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Submission + - Bank Of England Accidentally E-mails Top-Secret Brexit Plan to the Guardian (theguardian.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The first rule of "Project Bookend" is that you don't talk about "Project Bookend."

In retrospect, maybe the first rule should have been "you don't accidentally e-mail 'Project Bookend' to a news agency", because as the Guardian reports, one of its editors opened his inbox and was surprised to find a message from the BOE's Head of Press Jeremy Harrison outlining the UK financial market equivalent of the Manhattan project.

Project Bookend is a secret (or 'was' a secret) initiative undertaken by the BOE to study what the fallout might be from a potential 'Brexit', but if anyone asked what Sir Jon Cunliffe and a few senior staffers were up to, they were instructed to say that they were busy investigating "a broad range of European economic issues."

Comment Re:Hillarhea! accomplishment outside who she marri (Score 3, Informative) 231

by schwit1 (#49755667) Attached to: WSJ Crowdsources Investigation of Hillary Clinton Emails
I'm assuming you are being sarcastic.
  1. 1. Getting elected senator from a state that is overwhelming democrat is an accomplish, really? What did she accomplish AS the carpet bag senator?
  2. 2. Her being Sec of State was payback for supporting Obama's election.What did she accomplish AS Secretary of state besides getting an ambassador killed?
  3. 3. Successful attorney of child rapists
  4. 4. On HRC's commodities trading ... It is pretty obvious that Hillary had something better than luck. She had well-placed friends who wanted her to have $100,000. The likelihood of such a return on such an investment was close to lottery odds, twenty-four chances in a million.44 This was in a decade in which no speculator made more than $400 profit a day with one contract of cattle futures. Yet Hillary managed to make $5,300 a day. Such a return would have required her holding thirteen contracts, involving 232 tons of beef with a value of $280,000.

Submission + - Coral islands defy sea level rise

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Despite having some of the highest rates of sea level rise in the past century, the 29 islands of Funafuti Atoll in the Pacific show no signs of sinking.

Despite the magnitude of this rise, no islands have been lost, the majority have enlarged, and there has been a 7.3% increase in net island area over the past century (A.D. 1897-2013). There is no evidence of heightened erosion over the past half-century as sea-level rise accelerated. Reef islands in Funafuti continually adjust their size, shape, and position in response to variations in boundary conditions, including storms, sediment supply, as well as sea level.

Be aware as well that the cause of the rise in sea level here is not clearly understood. It could be the global warming we have seen since the end of the Little Ice Age of the 1600s, or other more complex factors.

Submission + - FBI can not name a single big case helped by Patriot Act's snooping provisions (washingtontimes.com) 3

Submitted by mi
mi writes: “The agents we interviewed did not identify any major case developments that resulted from use of the records obtained in response to Section 215 orders,” the inspector general concluded — though he said agents did view the material they gathered as “valuable” in developing other leads or corroborating information.

Comment Re:Camer was owned by the school (Score 5, Informative) 379

The school owned the camera he used. Therefore all work from that camera belongs to the school.

No. It does not work like that. If you borrow my guitar and write a hit song, it's your song, the copyright is yours. If you borrow my camera and take a Pulitzer-winning photo, it's your photo, the copyright is yours. Copyright goes to the creator of a work, not to the owner of any tools incidental to the creation.

Comment Re:Government Intrusion (Score 1) 837

This is the follow-up experiment to one run in the Netherlands over 20 years ago with LPG cars. (Did you know you can convert your car to run on natural gas, and have a switch to flip between the that and gasoline, for about $3000? Who knew?)

But rather than drive adoption of this by letting the much cheaper natural gas work its magic, they slapped a huge annual tax on said cars, so you would have to drive the equivalent of ~20,000 miles just to break even.

From that observation, pointing out how government concern for the environment was just lip service compared to its voracious desire for money, I predicted similar things for other developments in the future.

Well, here we are. Note in both cases they do this before, not after, achieving the ostensible goal of getting most, or even many, people on board such cars.

"They just want your money" -- 89,768-0 in predictive analysis of government action.

Comment Re:Stupid reasoning. (Score 1) 1094

by Impy the Impiuos Imp (#49738151) Attached to: Los Angeles Raises Minimum Wage To $15 an Hour

He also ignores that officials, happy to buy votes by spending taxes, will tax what the market can provide, so to speak, rather than what is needed.

This is why they mentally tie spending, taxing, and borrowing to the GDP rather than population or necessity. They want to be as high a fraction of that as possible. There's always more votes to buy.

It has nothing to do with necessity or population.

Submission + - Oregon to test pay-per-mile idea as replacement for gas tax (myway.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Oregon is about to embark on a first-in-the-nation program that aims to charge car owners not for the fuel they use, but for the miles they drive. Drivers will be able to install an odometer device without GPS tracking.

The program is meant to help the state raise more revenue to pay for road and bridge projects at a time when money generated from gasoline taxes are declining across the country, in part, because of greater fuel efficiency and the increasing popularity of fuel-efficient, hybrid and electric cars.

Starting July 1, up to 5,000 volunteers in Oregon can sign up to drive with devices that collect data on how much they have driven and where. The volunteers will agree to pay 1.5 cents for each mile traveled on public roads within Oregon, instead of the tax now added when filling up at the pump. Some electric and hybrid car owners, however, say the new tax would be unfair to them and would discourage purchasing of green vehicles.

Submission + - How the DEA harasses and robs train passengers (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Evidence suggests that the Drug Enforcement agency routinely detains, searches, and then steals from train passengers under the guise of searching for drugs.

This story isn't from some a libertarian website, but from the Atlantic. It describes the routine abuse of power by agents, often resulting in the theft of cash.

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