The average climate change denier doesn't give a damn about the NSF or hippies from Lawrence Berkeley. But Bush-the-Elder's friends? Now that carries some weight!
The Koch brothers are G.H.W. Bush's friends?
I didn't know that.
And, oddly enough, I didn't (and don't) really care.
Now, wake me up when the AGW loons decide that nuclear is better than coal, and I'll start taking them seriously.
If California decided enough was enough, and ignored federal laws, removed federal agents, sealed its border, issued its own currency + passports etc. What would happen?
Colorado would stop sharing its water with California, and the place would become a desert again.
And I expect that Oregon (and other States) would stop exporting electricity to California, and it would get pretty dark there.
Beyond that, the Federal government would no doubt react much the way it reacted the last time a State decided to secede, and we'd have a new Civil War.
Which CA would lose, since it has no Army, Navy, Air Force, nor a culture of civilians familiar enough with firearms to effectively start a military up from scratch.
They SAY you have the right to bear arms. The courts have ruled the phrase "the people" doesn't mean the people, but in fact the government.
District of Columbia vs. Heller.
The Supremes ruled that "the people" meant "the people" in that one. Yes, the Supremes have actually gone on record as saying that the Second Amendment is an INDIVIDUAL Right.
At the beginning the USA? Had the 39th largest military in the world, we are talking a joke of a military, with WWI era tanks, 25 year old ships, there just wasn't any money there.
I can well believe 39th largest ARMY, but not "military". The US Navy was certainly in the top three (UK, USA, Japan were the big three) and only the Kellogg-Bryant Naval Treaties kept it from being number one.
The Army followed the US' traditional pattern - it was a small, semi-pro force intended to provide a cadre for a much larger army in case of hostilities. The 3000 miles between the USA and its nearest reasonable enemies meant that they had plenty of time to build up an Army - the Brits in WW2 complained a lot that we didn't have enough guys fighting on the ground in Europe, but it took us almost three years to move the guys we did have over there. We'd have had to delay Normandy till '47 or so to match the Royal Army man for man, just due to lack of transport.
You only have to take immunosuppressants for a year or two with a bone marrow transplant. The bone marrow will learn to recognize your body after a while.
I am going to be having a bone marrow transplant to fix my cancer in the not terribly distant future, and my doctor has told me that *ideally* I will have to take strong immunosuppressants for a year or two, plus steroids for basically the rest of my life.
However, there is a non-zero chance that I will be taking some fairly strong immunosuppressants for the rest of my life.
Of course, in the latter case, I don't expect "the rest of my life" to be all that long....
I still think some of what comes out of the NRA is pretty kooky and I see no "liberal" or UN conspiracy to take any of that from me.
Let's see. Colorado massacre happens Friday late.
By Saturday morning, the first editorials calling for more gun control appeared.
Yesterday, Obama called for more gun control (admittedly, he was pandering to his base, since the "more gun control" he said we needed have been existing law for 40 years or so).
See now why the NRA worries about the liberal left trying to disarm the populace?
And that's not even counting the Brady Campaign and all the other branches of the gun control nutjobs, who have always been calling for more gun control since I was a kid...
Your link includes much speculation,and very little in the way of facts.
It also includes outdated information - Assange is NOT in his 597th day of house arrest (he never was under house arrest, he was simply required to wear that monitoring anklet) - he's in his 37th day on the lam from the law in the UK.
Useful hint for Mr. Assange - if you don't want people to think you're a criminal, don't break laws. And yes, jumping bail is a violation of the law.
Note that the rape accusations he may beat, likewise anything the USA might want to charge him with, but the bail jumping is so clearcut that he can't possibly avoid the legal penalties associated with same....
He can represent him in Sweden and represent him against the USA when they try to grab him once he sets foot on Swedish soil.
If the USA wanted him, why wait till he was in Sweden?
It would almost certainly be easier to extradite him from the UK than from Sweden.
Hell, if the USA seriously wanted him, a drone strike is cheaper and quicker than an extradition request, even if he's hiding in the Ecuadoran Embassy....
I've got cleaner water, better health care. Laws that make sure my food isn't poison. I've got a social safety net that keeps bands of thieves and kidnappers to a minimum. My air is also much, much cleaner. Sure, 80% of Indians never have these problems, but for the other 20% life just sucks. America put a lot of effort into closing that gap. For those of us that don't just live a charmed life we want that.
While all this is true, it doesn't actually respond to GP's point that the reason we have higher payscales than in 1970 is due (largely) to inflation.
Note that it's possible to have cleaner air and water, good healthcare, etc. without having almost 500% inflation in prices over the last 42 years (491.4% total - not per year - since 1970, according to one inflation calculator).
