Thing like this do make me pine for the days of actual switched circuits; when an airhorn, or even a really good whistle, could send enough signal and generate a loud enough noise to cause pain to the person on the other end, especially if they were wearing a headset. Yes, I know we're talking about robo-callers here. But they're almost always solicitations such that some keypress or another will connect you to someone in the organization calling you.
I quit watching the Walking Dead when all the human characters devolved into such a loathsome bunch that I was actually rooting for the zombies to kill them all... but they went the rest of the season without doing so. At least the most awful people in GoT qualify as magnificent bastards, not just bastards. And GoT does offer up some sympathetic characters like Tyrion, Daenerys, and Arya.
Really though, I'm hoping for some genuine Roddenberry-style optimism in the upcoming Star Trek series. I'm seriously burnt out on "dark, gritty, humanity at its worst".
> Like the new Star Trek being on Netflix should > reduce piracy outside the US.
And yet here in the US, they're still restricting it to their stupid "All Access" service. So it's apparent that they STILL don't understand that people don't want to have to go to "All Access" for this for one thing, HBO GO/Now for the next, Hulu Plus for another, Vudu for one more, then a VPN link to the UK and iPlayer, then FXnow, Amazon Prime for more, and of course Netflix, which is where it all belongs in the first place. Not to mention that all that required switching between my TV's built-in apps, the AppleTV, the PS4, the Chromecast, and the Macbook, depending on what service works where.
And all that's aside from Netflix's own asshattery that makes it necessary to VPN back home if you're traveling and need to kill time in an airport or hotel room.
Is it any wonder that so many people just give up and make TPB their next stop if something's not on Netflix? Somebody should really organize an old-fashioned Star Trek style mail-in campaign. But instead of "I grok Spock" bumper stickers; everybody prints out that Oatmeal comic about how hard it is to watch Game of Thrones and send that to the network executives.
Actually, yes. It's not at utterly foul as smoke. And, unlike smoke or "vape", it also doesn't carry unwanted drugs with it. But it's still pretty awful and tends to make me cough.
I'm not even sure how long it's been since I gave a flying crap about the olympics. But yeah, they're at least as big a collection of overtly corrupt scum as FIFA, and possibly even worse. Everyone associated in any way with both orgs could be sucked in their entirety into a gigantic sinkhole, never to be seen again, and nothing of value would be lost.
So, it's pretty clear to anyone who knows about things like the Earth being a spheroid exactly who the missiles in Romania are meant to defend against. And since the Russian's can by no means be said not to understand ballistics, rocketry, or great circle paths; it's equally clear that their objections to the ABMs in Romania are simple posturing for 100% political reasons that have nothing to do in any way with MAD or their own national security.
Upgrade callerID to use ANI or some other tech to prevent it from being spoofed or blocked; so we can find the bastards. Remove the exemption for charity and political fundraisers and pollsters. Remove the "existing relationship" loophole so that when you add your number the calls STOP unless you explicitly exempt them (And that exemption should be revocable.). Remove the 31-day wait when a number is added (Seriously, WTF? I'm not buying a gun here. I don't need a cooling-off period.) And crank up the penalties for violations such that it will hurt even a SuperPAC... maybe add in some criminal penalties too.
The first Alien movie... the one with Kane and the Nostromo... was directed by Ridley Scott, not James Cameron.
FFS, Slashdot. Why the head do you call yourself editors if you can't be bothered to, you know, edit. If you're going on posting this luddite, "Oh noes, substanceless technology is disconnecting us from reality." crap, at least get the basic facts upon which you're basing your argument correct.
Well, I doubt that Google would do so at the behest of China's government considering that Google gave them the finger and walked away from their market a few years ago, rather than censor and spy on their users.
And, as someone else pointed out, the government doesn't get its military intel from Google.
The interesting thing with Bernie vs. Hillary is for all of the specious hate from the Bernie Bros, how similar their positions really are. Over the course of the primaries, I took a fair number of those "which candidate matched my positions" quizzes; on of the more comprehensive literally being "isidewith.com".
Not that I needed the sites to know I'd be voting Sanders in the primary, and whichever Democrat got the nomination in the general. But it was nice to have all their positions consolidated in one convenient place. No surprise, I came up with a 97% match with Sanders. Thing is, Clinton was still a 90% match. And while that's not as good as Sanders, obviously, it's still a A; barely, but still an A. The highest-rated republican was John Katich, with a score in the 50s'; already an F. Trump was somewhere in the 20s; a catastrophically failing grade.
