Ronald Reagan would not be the first President to be deified.

Look at the monuments in Washington DC to various Presidents. Washington (Obelisk), Jefferson (Pantheon), Lincoln (Parthenon).

All of these are designs used by previous cultures in the worship of their Gods.

We just don't call it that because most of our citizens are nominally monotheistic.

Governments can accomplish a lot.

That's not the point here. It's a fact that governments always do their best to cover up their mistakes and self-aggrandize.

Holding up whatever public administration is in place at the current time in scorn for doing that is political gamesmanship at best, and demagoguery at worst.

It's inherent in the system (cf Monty Python).

Did you see the stats for the growth of their middle class over the past 15 years or so?

I'm not disputing that the country is ardently capitalist and has tightly guarded elite circles. But for most people in there, that's not where they are aiming for. What they want is basically just comfortable living, and their standard for it is getting pretty close to what the West enjoys. And with every new generation, there are millions more actually enjoying it - even though there's still hundreds of millions locked out. But for now, the trend is good.

> BTW, this is emblematic of the Obama administration

It's emblematic of EVERY administration going back thousands of years. Right wing present that this is something new but their world view seems to be completely uninfluenced by an appreciation of human nature or history.

For example:

Augustus was a shrewd and effective manager of his own public image. Itâ(TM)s now easy to take for granted that images of political leaders decorate our currency â" Augustus was among the first rulers to widely disseminate images of his own face on coins.

Itâ(TM)s hard to imagine even the most ardent Democrats supporting the literal deification of Barack Obama or erecting small shrines in his honor throughout Washington DC. By contrast, after Julius Caesar was posthumously declared a god, Augustus, as his adopted son, became known as the son of god. Along with the other gods, he received dedications at small crossroads shrines throughout Rome.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Books...

We seriously considered chronic lyme as a possibility and even got testing. The test came back negative, although there can be false negatives. We ultimately ruled it out on the basis of certain key symptoms being absent. Basically, we considered a LOT of things and did our best to rank the changes of each illness that might explain the symptoms. We were open to the idea of more than one cause but considered it a remote possibility; fortunately we were right.

Anyhow, homozygous MTHFR C677T can be serious, especially if there are other complicating mutations. Compared to some people my wife has a moderate problem. She had chronic fatigue (not to be necessarily confused with CFIDS), brain fog, autoimmune disease, gluten intolerance, weight gain, pale skin, hairloss, and many more symptoms. But she never lost feeling in her limbs; some people do. When you mess up the methylation cycle, all sorts of things can go wrong.

I'm not sure why you (an anonymous coward, so why am I feeding the trolls?) think that this mutation is of "dubious clinical significance." It's one of the more serious mutations, and the appropriate treatments have worked. Taking methylfolate, a few different forms of B12, and several other supplements has caused massive improvement in energy, return of proper skin tone, hair regrowth, appropriate weight loss, and so on. In other words THE TREATMENT WORKED.

This is one of those fortunate cases where a hard-to-find single cause has been identified. It explains ALL of the symptoms (many of which are secondary, caused by a deficiency caused by the underlying problem), and the treatment has worked very well. It's a little hard to get the exact dosages of vitamins right, because as soon as you get enough of one thing, the body will start repairing things, which requires other chemicals, and cause a deficiency in another thing, etc. So the fix isn't an over-night sort of thing but the progress is rapid.

And my biggest complaint is not that the MDs didn't know how to diagnose this. My complaint is that they EXPLICITLY REFUSED to help us when we were trying to track down the cause. Seriously. Most doctors just didn't have a clue and were unwilling to "do a lot of speculative testing," while some out-right said they refused to help us. Even if we came in with a list of tests to do to try to narrow down a range of possibilities (like a decision tree), they wouldn't do it. We had to figure this out completely on our own.

I don't expect MDs to know everything or be super-human. But I do expect them to listen and take patients seriously.

Sounds like you work for a crap employer. Most companies nowadays recognise that developers are far more productive with at least 2 monitors. Where I work we all have 2 dell monitors attached to a laptop docking station for our company issue laptop so we can actually use 3 screens if you don't mind one being smaller than the other two.

Why? Personally I try and avoid working unpaid hours from home, if it was part of my job requirement then I would want the company to buy be the necessary gear.

I don't mind the off bit of being on call to reboot servers and such, but that hardly requires anything more than a laptop screen.

Then why look at this card at all? You must be able to get something FAR cheaper if all you want is 2d real estate for software development. Wouldn't 2 or 3 cheaper cards be a far better purchase, even if you needed to buy a new motherboard to support it.

Ifr they were listening they would fix this crap. The problem though is that the stuff he points out all seems like the sort of horrible boring drivel that most devs hate fixing. they want to work on new features that are fun to implement, not digging through tons of other peoples code and all you see at the end is a few dialog boxes not being displayed when they don't make sense to.

This is one of the reasons why commercial software generally does this sort of thing much better, because you can assign this bug to someone then tell them their bonus depends on it getting fixed this sprint.

Doing that with unpaid devs is more tricky :)

... or for that matter any of your medical history. MDs do spot-diagnosis in 5 minutes or less based exclusively on what they've memorized or else they do no diagnosis at all.

My wife has a major genetic defect (MTHFR C677T), which causes severe nutritional problems. We haven't yet met an MD who has a clue about nutrition. Moreover, we had to diagnose this problem ourselves through genetic testing, with no doctors involved. We've shown the results to doctors, and they don't entirely disbelieve us, but they also have no clue what to do about it and still are dubious of the symptoms. (Who has symptoms of Beriberi these days? Someone whose general ability to absorb nutrients is severely compromised.)

