Once they have located an attacker, having privately owned armed drones would be very handy. if the attacker is a nation state, even more aggressive measures could be used.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership gives them the right to use "even more aggressive measures". It's called "corporate sovereignty" and it will be our undoing. Basically, it says that a corporation can sue governments for damages for any law that might conceivably cost them money.

We already have a mercenary military. Imagine the armies the Fortune 500 will put into the field, and the mischief they could create.

No, and I would greatly prefer if people the Clintons and Obama didn't hand these people trillions of tax payer dollars.

You mean Obama's the one paying all those Wall Street bonuses?

Damn, no wonder we got us a deficit, amirite?

If that were true, why haven't Chromebooks taken over?

The power of marketing.

There are a few people who believe that we don't need a government; that the free market can solve all problems up to and including national defense.

And all of those people are running for the GOP presidential nomination.

Maybe now, we can build some more dams

California? Dams?

I thought hydroelectric dams need water to operate.

Clinton also announced a new initiative to replace the warplanes of the American air force with modern and environmentally sound flying pigs.

We already have the F-35.

I wish I could vote for the real Al Gore.

It wouldn't matter unless you could get the Supreme Court to vote for him too.

About half of my power bill is the cost of generation, the other half is transmission...

He didn't say "price", he said "cost". Because "transmission costs" are how power companies raise rates. The transmission costs have not gone up, but they've raised to transmission price as an end-around local consumer groups that have gotten laws passed to limit energy cost increases.

Transmission "costs" are actually a profit center for companies that really should be regulated utilities instead of one-way piggy banks for billionaires.

Social networking is actually a good idea I think, but not with the proprietary platforms we've had until now. Something like Diaspora, a decentralized platform, is what we really need; that way people can control what they share, with whom, and they control the platform itself (since you run it on your own webserver, or one you sign up for to have an account on, but your data is your own and is easily moved to a competing service).

Having everything all centralized on one site with no democratization is making it usable because there's no real consumer choice or control.

Because you have a choice whether you want to use Facebook or something else or nothing. No one is forcing you to use Facebook. Your dumb relatives posting stupid pictures of themselves is not a compelling reason to use Facebook; it's not like trying to be a computer professional and refuse to use email (which would prevent you from getting a job in the field) or normal job posting sites.

Let me know when they make a Soylent that tastes like Harold's Fried Chicken (One Bite and We Got'Cha).

https://farm6.staticflickr.com...

Seriously, let me know.

[By the way, if you're ever in Chicago and looking for some terrific, delicious chicken or cat fish - and I mean really really good - try Harold's. Stuff is amazing. But be careful the really hot sauce is really hot. There are a bunch of Harold's around town for your late-night post Hawks/White Sox/Bulls game enjoyment.]

I did: The claim is bullshit because it computes meaningless numbers ["hourly wage"] for a meaningless group of people ["all workers"].

The NELP paper is misusing that number in its own analysis, by multiplying by the nominal number of work hours to arrive at an annual full time income and then reasoning about that.

Furthermore, if the number meant what the NELP paper implies it means, it completely contradicts their argument for raising the minimum wage to $15/h: if in some sense "40% of workers" already make that much money, then $15/h is a solid, middle-class income, not a sign of poverty.

If you think the number has meaning, why don't you clearly state what that meaning is.

No matter how you slice it, rationalize it and just straight-up bullshit about it, more than 40% of the people who are working are working for less than $15/hr.

then $15/h is a solid, middle-class income, not a sign of poverty.

What part of "40% of the workers make less than $15/hr" do you not get? The "less than" part is kind of important.

The current minimum wage is less than half of your "solid, middle-class income" of $15/hr. And if you add up the incomes of everyone making minimum wage in America it comes to a little more than half as much as the bonuses that get paid out to Wall Street bankers in one year. And we're talking about full-time minimum wage workers ($7.25/hr). And by "Wall Street", they don't include investment bankers in Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, etc etc. We're only talking about the swells that do their business on a few square blocks on Manhattan island. And we're not talking about their entire incomes, but just the bonuses. So they find more money in their Christmas fucking stockings than all the full-time minimum wage workers in the United States put together. And don't forget, Wall Street bankers don't produce a goddamned thing.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

Sure, but that's only an issue if the regulations specify Tesla levels of performance and efficiency. I'm suggesting the regs could be written with the most efficient ICE automobiles on the market *today* as the benchmark for what is feasible. These are by not necessarily fantastically expensive, nor are they hair-shirt city cars. The Mazda 3 is a four door sedan that seats five and has an engine that delivers 184 hp at 26 mpg city/35 highway; MSRP is 18.8K$. If you need a people mover you can get a seven passenger Mitsubishi minivan rated 25 city/31 highway for 23.2k$.

It's clear that the current state of the art in ICE makes affordable, practical cars that exceed the current average mileage technologically feasible. They're being sold now. If on the other hand you want high performance, e.g., to go 0-60 mph in under 4 seconds, then you're talking big bucks and exotic technology.

What manufacturers won't be able to do is slap a tarted-up body on a primitive $26,000 truck chassis, call it an SUV, and charge $50,000 for it. I'm talking about the Silverado based Suburban. I think there's a place in the world for such vehicles, but it's insane to charge an additional 24k to slap two rows of seating in place of a pickup bed; there's plenty of headroom to charge a gas guzzler tax on that one.

Ya know, instead of listening to what the politicians *say*, we could look at what the politicians *do*.

The two biggies I can think of are job outsourcing and civil rights. Let's see what Hillary has been doing for the last few years:

Overall, a mixed bag of non-caring of our jobs and rights.

Do we want yet another president that doesn't care about the people?

And we need to keep in mind that the fundamental characteristics of these countries is not that they happen to have socialist policies, but rather that they have capitalism, rule of law, and democracy. The combination of those three pretty much guarantees that they'll have comfortable and to some degree, affordable socialist policies.

Did I just get khallow to endorse some level of socialism? Please wait a second while I skypoint for a bit...

Unfortunately for those European Socialist countries since the EU was formed, the new late-stage capitalism financial aristocracy is using disaster capitalism to create all sorts of havoc. I don't know if they're taking after us, or we're taking after them.