If the republican candidate were someone like Schwarzenegger, who I guesstimate would come in somewhere in the low-to-mid 80s; I might even cross the aisle come November. Because, to be perfectly honest, Hillary does have issues and as a general principal, I don't like political dynasties and anointed dauphins, be they Bushes, Clintons, or even Kennedys. But vs Trump? The decision is crystal clear.
It's not just me. Literally everyone I know is better off now than we were under Bush. I scroll down through my friends list in Facebook and it's:
"Income has more than doubled" "Got her dream job at Tesla" "Escaped from ohio and works as a game developer" "Just bought a house" "Successfully started her own business and is helping her brother do the same" "Escaped the dead-end banking job and now runs the finances for a startup" "Advanced from Jr. QA tester to Sr. Test Automation Engineer" "Got his citizenship" "Finally found a partner and, thanks to the recent SCOTUS ruling striking down prop 8, was able to marry." "Just successfully defended his dissertation" "Moved from ohio and works as an embedded systems engineer" (Come to think of it, is kind of weird how many people I know moved here from ohio. I can think of at least four, off the top of my head. Not that I ever doubted that it must be a pretty dreary place though. So who can blame them?) And so on and so on and so on.
And we're hardly "privileged 1%-er Wall Street oppressors". We're just a bunch of ordinary people living our lives. In fact, according to salary.com, I'm now a touch below the median for my position/experience. And that's because salaries have been going up, and it's ALWAYS been the case that most companies issue raises slower than average salaries increase and you have to change jobs to chase the curve. Scrolling to the bottom of the list, the only way I can see that any of us are worse off now is that we're all eight years older and some of us have had health problems in that time; both of which fall under the category of "life happens".
Actually, yes. I was in the Castro when the BLM crowd decided to attack the bars and clubs there last year (It was January or February I think; definitely winter tho. So we're up to at least a year and a half, not just the "past few months" you mention.). My friends and I made ourselves scarce and moved our night out to Ruby Skye. It was obnoxious and they're a bunch of tools for lashing out and attacking random uninvolved third parties... and raging hypocrites for targeting the LGBT community... instead of staying focused on the police. At the same time though, they have a 100% valid and legit complaint. The police's abuse of the african american community is totally unacceptable. It's almost as if black people are being gunned down for sport by the cops at this point. And it absolutely has to stop.
But it's neither Obama's nor Bush's fault. It's the police's. This has been going on far longer than the presidencies of either. And I don't believe for a second that the situation is worse now than before. It's just that pretty much everyone has a camera built into their phone now, and it's far more common for their abuses to be brought to light.
It's a subconscious reflex caused by the accent. Even a complete dolt sounds intelligent and authoritative when speaking in the Received Pronunciation (ie. BBC English). The RP adds a few points to the default sexiness of the speaker as well.
> Trump would be a disaster... ok, but that doesn't > mean Hillary would be a disaster is any less true.
The most damning criticism of Hillary I've heard (And I hear a LOT of them. I count a number of hardcore Bernie Sanders supporters amongst my friends, and bashing Hillary on Facebook seems to be a full-time job for some of them.)... aside from the whole-cloth inventions from the fox "news" crowd anyway... is that she "represents the status quo" and "four more years of Obama" and that she's "the DNC establishment candidate".
Now, I voted for Sanders in the primary as well, and I would have preferred him as the nominee. But, you know what? The status quo of four more years of Obama policies wouldn't actually be that bad. Granted, we're not where we wanted to be by the end of his term when we elected him. He squandered a lot opportunity for progress, during the two years he controlled congress, by trying to be friendly with the republicans instead of shoving them aside and getting things done. And he's been hampered by their obstructionism ever since. He's not a perfect president, and he's not had a perfect term.
The more fair measure it to compare his term to what we had before. We're mired in fewer overseas conflicts and have fewer troops deployed in the ones we are involved in. The economy has not just rebounded, it's soared. Unemployment is at record lows. Recruiters solicit on email and LinkedIn daily. Some persistently enough to hunt down my, and several coworkers', work email and phone number. For it's faults... and the ACA does have them... we have universal health care. We've made a great deal of progress in civil rights for the LGBT community. And Osama bin Laden's dead ass is somewhere at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
Yes. We still have problems. The millennials are graduating with too much student debt. ENDA is not yet passed. Obamacare stopped short of a public option, much less single payer. Terrorism is still a thing. The housing market has actually rebounded too much, driving prices up to troublesome levels. And even after the Orlando massacre, the politician who's grown enough of a pair to tell the NRA to go fuck itself and actually work on fixing our gun problem is still a rare beast indeed.