No, the problems were all stupid decisions by the operators. The reactors didn't need to be SCRAM'd, and if they hadn't been, they'd have continued to produce power for their own cooling pumps.
On the other hand, the refusal in Japan (as in the USA) to deal with spent fuel rods other than to park them indefinitely onsite certainly contributed to the problem.
Just remember, every time someone fights to NIMBY the construction of a fuel rod reprocessing/storage facility somewhere, they're helping to set up the next Fukushima....
Population growth looks like it's going to take off soon because the largest generation of human beings in history is reaching breeding age.
"the largest generation of human beings in history" has applied to every generation in the last couple centuries. Yes, in spite of the best part of 100 million deaths in WW2, the there were more people alive at the end than at the beginning.
And yet, population growth rates have been declining pretty steadily for decades.
USA and Europe are into negative population growth when immigration is ignored.
China is theoretically into SEVERE negative population growth (one child per family implies a pretty massive population implosion coming up this generation) - though whether they're actually even close to achieving one child per family is debatable.
The rest of the world is busy trying to keep global populatin growth positive, but as they grow wealthier, their population growth rate is declining as well...
The current US deficit crisis isn't due to a spike in spending but a collapse in income.
Good theory, but not true.
2005 Federal tax revenues - $2.152 trillion
2012 Federal tax revenues - $2.469 trillion.
That works out to about 1.9% annual increase in revenues, which is a bit below inflation (2.3% per year on average).
Of course, the economy has well and truly sucked for the last four years, but even so, tax revenues are only about $60 billion below what would be expected from inflation.
And the annual deficit is rather more than $1 trillion higher than it was in 2005.
So, no, it isn't the revenues that are the problem (if it was all revenues, we'd have a deficit in the $400 billion range), it's the expenditures (which have increased at an annual rate of 5.3% or so since 2005 - much faster than inflation....
before we talk about entitlements I think we need to create a proper bar graph where one bar is entitlements and the other is military. Then we can talk entitlement cut.
From the 2012 budget...
MIlitary budget, including overseas contingency operations: $716.3 Billion.
Note that the above doesn't count the VA, which can adds in another $129.6 Billion.
If you assume that the VA is part of "military spending", that makes the total $845.9 Billion.
If you assume VA is NOT part of "military spending", then it probably should be added to "entitlement spending"....
Entitlement spending...
Social Security: $778.6 Billion.
Medicare: $484.4 Billion
"Income Security": $579.5 Billion.
Total: $1842.5 Billion
Not sure if that's all the entitlements, but looks reasonable. Note that Medicaid may or may not be included in "Income Security". If it's not, then add a hundred billion or so more onto the entitlement pile.
Note that payment on the National Debt amounted to $225 Billion. So about 6% of our federal spending vanishes to pay for overspending in previous years....
So, "entitlements" amount to rather more than twice "military spending" if you count VA as "military spending", and 2.75x "military spending" if you count the VA as "entitlement spending"....
Note, by the by, that those two chunks of money ("entitlements" and "military spending" amount to considerably more than we take in in tax revenue. So we could ZERO the rest of the government, and still have a large deficit with those untouched.
You seem unaware that the only way to "forbid screwing with legit traffic" requires that you determine whether any particular bit of traffic is "legit traffic" or not....
There's these things called "safety margins" that engineers like,
Once upon a time, back when nuclear power plants were first being built, it wasn't especially clear what effect neutron embrittlement would have over the lifetime of a nuke plant.
As a result, the plants tended to be over-engineered to astonishing degree.
Newer plants weren't over-engineered to such an extreme degree, but were still over-engineered.
In other words, the 40 year design lifetime was a VERY conservative estimate. Whether they can survive 80 years is debatable, but that's a question for the engineers/scientists.
I hope "almost certainly" is droll understatement.
It certainly is. On the other hand, assume you can send SMSes in a way which is not traceable and comparatively cheap. Assume you want the entire police force of some place - say, New South Wales - to be too busy and way less effective. Assume you want to commit some other crime which would greatly benefit from the police force in that place being too busy chasing phantoms.
What would you do?
Why "another crime"?
If I'd been paid to kill someone, this sounds like a wonderful way to distract the police - send this sort of memo to 5000 people, wait a week, then kill the one you were paid to kill.
While they're busy looking for ANY motive other than "paid killing", laugh all the way to the bank...
That all sounds very expensive and time consuming for both users and ISPs, and in many cases, probably unnecessary. How about this: if someone commits a crime the police investigate, the courts prosecute, and fines are paid/jailtime is done?
Last I checked, copyright violation is a civil matter, which the police don't handle.
Anyone whose solution to the world's problems starts with "kill 80+% of the population" worries me a great deal.
My land also is more than sufficient to keep my woodstove operational. But I don't consider that a useful alternative to more "conventional" solutions, because my solution works only for a handful.
