Syria is the only country named in the order. The other 6 were part of a law that Obama signed a year or two ago. But now the lefties are demanding that more majority-Muslim countries be added to the list, just like you did here.
Lemme bold a different part of this one incongruent line: (Incongruent? Yup. Readers are encouraged to find and read the entire section for themselves. Many of the citations in this section are books, and several of them are very well worth the read.)
These viewpoints are considered by most scholars to be fringe revisionist history.[158] Challenging efforts aimed at the "rehabilitation" of McCarthy, Haynes argues that McCarthy's attempts to "make anti-communism a partisan weapon" actually "threatened [the post-War] anti-Communist consensus", thereby ultimately harming anti-Communist efforts more than helping.[159]
So, the guy who was hunting for communists damaged the effort to remove communists from the government, and you take this as meaning that there were no communists in the government. OK.
Perhaps a better interpretation is that the public thought he was mean because they were kept in the dark about the true extent of the infiltration.
It is rapidly looking like the new left has taken up the playbook of the old right (and by old, I am starting to worry we are talking german mid 1930s..).
Germany, mid 1930s, right-wing... Deutsche Zentrumspartei? It has center in the name, which makes it far right by the standards of the time and place. I'm not positive, but I think that this was the only part that wasn't hard-left that had any influence to speak of in that era. Well, unless your political chart looks like this one.
It wasn't a small number, and it wasn't just spies.
Diplomat George Kennan drew on his State Department experience to provide his view that "The penetration of the American governmental services by members or agents (conscious or otherwise) of the American Communist Party in the late 1930s was not a figment of the imagination... it really existed; and it assumed proportions which, while never overwhelming, were also not trivial." Kennan wrote that under the Roosevelt administration: "warnings which should have been heeded fell too often on deaf or incredulous ears." However, Kennan made his assessment before the revelation of the Venona decrypts. The facts in the Venona documents were damning. The previous cautious assessments had to be revised. Not a few "but hundreds of American Communists abetted Soviet espionage in the United Statesâ in the 1930s and 1940s. No modern government had been more thoroughly penetrated. Plus, only a tiny fraction of the Venona intercepts have been decrypted (about 3%), so no one knows the entire extent of the penetration. All anyone can know for sure is that the Soviet penetration into the United States government was massive.
Replace this one with "At government education." McCarthy was completely and totally vindicated by the Venona files, and also by KGB files after the breakup of the Soviet Union. This was more than 20 years ago, and for some reason government schools are still teaching that he was a bad guy chasing after imaginary witches.
Your other examples are mixed, but this one is beyond doubt.
Well, fiction isn't necessarily the right word. Some parts of it are technically true, but misleading. Consider the unemployment numbers. You always imagine that number to be the portion of the country that needs a job. But it isn't, the headline number is the portion of the country receiving unemployment payments - which are time limited, and which go away if a person gets a part time job, etc, etc. In other words, it is a useful figure for short term fluctuations, but a lousy measurement for a multi-year malaise.
The labor statistics (headline name "job growth" or "new jobs") are a joke. They are allegedly based on estimates and get corrected as harder numbers come in. The initial estimates get all of the attention, and the corrections come silently and in the dark of night weeks and months later. Not surprisingly, for several years the corrections have nearly all been in the negative direction - meaning that the attention grabbing headline numbers have all been hopelessly inflated.
And anything involving the money supply or inflation gets redefined now and then to obscure comparisons to the past. And things like the CPI are hopeless, and would be even if managed by a perfectly honest angel. ShadowStats.com maintains, when possible, new data calculated using the historic formulas, giving as much continuity as possible. But I think it is a pay site now.
I disagree. I think the left has been too peaceful, too moderate, and too open. If they want to win in 2020, they need to get to work now on being more violent, more extreme and more insular. (2018 is a write-off, and it would be even if they were organized properly today.)
Everyone knows that Hillary's primary win was a sham. The voters wanted Bernie, the Communist, not Hillary, the crook. But Hillary is powerless now, and Bernie probably won't run again. They need to be searching, and searching now, for someone who is like Bernie, but even more. Someone who can tear down Trump's wall. Someone who can invite in even more peasants that Americans doesn't want but desperately need. Someone who can finally drive the final stake through the greedy heart of medical progress and get us single-payer.