But at the end of the day, when I compare the Obama years to the Bush years and contemplate the notion of eight more years of similar policy and progress, I think of the old talking point from the enemy side, and ask "Are we better off now than we were eight years ago?". And the answer is most definitely yes.
Autopilots are a specific set of technologies that have existed for many decades, have a known and long-established use case, and whose limitations are likewise well known, documented, and understood (by non-morons). There's no case for the use of the term "autopilot" to be false advertising or making promises that the technology is incapable of meeting. This is not the case when a promise of "unlimited" whatever is made.
An example of Tesla falsely advertising or reneging on its claims would be if they terminated the unlimited use of the supercharger network for Model S owners. But that's not happened, is it?
Seriously? With a username like "speedplane" you don't know anything about pre-Tesla autopilots, their capabilities, and their limitations? Autopilot, in a Tesla or a Boeing or anything else, means a set of functionality to reduce your workload by holding attitude and speed, and maybe to make course corrections. It does not mean 100% full-time hands-off operation while it engages you in witty banter with the voice of Anthony Daniels.
Some of us though have parents who gave away our NES and game collections during that year in college that we lived in the dorms before grouping up and getting our own apartments off-campus where we could have brought our old Nintendos.
Or, he's level-headed and pragmatic enough to understand that for whatever Clinton's faults; genuine, imagined, or made up from whole cloth by the republicans:
1) Trump would be incomparably and catastrophically worse. 2) He's not going to be the Democratic party nominee. 3) We live in the real world, and not some Fantasyland where a third-party or write-in candidacy would be viable.
Clinton wasn't my first choice either. But I'm not going to sit at home pouting in November, content to let the country burn, because the majority of the Democratic party didn't also want Sanders to be the candidate. Apparently, Sanders agrees with that sentiment.
Australia managed. And considering that pretty much everything on the continent that walks, slithers, crawls, swims, flys, or hops has at least the desire, and usually the ability, to kill you... often horrifically painfully; they had far more legitimate use for firearms than we do here.
Yeah. And when you scope out the very chart you linked to, that same rate during the 1950s and 1960s shows that metric barely ever climbing over 60%, only starting to rise about halfway into the 1970s. It plateaued in the 1990s and has been on a gradual decline since 2002.
That big hump couldn't have anything at all to do with the baby boomer generation entering the workforce en-masse in the '70s, and now starting to retire. Nope. It's all Obama's fault. That's the ticket.
Also, one point to bring up with the problems of Brave New World, or with the criticism of a scientific and rational society in general is: Compared to what? It's not like we've ever actually *tried* a 100% evidence-based, dispassionate, and rational form of government before.
Compared to what we have now? Brave New World starts to look pretty good. And remember that the misfits, weirdos, and free-thinkers in Brave New World aren't purged or anything. They get to go off and live in the Canaries, Azores, Hawaii, Polynesia, and New Zealand. Not a bad deal, I'd say.
(Yes. I know. One of the protagonists did wind up in the Falklands. But he ASKED to be sent there, as opposed to some place more clement.)
As opposed to what though? Right now, it's lawyers, lobbyists, theocrats, and corporate puppet-masters. And that lot is hardly doing a good job.
The current presidential lineup consists of a rabidly bigoted and xenophobic oompa-loompa of a reality television star who's 10-second-soundbite-ed himself into the republican candidacy; vs. an uninspiring "dynasty" candidate who enjoys power far too much, is possibly a crook, and whose primary merit is: "Well, at least she's nowhere near as awful as that other freak-show."? And that's just the headliners. I wonder what their VP picks will be? Trump/Snooki? Hillary Clinton/Michael Milken?
Whatever their faults, if it were a possibility in reality, I'd sure give a Doc Brown/Mr. Spock ticket a try.
Then you re-examine and refine your model based on new evidence and observations as time goes on. Newton's laws of motion are no less valid, fundamental, or revered since Einstein pointed out that things get somewhat squirrelly once you get velocities of a sufficient fraction of light speed. Nor is Einstein invalidated by Hawking pointing out that things get *really* weird when black holes are involved. The flat-earth and geocentric-universe people, on the other hand...
Slashdot Mirror
Thing like this do make me pine for the days of actual switched circuits; when an airhorn, or even a really good whistle, could send enough signal and generate a loud enough noise to cause pain to the person on the other end, especially if they were wearing a headset. Yes, I know we're talking about robo-callers here. But they're almost always solicitations such that some keypress or another will connect you to someone in the organization calling you.
