Social media advertisement is the sales guy sitting down at your table in the bar and trying to sell you a new refrigerator when you're hanging with friends because he saw you looking at refrigerators two weeks ago in a shop.

Search or content related advertising is the sales guy trying to sell you a new refrigerator when you're looking at refrigerators.

One of those has a chance to make a sale and might even be appreciated. The other is just irrelevant.

For sales, it's pointless to know what a customer is interested in if you don't know when they're interested in it, which means you're always better off targeting content over people because content has both temporal targeting as well as interest targeting implicitly right, while person profiling and social media presentation only gets a generic long term interest profile and implicitly targets people doing something other than being interested in products.

Yeah, the Internet's nothing to do with computers ... it's just tubes all the way.

Your point is pretty much self-refuting, because public transit is heavily subsidized, perhaps even more than automobiles are.

We don't come anywhere close to spending "half our budget on wars." The military (plus veterans' benefits) only accounts for about 22% of total federal spending.

Then you need better eyes. Unless you can actually get cybernetic implants you're stuck with the choice of fine detail or large quantities of information at the same time.

Even the GP is overestimating the capabilities, because the 20/20 resolution itself is limited to a very narrow field of view; the human eyes capability of even resolving text at all is pretty much nonexistent outside a 6 degree arc.

Now, if we could get monitors where you'd have to look away from an image of the sun because it's too bright, that would actually be something I'd be interested in. Because with contrast we're nowhere near the physical capabilities of perception and that would make some difference.

Vaccines cause neurotypicality - you heard it here first!

I'm sorry, but this is beside the point. If there are going to be 501(c)(4)s, the IRS has to judge them fairly, and they weren't. Maybe you think the AARP, the NRA, the League of Conservation Voters, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the National Wildlife Federation Action Fund, and all the rest should be taxed like for-profit corporations, but under the interpretation of the law that has existed for decades, they aren't. And if you are going to change that, don't change it for one political view, and not for the others.

I am not downplaying the importance of the NSA scandal, but the IRS scandal is, in a way, worse. While the NSA violated the right of masses of Americans, it is (as far as we know) an "equal opportunity" violation of rights. But the IRS scandal is about using the machinery of government for partisan advantage. That is hugely dangerous in a way different, and arguably worse.

Nonsense. What section of the code should they have applied for? 501(3)(c)s have strict limits on participation in politics. 501(c)(5) and 501(c)(6) are even worse fits.

If Obama's campaign organization can become a 501(c)(4) and now serve has a propaganda and lobbying arm for Democrats, including running the Presidential Twitter feed, how is it that groups that want to educate people about the Constitution are somehow too political? Or you seriously going to argue that Organizing For America qualifies, but hundreds of Tea Party groups do not? Give it up, dude. This is a genuine scandal of Nixonian proportions.

Exactly. Lois Lerner also went after the Christian Coalition when she was at the FEC.

Can we please stop referring to this as a "fake scandal"? It's real.

1. - Hundreds of conservative groups were targeted
2. - Applications were delayed for months and years
3. - Absurd, intrusive, unusual questions were asked: for membership lists, readings lists, the content of prayers (WTF?)
4. - 100% of the 501(c)(4) groups audited by IRS were conservative
5. - The IRS audited 10% of all Tea Party donors from the lists provided to the agency
6. - Meanwhile, Obama's campaign org OfA smoothly became a 501(c)(4), and still runs his Twitter feed. No partisan politics there!
7. - Obama's skeezy half-brother had his "charity" fast-tracked to 501(c)(3) status, despite years of illegal fundraising, and had those illegal actions approved retroactively.
8. - And all along, administration officials lied repeatedly: it was a rogue activity of a few people in Cincinnati, etc., and most recently, Congressional testimony that the IRS has all of the emails.

Richard Nixon could only dream of using the IRS like this. By now, only the willfully blind can consider this a "fake" scandal.

And yet Mexico has over triple the rate of tuberculosis, which makes me question the efficacy of those vaccination rates.

Nonsense. He knows what he sees in his work. He wasn't making an epidemiological statement, he was making an observational one: the TB cases he was seeing were disproportionately illegal immigrants. Observation is not necessarily "observational bias."

No, I just assume he's an expert on the characteristics of his patients and their diseases, because that's his job.

He worked at a free clinic, and was speaking from personal experience. I don't think a doctor has to be an epidemiologist in order to note what he sees.