When facing a nearly unprovable situation (e.g, the security or insecurity of a system), we often resort to deities and idolatry.

It's much easier to believe in magic pixie dust called security protection that you can apply to some activity which is insecure to make it secure, than to face the reality that the activity itself might be inherently insecure and we must modify our activity to make it secure.

You have a virus, there must exist anti-virus protection, you have malware, there must exist some anti-malware protection, just a little more encryption, and a little more authentication will always help too (just like sunblock and contraceptive devices, you gotta apply that stuff correctly or it doesn't work as advertized). However, as we have seen, the belief in these artifacts are mostly a mirage. It's not to say these things aren't useful to a limited extent, but we want to believe we can use technology to "solve" a problem that is intrinsic. Hope springs eternal.

Sadly, it isn't that simple. Basically what happened is that the Senate passed a bill (62-37) that coupled the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) extension with an amendment that extended a worker retraining program. In the House the bills were decoupled. The vote rejected the *retraining* bill (but passed the TPA bill) which effectively requires a revote by the senate to grant TPA separately (if the goal is to get it in a form for the president to sign it rather than just blame someone for its failure to pass).

The extension alluded to by the OP is that there is an extension clause in the bill that allows the president to request an extension from 2018 to 2021, but the extension must be requested before June 30, 2018. If either house can pass a bill that rejects this extension, it is considered denied. FWIW, a similar extension clause has been in most TPA that have been granted in the past and were generally put in as a safety in case negotiations schedules are not maintained.

The only foreseeable situation that this affects is if one party were in control of both houses and the presidency, the out-party could then still theoretically filibuster a vote on a negotiated treaty in the Senate if the TPA authority was not in effect. However, with the recent change in filibuster rules of the senate regarding nominations by the democrats (the so-called 'nuclear-option' that was exercised), it isn't inconceivable that filibustering a treaty could trigger a similar 'nuclear' option in the senate if it came down to it, so it may not even matter in practice and is kind of a red herring.

As to why TPA is necessary, it of course isn't, but not having it allows a few members of congress to essentially hold the enabling legislation for a treaty hostage by offering amendments or failing to issue a committee report to allow a floor vote. Since adding an amendment would force the negotiators back to the table, it is presumed that other treaty parties would never offer their best level of concessions during ordinary negotiations (saving them to counter future nit-picking terms offered by rouge legislators) resulting in a sub-optimal agreement for us.

The TPA isn't like the war powers resolution in that it is a bill that affects the rules congress applies to itself by simply limiting debate, amendments and other procedural measures (which it is of course free to do to itself and has done many times in the past). The WPR is hotly debated as being unconstitutional in that it appears allows the president to take unilateral action and report on it later without action from congress. Also, the TPA also has many provisions in it directs negotiations a certain way and if the president ignores them, the TPA is effectively revoked (debate and amendments are then allowed in these areas). Unlike the WPR, the TPA allows congress to reject a treaty *before* it takes effect (not after the fact like the WPR).

Hardly, it's more likely that your "accident" will contribute the increased estimated loss potential in your insurance pool, and result in increases for you in the long run. Just because it isn't your fault doesn't mean that your premium won't go up (just not relative to others).

FWIW, because of recent auto-insurance reforms in many states, insurance companies are no longer allowed to directly charge the risk premium to their customer (because some factors they used like geography/zip code and gender/marital status and age were deemed too discriminatory). As a result, they are forced to pump the allowed factors and temper the restricted factors to spread out the premium charges.

For example, in California the spread for restricted factors must be limited to be a smaller than the lowest weight given to safety record, mileage and experience the insurance premium computation. So even if the accident isn't your fault, it may be scored as "no-fault" and the other party may be in your insurance pool.

Apparently you do not understand the role that terrorists and anarchists play in the political equation. They generally don't do this for money, they do this to further their agenda. In the case of the typical teenage anarchist, their agenda is to prove they are smarter than the "man".

Not everything is done for money.

FWIW, there's even a "church-tax" (fees collected by the government on behalf of a church) in many European countries including the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden) and Austria, Italy and Germany. Rules vary, but participation of the population in state affiliated churches is north of 67% in some countries, although there has been a recent trend of people leaving churches in European countries if it allows them to avoid paying these "taxes".

Of course paying the tax and actual active membership in a church are two different things. Apparently in Europe, there are lots of passive members that continue to simply just pay the tax (presumably for traditional reasons) inflating the membership rolls of the churches and overstating their influence...

