Where does it end is not an argument.

"We won't let 3 year olds drive cars? Where does it end?"

I'm glad to hear that Tommy is finally reunited with is 1965 AMC Ambassador, which Ray so cruelly sent to the crusher (just because it had fungus growing out of the seats and it hadn't moved for years).

If ever there were a time for Slashdot to allow image links, this would have been it. Meantime, this link is for you.

Without meaning to sound like a jerk, the show wasn't quite as "natural" as they made it sound. The show was heavily edited by some extraordinarily talented crew, which is how the callers always sounded so articulate and they never had to cut people off for time. They selected the most effective calls; I believe that part of what they're doing now includes old calls that didn't get aired. They worked very hard to create an illusion of naturalness, kind of like the un-made-up look that requires so much makeup work.

That's not to detract from Tom and Ray, who were incredibly gifted both as radio personalities and as mechanics. I've never heard anybody with anywhere near their level of talent. They brought warmth and humanity that resonated with callers and brought out the best in them. The crew helped make it look as easy with a bit of slight-of-hand, but they couldn't have done it without their utterly amazing source material.

Yep. Effectively, it's a four-variable problem: x, y, z, and t. If you had a synchronized atomic clock with you, you might be able to do it with just three satellites, but that would be pretty bulky and delicate.

Larger than Columbus thought. The consensus among the experts, going back to Eratosthenes, was pretty much right on the money. Columbus was the only one who thought it was smaller (much smaller, by 2/3), which is why he was rejected by the Portuguese king. I don't know how he managed to convince the Spanish monarchs to fund his expedition, but if he hadn't gotten very lucky, he would indeed have killed his crew.

In this case, it might be the opposite: Blacksburg is the home of Virginia Tech, and between the students and the professors it's considerably more liberal than the deep red you'd see on a coarser-grained map of the area. It does give them access to a large pool of both liberals and conservatives, if they're seeking volunteers from off campus.

At the very least they'd be able to statistically adjust it against national demographics, though the study isn't very large. I'd think of it as an interesting bit of preliminary work, but it would have to be replicated very broadly before taking it seriously.

One of the specific provisions of the ACA is to limit that cut to 20%. Companies have had to actually send rebates when they took in more than that.

Whether the middleman's value is worth even that much is a different question. It's not completely valueless: they negotiate the price with the hospital, and they're on your side in wanting to pay less. It would much much harder for you to do that yourself, since you're not an expert in the cost of care or on what anybody else paid. That's a benefit to some, and a cost to those more savvy negotiators. I can tell you that I'm not in the latter category.

I've always found it kind of odd that Republicans wanted to eliminate the latter, without eliminating the former, which is obviously more popular. It seems to me that Democrats at some point should have said, "Sure! Hey, everybody, you can stop paying for insurance."

I know that it wouldn't actually get that far, but it seems to me that they could at least have gotten the insurance companies mad at the Republicans for making "paying for insurance" the problem. It's the only unpopular provision in the law, but necessary.

What a difference 17 years make. Now there are a great many individual 12.9 gigabyte PowerPoint slide decks running around.

Thanks. No mod points today, but I appreciate somebody attempting to extract information from this rather than just apply quantum juju. #ifuckinghatesciencewriters

It depends on how you count the return. The US GDP is still going up. Perhaps it would be going up faster if we weren't jumping at our own shadows, but it doesn't appear to be bankrupting us.

We do a much better job at it ourselves. A graph of GDP shows only one visible hitch, the 2007 crisis. That had nothing to do with terrorism, unless you want to call the widespread fraud by the major investment banks "terrorism" (and I bet you could find some people to agree with you if you wanted to). It certainly wasn't Al Qaeda's fault; any hitch in the graph around September 2001 is lost in the noise.

Here's the problem; I *have* heard all of their arguments before. There's not going to be anything novel here. This is pretty well-trodden ground.

That's not a formal proof. It's an allocation of my time and resources. They can generate new conferences faster than you can refute them. "You can't dismiss me until you've heard MY version of this old argument, and you can't know that it's the same thing until you've heard it" gives them an infinite lease on my time.

So I'm not going to "hear them out". Somebody, I imagine, will, because an odd number of people seem to enjoy re-fighting this. And if they manage to derive an argument with a shred of merit, I suspect it will get back to me. If it takes a long time to do that, well, that's how it is with all ideas. Valid ideas stand the test of time; truth lends them durability because it can be independently re-discovered.

That means that I don't have to give them any time to consider their ideas. And for them to insist I do is dishonest. Any argument they might have to make has to begin with "OK, I understand why you consider the rest of my ideas idiotic, and your reasoning was sound," because it is. Until then it's just more deranged babble.

If I'm following the discussion (and thanks so much for this; I was hoping somebody would explain the concept), the value of goodwill depreciates over 15 years, yes? And you can deduct that as you would the depreciation of a physical asset.

Is that reasonable? On the one hand I could see it. If Coca Cola were to stop doing whatever it's doing to build up goodwill, the value of the brand would decrease over time. The number is arbitrary but that's just the consequence of trying to codify a tax system; buildings and machines don't break down on a fixed schedule either. It does "depreciate".

But on the other hand, it feels like it's an incentive to invest in intangibles rather than tangibles, which doesn't seem like it's as productive for the economy. I know that intangibles produce jobs; that basketball team is selling entertainment, and keeping people employed from the players to the peanut vendors. But entertainment dollars are fungible; how much of Coca-Cola's goodwill produces additional jobs via additional soda sales and how much of it is just devoted to putting dollars in their pockets rather than Pepsi's owners?

In the case of a general social networking tool, there kinda can be only one. People won't check every site every day, and the one they check most often will be the one with most of their friends. If you have "Ello friends" and "Facebook friends", odds are you'll visit one site much less, and your friends there will drift further away.

There's room for various niche sites, but they need a differentiator. I can imagine Ello wanting to be the social networking site for those who want privacy, but strikes me as being kind of counter to the point of social networking. People go to Facebook *because* it violates their privacy. It does so a bit more than most realize, perhaps, but really they only seem to notice the monetization of their lack of privacy, rather than the lack of privacy itself.

Yes, but they're not improving it, and the new Maps doesn't seem to be replacing the features of Classic Maps that I really liked. Any interface needs improvement, and while I like the older interface, its failures become more grating over time.