Really just ignorantly untrue. Nice houses, second homes, good services, retirement portfolio, helping worse-off relatives, donations to charitable causes--there are many expenses that wealthy people have (or choose to have) which are perfectly legitimate and can easily go past the $200K/year mark.

Scientific consensus is like "you cannot exceed the speed of light." If you happen to demonstrate that you exceeded the speed of light, you want to be careful about how you present it--e.g. "we have this interesting result and can someone help show what we did wrong?"--but the community will take notice if you actually show that the consensus is wrong. The more consensus there is, the better the evidence you need to posit the question, but the community still listens.

That's fair. These are problems I've seen in a majority or at least large minority of the studies I've seen and that I have seen referenced, but I do not work in the field so may suffer from sample bias. :)

Many studies in psychology and sociology do study correlation. There's nothing wrong with it, it just creates a limitation that it is difficult to reliably develop clinical tools from. You can call the studies "preliminary" if you want, but that doesn't make them invalid.

There are also causative experiments that are interesting and useful. They do not suffer from the same limitation, although others (e.g. common experimental populations) apply.

Absolutely. Most of the studies I have seen discussed or come across in psychology have been correlation-based. While many people are good at saying they don't know for sure what the study means, most people looking at it interpret it to have meaning that fits with their preexisting biases.

Yes, hence the problem with conducting so many experiments on college students.

Not only them. You also see a lot of the same problems in psychology textbooks, for example, and among psychologists. Psychologists are not immune to the problems which plague non-psychologists looking at the research.

I have no problem with any study's principal investigator. I may have problems with their conclusions, but prefer to read a study before I critique it. A broad statement that I have seen certain problems in a field or two does not invalidate the work of any particular person, or even the field as a whole--it simply says that I have seen an issue that the field needs to work on. And it does, to some extent--while psychology is still bad at questioning some underlying tenets, it is much more focused on, for example, cross-cultural research than it was twenty years ago.

It's actually much worse than that.

Studies in economics and psychology tend to suffer from certain problems which limit their real-world application and the likelihood that they actually mean what people think they mean.

First, they are often based on correlation rather than causation. This is especially true with psychology studies, and readily allows confirmation bias, incorrect interpretations of data, and interpretations of data which are heavily influenced by the perspective of the researcher.

Second, they are often done on western college students. This tends not to yield rules of general applicability.

Third, most economics (and psychology of economics) experiments are advertising experiments. They are done by corporations for financial gain and the results are generally kept secret because they are part of a company's IP and help the company sell its products, and because it simply saves the company money to not bother publishing.

Would you rather be surrounded by smart people or by normal people?

Better schools give you smarter peer groups, and you learn from and with smarter peer groups.

1) Putin is just posturing re: tactical nukes.

2) If Russia used tactical nukes, at least against NATO troops, it would go *very* badly for Russia. We're talking collapse-their-economy bad at the absolute minimum.

Power lines make communities much, much uglier if you actually stop to look at them. Convenience almost always trumps annoying the reticent.

The more people who know about the developer, the safer he is, at least while he is being harassed by relatively minor officials. We should be happy to accept a post or two about a nerd who is under threat by a government seeking to hide the truth about a military invasion.

Science is done best when it is done with the free exchange of truthful information and ideas. A nation which hides the truth is operating in a way fundamentally contrary both to the ideals of the open source community and to the spirit of intellectual exploration.

Nerds who don't care about that aren't nerds at all. There are a lot of diatribes about the authenticity of geekdom or nerdery. Most are just people trying to identify with one group or another and somehow believing the label affects their status in a way that people around them care about. But at the core of all Slashdot-related identities lie knowledge, intellectual expression, and the taking of joy in the exchange of information.

Yes, they do. But not all of them and certainly not in the manner that the GP presented. One needs to actually understand how the system works before one condemns it and/or proposes fixes for it. Incidentally, most of the people in politics hate the system as much as you do. You think they enjoy spending so much of their day begging people for money so they can fund their campaigns? The real world isn't House of Cards, most people actually enter public service for noble reasons, ranging from the mundane fixing of potholes to the desire to advance a social cause. The problem is two fold:

1) Campaign finance reform is inherently suspect because it's passed by people who have an incentive to make it harder for incumbents to lose elections. There's a reason why opponents frequently referred to McCain-Feingold as the "Incumbent Protection Act"

2) Meaningful campaign finance reform would require a Constitutional Amendment; the idea I most liked was the notion of precluding private donations but giving every American citizen X dollars to allocate as they see fit. It's an awesome idea but one that's utterly unconstitutional. Perhaps you should start building a network for this concept rather than spouting talking points about money going into Senators pockets?

Having everybody live off a high protein diet is unsustainable. There are whole segments of American society that couldn't afford it, never mind the third world, and even if money was no object it would be completely unsustainable from an environmental standpoint.

It's cute though that you took what I was saying and morphed it into "cutting sugar is unsustainable"; all I did was condemn your silly paleo diet, not the notion of cutting sugar or making other healthy lifestyle choices. One can cut out soda (or even enjoy it in moderation) without adopting a made up diet that claims to be what our ancestors ate.

Of course, physical activity is even better. I eat whatever the hell I want. You can do that when you're averaging 30 miles a week of running. Pass the cheesecake, mmm'kay?

You know that talking point is total bullshit, right? What you describe would be a felony offense in the United States. Nor can corporations give money directly to campaigns. They can donate to PACs, which are a special animal in the American political system, but they can't donate directly to campaigns or candidates. When people tell you that "Big oil/telecom/Hollywood/whatever gave X dollars to Y candidate" they really mean that the employees of those industries gave X dollars to Y candidate. Work at a gas station and donate $20 to your State Assemblywoman? That's added to the total donation from "big oil" when her opponent needs a talking point.

I realize such intricacies don't make for good talking points but it would be extremely helpful if people would at least learn how the system works rather than spreading FUD that only serves to undermine the tenuous amount of faith we have left in our system.

Try doing any cardio of moderate to heavy intensity (which you really ought to be doing, if you want to live a long life) without carbs. Your diet is a fad and an utterly unsustainable one (from an environmental standpoint) at that. If you really want to live like our ancestors did start having sex at 10 and forgo modern medicine. You'll be dead in your 20s and the carbon impact of your selfish lifestyle will cancel itself out.

What's wrong with coffee?

Except she won't be. And that's the problem. If they take their blood pressure and cholesterol meds they fucking live forever and just keep on eating. Meanwhile the rest of us get to subsidize their lifestyle choices because our healthcare system doesn't allow insurance underwriters to take lifestyle choices into account. The 40 year old sedentary fat ass pays the same as the 40 year old marathon runner.