... when I was brought aboard. The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
I quit watching the Walking Dead when all the human characters devolved into such a loathsome bunch that I was actually rooting for the zombies to kill them all... but they went the rest of the season without doing so. At least the most awful people in GoT qualify as magnificent bastards, not just bastards. And GoT does offer up some sympathetic characters like Tyrion, Daenerys, and Arya.
Really though, I'm hoping for some genuine Roddenberry-style optimism in the upcoming Star Trek series. I'm seriously burnt out on "dark, gritty, humanity at its worst".
> Like the new Star Trek being on Netflix should
> reduce piracy outside the US.
And yet here in the US, they're still restricting it to their stupid "All Access" service. So it's apparent that they STILL don't understand that people don't want to have to go to "All Access" for this for one thing, HBO GO/Now for the next, Hulu Plus for another, Vudu for one more, then a VPN link to the UK and iPlayer, then FXnow, Amazon Prime for more, and of course Netflix, which is where it all belongs in the first place. Not to mention that all that required switching between my TV's built-in apps, the AppleTV, the PS4, the Chromecast, and the Macbook, depending on what service works where.
And all that's aside from Netflix's own asshattery that makes it necessary to VPN back home if you're traveling and need to kill time in an airport or hotel room.
Is it any wonder that so many people just give up and make TPB their next stop if something's not on Netflix? Somebody should really organize an old-fashioned Star Trek style mail-in campaign. But instead of "I grok Spock" bumper stickers; everybody prints out that Oatmeal comic about how hard it is to watch Game of Thrones and send that to the network executives.
Actually, yes. It's not at utterly foul as smoke. And, unlike smoke or "vape", it also doesn't carry unwanted drugs with it. But it's still pretty awful and tends to make me cough.
I'm not even sure how long it's been since I gave a flying crap about the olympics. But yeah, they're at least as big a collection of overtly corrupt scum as FIFA, and possibly even worse. Everyone associated in any way with both orgs could be sucked in their entirety into a gigantic sinkhole, never to be seen again, and nothing of value would be lost.
> The US installing a "missile shield" in Romania has
> nothing to do with North Korea, though.
No, but they're pretty close to the trajectory that Iran would use if their nuclear program were to succeed:
http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=o...
And they're completely useless against Russia:
http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=u...
So, it's pretty clear to anyone who knows about things like the Earth being a spheroid exactly who the missiles in Romania are meant to defend against. And since the Russian's can by no means be said not to understand ballistics, rocketry, or great circle paths; it's equally clear that their objections to the ABMs in Romania are simple posturing for 100% political reasons that have nothing to do in any way with MAD or their own national security.
Put some teeth into the do-not-call list:
Upgrade callerID to use ANI or some other tech to prevent it from being spoofed or blocked; so we can find the bastards. Remove the exemption for charity and political fundraisers and pollsters. Remove the "existing relationship" loophole so that when you add your number the calls STOP unless you explicitly exempt them (And that exemption should be revocable.). Remove the 31-day wait when a number is added (Seriously, WTF? I'm not buying a gun here. I don't need a cooling-off period.) And crank up the penalties for violations such that it will hurt even a SuperPAC... maybe add in some criminal penalties too.
The first Alien movie... the one with Kane and the Nostromo... was directed by Ridley Scott, not James Cameron.
FFS, Slashdot. Why the head do you call yourself editors if you can't be bothered to, you know, edit. If you're going on posting this luddite, "Oh noes, substanceless technology is disconnecting us from reality." crap, at least get the basic facts upon which you're basing your argument correct.
In fairness, there are cool things to do in the South Bay, and even on the peninsula. Not that tourists would know about them by default though.
Well, I doubt that Google would do so at the behest of China's government considering that Google gave them the finger and walked away from their market a few years ago, rather than censor and spy on their users.
And, as someone else pointed out, the government doesn't get its military intel from Google.
The interesting thing with Bernie vs. Hillary is for all of the specious hate from the Bernie Bros, how similar their positions really are. Over the course of the primaries, I took a fair number of those "which candidate matched my positions" quizzes; on of the more comprehensive literally being "isidewith.com".
Not that I needed the sites to know I'd be voting Sanders in the primary, and whichever Democrat got the nomination in the general. But it was nice to have all their positions consolidated in one convenient place. No surprise, I came up with a 97% match with Sanders. Thing is, Clinton was still a 90% match. And while that's not as good as Sanders, obviously, it's still a A; barely, but still an A. The highest-rated republican was John Katich, with a score in the 50s'; already an F. Trump was somewhere in the 20s; a catastrophically failing grade.
