I'm pretty generous when it comes to hiring people to do things I don't want too, but who...

Ok, suggestion for just such a hire (so you can have an opportunity to be generous!): Retain someone to teach you the difference between "to" and "too." :/

Math:

Ameliorating $4/month waste:

$1000 / 4 = 250 months until positive ROI. Your $1000 estimate is way high, though -- what he proposed is about $300 at most, at the scale he indicated. Probably not even that. It mostly depends on the wiring. Long is costly. Short and efficient, you're way down in costs. The rest is relatively constant. Solar panels, charge regulator, inverter. I show the closer numbers along with yours in square brackets: [$300 / 4 = 75 months until +ROI]

That's 20 years. [6 years]

After that, it's a constant ~$48 / year win.

Over the working and retired lifetime, figuring age 30 is when this is done in deference to slashdot's basic demographic as I perceive it, 40 years remain, so 20 [6] of that is payment, which means the ROI is 20 x $48 = $960 [34 x $48 = $1632]

There's also the social benefit of not drawing that power. It all adds up.

There's also the benefit of not losing functionality when power goes out.

And it's fun and personally rewarding.

And it's affordable, much more so that typically larger solar projects.

So, no, no stupidity. You're not thinking clearly, and to top that off, your data is bad.

The link is between nutrition and brain development, and considering the odds of poor nutrition is higher in poorer families than in wealthier families, the conclusion does not seem bad at all. Nothing says that all families that live in poverty will have children with developmental problems, but it does argue you're much more likely to see the phenomenon in such families.

I can't imagine why anyone would see this as controversial.

And how was a minority population viewed as subhuman, terrorized by both legal and extralegal organizations supposed to participate in the market? Jim Crow was only one aspect of a century of segregation and persecution of southern African Americans. Your perpetuating this fantasy that it was all the legislatures' faults, when every historical indication was that the majority of Americans in the Jim Crow states had absolute no problem with the laws, or with the idea that blacks and whites should not mingle, even in the market square.

Again, I will repeat, business is not some separate entity, some creature that exists in a vacuum. It exhibits the same prejudices that the wider society does, because it is simply a facet of that society. The Jim Crow laws weren't forced upon all southerners, they were forced on blacks by a majority of southerners who wanted to make sure they stayed at the bottom of the pole.

I don't know what is surprising about this. We've known for decades that poor nutrition during the developmental years can lead to poor brain development and permanent cognitive problems.

but why should anyone but the individual pay for said options???

We have to start from the premise that said individual may well not be able to afford these options.

Then, we pay for the same reason that we as group pay for other things that benefit society over the long term, like roads, fire departments, public education, defense, sewers, sidewalks, dikes, rain gutters. We know certain needs are going to come up, and/or certain events will actually happen, so we prepare for them in some way that optimizes the outcome.

Unwanted children are very often a serious burden both on society at large, and often upon the parents, and often even to themselves. The workforce is diminished and damaged, and people grow up under conditions that start out with a fairly strong negative impetus.

We benefit directly by stronger parent-child relations; by prepared parents as opposed to "oh crap, I/we didn't plan on THIS!" parents; By better educated and happier citizens.

It's the future we're investing in. That's one of the best things society can do.

Lastly, the evaluation should, at least in my estimation, be based upon this criteria:

Which is worse? Unwanted children, loss of productivity, social turmoil and misery, or a very reasonable levy upon the citizens in general?

All family planning services taken together ca. 2010 account for 2.37B out of the total of 3.55 trillion spent, or .06%, or 6/10,000ths of the total expenditure. That means for every $1000.00 you paid in taxes, that 60 cents of that went to cover family planning. Not too harsh, I'm thinking.

To me, if that is the question (and I think it is), the answer is pretty much a foregone conclusion.

Oh ya, because we know he was born on Mars and he's been denying it all his life. Denial is the best evidence of a lie. The whole Kenya thing is just a smokescreen to entrap the ignorant who don't know the Mars story.

I'm having difficulty imagining how this happened. The forgot to "check" autofill, or did the article goof and mean "uncheck" autofill? And what would autofill do anywa? I use Outlook but I have no autofill that I see. Will it fill in a random list of addresses if you forget to put anything in the "To:" field?

Actually, that theory makes the most sense...

For information, their car did ram a police vehicle that was blocking their entrance, presumably intentionally. This was not just some people intending a humorous protest in drag up at the NSA steps.

