I'm surprised he bothered while a Democratic president was in office, although he can always go after Republicans in Congress I suppose.

Bloom County was about as tendentious in their criticism as Doonesbury.

What's even funnier it's that the dolts pitching this agenda have no idea how little actual impact they're having; I founded my company with my wife listed as primary, so it's a "woman-owned business". I know not one but TWO business (one of them sizable) in which the founders were a couple of white guys and a black friend - the white guys put up the money and actually run the business, the black guy lets them use his identity as principal to make it a "minority" business.

My guess is that a significant portion of the "progress" made toward this utopian diversity goal is bullshit, and many if not most of these businesses are really funded and/or run by white men.

This is ridiculous.
First, the expansion/contraction of plastics is generally MUCH much higher than concrete/pavement.
Second, the "prefab road sections" are absurd; nobody builds roads like this already (of any material) because they would be ruinously expensive (not because of the raw material costs), nothing has come close to the level of durability needed to handle 50-ton trucks repeatedly for decades, and extremely hard to deploy.
Third, the overwhelming majority of plastic in the ocean is 0.1mm or smaller (http://theconversation.com/in-the-ocean-the-most-harmful-plastic-is-too-small-to-see-35336) - the cost/magnitude of scale to sieve this from the oceans is mind-boggling.

Seriously, Dutch, I love you - but that's a mind-blowingly dumb idea.

Don't get me wrong, I prefer analog volume dials to the crappy push button volume controls almost everywhere, but a phones a dumb place to have one.

What's going to prevent that dial turning every time it's put into a pocket?

You're missing the point more essentially: What's "GMO"?

Is selective breeding "GMO"? Is splicing a branch onto a tree "GMO"? Hell, if you deliberately select one cow to breed with that bull, you're 'managing' natural selection, and thus is that GMO?
Is using that bull's semen in another artificially inseminated cow "GMO"?

Every piece of corn you eat - from the cob at KFC to something grown entirely organically by the hippies next door, is "genetically modified' because they are not even *close* to the original strain of corn. Same with wheat, apples, oranges, everything of food value has been 'managed', bred, cross pollinated, or selected for traits - is that GMO?

Does it have to be done with a microscope?
If I develop a new herbicide, spray it on a field of grain, and then pull out the plants that survive, use their seeds to grow a new crop, and do the same things a few times to develop herbicide-resistant seeds, are those "GMO"?

I just find the entire subject farcical because you can't get two activists to agree even on what "GMO" means - just that it's evil, whatever the definition.

...in other news, Google Engineers are new developing the next capability for the driverless car, the so called GOASSATODFBADFSPOSTRIYAWHITBTPTHOOTAASFSATPOIAW system, which stand for "Get out and start swearing at the other driver for being a dumb fuck stupid piece of shit that ran into you and wouldn't have if they bothered to pull their head out of their ass and stop fucking staring at their phone once in a while." heuristic engine, which will immediately assign blame and begin a confrontation with the other driver, simultaneously calling a lawyer and filming everything at the scene.
The next stage is expected to be the UYIWMGFYSITMOTFRYFTMIYWSYFYCTALATIOIAW "Oh yeah? It wasn't my goddamned fault you stopped in the middle of the fucking road you fat turd maybe if you weren't stuffing your face you could take a look around the intersection once in a while" response system, and eventually the (tits&tears) "pop my top blouse button and break down into tears hoping he won't sue my ass off" system to deal with the remaining human drivers on the road.

I get the intent, but I'm going to submit that what people living in HUD housing need is NOT a better porn/tv/streaming bandwidth to their home. *NOBODY* needs gigabit fiber access to do their homework online.

I wasn't even saying "rah rah" my side, actually, just that Democratic presidents are naive enough to believe that such agreements are meaningful, all the way back to FDR who believed he could personally 'charm' Stalin.

I didn't really think we needed an example of what Republican presidents are prone to; has anyone forgotten 2001-2008 (and frankly the following years are a result of them) in Iraq/Afghanistan?

I'd object without any financial stake because it doesn't fucking make sense.

EVERY SINGLE ORGANIC* FOOD YOU EAT HAS BEEN "GENETICALLY MODIFIED" FROM ITS ORIGINAL FORM by (at the very least) selective breeding if not more intrusive means.

*ironically, the only "food" you can eat and totally avoid this would be entirely synthetic things like Twizzlers and Sweetarts. Have at it, Luddites.

....since when it goes off, it'll probably either be in conjunction with or set off the Yellowstone supervolcano, and everyone else will have their own catastrophic issues to deal with.

Hey, but at least we might stop hearing about global warming for a while. There's a silver lining.

I'm sure that this will work out at least as well as it did the last time a Dem US president made a deal to "stop the development of nuclear weapons".

I'm sure Japan, South Korea, and others in the region still remember that agreement with pride and joy.

Funny, I was going to say "....we need to figure out how we can tax the shit out of it" but yours works too.

The president is committed to GETTING a deal here regardless of how shitty it is.

Legacy and all that.

You're right; 0.004% of the best-educated, most culturally advanced (IMO) people on the planet have figured out how to do it right.

I"m not sure that's a very encouraging figure?

Personally, I believe that Iceland - population 300,000 - is probably somewhere near a natural limit of actual connected, responsible government. In the same sense that true communism really only works at the household/clan/tribal level, it may be that representative democracy - as an actual thing, not just a pastiche of it - tops out at a certain point as well, and beyond that every government leans towards despotism, for practical effectiveness' sake even setting aside the apparently inherently aggrandizing and greedy nature of humans.

Not precisely. You need to work on your history. First of all, this was the result of policies implemented in the 90s - when Clinton was in office.
I remember in the 90s the parade of corporate execs being called before congress (and Mr Frank specifically) to be publicly pilloried for 'racism' of 'redlining' districts - ie, calling out low-income areas as not-worth-the-risk-of-loaning to.
As a result of these activities, the US gov't loosened requirements and strongly encouraged these firms both public and private to lend to the low-income households so they too could "share in the American dream".
NO DOUBT, once the government made its stance clear, the banking/loan industry went after these ignorance, naive customers aggressively and in many cases illegally exploiting them.
But the Bush White House for 6 years warned that there were problems on the horizon without significant structure reform of GSEs like Fannie Mae (http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2008/10/20081009-10.html) but nothing was done - and I'll *certainly* agree with you that the GOP congress was absolutely incompetent from 2000-2004 when they really COULD have done something useful.