In other words, I'd rather have solutions for everyone, not just for the favored few (i.e. the rich)....
but our main source of heating is a wood-fired stove which is totally sustainable.
Noting, of course, that this last is true as long as wood-fired stoves are rare. If everyone had one, there'd not be enough forest in the world to provide the wood required.
A typical assault rifle clip holds 30 rounds, and he changed clips at least once according to early reports.
Of course, he didn't have an assault rifle, since those are pretty much illegal to own without an FFL, which he didn't have.
What he had was a semi-automatic rifle. And if he'd been using one with a five round magazine, he'd still have been able to kill a dozen or so people. It's not like it takes more than a couple-three seconds to swap magazines (or to reload with a stripper clip, if you don't have a detachable magazine).
And it's not like you only are allowed to have two magazines.
Slashdot Mirror
The Koch brothers are G.H.W. Bush's friends?
I didn't know that.
And, oddly enough, I didn't (and don't) really care.
Now, wake me up when the AGW loons decide that nuclear is better than coal, and I'll start taking them seriously.
At the current guesstimates as to rate of sea level rise, the population of Florida will need to start worrying about it in two-three centuries.
Either that, or they can build a three foot high floodwall around their property right now.
Colorado would stop sharing its water with California, and the place would become a desert again.
And I expect that Oregon (and other States) would stop exporting electricity to California, and it would get pretty dark there.
Beyond that, the Federal government would no doubt react much the way it reacted the last time a State decided to secede, and we'd have a new Civil War.
Which CA would lose, since it has no Army, Navy, Air Force, nor a culture of civilians familiar enough with firearms to effectively start a military up from scratch.
District of Columbia vs. Heller.
The Supremes ruled that "the people" meant "the people" in that one. Yes, the Supremes have actually gone on record as saying that the Second Amendment is an INDIVIDUAL Right.
Which pisses off the Left no end....
I can well believe 39th largest ARMY, but not "military". The US Navy was certainly in the top three (UK, USA, Japan were the big three) and only the Kellogg-Bryant Naval Treaties kept it from being number one.
The Army followed the US' traditional pattern - it was a small, semi-pro force intended to provide a cadre for a much larger army in case of hostilities. The 3000 miles between the USA and its nearest reasonable enemies meant that they had plenty of time to build up an Army - the Brits in WW2 complained a lot that we didn't have enough guys fighting on the ground in Europe, but it took us almost three years to move the guys we did have over there. We'd have had to delay Normandy till '47 or so to match the Royal Army man for man, just due to lack of transport.
I am going to be having a bone marrow transplant to fix my cancer in the not terribly distant future, and my doctor has told me that *ideally* I will have to take strong immunosuppressants for a year or two, plus steroids for basically the rest of my life.
However, there is a non-zero chance that I will be taking some fairly strong immunosuppressants for the rest of my life.
Of course, in the latter case, I don't expect "the rest of my life" to be all that long....
Leftists. Washington DC city government has always leaned strongly to the left, hence their rather draconian gun laws....
Let's see. Colorado massacre happens Friday late.
By Saturday morning, the first editorials calling for more gun control appeared.
Yesterday, Obama called for more gun control (admittedly, he was pandering to his base, since the "more gun control" he said we needed have been existing law for 40 years or so).
See now why the NRA worries about the liberal left trying to disarm the populace?
And that's not even counting the Brady Campaign and all the other branches of the gun control nutjobs, who have always been calling for more gun control since I was a kid...
Your link includes much speculation,and very little in the way of facts.
It also includes outdated information - Assange is NOT in his 597th day of house arrest (he never was under house arrest, he was simply required to wear that monitoring anklet) - he's in his 37th day on the lam from the law in the UK.
Useful hint for Mr. Assange - if you don't want people to think you're a criminal, don't break laws. And yes, jumping bail is a violation of the law.
Note that the rape accusations he may beat, likewise anything the USA might want to charge him with, but the bail jumping is so clearcut that he can't possibly avoid the legal penalties associated with same....
If the USA wanted him, why wait till he was in Sweden?
It would almost certainly be easier to extradite him from the UK than from Sweden.
Hell, if the USA seriously wanted him, a drone strike is cheaper and quicker than an extradition request, even if he's hiding in the Ecuadoran Embassy....
While all this is true, it doesn't actually respond to GP's point that the reason we have higher payscales than in 1970 is due (largely) to inflation.
Note that it's possible to have cleaner air and water, good healthcare, etc. without having almost 500% inflation in prices over the last 42 years (491.4% total - not per year - since 1970, according to one inflation calculator).
No, the problems were all stupid decisions by the operators. The reactors didn't need to be SCRAM'd, and if they hadn't been, they'd have continued to produce power for their own cooling pumps.
