Uhhh, there's nothing free market or capitalism about USPS and unions of quasi-governmental workers. There's nothing free market about laws that prohibit companies from firing striking workers.

Government (and quasi-government, the USPS is effectively a government agency) employee unions have a unique position in that the "business" can't choose to go out of business and go elsewhere. So it's forced to capitulate to any demand, however unreasonable, that is not illegal and that the union is unwilling to budge on. Government employee unions are a bad idea for this reason.

There's another issue- moral hazard. When management of a private company make concessions during union bargaining, they are directly responsible (to their board and the marketplace) for paying the consequences of making those decisions. Politicians and government managers have much less accountability for making decisions that are not in the government's interest- managers are often shielded by law from retaliation (like firing for incompetence), and elections are often long away and often unions funnel more money to candidates who favor them in lawmaking and negotiations. So there's not much incentive to be adversarial in government employee union negotiations.

Exactly! I was about to post the same thing.

The initial investigation by the university was a whitewash, amounting to "they said they didn't do anything wrong". Look in my history for my comments on that. The NSF report (I just read the summary) seems pretty professional and thorough, but it "exonerates" Mann against a charge that no one seems to have made, i.e. that he falsified data. I have not read any such claim anywhwere credible (and in fact the NSF report explains at the beginning that their investigation was self-generated, not based on external complaints anyway, so I guess NSF just decided to look into it on their own).

Most of the NSF report basically sums up as "NSF didn't fund his research so our standards don't apply". The whole problem with Mann and with Hadley CRU is not that they falsified any data, but (1) that their methods were incredibly biased towards the outcome they wanted (support for AGW), and (2) that a small amount of research by a small number of individuals was used to try to change public policy, out of proportion with the weight of the evidence, coupled with the clear intent to suppress conflicting studies and voices.

I have no qualms with the NSF report. However it doesn't address my concerns with Mann or Hadley CRU.

Engineers do apprentice; it's a requirement of licensure. Usually licensure requires several of years of practice under a licensed engineer, in addition to degree requirements and testing.

See the article on Ars Technica

This is incorrect.

In the past we found undesirable behavior with private fire fighting organizations. This does NOT lead to the necessary conclusion that fire fighting MUST be a government provided service. It just means that we need mechanisms, legal or otherwise, to prevent bad behavior. There were also good aspects to private fire fighters.

For example, I personally like the idea of two fire fighting companies racing to my house as fast as they can, because only the first one on scene gets paid by the insurance company. This incentivizes timely response and placement of many fire stations in order to minimize distance.

In the Tennessee case, I think that the right thing to have done would have been to put out the fire and then send the guy a bill for the cost of putting the fire out. Not out of kindness, but just to avoid bad PR. In an area with high building density then there must be a fire response, and this model would work there as well. Already some cities charge you if you have a traffic accident and knock down a light pole, for instance.

I just don't think government is particularly good at anything, and I don't think that de jure monopolies result in the best outcomes.

Read the linked article. Saving gas is NOT the self-identified main reason that most people buy Prius. As I said, most people who buy Prius, by far the dominant hybrid, is because of, in their own words, "it makes a statement about me". This is smug; it's another way of saying "I'm better than you". Even your holier than thou "I use half the gas that you do" response is smug. You have no idea what kind of car I drive, or if I even drive at all, so your statement is unsupported by facts.

The decision to buy a hybrid is usually emotional, not rational. A 2007 survey indicates that most (57%) Prius owners' primary motivation for purchasing the vehicle is because "it makes a statement about me". As other posters (and a South Park episode) have commented, buying a hybrid is just a new way to be smug.

RFID toll tokens have already been successfully used to prove location and travel:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericfitz/archive/2007/08/10/ez-pass-logs-used-in-divorce-cases.aspx

That was my first thought as well. If you don't want people to ever see something, then don't ever record it in the first place, and for god's sake, don't record it on the web using equipment that belongs to your boss.

There have been court rulings (and probably will be more in the future) that allow bosses to monitor your communications on equipment that belongs to them. So just stay away from that.

Also, the internet never forgets- if you don't want something visible in the future, then you better keep it off the web now.

Crypto degrades over time as processing power and mathematical research improve, so it doesn't make sense to say " uses with , just use that". Who knows? The day after you die they might break the product implementation or the crypto algorithm or come up with a way to try the entire universe of key space in O(1), so encrypting something but leaving it lying around is not a safe thing to do.

Better to never create the information if you don't ever want anyone to see it. Keep it in your head. There are lots of mnemonic tricks for remembering things that you want to recall later.

Regardless of which side you fall on, read the pdf and then ask yourself if you feel the investigation methodology was satisfactory.

The investigation into Mann was essentially "we read the emails and didn't find a statement like 'I committed fraud'", and then we interviewed the guy, and he said he didn't do it. Ergo, he must be innocent, right?

Can you imagine if we ran criminal courts the same way?

The investigations were a worthless waste of everyone's time. Because of the lack of diligence, not only fail to resolve the dispute, but tend to have the opposite effect. A non-thorough investigation always looks like a cover-up.

I am not stating or even implying that there was any effort to cover up wrongdoing, and I am not saying that Mann did anything wrong. I am saying that you cannot reasonably conclude either point due to the methodology of the investigation.

As I said, read it yourself and draw your own conclusion. I know I'm going to be modded down and ridiculed for even failing to accept the results of the investigation as gospel; draw your own conclusions about people who behave that way.

Which is precisely why you will never be in such a situation.

Doc Ruby, you are a Troll.

Show me the bill that anyone tried to get passed in the last 30 years that tried to outlaw contraception (some flake submitting a bill that died in committee doesn't count). Show me a bill that anyone tried to get passed which attempts to prohibit or limit the practice of any religion except Christianity, or for that matter, has any effect that tends to diminish the practice of any religion.

The issues with abortion and creationism are complex and although you obviously have a strong opinion on the matter which precludes debate, it is a reasonable thing that if we are going to force children to learn a state-imposed curriculum, then the community should have input into that curriculum. Likewise it is a reasonable thing to discuss whether/when a fetus turns into a baby, whether abortion is infanticide, etc. It doesn't mean that the other side wants to impose its religious views on you. It's that they don't want YOU imposing YOUR views on them.

There's a small percentage of the population at either end who would willfully force the rest of the population to comply with their worldview. The rest of us realize that we live in a democratic republic and that individual communities might choose to pass laws that we would personally find distasteful.

The position you advocate, which is that people who hold these views (evidenced by a survey of people's beliefs) are trying to establish a theocracy. This is absurd and intellectually dishonest.

I *WANT* people's beliefs to influence their lawmaking. If someone believes that gays being denied the right to marry is a violation of their civil rights, then I want that person to sponsor and drive legislation to change the matter. If someone believes that evolution is a crock and that God created the earth in 7 days, then I want them to fight for inclusion of that in the curriculum. I might not want them to win, and in practice I usually find that there is some underlying principle that we disagree on that needs addressing (why does the government sanction/perform marriage? is creationism science?) but I want them to have their chance to debate the issue civilly.

There are flakes on both ends of the spectrum, but they are so far out of mainstream that they typically have no effect on anything. That is, until they get elected by hiding their agenda and then push through ideology-driven laws that the majority of the country oppose. But by and large the system is self regulating and corrects itself.

It's trolls like you who incorrectly stereotype people and use variants of Godwin's Law to attribute evil motives to people with whom you disagree.