Finding that person is going to be difficult because the power struggle between the Clintons and the Obamas had a lot of casualties, and now the roster of rising stars in the Democrat party is pretty thin. Someone new needs to show up, ideally a prominent rioter. Obama was all talk. He talked shit about America, but he never did anything about it. The new leader needs to be a do-er, and what better way to show commitment to the cause than by smashing a Starbucks window, or looting a ghetto liquor store?
Those cover extreme and violent. The last key ingredient is insularity. Everyone needs to cut themselves off from people that don't agree with them. No talking to Americans. No listening to AM radio. No Breitbart, but that one hardly needs to be said. Their only contact with dissenting opinions should be when they beat up people trying to attend Republican rallies or conventions. Properly isolated like this, no negativity will be able to penetrate the bubble, and the next election will be a sure thing, just like 2016 was.
perhaps unsurprisingly coal actually kills the most birds.
Huge numbers of birds, roughly 7.9 million, may be killed by coal, according to analysis by Benjamin K. Sovacool, director of the Danish Center for Energy Technologies. His estimate, however, included everything from mining to production and climate change, which together amounted to about five birds per gigawatt-hour of energy generated by coal.
I howled with laughter dude. Violent Democrat thugs have been attacking us and making death threats against us for a long, long time. Blaming it on Trump now is hilariously novel.
Now, your turn. When has Trump ever encouraged people to be violent? For that matter, when have Trump supporters even been violent? When did Trump supporters chase down and beat up Democrats? When did Republican riots force Bernie to cancel a campaign event?
A riot is a form of civil disorder commonly characterized by a group lashing out in a violent public disturbance against authority, property or people. Riots typically involve vandalism and the destruction of property, public or private. The property targeted varies depending on the riot and the inclinations of those involved. Targets can include shops, cars, restaurants, state-owned institutions, and religious buildings.
To answer your question: no, tweeting and speaking are not riots.
Trump is probably as close to a working class president as we are ever going to see. He isn't working class himself, he wasn't born into a working class family, he doesn't pretend to be working class or have the same tastes as working class people.
But he also doesn't treat them like dogshit to be scraped off of his shoe.
If there is one thing that the left has shown consistently over the last 50 years or so, it is that their idea of civility is doing exactly what they say.
Obama's idea of taking the high road was to make speeches about how he's inviting Republicans to abandon their principles and do exactly what he wants, while he and his party called them terrorists and arsonists if they disagreed in any meaningful way. Meanwhile, every single fucking office of the federal government was turned into a weapon to be used against those who opposed him or his policies.
He ranted and raved about the evils of Fox news and talk radio - and those Americans that watch and listen to them. His IRS targeted and suppressed conservatives groups, arguably costing Romney the election in 2012. His administration spied on the press and destroyed the lives of whistleblowers. He ordered the assassination of American citizens overseas. His goons torched buildings and cattle in the west and damn near murdered several ranchers - and that's not even counting their attempt to Ruby Ridge the Bundy family. His prosecutors smeared and vilified policemen who had the audacity to protect their own lives from murderous thugs while he fanned the flames on TV. While losing in the courts and legislature, he used every executive tool he had available to hinder, harass and annoy gun owners.
If that is your idea of civility, I think you'll find that we've had all of it that we are going to take for a good long while.
Actually it isn't unclear at all. The owners (usually dozens or hundreds of them) are joint owners in all regards except that they can't unilaterally decide to sell the parcel.
What is unclear is how to divvy up the property taxes. Hawaii's property tax system is the second worst in the country, in terms of complexity. (Minnesota is still king, for totally different reasons.) But the software they use is perfectly capable of managing arbitrary numbers of co-owners per parcel.
