You simply misinterpreted my comment.

I wasn't advocating punishing people under investigation.

I was pointing out that the true problem was cops under investigation are never found guilty and punished. The reason people are complaining about the paid suspensions is they've given up on actual findings of guilt, so they're focusing on increasing the severity of the only consequence the cops experience, the suspension.

The IRS thing is possible, but not an imminent threat. An active investigation IS an imminent threat, so it will cause you to severely hedge your bets.

Consider if you were a cop under paid suspension with a hearing hearing in 6 months. You know you're innocent but you figure there's still a 10% chance you'll be found guilty.

How do you think it would affect your spending habits if you knew in 6 months the department would ask for all of that salary back? Personally I'd put that money in the bank and not touch a penny. It would be the same as an unpaid suspension with retro-active pay if I was found innocent.

How is a 6 month delay in salary not a punishment?

Huh? I think you have it backwards.

Your suggestion punishes the innocent because even though they're still paid they can't use that income because of the shadow of a potential adverse finding.

My suggestion is you still get paid while under suspension and by default get to keep that money in the case of a conviction (civil suit are a separate manner).

The problem with your scenario isn't the miscarriage, it's the threat of miscarriage.

Innocent or guilty, if you're accused you need to prepare for the scenario where you're found guilty. The best system allows the guilty to live the same as the innocent while awaiting trial, otherwise we punish the innocent.

By introducing a retro-active punishment, like taking back all the wages paid out during the suspension, you're going to punish the innocent along with the guilty. The innocent, even though there is unlikely to be a clawback, will have to live as if they're not being paid so they don't risk bankruptcy in the case of a conviction.

So innocent cops under investigation can't spend the salary they're making since they have to save it for the off-change they'll be found guilty?

You're thinking about the wrong problem. The problem isn't cops being place on paid leave while under investigation, it's cops under investigation never being punished regardless of the severity of their actions.

Do you think the censorship effort would be as successful if it were being directed against pro-rebel content?

If not, then there is a legitimate complaint to be made about the partiality of the Russian office.

In the short term maybe, but bad PR matters.

If people start associating FB with pro-Russian censorship people will think less positively of FB. Even without any kind of boycott they'll enjoy their time on FB less due to the negative association, as a result they'll use it less and potentially even open the door for a competitor a little bit more.

It's probably not a big deal as far as FB is concerned, but it's certainly not something in their favour.

Would you prefer they use the Kremlin run VK?

The Bubonic Plague strikes me as a bit of a red flag. I don't know much about biological warfare but the Bubonic Plague strikes me as something you talk about if you don't know anything about biological warfare and just want something that sounds bad and has historical connotations.

Even if they had a good disease I still think it's a terrible plan.

If they target a western state the health care system will make it mostly useless. If they target a middle eastern state they're at war with it will be worse than useless, the target state will have better health care than the neighbouring ISIS territory, the plague could easily boomerang and devastate the ISIS controlled areas far worse than the target state.

True but it's much more a piece of trivia than a politically relevant fact.

A few years back I remember an article about Stephan Dion and Jack Layton (the then leaders of the 2nd and 3rd largest parties in a minority Parliament) claiming they were both atheists.

I don't know if it was true or not, I honestly didn't care that much. The astounding thing was that was the opinion shared by the overwhelming majority of online comments on the website of what I recall was a right wing paper. A few engaged in mild speculation but no one really cared enough to even dig or get emotional.

These were the 2nd and 3rd most important politicians in the country and the topic of their religious affiliation was so irrelevant people scarcely bothered to investigate.

By contrast the US is so obsessed with religion that congress doesn't have a single open atheist. Not to mention the massive religious examinations of presidential candidates.

Sure this stuff does become relevant, particularly with regards to climate change, but we have nowhere near the culture wars that are going on in the US.

Butter is in according to this reply

and just stick to meat, fish, animal fats, oily fish, eggs, lard and butter, vegetables (starchy ones in smallish quantities, rather mostly greens) then, Paleo would say, things fall into place pretty quickly.

I just had two amusing thoughts about that:

1) That might be a valid paleo meal.

2) If it isn't a paleo meal, probably the only thing they'd disallow was the potato, which happens to be the only thing paleolithic people might have actually eaten.

I'm skeptical that our paleolithic ancestors ate a lot of butter and bacon. I have no objection to the idea that paleo works, just to the idea that it's the only real thing that works or that we have a good idea of what our ancestors ate. Lots of modern subsistence hunters get a ton of their calories from starchy tubers or even honey, why not our paleolithic ancestors?

I don't think the success comes from cutting out carbs, it comes from cutting out highly processed food which are designed to be highly palatable (and often contain a lot of carbs). If paleo is an effective method for you then by all means keep doing it, but the source of the success isn't that fats are good or carbs are bad, it's that the super fattening aromatic pastries are definitely not allowed so you can just cross them off the list.

The potato only diet is an extreme example but definitely shows that potatoes can cause weight loss.

I feel like Gary Taubes and his junk science has gotten a lot of people wrongly obsessed with GI. Protein also has a pretty decent GI load, and a lot of evidence suggests that high protein diets are even more successful than low-carb diets. You're working off the assumption that the body has almost no ability to regulate its own metabolism. But the blood sugar spike is followed by the insulin spike because the body is regulating the metabolism. GI is only a concern for diabetics because they've lost the ability to regulate blood sugar.

The palatability hypothesis explains both pieces of evidence beautifully. It explains why carbs, and particularly sugar, can be very fattening and trigger more cravings. But at the same time why a simple baked potato keeps you satisfied with far fewer calories.

I don't think it has anything to do with insulin or glycemic index, in fact it's depressingly simpler than that, the palatability hypothesis.

When we're surrounded by highly palatable foots we overeat. And as it turns out mostly highly palatable things have a lot of carbs, hence the association between low-carb or low GI and weight loss. But one of the best weight loss foods is plain baked potatoes, and they're nothing but starch with a ridiculously high GI. That doesn't mean the food can't be tasty, fruit is pretty damn good, but you're not going to be able to get away with a diet of pizza, cookies, chips, and doughnuts because those trigger overeating like crazy. And if you're addicted to them it's not that hard to kill the addiction, just don't have them in the house. Out of sight, out of mind.

I've actually been surprised how avoiding the hyper-palatable foods has improved my cravings. Everyday at work they literally put a plate of cookies on a bookshelf directly in front of my desk and I don't even feel tempted. You don't have to do anything crazy, just keep to simple foods, avoid the super tasty snack foods, and it will make a huge difference.

He's not entirely wrong. The underpinnings are critical of course, buy they're also sort of generic. But even as someone who primarily uses a CLI the Window Manager is still my primary point of interaction. Application switching, clipboard style, aesthetics, etc, I see the effects of the WM every time I interact with the machine.

Here I agree, I've never seen the plethora of distros as an issue. In fact I see them as a strength as they can very easily tailor and market for a specific audience without diluting their brand. I mean how well does apple actually do in the server space? They shouldn't have any trouble with their Unix underpinnings but I think a lot of people have trouble taking Apple seriously as a server because of their home user market focus.

If someone asks me for advice on installing Linux I generally recommend Fedora or Ubuntu depending on how bleeding edge they want to be (or for a laptop how well the LiveCD works). From a novice user's perspective the distro's are pretty generic.

Like Steve Jobs?