If the republican candidate were someone like Schwarzenegger, who I guesstimate would come in somewhere in the low-to-mid 80s; I might even cross the aisle come November. Because, to be perfectly honest, Hillary does have issues and as a general principal, I don't like political dynasties and anointed dauphins, be they Bushes, Clintons, or even Kennedys. But vs Trump? The decision is crystal clear.
It's not just me. Literally everyone I know is better off now than we were under Bush. I scroll down through my friends list in Facebook and it's:
"Income has more than doubled"
"Got her dream job at Tesla"
"Escaped from ohio and works as a game developer"
"Just bought a house"
"Successfully started her own business and is helping her brother do the same"
"Escaped the dead-end banking job and now runs the finances for a startup"
"Advanced from Jr. QA tester to Sr. Test Automation Engineer"
"Got his citizenship"
"Finally found a partner and, thanks to the recent SCOTUS ruling striking down prop 8, was able to marry."
"Just successfully defended his dissertation"
"Moved from ohio and works as an embedded systems engineer" (Come to think of it, is kind of weird how many people I know moved here from ohio. I can think of at least four, off the top of my head. Not that I ever doubted that it must be a pretty dreary place though. So who can blame them?)
And so on and so on and so on.
And we're hardly "privileged 1%-er Wall Street oppressors". We're just a bunch of ordinary people living our lives. In fact, according to salary.com, I'm now a touch below the median for my position/experience. And that's because salaries have been going up, and it's ALWAYS been the case that most companies issue raises slower than average salaries increase and you have to change jobs to chase the curve. Scrolling to the bottom of the list, the only way I can see that any of us are worse off now is that we're all eight years older and some of us have had health problems in that time; both of which fall under the category of "life happens".
Actually, yes. I was in the Castro when the BLM crowd decided to attack the bars and clubs there last year (It was January or February I think; definitely winter tho. So we're up to at least a year and a half, not just the "past few months" you mention.). My friends and I made ourselves scarce and moved our night out to Ruby Skye. It was obnoxious and they're a bunch of tools for lashing out and attacking random uninvolved third parties... and raging hypocrites for targeting the LGBT community... instead of staying focused on the police. At the same time though, they have a 100% valid and legit complaint. The police's abuse of the african american community is totally unacceptable. It's almost as if black people are being gunned down for sport by the cops at this point. And it absolutely has to stop.
But it's neither Obama's nor Bush's fault. It's the police's. This has been going on far longer than the presidencies of either. And I don't believe for a second that the situation is worse now than before. It's just that pretty much everyone has a camera built into their phone now, and it's far more common for their abuses to be brought to light.
It's a subconscious reflex caused by the accent. Even a complete dolt sounds intelligent and authoritative when speaking in the Received Pronunciation (ie. BBC English). The RP adds a few points to the default sexiness of the speaker as well.
> Trump would be a disaster... ok, but that doesn't
> mean Hillary would be a disaster is any less true.
The most damning criticism of Hillary I've heard (And I hear a LOT of them. I count a number of hardcore Bernie Sanders supporters amongst my friends, and bashing Hillary on Facebook seems to be a full-time job for some of them.)... aside from the whole-cloth inventions from the fox "news" crowd anyway... is that she "represents the status quo" and "four more years of Obama" and that she's "the DNC establishment candidate".
Now, I voted for Sanders in the primary as well, and I would have preferred him as the nominee. But, you know what? The status quo of four more years of Obama policies wouldn't actually be that bad. Granted, we're not where we wanted to be by the end of his term when we elected him. He squandered a lot opportunity for progress, during the two years he controlled congress, by trying to be friendly with the republicans instead of shoving them aside and getting things done. And he's been hampered by their obstructionism ever since. He's not a perfect president, and he's not had a perfect term.
The more fair measure it to compare his term to what we had before. We're mired in fewer overseas conflicts and have fewer troops deployed in the ones we are involved in. The economy has not just rebounded, it's soared. Unemployment is at record lows. Recruiters solicit on email and LinkedIn daily. Some persistently enough to hunt down my, and several coworkers', work email and phone number. For it's faults... and the ACA does have them... we have universal health care. We've made a great deal of progress in civil rights for the LGBT community. And Osama bin Laden's dead ass is somewhere at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
Yes. We still have problems. The millennials are graduating with too much student debt. ENDA is not yet passed. Obamacare stopped short of a public option, much less single payer. Terrorism is still a thing. The housing market has actually rebounded too much, driving prices up to troublesome levels. And even after the Orlando massacre, the politician who's grown enough of a pair to tell the NRA to go fuck itself and actually work on fixing our gun problem is still a rare beast indeed.