I'm pretty sure Hawaii switched entirely to Torrens because of this, so the problem at least is not getting any worse. In a deed system, ownership is attested by documents which aren't necessarily known to outside parties. In theory, under that system, someone could show up today with a 100 year old deed showing that the owner at the time sold it all privately before he died, which would invalidate the heir's claims and all subsequent sales. In Torrens, ownership is centrally recorded (at the county or whatever) and sales are done by instructing the recorder to update their ownership records.
Did you actually read my post, or did you just skim it for keywords to trigger on?
I'm not threatening violence, I'm predicting it, conditional on circumstances that I don't expect to happen. And I'm not blaming the victims of said potential violence for damaging the character of the potential perpetrators, I'm lamenting it. If the day comes when tyranny needs to be physically removed from our nation, the tools of said tyranny are not going to fare well, even though they are victims too.
Further, I'm not saying that we shouldn't stand up for the people with actual medical problems, I'm saying that we should stand up for them by dividing them from the people that do not have medical issues. Right now, they are hopelessly entangled, to the detriment of both groups, for the gain of a third group that seeks to use them for political gain.
You may be relieved to hear that I also have sympathy for useful idiots like yourself. (Google that phrase before you take it as a personal insult.)
Alt-right here with my take on things. We aren't monolithic, so not everyone alt-right agrees with all, or even necessarily any, of this.
Real disorder. Fake treatment. ( -- When I started writing, I had intended those four words to be the entire post.) Notice that other dismorphic disorders, like anorexia, aren't "treated" by indulging the fantasies of the sufferer. Doctors don't prescribe lap bands for people who think they are fat when they aren't. But gender dismorphia is a political weapon now, much to the detriment of the people who suffer from it, and so anyone who doesn't think we should castrate men who think they are women is an awful bigot.
If we were honest about this topic, we would notice that suicide rates increase dramatically a few years after surgery - ending up even higher than pre-surgery levels. It appears that for many people denied psychiatric treatment, surgery was a false hope. When it sinks in that surgery did not fix anything, and there are no other options left, despair sets in.
Perversely, at this stage, re-stigmatizing the condition is the most compassionate thing that can be done. Stigmatize isn't the right word exactly, but sadly, we are unlikely to gradually return to reality, so the pendulum is going to swing back too far. If we do it soon, the "swing back too far" won't be too bad - we can clear the pipeline of those merely confused, those seeking attention and those that are the suffering as a result of someone else's Munchausen-by-proxy. Let it go too far left though, and the pushback is likely to be violent, which will hurt those in genuine need of compassion the most, but will also damage the civic character immensely.
At any rate, Chelsea Manning appears to be a traitor in his heart. Snowden appears to have acted towards what he believed was best for the American people. He was flawed, and he made mistakes, but was basically going in the right direction for the right reasons, and he took some care to avoid unnecessary damage. Chealsea, on the other hand, appears to have acted out of malice, with a goal of causing as much damage on the way out as he could. He may have done some good incidentally, but blowing the whistle doesn't seem to have been on his radar until he realized that it could earn him some sympathy. At least that was my impression at the time, when I was flipping randomly through the documents.
P.S. Sorry, this isn't up to my usual proofreading standards. Been a long day and I'm yawning as I try to read it. I hope it is less sleep-inducing for you readers than it was for me to write.
Apparently you've never looked at wikipedia history before. Take a look at this first mention. Hmm, that page was created 9 months before winning a national office. Flynn's first mention was 84 months before he was up a national office. And even big complicated pages start with little tiny nuggets.
And there is a note on the top...
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by ChildofMidnight (talk | contribs) at 18:44, 5 January 2010...
If only you had kept reading... The stuff that you elided is very important to understanding what you were looking at.
First, you know that the pee memos were made up by 4chan, right? And that story's inclusion in a document (the one you linked) written by the fake news company behind all of the "1 simple trick to get you to click this link" ads does not exactly say good things about their sources or verification?