What makes anyone think that this will change if your doctor has access to your DNA, even with detailed analysis? They won't take the time to actually read any of it. In fact a lot of what we know about genetic defects pertains to problems in generating certain kinds of enzymes, a lot of which participate in nutrient absorption. (So obviously RESEARCHERS know something about nutrition.) These nutritional problems require supplementation that MDs don't know about. Do you think the typical MD knows that Folic Acid is poison to those with C677T? Nope. They don't know the differences between folic acid, folinic acid, and methylfolate and still push folic acid on all pregnant women (they should be pushing methylfolate). They also don't know the differences between the various forms of B12 and always prescribe cyanocobalamin even for people who need the methyl and hydroxy forms.

Another way in which MDs are useless is caused by their training. Bascally, they're trained to be skeptical and dismissive. Many nutritional and autoimmune disorders manifest with a constellation of symptoms, along with severe brainfog. Someone with one of these problems will generally want to write down the symptoms when talking to a doctor, because they can't think clearly. The thing is, in med school, doctors are specifically trained to look out for patients with constellations of symptoms and written lists, and they are told to recognize this as a condition that is entirely within the mind of the patient. Of course, a lot of doctors, even if not trained to dsmiss things as "all in their head" are terrible at diagnosis anyway. They'll have no clue where to start and won't have the patience to do extensive testing. It's too INCONVENIENT and time-consuming. They won't make enough money off patients like this, so they get patients like this out the door as fast as possible.

I've had some good experiences with surgeons. But for any other kind of medical treatment, MDs have been mostly useless to me and my family. In general, if we go to one NOW, we've already disgnosed the problem (correctly) and possibly need advice on exactly which medicine is required, although when it comes to antibiotics, it's easy enough to find out which ones to use. (Medical diagnosis based on stuff you look up on the internet is really hard and requires a very well-trained bullshit filter, and you also have to know how to use the more authoritative sources properly. However, it's not impossible for people with training in things like law, information science, and biology. It just requires really good critical thinking skills. BTW, most MDs don't have that.)

MDs are technicians. Most of them are like those B-average CS grads from low-ranked schools who can barely manage to write Java applications. If you know how to deal with a low-level technician, guide them properly, and stroke their ego in the right way, you can deal with an MD.

Was it, though? China circa 1960s/70s was a totalitarian dictatorship where Tiananmen square was an impossibility simply because any dissent would be crushed long before it would get to mass protest stage, and the yearly number of victims was far greater, too. Compared to China after Tiananmen, the latter is far more liberal. It's even more liberal today.

I did not suggest doing such a thing. The best thing you can do is just trade (and yes, this doesn't preclude e.g. tariffs to even out the price of labor differences, environmental concerns etc).

It's a Chinese company located in China, and most of its business and customers are in China. So why is it doing its IPO on the US stock market?

Shouldn't NYSE/Nazdaq disallow this? SEC and FTC have no jurisdiction in China or anywhere else outside the USA. If a chinese company listed on NYSE did fraudulent accounting or whatever, SEC can't do jack shit about it.

The whole thing seems like a clever scheme by Chinese companies and Goldman Sachs to sucker money out of U.S. investors.

Well first off, it should ring major alarm bells to any investor that Alibaba isn't doing it in their native country. I mean, either the Chinese government has rules against it, or the founders are basically trying to skirt Chinese law for whatever reason. That's a major red flag without even looking at the details of the arrangement.

Sorry, I don't buy any arguments about whether or not the Chinese government allows IPOs like that - Alibaba is the largest e-commerce site in the world doing practically Chinese-only business, and you can't figure out Chinese investment law? I don't think so.

Yes, I'm willing to call it "shady" from the get go. Either that or it's a house of cards in China that's about to collapse. I'm sorry, but if you're so business savvy to basically be the #1 marketplace in the world, out-doing Amazon, eBay and other sites combined, and you're doing the IPO in the US, there's something majority shady going on, perhaps even criminal (hiding from the Chinese government? Forget to hire the standard Communist party official?).

And oh, the SEC does have some power still - they can effectively suspend trading or even force delisting. Yes, it means current shareholders get screwed, but it prevents future shareholders from being screwed more. Hell, they can still levy fines to be paid by company owners (i.e., shareholders). It's the shareholders that are taking on a lot of risk because they can't bring the executives to bear.

As a side note, who the fuck thought that "AdMob" would be a good name for an advertising site? "We're going to MOB you with ADS!"

Fuck Off, AdMob.

Well, they were advertising for mobile devices - basically the iPhone and later Android devices.

(And Apple and Google were competing to acquire AdMob, but Google eventually paid more and likely paid Apple to create iAds to get around anti-trust).

Oh yeah, don't forget that Google's ad CDN is 1e100.net.

Russia is independent of the USA part of the Internet to a degree you can hardly imagine. They have their own Facebook (vk), their own Google (yandex), two DNS root-server anycast instances, and even for credit cards they'll not be very sorry as Russians prefer debit cards from their own banks over Master/VISA credit cards.

Sure it'd be noticeable and some stuff would stop working, but it is certainly feasable.

If they ask, I'll consider it and I may decide this way or that.

If they lock me out without ads, I'll never visit their site again. I don't want ads, they don't want me as a visitor, we seem to have a concord.

As Chinese economy grows, so does its middle class. As its middle class grows, it demands more democratic reforms and more government responsibility - ultimately, a way to better China, for both its people and its neighbors.

So if you want a better China, you should do the exact opposite of what you're doing.