300 tons of contaminated water doesn't seem like a lot when you consider there are (roughly) 784,430,000,000,000,000.00 tons of water in the pacific ocean alone. I think I'll still eat fish...
Make that 300 tons of contaminated water per day, something that Japan's environmental agency says has been happening since very soon after the initial accident in March of 2011. According to NPR, the next plan is to dig a bunch of cooling pipes into the ground and create an underground "ice wall" to stop the contamination from flowing out in to the ocean. No, really
You can trivialize all you want, but if I were you I'd avoid eating the fish from anywhere near the Japanese coast, and anything that eats there during annual migrations. Could be bad for your health. Radioactivity builds up in plants and animals over time, and it's been pouring in for 2 1/2 years now.
If that isn't bad enough, a newly stated concern is the proximity of melted fuel in relation to the Tokyo aquifer that extends under the plant. If and when the corium reaches the Tokyo aquifer, there will be 40 million people in the Tokyo area without access to safe water.
Great, you have some exploratory studies that show potential research avenues for further looking into. Now compare those to the known negative effects of manure, and you'll have a more complete view of the topic.
Because Roundup has just as long and wide-spread history of use in human agriculture as manure?
How is a government subsidized tradein for a new car destroying wealth? Seem more like aid in purchasing a capital good to me.
It wasn't the subsidy or the new car that destroyed capital, it was all the strings (like come attached to every government grant or subsidy). The "strings" in this case said that your trade-in, regardless of age or utility, had to be destroyed and crushed.
It even described how. First, you had to drain all the oil from the engine, add a sand/silica mixture to the cooling system, then you had to run the engine until it froze up. What was left of the car had to be crushed. This meant that not only were all those cars destroyed, but the ones left on the road are harder to find parts for because all the engine parts were destroyed and everything else was crushed. You can find lots of videos of engines being destroyed on the interwebs.
The value in all those destroyed cars was far greater than anything that was created by the incentives. And in the long term it hurts the poorest the most, who need transportation for jobs and keep their cars longer and rely on older cars to be reasonable to buy.
I think the OP was referring to the fact that it was the "first known human artifact to enter outer space."
It may have entered outer space, but that's useless for getting anything into orbit. The V-2, which was the longest-range missile at the time, was incapable of achieving orbit.
They are still talking about starving it when they increase spending and decrease revenue. They were never trying to starve it, just spend now and wait for your children to pay it back later.
The best thing everyone in reciept of such a gag order can do is publish or publisice it in the same way as any ordinary warrant served. They will try to prosecute, but in so doing they will have to put their law to the test. They don't want to do that -- yet. So, I'd hurry up and publish.
There have been some such cases, but the Feds always drop the case before it gets very far, because they know it won't stand up to public scrutiny before anything but the most statist-supportive judge.
No, a court like FISA can be compatible with them. As long as it's not allowed to be secretive and above public accountability. FISA was created to stop the abuses that Nixon did of abusing the intelligence services to spy on anyone he wanted. And until the Patriot Act it actually did a decent job of that.
Bullshit. If Nixon's abuses had anything at all to do with the eventual drafting of the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001," then it was simply the power elites wanting to do the same thing but not get caught like Nixon. The act was nothing but a blatant "fuck you" to the restrictions on Federal power laid out by the Constitution, and the ability to keep most of it secret and thus avoid admonishment of civil libertarians.
And it's now starting to backfire, as evidenced by Manning, Wikileaks, Snowden, etc. Because with 4 million people with "top secret" clearance, including 500,000 private contractors, there are bound to be plenty that find the secret behavior of the government abhorrent, and a few with the guts to actually stand up and do something about it.
That's a good illustration of our system being one that features positive feedback loops. It has to keep getting worse until it collapses under its own weight.
The Republicans have been talking about starving the beast for a long time, often using it for their spending increases balanced with increased borrowing. Is the beast skinny now, or still fat? Looks fat to me.
It's best skinny, but Republicans gave up on trying to starve it a long time ago, and all they do now is fight with Democrats over where to get the fat from, and which body part to store it in.
"For every social problem A caused by government program X, problem A can be solved by abolishing program X."
Thereby creating Problem B, and worsening Problem Y, which was being alleviated by Program X.
Which of course is impossible, because "abolishing program X" is something that never happens. Instead, we get government program B to solve problem A, which then causes problem Y, and because program B is impossible to eliminate, we get government program Z, which creates problem C and so on and so on and here we are - with lunacy like the failed ethanol program that won't die, farm subsidies to rock stars (recently renewed AGAIN), and the PRISM program to fight terrorism, which was created by US foreign policy in the first place.
Germany here: The problem is: Our own BND is just as bad.
Russia here. WTF are you complaining about?