And second...
the building makes approximately $20 million a year in rent and was worth $500 million in 2008... the building's cash flow in 2014 was $104,000. During the previous three years, in the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis, it had negative cash flow of $5.5 million.....On financial disclosure forms filed with the Federal Election Commission, the Republican presidential candidate listed the property's income at more than $5 million, the highest category on the form
I put those back in order for you. Still don't see it? Try this version:
2008, height of the boom: +20 million. 2009-2010, "the end of the world": ??? 2011-2013, 3 years waiting for the recovery: negative 1.8 million (average) 2014, back in black, but just barely: +104,000 2015, healthy, but not back to pre-bust levels: +5 million
I'd be more skeptical about these numbers if not for the thousands of stories in the financial press about the crash and recovery of CRE that map out this exact same roller coaster in all of the markets in the US.
As for Michael Flynn, Wikipedia considered him noteworthy starting January 5th, 2010.
P.S. Calling your own bias "objective" is the hallmark of a liar.
This program is always sold to the public as a way for American companies to get world class talent. We are encouraged to imagine that we are hiring Einstein or von Braun.
A friend of mine is running a startup. They needed someone with serious competency in two peculiar fields. I think they picked up a kid out of eastern Europe and brought him to LA for like $150,000 per year. They'd have paid five or six times that if they had to, because he was one of like three people in the world who could do what they needed done.
Set the floor at $300,000 and that's who we will be bringing to our country, the guy who can do the job that literally no American can do, not thousands of mid/lower level line workers. We've got plenty of those here already.
Only a few people get it discounted. Most people have insurance, either private or through government. They get a prescription, and they pay their $5 or $10 copay to fill it, the insurance company pays the difference between the copay and the negotiated price (typically 10-20% less than the list price). Note that I said "negotiated price" - they could get themselves a better deal if they wanted to.
The insurance company (including Medicare or Medicaid) isn't happy when the price goes up, but it is still vastly cheaper than the alternative, and for them, it is a tiny drop in a huge bucket, and apparently not even worth the effort of negotiation.
Meanwhile, the company that developed it got a huge cash infusion to finance future projects while everyone is putting on a show of indignant outrage directed towards the company that figured out a clever way to make a little profit by funding medical research.
In the late 90s, my high school started a vocational program. We had always had welding, auto shop and wood shop, but those were one or two class introductions. The new course built houses. Starting from a vacant lot and a set of blueprints, the students cleared the vegetation, dug and poured the foundation, framed the house, insulated it, roofed it, sided it, installed the electrical and plumbing, installed flooring and sheet rock, painted the interior, landscaped the lot, installed appliances and sold it.
I still remember that a lot of adults were upset that the school would even consider that some kids might not want or need to go to college. 10 years later, most of the kids that were in the first two years of that program owned their own businesses - roofers, painters, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, landscapers, etc. Around the same time, people were starting to really wake up to the worthless degree + debt problem that the cult of college had caused.
Despite all this, people tried to get the program shut down every year for a while. The only thing saving it in the early years was that it was profitable for the school. I don't pay any attention to news from back home any more, but I wonder sometimes if the cultists were ever successful in getting rid of it.
$100,000 is still too low. I'd say $300,000, but I'm open to an auction system too. The auction method would need a quota, and the other could safely be open ended.
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations, you walked right into the trap.
Syria is the only country named in the order. The other 6 were part of a law that Obama signed a year or two ago. But now the lefties are demanding that more majority-Muslim countries be added to the list, just like you did here.
I thought that Cato called Obama out on his racism pretty often, didn't they?
Oh, wait, did you think that Trump made that list of countries? Lawls no, Obama signed that into law a year or two ago.
If we keep handing out prizes for self-enrichment, we'll never be able to reign in DC.
Lemme bold a different part of this one incongruent line: (Incongruent? Yup. Readers are encouraged to find and read the entire section for themselves. Many of the citations in this section are books, and several of them are very well worth the read.)
So, the guy who was hunting for communists damaged the effort to remove communists from the government, and you take this as meaning that there were no communists in the government. OK.
Perhaps a better interpretation is that the public thought he was mean because they were kept in the dark about the true extent of the infiltration.
Germany, mid 1930s, right-wing... Deutsche Zentrumspartei? It has center in the name, which makes it far right by the standards of the time and place. I'm not positive, but I think that this was the only part that wasn't hard-left that had any influence to speak of in that era. Well, unless your political chart looks like this one.
