God bless Lili St. Cyr!

Serious? No. I don't seriously expect really safe speed limits to be set up by any democracy that has so many motorists in it. But I do think that's what we ought to do. As a civilisation, we are killing our own children at an appalling rate, just so that motorists can catch up to the back of the next long line of stationary traffic a few seconds faster. In town, slow down.

Look at the scenario you described. A car doing the speed limit towards a marked crosswalk... it's such a familiar scenario that we forget to be horrified. Think about what we're doing here. We have footpaths across the street specifically for people to walk across. And then we have motorists driving straight at those footpaths, at such speed that it would literally be a crime to go any faster at all, at such speed that they couldn't possibly stop should anyone suddenly walk out on the path. These motorists expect everyone else in the world to pay attention, to stay out of their way. God forbid they themselves should slow down! They're 'doing the limit' and that makes it OK.

That limit is obviously much too high. It should come down. Twenty is plenty.

Then let's redesign those footpaths. At the moment there are raised paths either side of the street, and when the path runs across the middle of the street it is lowered. For the convenience of motorists, of course; otherwise they might have to slow down. Well, let them slow down! The path across the street is a pedestrian walkway just like the paths either side, so let's have it at the same height, for the convenience of people using wheelchairs, people pushing infants in prams, people with mobility issues. We'll put a gentle slope to either side of the path so that it isn't a nasty bump for motor traffic. Well, I mean - so that it isn't a nasty bump if the motor traffic is moving at a safe speed.

Yeah, speed limits are definitely way too high, you're right about that. 20mph in cities is plenty. Then you have a lot longer in which to notice people walking across the road, your brakes have much less work to do in order to bring the vehicle safely to a stop, and if you still fail to respond in time you'll do much less bodily harm to somebody.

And not only will the federal reserve not create inflation, Janet has been Yellen' about reversing QE (not that anyone believes anything the Fed says anymore). That would effectively take 4 Trillion (yes, with a 'T') out of the economy (though not all at once, hopefully). That would have the same effect as firms hoarding cash. Why would they do that? Because "mebbe' we need to do QE again some time". Which makes absolutely zero sense.

The problem is that the fed keeps screwing with the money supply. Firms then put their efforts into repositioning to take advantage of the new economic conditions rather than getting shit done. I'm not so laissez faire on fiscal policy or regulation, but monetary should be left alone. Let the economy reach equilibrium. Let us plan for the future with some sort of certainty at least on the thing people can control (the amount of money in circulation).

I'm not sure if they're getting data directly from Visa/MC, but why not just let them have it. Make all that data available through a REST API. We obviously can't stop them from tracking us, so why not let them just have out data easily -- and get the data ourselves while we're at it.

Sure, you can download spending data from some banks, but it's not easy. Why not require that banks and/or vendors make every single non-cash transaction available, including itemized details rather than just totals, available in real time via a standard protocol. Imagine the apps we could write to introduce real competition and price comparison into the market if we had that data.

With Michigan's exemplary track record implementing minimal regulations, what could possibly go wrong?

Seriously though, I'm glad their beta(alpha?)-testing this for the rest of us. I think we all agree self-driving cars have great potential once we get it right, but someone has to go first to get there. Way to take one for the team, Michigan!

This implies that rich and upper-middleclass people are stupid. 90% of Americans have a net worth < $1 million. 99.5% have a net worth < $11.8 Million. Under current tax law, you only pay federal estate taxes on the part of your net worth that exceeds $10.9 Million for 2016, which is automatically adjusted for inflation. That < 1% of the population obviously couldn't have elected trump on their own, so the rest of the rich and semi-rich who voted for him must either be stupid or naively optimistic about their future earning prospects. Even if the Democrats were in power and bumped the estate tax exemption down to the pre-Bush $1 million level, that's still only 10% of Americans who'd pay a penny in estate taxes.

Speculating about the higher order effects of how large structural changes in the tax code will effect the income distribution is akin to astrology, but the 1st order effects are clearly more beneficial for a small minority of the wealthiest Americans.

Note that this post isn't rhetorical. It's entirely possible that Trump voters did vote primarily on personal economics and fall into these three categories:

• 1. Think Trump's tax policies will directly benefit them, but just can't or didn't bother to do the very simple math.(i.e. the stupid and the lazy)
• 2. Understand that Trump's tax policies will lower taxes on people richer than them a lot more than it will lower taxes on them directly, but believe the higher-order effects will have a net benefit to them (i.e. trickle-down economics).
• 3. Are really rich and will benefit from Trump's tax policies

I'm just saying that #3 is far too small a voting block to even move the needle in the popular or electoral college votes. If economics was a deciding factor for a significant number of voters, some combination of #1 and #2 were heavily involved.

And there's your answer. He WILL bring jobs back to America. His tariffs will raise prices and cause scarcity. One party control will abolish the minimum wage and the social safety net. Once we're all broke and desperate, deregulation will gut both OSHA and the EPA, making American labor competitive again. Then the incredibly wealthy elite like Trump can manufacture things at home while still increasing their share of GDP even faster than they did under the Democraps (which was pretty fast!)

Slashdot has been making me less productive since before Twitter and Facebook were a gleam in the eye of Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg's eyes. And I've been using "well, it's technical, so maybe I'll meet someone or learn something" as an excuse to read slashdot the whole time. Doh! I'm doing it again, right now, as I type. Screw this trash. I'm done with it. I hereby give up caffeine too, since its clearly just a tool the Illuminati use to control us all.

Probation? He needs a "thank you" from both Apple and whatever IT department manages 911. If they can't handle a 6000-phone oops by some kid, WTF do I pay my taxes for? When ISIS and foreign governments launch such attacks, they will be much larger scale and at much less opportune times that really do cause lots of death and mayhem. He basically just walked into their wide open front door and said, "hey, you left the door open". If he happened to track a bit of mud on the carpet on his way out, that seems like a small price to pay.

It's all true, I was there where Nibiru (our mystery planet) and Tiamat (the remnant of which became Earth) collided. And it was a conspiracy too. I know because everyone's home insurance had a interplanetary collision exclusion. WTF! Why would they even put that in there -- unless they knew it was going to happen.

I knew I should have voted for Enlil. He may have been a bully, but at least he wasn't selling influence to the highest bidder like EA.

- Ashurbanipal

Obviously Ecuador is meddling in the US election, but if they hadn't they'd be truly unique among nations. I'm not mad at Ecuador (or Russia if they were the source of leaked info) for hacking or disclosing this that and the other. I expect it. It's just some bits on disk somewhere. It's not like they shot a missile at us. That sort of think occurred long before the Internet, it's just less risky and at greater scale these days.

I just hope to high Heaven that our secret intelligence services have the capability to do the same.

No, I meant that I figured there would be so many people wanting to make this monty python reference that there would be a queue to do so. How did I end up first in the queue? Why would anyone need to wait for a cue to make a Monty Python reference on slashdot?

No go back to eating your donuts (or doughnuts, if you prefer) grammar police.

Yep, basically the only way I can see it working would be with automated group sharding. Probably not even AI needed, just a system that learn your preferences based on others who behave similar with blocking to you and would allow social predictive blocking.

It's barely profitable and the user base has stagnated. Essentially, it's just 'still around' rather than a big thing. And worse, it doesn't seem to have any idea about how to resolve the issues.

Frankly, I don't think it can and remain 'twitter'. I don't think the particular communication pattern that twitter supports is sustainable; it's essentially built to guarantee a devolution of conversation into the worst human communication forms, flamewars, bullying, etc.