Aussie here, Bruce lost the tapes again, can one of you guys send us the backup?
Nigerian here, I have your tapes, and if you can kindly assist in repatriating my royal father's $37 million frozen asset to your account, we can certainly have a mutually beneficial relationship.
The indians in Manhattan sold the land for the meager price of $24 to [straightdope.com] US interests in 1626.
From the link:
There are some who would contend that $72 or even $24 for Manhattan was not such a hot bargain. These people are mostly Republicans.
LOL. Then there's this gem:
One popular history of Manhattan notes that the Canarsie Indians "dwelt on Long Island, merely trading on Manhattan, and their trickery [in selling what they didn't possess to the Dutch] made it necessary for the white man to buy part of the island over again from the tribes living near Washington Heights. Still more crafty were the Raritans of [Staten Island], for the records show that Staten Island was sold by these Indians no less than six times."
Thanks for the laugh. I guess the Native Americans where the original Brooklyn Bridge salesmen.
Soil, that's an issue. That would have to be a combination of fertilizer,humus,natural soil bacteria, nemotodes, fungi, insects, etc, and space dirt - rock dust from asteroid mining, lunar regolith, etc.
There are almost 6 billion people on Earth. The small folk can easily be converted to soil, as soon as they outlive their usefulness on the ships.
In that case, it is the wrong question. Humanity could build such a thing, but probably won't. Technically, it was already possible during the second world war (if you can build an intercontinental ballistic missile, you can build a spacecraft).
I don't think there was actually a functional ICBM available during WW2, although the V-2 came close, I don't think it was capable of achieving a stable orbit. If Germany's program had continued (that is, if they hadn't lost the war and all of their scientists to the US and USSR), it may have been achieved sooner. As it was, I don't think we had the technology until at least the mid-1950's.
Incorrect. They choose cheaper labor over more expensive labor. This is Business 101. No court in the land would rule for Plaintiff.
Fortunately for the plaintiff, they cannot use the "we wanted cheaper labor" defense, since they would then be subject to liability for falsely claiming that they could not find suitable local talent, the only justification for hiring using H1-B visas.
It's about time someone started calling out these companies for this crap. People keep telling their Congressional representatives the same thing, but all they hear are the corporations with big donation money. Maybe a few of these lawsuits will bring some attention to this obvious scam.
Yes, I get that outrageously off-topic federal laws are often justified under the Commerce Clause, but the OP specifically mentioned the individual health care mandate, which failed on Commerce Clause grounds. NFIB v. Sebelius actually put some serious limits on the use of Congress' authority under the Commerce Clause (finally).
Nope.
Drugs will never be legal until the entire system is changed to take the profit away from prohibition. Look at who benefits. Police departments get bigger budgets to militarise even more (for example, Maricopa County, AZ is the most famous one). Businesses are making money selling that military grade gear to 'law enforcement' organisations and individuals. Politicians keep office selling the fear of drug addicts to the voters. The list goes on and on and on. Follow the money, it's the only way you'll understand it all.
Fortunately, grass roots can beat money in a representative system almost every time. But as long as the people voting for representatives and pressuring them to pass laws think that people need to be protected from themselves, you'll never get enough folks supporting the end of prohibition. Some places don't even need representatives - the people can vote for ending prohibition themselves (California, for example), but, that's been tried, and the "people will harm themselves if we do this" marketing gimmicks worked on the voters even there.
help pay for the treatments of the hard luck cases.
Luck has nothing to do with it - it's a choice. I've had my own addictions (nicotine, caffeine), and vices, but I'm not delusional enough to blame someone else, or worse, "luck".
This attitude is why drugs will never be legalized in a rational fashion, because we refuse to hold people accountable for their own actions, instead preferring to blame "society" and "luck", thus the reasonable course of action is to make them illegal thus the nanny state can protect those people from themselves.
Until we start demanding personal responsibility from our citizens, the state will continue to view every potential harm as an opportunity to punish the innocent, which is what drug prohibition does.
Yes, and we always knew that individual law enforcement officer lied like this - and that even certain departments might be known for it. What we didn't know, was that this was being architected at a grander level and that people were actually being specifically trained to do this. Lying to the court is a crime. Hiding the provenance of evidence is a crime. These people are criminals and should be prosecuted. They won't be though. Nothing will come of it. Just like nothing will come of the NSA spying case.
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300 tons of contaminated water doesn't seem like a lot when you consider there are (roughly) 784,430,000,000,000,000.00 tons of water in the pacific ocean alone. I think I'll still eat fish...