It wasn't a small number, and it wasn't just spies.
Replace this one with "At government education." McCarthy was completely and totally vindicated by the Venona files, and also by KGB files after the breakup of the Soviet Union. This was more than 20 years ago, and for some reason government schools are still teaching that he was a bad guy chasing after imaginary witches.
Your other examples are mixed, but this one is beyond doubt.
Well, fiction isn't necessarily the right word. Some parts of it are technically true, but misleading. Consider the unemployment numbers. You always imagine that number to be the portion of the country that needs a job. But it isn't, the headline number is the portion of the country receiving unemployment payments - which are time limited, and which go away if a person gets a part time job, etc, etc. In other words, it is a useful figure for short term fluctuations, but a lousy measurement for a multi-year malaise.
The labor statistics (headline name "job growth" or "new jobs") are a joke. They are allegedly based on estimates and get corrected as harder numbers come in. The initial estimates get all of the attention, and the corrections come silently and in the dark of night weeks and months later. Not surprisingly, for several years the corrections have nearly all been in the negative direction - meaning that the attention grabbing headline numbers have all been hopelessly inflated.
And anything involving the money supply or inflation gets redefined now and then to obscure comparisons to the past. And things like the CPI are hopeless, and would be even if managed by a perfectly honest angel. ShadowStats.com maintains, when possible, new data calculated using the historic formulas, giving as much continuity as possible. But I think it is a pay site now.
And then there is the climate "data"...
I disagree. I think the left has been too peaceful, too moderate, and too open. If they want to win in 2020, they need to get to work now on being more violent, more extreme and more insular. (2018 is a write-off, and it would be even if they were organized properly today.)
Everyone knows that Hillary's primary win was a sham. The voters wanted Bernie, the Communist, not Hillary, the crook. But Hillary is powerless now, and Bernie probably won't run again. They need to be searching, and searching now, for someone who is like Bernie, but even more. Someone who can tear down Trump's wall. Someone who can invite in even more peasants that Americans doesn't want but desperately need. Someone who can finally drive the final stake through the greedy heart of medical progress and get us single-payer.
Finding that person is going to be difficult because the power struggle between the Clintons and the Obamas had a lot of casualties, and now the roster of rising stars in the Democrat party is pretty thin. Someone new needs to show up, ideally a prominent rioter. Obama was all talk. He talked shit about America, but he never did anything about it. The new leader needs to be a do-er, and what better way to show commitment to the cause than by smashing a Starbucks window, or looting a ghetto liquor store?
Those cover extreme and violent. The last key ingredient is insularity. Everyone needs to cut themselves off from people that don't agree with them. No talking to Americans. No listening to AM radio. No Breitbart, but that one hardly needs to be said. Their only contact with dissenting opinions should be when they beat up people trying to attend Republican rallies or conventions. Properly isolated like this, no negativity will be able to penetrate the bubble, and the next election will be a sure thing, just like 2016 was.
ROFL
I howled with laughter dude. Violent Democrat thugs have been attacking us and making death threats against us for a long, long time. Blaming it on Trump now is hilariously novel.
Now, your turn. When has Trump ever encouraged people to be violent? For that matter, when have Trump supporters even been violent? When did Trump supporters chase down and beat up Democrats? When did Republican riots force Bernie to cancel a campaign event?
From https://infogalactic.com/info/Riot:
To answer your question: no, tweeting and speaking are not riots.
Just because the press doesn't want to report on his scandals, doesn't mean he didn't have scandals.
Trump is probably as close to a working class president as we are ever going to see. He isn't working class himself, he wasn't born into a working class family, he doesn't pretend to be working class or have the same tastes as working class people.
But he also doesn't treat them like dogshit to be scraped off of his shoe.
If there is one thing that the left has shown consistently over the last 50 years or so, it is that their idea of civility is doing exactly what they say.
Obama's idea of taking the high road was to make speeches about how he's inviting Republicans to abandon their principles and do exactly what he wants, while he and his party called them terrorists and arsonists if they disagreed in any meaningful way. Meanwhile, every single fucking office of the federal government was turned into a weapon to be used against those who opposed him or his policies.