It is political though, since it's all about encouraging the voters.

And because the democrats supported this push for equal rights, the intolerant segments of the south responded by flipping in very short time over to the republicans. A few could not even bear this indignity and instead created a third segregationist party, the Dixiecrats, but in short order they became republican too. Soon the relative newcomers controlled the party, which previously was a very pro-business and pro-industry party with little in common with southern interests. This is very much analogous to the magnetic poles flipping.

I find it absolutely ironic that today they love to call themselves the "Party of Lincoln" when for a century the south hated the republicans with a passion. Their famed leaders like Lincoln or Eisenhower have nothing in common with the current party. Even Reagan would be unlikely to be elected today because he'd be seen as too liberal, too pro-tax, and he had too many friends who were democrats. Nixon though they like to distance themselves from, but he's the man who caused the poles to flip with his southern strategy.

Your cite: "the current event is the most severe drought in the last 1200 years"

Responding cite: "multiple droughts in California that lasted 10 or 20 years in a row during the past 1,000 years"

I think that in presenting this, the poster may be contending that a 20-year drought is more severe than a 3 year drought. Although that really depends on the range of conditions we call a drought. If it's a narrow range, a 20-year event is almost certainly worse than a three year event. If the range is wider, not so certain. I wonder if the tree ring data can be analyzed for severity as well as duration.

Then we have this in the responding cite:

"a 240-year-long drought that started in 850 and, 50 years after the conclusion of that one, another that stretched at least 180 years."

That means the former started 1150 years ago (within your 1200 year range) and the next one, after that.

Pretty sure the other poster has checkmated you one way or another, and perhaps both, assuming the data being cited is accurate.

The dustbowl also checkmates anything California is currently experiencing, just as an aside.

There's just no way this allows us to assign the current drought definitively to AGW, as the data shows much worse events without any such impetus.

So, could it be AGW causing the current drought? Sure. Is it? No one knows. And when people claim it is? They are full of hot air, either passing along misinformation, or being disingenuous themselves (I always assume the former, because the number of people who actually have a reasonable grasp on the situation are very few on either side.)

There are a few distinct differences between that older bills and this new one, even though the title is somewhat similar.

First, the law applies to for-profit businesses. And religious beliefs can be used as a defense in any private lawsuit. This clause was added because a similar New Mexico law lost a legal challenge for those reasons. The federal law does not have this clause. The original federal law and most of the state laws that copied it, are based upon keeping the government from interfering with expression of religious views (like muslim inmates being allowed to keep beards).

NExt, the law applies to protections of practices whether or not compelled by a system of religious belief. That is, very fringe practices not justified by the religion are under the protection here. So even if your church has no divinely inspired scriptures telling you to not sell products to gay people, you can still claim that you are protected by this law. Thus the Church of Cannabis has opened in Indiana, with the use of cannabis being a part of their beliefs, using this law as their basis to exist legally.

The federal law at the time was a relatively benign law, meant to protect things like feeding the homeless in parks. Since then the law has been interpreted differently by several courts and many of the people originally supporting the law in congress have backed away from it. Having a similar title does not make two laws the same thing.

These two were tied up in the chain of evidence that led to his conviction, so depending on what gets tossed he has a chance here. Now he did admit that at one time he was DPR and that he had resumed work under the alias so he's probably not going to get everything overturned. But his defense was that someone else associated possibly with MTGOX was the mastermind framing him more recently.

So what's intriguing here is that one of the investigators was doing some shenanigams with MTGOX accounts and was involved in seizing MTGOX assets. Since MT GOX started having liquidity problems right during this investigation of Silk road, it really makes you wonder if this is where some of those missing assets went.

Furthermore the agents appear to have done things as their shenanigans came to light to obfuscate the trail back to them. This is not too far afield from ulricht's claim that someone was framing him, asking him to step in as DPR, and putting keys on his computer.

It actually seems it's not far fetched to imagine Ulricht was telling the truth about having relinquished DPR that someone suddenly invited him back into the game as the FBI closed in. Perhaps there's some grains of truth in there somewhere. e.g. maybe one of the agents did add his bitcoin keys to Urichts computers.

Given those sorts of conjectures it seems very reasonable he should get a new trial. He's guilty by his own admission, but maybe not guilty of everything he's charged with.