Make that 300 tons of contaminated water per day, something that Japan's environmental agency says has been happening since very soon after the initial accident in March of 2011. According to NPR, the next plan is to dig a bunch of cooling pipes into the ground and create an underground "ice wall" to stop the contamination from flowing out in to the ocean. No, really
You can trivialize all you want, but if I were you I'd avoid eating the fish from anywhere near the Japanese coast, and anything that eats there during annual migrations. Could be bad for your health. Radioactivity builds up in plants and animals over time, and it's been pouring in for 2 1/2 years now.
If that isn't bad enough, a newly stated concern is the proximity of melted fuel in relation to the Tokyo aquifer that extends under the plant. If and when the corium reaches the Tokyo aquifer, there will be 40 million people in the Tokyo area without access to safe water.
Great, you have some exploratory studies that show potential research avenues for further looking into. Now compare those to the known negative effects of manure, and you'll have a more complete view of the topic.
Because Roundup has just as long and wide-spread history of use in human agriculture as manure?
In the case of Roundup, a lot of studies have been done testing the danger to human health, and it seems to be no more dangerous than manure.
Well, there have been a lot of studies run by Monsanto that seem to show that. But then there are other studies that show links to Parkinson's and Autism, cancer, degradation of soil nutrients, as well as lethal effects in amphibians, and perhaps most alarming, a recent study found roundup in the urine of 44% of European Union citizens. Not only that, but it seems that it is actually many of the adjucts used in Roundup applications that are being shown to have the most toxicity, an issue most of the studies completely ignore by studying only the glyphosate, instead of the entirety of the compounds being used in such abundance.
How is a government subsidized tradein for a new car destroying wealth? Seem more like aid in purchasing a capital good to me.
It wasn't the subsidy or the new car that destroyed capital, it was all the strings (like come attached to every government grant or subsidy). The "strings" in this case said that your trade-in, regardless of age or utility, had to be destroyed and crushed.
It even described how. First, you had to drain all the oil from the engine, add a sand/silica mixture to the cooling system, then you had to run the engine until it froze up. What was left of the car had to be crushed. This meant that not only were all those cars destroyed, but the ones left on the road are harder to find parts for because all the engine parts were destroyed and everything else was crushed. You can find lots of videos of engines being destroyed on the interwebs.
The value in all those destroyed cars was far greater than anything that was created by the incentives. And in the long term it hurts the poorest the most, who need transportation for jobs and keep their cars longer and rely on older cars to be reasonable to buy.
I think the OP was referring to the fact that it was the "first known human artifact to enter outer space."
It may have entered outer space, but that's useless for getting anything into orbit. The V-2, which was the longest-range missile at the time, was incapable of achieving orbit.
Well if you can trust the FBI
Oh, of course we can. It's not like they are faking it or anything.
They are still talking about starving it when they increase spending and decrease revenue. They were never trying to starve it, just spend now and wait for your children to pay it back later.
FTFY
The best thing everyone in reciept of such a gag order can do is publish or publisice it in the same way as any ordinary warrant served. They will try to prosecute, but in so doing they will have to put their law to the test. They don't want to do that -- yet. So, I'd hurry up and publish.
There have been some such cases, but the Feds always drop the case before it gets very far, because they know it won't stand up to public scrutiny before anything but the most statist-supportive judge.
No, a court like FISA can be compatible with them. As long as it's not allowed to be secretive and above public accountability. FISA was created to stop the abuses that Nixon did of abusing the intelligence services to spy on anyone he wanted. And until the Patriot Act it actually did a decent job of that.
Bullshit. If Nixon's abuses had anything at all to do with the eventual drafting of the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001," then it was simply the power elites wanting to do the same thing but not get caught like Nixon. The act was nothing but a blatant "fuck you" to the restrictions on Federal power laid out by the Constitution, and the ability to keep most of it secret and thus avoid admonishment of civil libertarians.
And it's now starting to backfire, as evidenced by Manning, Wikileaks, Snowden, etc. Because with 4 million people with "top secret" clearance, including 500,000 private contractors, there are bound to be plenty that find the secret behavior of the government abhorrent, and a few with the guts to actually stand up and do something about it.
That's a good illustration of our system being one that features positive feedback loops. It has to keep getting worse until it collapses under its own weight.
The Republicans have been talking about starving the beast for a long time, often using it for their spending increases balanced with increased borrowing. Is the beast skinny now, or still fat? Looks fat to me.
It's best skinny, but Republicans gave up on trying to starve it a long time ago, and all they do now is fight with Democrats over where to get the fat from, and which body part to store it in.
"For every social problem A caused by government program X, problem A can be solved by abolishing program X."
Thereby creating Problem B, and worsening Problem Y, which was being alleviated by Program X.
Which of course is impossible, because "abolishing program X" is something that never happens. Instead, we get government program B to solve problem A, which then causes problem Y, and because program B is impossible to eliminate, we get government program Z, which creates problem C and so on and so on and here we are - with lunacy like the failed ethanol program that won't die, farm subsidies to rock stars (recently renewed AGAIN), and the PRISM program to fight terrorism, which was created by US foreign policy in the first place.
