The University's are in the process of being privatized here. A few Venture Capitalists noticed our Federal Gov't would give guaranteed loans out to any school with accreditation. So they bought up a bunch of old Secretary Schools that has accreditation from the 40s and 50s and used those to get loans for students to go to their diploma mills.

Meanwhile we've got a political movement to lower taxes while keeping spending constant so that our country goes massively in debt. The debt isn't really a problem (we owe it to ourselves) but it frightens people. After 30 years we have people exploiting that fear to get cuts in education in the name of saving money. The whole scheme is called "Starve the Beast" and was thought up by our Republican and Libertarian parties. The result is most of our subsidies for state education have been cut.

Positive Sum Gaming would work if the rich didn't gain when you lose. But they do. They gain power. See here.. Adaption is a slow, painful process. When the industrial revolution hit in the mid 1700s millions were impoverished by automation before the economy caught up in the 1800s. 60+ years of misery. We've seen it happen, I don't see any good reason we should let it happen again just to preserve a misguided notion of "freedom" at all costs.

You're also assuming we have to have 80% of humanity living in abject poverty. But is that really true? Are we as a people so weak that we can't feed or cloth one another? We already know the answer is no. We already produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet, we just need people willing to say it's OK for people to have food, even if they didn't work themselves to death to get it.

right now. But wages have been in decline for 30 years. A little mis management is one thing (Mitt Rhomney was famously so broke at one point he had to sell the stocks his dad gave him to make ends meet :P ), but we're getting to the point where it's impossible to "work your way through college".

For one thing, when we say "Wages Adjusted for Inflation" we mean inflation as a whole, but the cost of food and shelter (what college kids spend most of their money on, jokes about Ramen & Natty Lite aside) have gone up much faster than inflation. The sort of job you can hold while in College is gonna pay $8-$15 an hour depending on where you live. I know ppl at that income level working part time because the economy sucks and they made mistakes. They're not making it, and somehow I doubt the added expense/stress of school would help them, especially after they graduate with $150k in loans... If you're one of those super humans that doesn't need sleep and can go to class and the work 8 hours then spend 8 hours doing homework you might make it. Everyone else will just drop out. The consoles tell you this when you apply, and a lot of the big majors (Math, CS, MIS, Medical) won't take you if you're working full time.

What sucks is we're so much more productive, you'd think we'd be working less. But why the hell would we give anything to anyone if they didn't "work" for it?

Which is complete crap, by the way. Scholarship students get meal plans, and cafeterias let you eat as much a you want and don't really pay attention to students sneaking out food (especially if they are star athletes). Hell, when I played football in college and had 2 a days during camp the team would even feed us after the evening practices. And yeah, sometimes when we got out of practice during the season the cafeteria would be closed. But we had a grill and a little convenience-store type plce that sold frozen or boxed/packaged food that you could buy with your meal plan. And this was at a tiny university. Larger colleges will have multiple cafeterias, multiple on-campus restaurants/grills (which take meal plans), and usually have deals with just off campus places that take meal plans as well. I played with rich kids and poor kids, scholarship and non-scholarship kids, and I can guarantee you that none of them ever went to bed hungry.

Hmm, is it just me or does Pyongyang sound like the name of a Russian speaking city to me...

Absolutely.

Israel is actively occupying Palestine and stealing the Palestinian's land.

Look at the racism that occurs against Hispanics in the US due to them taking some crappy jobs. Is it a surprise that a nation that's been constantly losing it's land to self-identified Zionists for over 100 years is going to end up really antisemitic? Having Palestinians spontaneously turn into a nation of Ghandis isn't a realistic prerequisite for peace in the middle east.

But how capable would those reservist truly be? Consider first of all the economic situation in NK: a significant portion of the population is going hungry, if not outright on the verge of starvation. I am sure they keep their active duty soldiers fed decently well, but in the case of a war most of the reservists called up would be physically capable of only limited combat duty. You also have to take into account the quality of the arms available to the reservists: chances are a lot of the reservists would be armed with Cold War era Soviet cast-offs and clones, quite possibly even WWII-era weapons such as PpsH sub machine guns.

As for numbers, well, Operation Barbarossa showed what a small but well trained, well equipped, professional army can do against large numbers of poorly trained and equipped conscript soldiers. While quantity does have a quality all it's own, North Korea's limited numbers of truly modern weapons would not stand up to an invasion by South Korea/US or even Chinese troops. Would it be over in 2 days? Very unlikely. Would millions of North Koreans be dead within a week? Almost certainly. North Korea has neither the space to trade for time nor enough materiel stockpiled to survive a protracted, high intensity conflict. Of course, at any sign of hostile intent on the part of SK, NK would immediately begin a massive bombardment of Seoul, and as they lost territory would probably consider the use of any nuclear weapons they may have on Seoul as well since, when you are on the verge of destruction yourself, MAD doesn't seem too terrible and you might as well take your enemy down with you. This is why South Korea has never invaded North Korea, even though it is almost guaranteed they would win (China wouldn't step in because that would mean they would have to fight the US): tens of millions dead in North Korea, millions probably dead in South Korea, the South Korean eceonomy would be wrecked, and they'd have to deal with integrating any surviving NK citizens (remember all the issues Germany had when it peacefully reintegrated with the DDR?)

