, it's fucking 2014. Perhaps we could invest in modern posting tech that lets us paste things like biased quotes without getting crap codes like âoe ?
Or maybe convert all postings to monotype courier, so we're reminded that slashdot's still only a handsbreath above a BBS?
To the Left, yes.
My favorite question to Democrats is: Quick, tell me 5 things that George W Bush said that were commendable.
I can easily find 5 banal positive things that Obama, or Kerry, or Clinton said that I agree with, despite disagreeing with them politically. I don't find them evil, just ignorant or misprioritizing things, so it's simple to find basic human statements I agree with.
If you can't find 5 positive things to say about your opponent, you're a zealot, and any discussion you enter is a waste of time.
I'll use Thomas Sowell's example: People like to live by water, on a shore.
There is only X shoreline.
There are two ways to apportion that shoreline.
1) money: let people buy and sell it, or
2) you can divide it up, and give a piece to everyone; of course, this results in uselessly small pieces (and you have to forbid transfers or you end up with #1), complications with inheritance (is it heritable? How do you deal with death? Marriage?)
The problem with #1 is that as the resource is finite, the prices will become very, very high.
San Francisco is a wonderful location but is extraordinarily geographically constrained. Which do you want: a dictatorship that controls everything and allocates places to people according to what they think is fair today, or a "free" market where prices skyrocket to their value and prevent any but the super-wealthy from living there?
You can't have both, as I suspect that the inefficiencies of trying to chart a middle course make it the worst possible choice.