He ranted and raved about the evils of Fox news and talk radio - and those Americans that watch and listen to them. His IRS targeted and suppressed conservatives groups, arguably costing Romney the election in 2012. His administration spied on the press and destroyed the lives of whistleblowers. He ordered the assassination of American citizens overseas. His goons torched buildings and cattle in the west and damn near murdered several ranchers - and that's not even counting their attempt to Ruby Ridge the Bundy family. His prosecutors smeared and vilified policemen who had the audacity to protect their own lives from murderous thugs while he fanned the flames on TV. While losing in the courts and legislature, he used every executive tool he had available to hinder, harass and annoy gun owners.
If that is your idea of civility, I think you'll find that we've had all of it that we are going to take for a good long while.
Actually it isn't unclear at all. The owners (usually dozens or hundreds of them) are joint owners in all regards except that they can't unilaterally decide to sell the parcel.
What is unclear is how to divvy up the property taxes. Hawaii's property tax system is the second worst in the country, in terms of complexity. (Minnesota is still king, for totally different reasons.) But the software they use is perfectly capable of managing arbitrary numbers of co-owners per parcel.
I'm pretty sure Hawaii switched entirely to Torrens because of this, so the problem at least is not getting any worse. In a deed system, ownership is attested by documents which aren't necessarily known to outside parties. In theory, under that system, someone could show up today with a 100 year old deed showing that the owner at the time sold it all privately before he died, which would invalidate the heir's claims and all subsequent sales. In Torrens, ownership is centrally recorded (at the county or whatever) and sales are done by instructing the recorder to update their ownership records.
Did you actually read my post, or did you just skim it for keywords to trigger on?
I'm not threatening violence, I'm predicting it, conditional on circumstances that I don't expect to happen. And I'm not blaming the victims of said potential violence for damaging the character of the potential perpetrators, I'm lamenting it. If the day comes when tyranny needs to be physically removed from our nation, the tools of said tyranny are not going to fare well, even though they are victims too.
Further, I'm not saying that we shouldn't stand up for the people with actual medical problems, I'm saying that we should stand up for them by dividing them from the people that do not have medical issues. Right now, they are hopelessly entangled, to the detriment of both groups, for the gain of a third group that seeks to use them for political gain.
You may be relieved to hear that I also have sympathy for useful idiots like yourself. (Google that phrase before you take it as a personal insult.)
No, this is wrong. Accepting a pardon has long been considered an admission of guilt.
Alt-right here with my take on things. We aren't monolithic, so not everyone alt-right agrees with all, or even necessarily any, of this.
Real disorder. Fake treatment. ( -- When I started writing, I had intended those four words to be the entire post.) Notice that other dismorphic disorders, like anorexia, aren't "treated" by indulging the fantasies of the sufferer. Doctors don't prescribe lap bands for people who think they are fat when they aren't. But gender dismorphia is a political weapon now, much to the detriment of the people who suffer from it, and so anyone who doesn't think we should castrate men who think they are women is an awful bigot.
If we were honest about this topic, we would notice that suicide rates increase dramatically a few years after surgery - ending up even higher than pre-surgery levels. It appears that for many people denied psychiatric treatment, surgery was a false hope. When it sinks in that surgery did not fix anything, and there are no other options left, despair sets in.
Perversely, at this stage, re-stigmatizing the condition is the most compassionate thing that can be done. Stigmatize isn't the right word exactly, but sadly, we are unlikely to gradually return to reality, so the pendulum is going to swing back too far. If we do it soon, the "swing back too far" won't be too bad - we can clear the pipeline of those merely confused, those seeking attention and those that are the suffering as a result of someone else's Munchausen-by-proxy. Let it go too far left though, and the pushback is likely to be violent, which will hurt those in genuine need of compassion the most, but will also damage the civic character immensely.