Which strip of land? Israel or the West Bank? I agree that Iran has said some worrying things and Israel seems a nice place to live filled with generally pleasant people. But they are without a doubt the aggressors in the current conflict and having nukes is one of the factors that has emboldened them to adopt such an extreme strategy. Now their enemies having nukes is a really scary proposition because Israel has adopted an extremely aggravating position predicated on the idea that their enemies are powerless to harm them.

I don't know if this is nuts. I'd have to see the full arguments on both sides, and so far what we have to go on is a one-sided summary.

If the *only* effect of the proposed regulation would be to increase beer prices, then sure, I agree with you 100%: government is being stupid. But if there's a good reason for the regulation, then I'd disagree with you.

Reading the article, it seems like the idea that this regulation will cause beer prices to spike dramatically seems a bit alarmist. The regulations would require brewers who send waste to farmers as animal feed to keep records. It seems hard to believe that this would significantly raise the price of beer or whiskey given that alcohol production is already highly regulated. On the other hand, it seems like there is no specific concern related to breweries. They were just caught up in a law that was meant to address animal feed.

If you want an example of a regulation free utopia, look no further than China, where adulteration of the food chain is a common problem. If the choice were a regulatory regime that slightly complicates brewers lives, and a regime that allows melamine and cyanuric acid into human food, I'd live with higher beer prices.

Fortunately, we don't have to live with either extreme. We can regulate food adulteration and write exceptions into the regulations for situations that pose little risk. Since presumably the ingredients used in brewing are regulated to be safe for human consumption, the byproducts of brewing are likely to pose no risk in the human food chain.

I haven't heard of anyone talking about driving brewers out of business wholesale, but any increase in operating cost is going to have negative repercussions for a business, which may mean lower profits, leading to reduced employment. That's just the way these things work. Note that this could also have a ripple effect, such as increasing the price of milk, since farmers have been able to rely on this cheap and nutritious feed for a long time.

You mentioned "they could have" in your response, but I could counter with "they never have so far", which seems a more powerful argument. This practice has been going on for over a century with apparently no real trouble, and suddenly the brewers are going to poison the farmer's cattle? It seems a bit far-fetched, since after all, these are the by-products of human-consumable beverages. I'd be more apt to support this if there was a documented history of problems with this practice.

Government, by it's nature, tends to want to create more and more rules and regulations. I think that's part of the natural desire to proactively protect against problems, but it's also has slightly less noble purposes as well. More regulations essentially means the government has to grow to enforce those regulations. It's in the FDA's own self-interest to pass as many rules and regulations as it can, because then it's "business" grows. That means those in the FDA can move up their own "corporate ladder", so to speak.

Government regulations have to be viewed as a necessary evil. All but the most die-hard libertarians or anarchists would say we need no regulations, but there's always a careful balancing act that must be made between the imposed overhead of these regulations and the benefits they provide in terms of safety, reliability, and consumer rights. So, I think it's worth questioning whether the imposed cost of this new proposal is worth the imposed overhead and costs.

True, I do sometime forget how small and poor Russia really is. Sorry, American here, and we've been told for 60 years the big bad Russians are coming for us any day now...

Of course they still have to neutralize the horizontal momentum, otherwise they crash into the ground with only a high horizontal speed instead of having a high vertical speed as well. All a separate landing pad saves them is the fuel required to fly back to the launch pad - but they'd then need a ship to carry the rocket from the sea-based landing pad, and then transfer it to some sort of overland vehicle capable of carrying a 200 foot long rocket massing over 500 tons. Considering everything I've heard is that flying it all the way back to the launch pad only adds a tiny percentage to the needed fuel, which itself is a tiny percentage of the cost of a launch, it seems like that's adding a whole lot of complexity for very questionable benefit, in fact I wouldn't be surprised if flying it back was actually cheaper than the alternative.

Quite so, and they mention just that in the article.

How does recycling beer-brewing waste as a cheap, nutritious animal feed instead of burying it in a landfill contribute to ocean acidification?

So, is NASA currently paying a nearly 3x premium to SpaceX just to get their technology off the ground or what? Not that I object to such long-term thinking, quite the opposite in fact, but I could swear the SpaceX contract was marketed as a cost-saving maneuver.

It says here that it currently costs $10,000 to get a pound of payload into orbit, but from TFA SpaceX has a $1.6 billion contract for 12 launches, and if the current ~5000 pound payload is typical that works out to ~$27,000 per pound. Granted, assuming SpaceX perfects the reusable F9 that stands to potentially reduce launch costs 5 to 20-fold, easily making it one of the cheapest options available, even assuming that the current contract strictly covers launch costs and profit and without any R&D budget. But it's hardly a cost-saving maneuver in the short term.

Also, gotta love the phrasing in the summary "In another win for the company, as the L.A. Times reports, SpaceX also has launched a re-supply mission to the ISS." As though completing the mission that's actually paying the bills was just an added bonus.