But at the end of the day, when I compare the Obama years to the Bush years and contemplate the notion of eight more years of similar policy and progress, I think of the old talking point from the enemy side, and ask "Are we better off now than we were eight years ago?". And the answer is most definitely yes.
Autopilots are a specific set of technologies that have existed for many decades, have a known and long-established use case, and whose limitations are likewise well known, documented, and understood (by non-morons). There's no case for the use of the term "autopilot" to be false advertising or making promises that the technology is incapable of meeting. This is not the case when a promise of "unlimited" whatever is made.
An example of Tesla falsely advertising or reneging on its claims would be if they terminated the unlimited use of the supercharger network for Model S owners. But that's not happened, is it?
Seriously? With a username like "speedplane" you don't know anything about pre-Tesla autopilots, their capabilities, and their limitations? Autopilot, in a Tesla or a Boeing or anything else, means a set of functionality to reduce your workload by holding attitude and speed, and maybe to make course corrections. It does not mean 100% full-time hands-off operation while it engages you in witty banter with the voice of Anthony Daniels.
Some of us though have parents who gave away our NES and game collections during that year in college that we lived in the dorms before grouping up and getting our own apartments off-campus where we could have brought our old Nintendos.
Or, he's level-headed and pragmatic enough to understand that for whatever Clinton's faults; genuine, imagined, or made up from whole cloth by the republicans:
1) Trump would be incomparably and catastrophically worse.
2) He's not going to be the Democratic party nominee.
3) We live in the real world, and not some Fantasyland where a third-party or write-in candidacy would be viable.
Clinton wasn't my first choice either. But I'm not going to sit at home pouting in November, content to let the country burn, because the majority of the Democratic party didn't also want Sanders to be the candidate. Apparently, Sanders agrees with that sentiment.
Australia managed. And considering that pretty much everything on the continent that walks, slithers, crawls, swims, flys, or hops has at least the desire, and usually the ability, to kill you... often horrifically painfully; they had far more legitimate use for firearms than we do here.
Yeah. And when you scope out the very chart you linked to, that same rate during the 1950s and 1960s shows that metric barely ever climbing over 60%, only starting to rise about halfway into the 1970s. It plateaued in the 1990s and has been on a gradual decline since 2002.
That big hump couldn't have anything at all to do with the baby boomer generation entering the workforce en-masse in the '70s, and now starting to retire. Nope. It's all Obama's fault. That's the ticket.
Also, one point to bring up with the problems of Brave New World, or with the criticism of a scientific and rational society in general is: Compared to what? It's not like we've ever actually *tried* a 100% evidence-based, dispassionate, and rational form of government before.
Compared to what we have now? Brave New World starts to look pretty good. And remember that the misfits, weirdos, and free-thinkers in Brave New World aren't purged or anything. They get to go off and live in the Canaries, Azores, Hawaii, Polynesia, and New Zealand. Not a bad deal, I'd say.
(Yes. I know. One of the protagonists did wind up in the Falklands. But he ASKED to be sent there, as opposed to some place more clement.)
As opposed to what though? Right now, it's lawyers, lobbyists, theocrats, and corporate puppet-masters. And that lot is hardly doing a good job.
The current presidential lineup consists of a rabidly bigoted and xenophobic oompa-loompa of a reality television star who's 10-second-soundbite-ed himself into the republican candidacy; vs. an uninspiring "dynasty" candidate who enjoys power far too much, is possibly a crook, and whose primary merit is: "Well, at least she's nowhere near as awful as that other freak-show."? And that's just the headliners. I wonder what their VP picks will be? Trump/Snooki? Hillary Clinton/Michael Milken?
Whatever their faults, if it were a possibility in reality, I'd sure give a Doc Brown/Mr. Spock ticket a try.
Then you re-examine and refine your model based on new evidence and observations as time goes on. Newton's laws of motion are no less valid, fundamental, or revered since Einstein pointed out that things get somewhat squirrelly once you get velocities of a sufficient fraction of light speed. Nor is Einstein invalidated by Hawking pointing out that things get *really* weird when black holes are involved. The flat-earth and geocentric-universe people, on the other hand...