Germany here: The problem is: Our own BND is just as bad.
Russia here. WTF are you complaining about?
Aussie here, Bruce lost the tapes again, can one of you guys send us the backup?
Nigerian here, I have your tapes, and if you can kindly assist in repatriating my royal father's $37 million frozen asset to your account, we can certainly have a mutually beneficial relationship.
The indians in Manhattan sold the land for the meager price of $24 to [straightdope.com] US interests in 1626.
From the link:
LOL. Then there's this gem:
Thanks for the laugh. I guess the Native Americans where the original Brooklyn Bridge salesmen.
Soil, that's an issue. That would have to be a combination of fertilizer,humus,natural soil bacteria, nemotodes, fungi, insects, etc, and space dirt - rock dust from asteroid mining, lunar regolith, etc.
There are almost 6 billion people on Earth. The small folk can easily be converted to soil, as soon as they outlive their usefulness on the ships.
In that case, it is the wrong question. Humanity could build such a thing, but probably won't. Technically, it was already possible during the second world war (if you can build an intercontinental ballistic missile, you can build a spacecraft).
I don't think there was actually a functional ICBM available during WW2, although the V-2 came close, I don't think it was capable of achieving a stable orbit. If Germany's program had continued (that is, if they hadn't lost the war and all of their scientists to the US and USSR), it may have been achieved sooner. As it was, I don't think we had the technology until at least the mid-1950's.
This made me laugh, and I almost gave you a Funny mod. But... grammar. s/b:
Man, even the quality of the trolls has gone way downhill.
Incorrect. They choose cheaper labor over more expensive labor. This is Business 101. No court in the land would rule for Plaintiff.
Fortunately for the plaintiff, they cannot use the "we wanted cheaper labor" defense, since they would then be subject to liability for falsely claiming that they could not find suitable local talent, the only justification for hiring using H1-B visas.
It's about time someone started calling out these companies for this crap. People keep telling their Congressional representatives the same thing, but all they hear are the corporations with big donation money. Maybe a few of these lawsuits will bring some attention to this obvious scam.
Booooo hissssss
Prior to ACA, it was Gonzales v. Raich and Raich lost on commerce clause grounds.
Yes, I get that outrageously off-topic federal laws are often justified under the Commerce Clause, but the OP specifically mentioned the individual health care mandate, which failed on Commerce Clause grounds. NFIB v. Sebelius actually put some serious limits on the use of Congress' authority under the Commerce Clause (finally).
Being surrounded by rednecks, hicks, and the Jesus fan club costs sanity.
Nothing like sheltered Yankees with no clue about life outside the beltway that they didn't learn from reruns of the Beverly Hillbillys. AMIRITE?
Nope. Drugs will never be legal until the entire system is changed to take the profit away from prohibition. Look at who benefits. Police departments get bigger budgets to militarise even more (for example, Maricopa County, AZ is the most famous one). Businesses are making money selling that military grade gear to 'law enforcement' organisations and individuals. Politicians keep office selling the fear of drug addicts to the voters. The list goes on and on and on. Follow the money, it's the only way you'll understand it all.
Fortunately, grass roots can beat money in a representative system almost every time. But as long as the people voting for representatives and pressuring them to pass laws think that people need to be protected from themselves, you'll never get enough folks supporting the end of prohibition. Some places don't even need representatives - the people can vote for ending prohibition themselves (California, for example), but, that's been tried, and the "people will harm themselves if we do this" marketing gimmicks worked on the voters even there.
help pay for the treatments of the hard luck cases.
Luck has nothing to do with it - it's a choice. I've had my own addictions (nicotine, caffeine), and vices, but I'm not delusional enough to blame someone else, or worse, "luck".
This attitude is why drugs will never be legalized in a rational fashion, because we refuse to hold people accountable for their own actions, instead preferring to blame "society" and "luck", thus the reasonable course of action is to make them illegal thus the nanny state can protect those people from themselves.
Until we start demanding personal responsibility from our citizens, the state will continue to view every potential harm as an opportunity to punish the innocent, which is what drug prohibition does.
They'll just leverage the interstate commerce clause as they did to justify the individual health care mandate.
That was the original argument, but it failed. It's currently justified as a tax.
Yes, and we always knew that individual law enforcement officer lied like this - and that even certain departments might be known for it. What we didn't know, was that this was being architected at a grander level and that people were actually being specifically trained to do this. Lying to the court is a crime. Hiding the provenance of evidence is a crime. These people are criminals and should be prosecuted. They won't be though. Nothing will come of it. Just like nothing will come of the NSA spying case.
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