On the other hand, the refusal in Japan (as in the USA) to deal with spent fuel rods other than to park them indefinitely onsite certainly contributed to the problem.
Just remember, every time someone fights to NIMBY the construction of a fuel rod reprocessing/storage facility somewhere, they're helping to set up the next Fukushima....
"the largest generation of human beings in history" has applied to every generation in the last couple centuries. Yes, in spite of the best part of 100 million deaths in WW2, the there were more people alive at the end than at the beginning.
And yet, population growth rates have been declining pretty steadily for decades.
USA and Europe are into negative population growth when immigration is ignored.
China is theoretically into SEVERE negative population growth (one child per family implies a pretty massive population implosion coming up this generation) - though whether they're actually even close to achieving one child per family is debatable.
The rest of the world is busy trying to keep global populatin growth positive, but as they grow wealthier, their population growth rate is declining as well...
Good theory, but not true.
2005 Federal tax revenues - $2.152 trillion
2012 Federal tax revenues - $2.469 trillion.
That works out to about 1.9% annual increase in revenues, which is a bit below inflation (2.3% per year on average).
Of course, the economy has well and truly sucked for the last four years, but even so, tax revenues are only about $60 billion below what would be expected from inflation.
And the annual deficit is rather more than $1 trillion higher than it was in 2005.
So, no, it isn't the revenues that are the problem (if it was all revenues, we'd have a deficit in the $400 billion range), it's the expenditures (which have increased at an annual rate of 5.3% or so since 2005 - much faster than inflation....
From the 2012 budget...
MIlitary budget, including overseas contingency operations: $716.3 Billion.
Note that the above doesn't count the VA, which can adds in another $129.6 Billion.
If you assume that the VA is part of "military spending", that makes the total $845.9 Billion.
If you assume VA is NOT part of "military spending", then it probably should be added to "entitlement spending"....
Entitlement spending...
Social Security: $778.6 Billion.
Medicare: $484.4 Billion
"Income Security": $579.5 Billion.
Total: $1842.5 Billion
Not sure if that's all the entitlements, but looks reasonable. Note that Medicaid may or may not be included in "Income Security". If it's not, then add a hundred billion or so more onto the entitlement pile.
Note that payment on the National Debt amounted to $225 Billion. So about 6% of our federal spending vanishes to pay for overspending in previous years....
So, "entitlements" amount to rather more than twice "military spending" if you count VA as "military spending", and 2.75x "military spending" if you count the VA as "entitlement spending"....
Note, by the by, that those two chunks of money ("entitlements" and "military spending" amount to considerably more than we take in in tax revenue. So we could ZERO the rest of the government, and still have a large deficit with those untouched.
We do all those things, and we'll reduce our deficit to maybe three quarters of a trillion per year.
Which will make it the fifth highest in history....
5'4" is TALL??
You seem unaware that the only way to "forbid screwing with legit traffic" requires that you determine whether any particular bit of traffic is "legit traffic" or not....
Which pretty much means monitoring all traffic...
Once upon a time, back when nuclear power plants were first being built, it wasn't especially clear what effect neutron embrittlement would have over the lifetime of a nuke plant.
As a result, the plants tended to be over-engineered to astonishing degree.
Newer plants weren't over-engineered to such an extreme degree, but were still over-engineered.
In other words, the 40 year design lifetime was a VERY conservative estimate. Whether they can survive 80 years is debatable, but that's a question for the engineers/scientists.
Why "another crime"?
If I'd been paid to kill someone, this sounds like a wonderful way to distract the police - send this sort of memo to 5000 people, wait a week, then kill the one you were paid to kill.
While they're busy looking for ANY motive other than "paid killing", laugh all the way to the bank...
Last I checked, copyright violation is a civil matter, which the police don't handle.
Anyone whose solution to the world's problems starts with "kill 80+% of the population" worries me a great deal.
My land also is more than sufficient to keep my woodstove operational. But I don't consider that a useful alternative to more "conventional" solutions, because my solution works only for a handful.
In other words, I'd rather have solutions for everyone, not just for the favored few (i.e. the rich)....
Noting, of course, that this last is true as long as wood-fired stoves are rare. If everyone had one, there'd not be enough forest in the world to provide the wood required.
Of course, he didn't have an assault rifle, since those are pretty much illegal to own without an FFL, which he didn't have.
What he had was a semi-automatic rifle. And if he'd been using one with a five round magazine, he'd still have been able to kill a dozen or so people. It's not like it takes more than a couple-three seconds to swap magazines (or to reload with a stripper clip, if you don't have a detachable magazine).
And it's not like you only are allowed to have two magazines.
Gawd, where was that? Every State I've lived in that had CCW required some range time as part of the training...