At any rate, Chelsea Manning appears to be a traitor in his heart. Snowden appears to have acted towards what he believed was best for the American people. He was flawed, and he made mistakes, but was basically going in the right direction for the right reasons, and he took some care to avoid unnecessary damage. Chealsea, on the other hand, appears to have acted out of malice, with a goal of causing as much damage on the way out as he could. He may have done some good incidentally, but blowing the whistle doesn't seem to have been on his radar until he realized that it could earn him some sympathy. At least that was my impression at the time, when I was flipping randomly through the documents.
P.S. Sorry, this isn't up to my usual proofreading standards. Been a long day and I'm yawning as I try to read it. I hope it is less sleep-inducing for you readers than it was for me to write.
Apparently you've never looked at wikipedia history before. Take a look at this first mention. Hmm, that page was created 9 months before winning a national office. Flynn's first mention was 84 months before he was up a national office. And even big complicated pages start with little tiny nuggets.
If only you had kept reading... The stuff that you elided is very important to understanding what you were looking at.
First, you know that the pee memos were made up by 4chan, right? And that story's inclusion in a document (the one you linked) written by the fake news company behind all of the "1 simple trick to get you to click this link" ads does not exactly say good things about their sources or verification?
And second...
I put those back in order for you. Still don't see it? Try this version:
2008, height of the boom: +20 million.
2009-2010, "the end of the world": ???
2011-2013, 3 years waiting for the recovery: negative 1.8 million (average)
2014, back in black, but just barely: +104,000
2015, healthy, but not back to pre-bust levels: +5 million
I'd be more skeptical about these numbers if not for the thousands of stories in the financial press about the crash and recovery of CRE that map out this exact same roller coaster in all of the markets in the US.
As for Michael Flynn, Wikipedia considered him noteworthy starting January 5th, 2010.
P.S. Calling your own bias "objective" is the hallmark of a liar.
This program is always sold to the public as a way for American companies to get world class talent. We are encouraged to imagine that we are hiring Einstein or von Braun.
A friend of mine is running a startup. They needed someone with serious competency in two peculiar fields. I think they picked up a kid out of eastern Europe and brought him to LA for like $150,000 per year. They'd have paid five or six times that if they had to, because he was one of like three people in the world who could do what they needed done.
Set the floor at $300,000 and that's who we will be bringing to our country, the guy who can do the job that literally no American can do, not thousands of mid/lower level line workers. We've got plenty of those here already.
Only a few people get it discounted. Most people have insurance, either private or through government. They get a prescription, and they pay their $5 or $10 copay to fill it, the insurance company pays the difference between the copay and the negotiated price (typically 10-20% less than the list price). Note that I said "negotiated price" - they could get themselves a better deal if they wanted to.
The insurance company (including Medicare or Medicaid) isn't happy when the price goes up, but it is still vastly cheaper than the alternative, and for them, it is a tiny drop in a huge bucket, and apparently not even worth the effort of negotiation.
Meanwhile, the company that developed it got a huge cash infusion to finance future projects while everyone is putting on a show of indignant outrage directed towards the company that figured out a clever way to make a little profit by funding medical research.
In the late 90s, my high school started a vocational program. We had always had welding, auto shop and wood shop, but those were one or two class introductions. The new course built houses. Starting from a vacant lot and a set of blueprints, the students cleared the vegetation, dug and poured the foundation, framed the house, insulated it, roofed it, sided it, installed the electrical and plumbing, installed flooring and sheet rock, painted the interior, landscaped the lot, installed appliances and sold it.
I still remember that a lot of adults were upset that the school would even consider that some kids might not want or need to go to college. 10 years later, most of the kids that were in the first two years of that program owned their own businesses - roofers, painters, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, landscapers, etc. Around the same time, people were starting to really wake up to the worthless degree + debt problem that the cult of college had caused.
Despite all this, people tried to get the program shut down every year for a while. The only thing saving it in the early years was that it was profitable for the school. I don't pay any attention to news from back home any more, but I wonder sometimes if the cultists were ever successful in getting rid of it.
$100,000 is still too low. I'd say $300,000, but I'm open to an auction system too. The auction method would need a quota, and the other could safely be open ended.