As for vaccines, I don't think there is much different underlying sentiment in European vs the USA-ans. is primarily an issue where there is a big push to be current on vaccines when entering school in the USA, where in most European countries the focus is in the (public) healthcare system. Perhaps both the USA and Europe, attendance to school is still more universal than attendance to healthcare (even if both are "free") and the resulting diseases bear this out.

When you get to a position where the person in front of you has to quit (or die) for you to get ahead, move on...

However, never run *away* from a situation, only run to something better (with more opportunity), often the grass appears greener elsewhere, but you should do your homework.

Oh yeah, and accumulate as many brownie points as you can along the way, they will come in handy...

It is always *easier* to ask forgiveness than to get permission, but if the result is poor, depending on your place in the line, it is not always *better*...

Luke 12:48 But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.

I observe that many customer and patient-facing employees are able to fake empathy on demand.

Although teaching empathy to some people appears to be a spectacular failure today, I suspect that all it takes is a (temporary) psychopathic view on the world to learn enough manipulation to fake empathy, which is probably why we aren't teaching it effectively today to those people. On the other hand, would we want to train a computer to be psychopathic enough to fake empathy? I think not.

I don't think "accessory before the fact" means what you think it means. "Accessory before the fact" means you know about the *crime* (or perhaps even encouraged it) before the crime is committed. Simply enabling the commission of a future crime by your actions does not make you an accessory if you have no knowledge about the crime.

The SAT was redesigned in 2005 to eliminate the stupid analogies, add reading comprehension, free-form math, and added another section to test essay writing to test sentence/paragraph formation and general grammar (now scored on a 2400 point scale instead of a 1600 point scale).

They are re-redesigning the test again this year to make the essay optional (back down to 1600 points) and changing the grading of the essay to actually have some content of the essay factor into the score (in the 2005 version of the test, you could have scored perfect on the essay by writing total fictitious nonsense as long as it was grammatically and logically correct), eliminating the penalty for guessing (to match the ACT), and adding more achievement testing (also to match the ACT).

Although it's true that many colleges ignore the SAT essay, but multiple choice portion of the test is *not* highly correlated with academic success. The highest correlation is (sadly) family income, followed by weighted/normalized high-school grades (e.g., not GPA, but a weighted GPA), and only then standardized tests. Also above a certain high score (~1400/1600 on the SAT), there is nearly no correlation at all with higher scores and educational and post-educational outcomes (and yes I used to work with admission committees for a university that cooperated with other highly-selective university to compile statistics on this subject over many years back in the '80s).

The idea that the SAT matters is a myth propagated by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) corporation. In fact the creation of the competing ACT test was prompted by the fact that the SAT origins were an *aptitude* test (that can draw it's lineage from the US army IQ testing recruits in WWI) , not an *achievement* test (testing things that you should learn in school).

Colleges wanted an achievement test, but were dismissed by the ETS, however because of the use of the SAT in ivy league schools, the University of California signed on in 1960 and made the ETS/SAT into a juggernaut. Now because of discontent by UC and other schools on its predictive value, the ETS has changes the SAT twice in 10 years, which in its latest form, now looks more like an *achievement* test (like the ACT was).

Of course there is open debate in higher education on even requiring tests like the SAT or ACT. For example this study tracking 123,000 students over 33 universities found only minimal correlation of academic success with even submitting SAT scores to the school to evaluate (let alone what the score actually was).

Ironically, Tesla (the new one) and Edison are on the same side this time... DC for the win ;^)

As I understand it, Russia threatened to, but didn't actually withdraw the supply of rocket motors (i.e., the RD-180 used by the Atlas V), but the US Congress has prevented any military contractors from giving Russia any money (e.g, ULA for rocket motors) because of the Crimea/Ukraine situation. Sadly, Russia probably just inadvertently seeded the idea to the US congress and they ran with it...

Apparently, there is an out. In the event of a national emergency, NASA can actually finish purchases of these rocket motors from Russia and sell them to the ULA because the ban technically only applies to military contracts, not civilian contracts. This is totally stupid as either way the bulk of the money is going to the same Russian company: NPO Energomash. Of course the biggest beneficiary of the ban this might be SpaceX (and maybe even the ULA if you count the additional money the congress threw at them to get the votes for the ban and the fact that they will probably eventually get permission to buy enough engines to tide them over until Vulkan launches).

Can someone tell me how this isn't just unseemly science rather than bad science? Sure it might seem like you are "cheating", but if the data tells you something that you didn't expect going in and you change your hypothesis along the way, you still are presenting data and you simply just took a shortcut publishing your second paper and just tossed-out your initial attempt at writing a paper.

To me, bad science would be cherry-picking your data to fit your original hypothesis (or perhaps your ideology or world view).