That's great, if you live in an area where it's possible to pull off to the side of the road. In many places where I live, there IS no side of the road, especially when that road runs along a ravine, or the road has trees all along both sides. It's great if you want to avoid speed traps, since there's no where for a cop to park - but terrible if you need to pull over for an emergency.

Or the side of the road is a sidewalk with pedestrians. Or you're on the highway - do you really think it's a good idea to pull over on the highway?

I'm not trying to defend people who text and drive (although "sitting at a red light" != "driving", IMO) - personally I make my wife handle all phone/GPS details while I'm driving - but I think pulling over to text is more dangerous than texting at a red light. At least in my locale.

The big difference between being drunk at a stoplight and texting at a stoplight is that when you put the phone down and start moving, you're no longer texting. But if you were drunk and you start moving...you're still drunk.

But for that matter, I don't know why anyone types on text messages anymore. Verbal transcription in the latest mobile OS platforms is so good that I haven't typed a message in at least a year.

A driver trying to steer out of the way of a pedestrian engaged in reckless behavior (like walking out in front of traffic) might very well end up killing someone, and it WOULD be the pedestrian's fault.

I'd rather people talk on the phone while driving, than text or GPS while driving, or even talking to a passenger in the same car.

You see, when talking on the phone, your eyes are still on the road. If texting or GPS, your eyes are on the gadget. If talking to a passenger, you will inevitably look away from the road in order to observe nonverbal cues from your companion.

Why is it that the natural reaction of attraction to a beautiful woman implies that she is an object?

this information comes from revelation of secret court documents, not a PR statement itself.

I believe I read that this declassified opinion from FISC was written *after* the Snowden documents were leaked. So we cannot actually be too sure that this opinion was not written as a matter of PR.

You will appreciate this.

A widow in PA lost her $280,000 home over $6.30 in unpaid property taxes. Well, after interest and penalties, the $6.30 became $235 - still less than 0.1% of her home value.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100975448

Fortunately, a Judge has decided she has a chance to appeal the loss of her home. But it has already been auctioned off.

The NYT link does not back up your side of the story. In fact, it explicitly debunks the other two links.

Moreover, their claim depends on careful selection of the starting and ending points. The starting point is almost always 1998, a particularly warm year because of a strong El Niño weather pattern.

Somebody who wanted to sell you gold coins as an investment could make the same kind of argument about the futility of putting your retirement funds into the stock market. If he picked the start date and the end date carefully enough, the gold salesman could make it look like the stock market did not go up for a decade or longer.

Emphasis mine. Every time someone says "global temperatures are not going up" - literally, every single time - it is because they use 1998 as the starting point. 1998 sets off all kinds of alarm bells, because it's a cherry-picked date.

Worse, it's not even proper statistics. These people are using high-school-level point-slope form; (Y2-Y1) = m(X2-X1). That's the only way you can get "flat". If you do a proper undergraduate-level Least Squared Linear Regression, even using 1998 as your starting point isn't enough to claim "flat". If you don't feel capable of performing undergraduate statistics, you can always use Excel, or any number of free online spreadsheets, to do the Linear Regression for you.

It is not a matter of "how do you know that that's not supposed to be [the] temperature?"

It's not like we have real "equilibriums", i.e. a global minima/maxima. It's more like we have a lot of local minimas/maximas. Enough forcings can push us out of our current local min/max and into a new min/max - like a flip flop that went metastable, sure it's not "supposed" to be at half-voltage, but it's a local minima that is relatively stable until something forces it toward the global minima. In all cases, the earth is at temperatures it's "supposed" to be at, otherwise we'd be violating laws of physics.

The question is, can humanity deal with the new local min/max as well as humanity dealt with the old min/max? That is why arguments about what temperature the earth was back in prehistory are red herrings. We didn't have massive civilizations with skyscrapers and monoculture farms feeding billions of people back in prehistory.

No?

So it's not true that the 1979 revolution in Iran was in part fueled by anti-American animosity for our role in installing and supporting the Shah as ruler of Iran?

I mean, sure, in 1953, they might not have been opposed to what was happening (if they even knew what was happening at the time). But then again, in 2003, the US and most of the world thought Iraq had WMD and planned on using it. Funny how time has a habit of changing how an action is perceived. Just because someone isn't against it at the time it happened doesn't mean that it isn't viewed as a "disagreement" after-the-fact.

Bad analogy. You're choosing an evil target and a sympathetic target - that is not the case in Syria. On one side, you have Assad. On the other side, you have a coalition of rebels, a significant portion of whom align themselves with al-Qaeda (they are referred to as "al-Nusra" in media reports)

Better analogy: you have two neighbors, Assad and al-Nusra. You hate them both, they're both deadbeats, they leave garbage all over their lawn, beat their wife and kids, etc. You see Assad and al-Nusra get into a fight with each other.

Doing nothing in this case is prudent because you don't want either of them to win the fight. They're both bad guys.

Damascus is not a remote village full of civilians. It is the capital of Syria.

This would be not unlike Obama gassing a suburb of DC because he's in a disagreement with Republicans.

Keep in mind that the gas attack happened in a suburb of Damascus.

Damascus is the capital of Syria. Assad's palace is like, what, 10 miles from where the gas attack happened?

Do you REALLY think that he would launch a gas attack when a change in the wind could bring that gas directly to him? That reminds me of the people who think Iran would blow up Israel, not realizing that the land Israel sits on is holy land for Iran, too; the epitome of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Could that little disagreement have anything to do with another little disagreement the Iranians had with the US in 1953?

1) Competition is good, right? Well, if these health exchanges that PPACA sets up provide more competition to provide insurers, isn't that a good thing? I mean, if the private insurance is so much better than the public health exchanges, everyone will just buy private insurance.

2) Congress isn't exempting anyone. Congress pays for some of the staffers' insurance. This little "exemption" thing (lol) is about how the payments will be handled under PPACA.

3) Tort reform isn't going to fix the incentives. Patients don't have enough knowledge to make intelligent decisions, and their decisions are frequently made under duress. Doctors have huge debt burdens that need to be taken away. Insurance companies have shareholders that they need to pay off. Hospitals make money on every service, so their incentive is to provide as many services as possible, even if they aren't necessary.

IMO, the true potential for reform involves two things.

a) Increase the supply of medical professionals. Supply goes up, price goes down. To make this easier, medical school needs to be less expensive. We need more GPs, fewer specialists, and you don't need to be top-tier to help people with checkups, or general medical treatments for colds, flus, etc.

b) Smaller patient care centers. Imagine a doctor's office, but instead of doctors, it's staffed almost entirely by nurses. They form a triage, identifying people who don't actually need to see a full-fledged M.D. They would take walk-ins, no appointment necessary, so that people are more willing to go see the nurse about their problem, instead of waiting for it to become so bad that they need to go to the hospital. This would take care of the bulk of medical appointments, reducing the burden on doctors so that they can spend more than five or ten minutes with each patient.

Unfortunately, neither of my two suggestions do anything to fix most of the incentives. I'm afraid to say it, but the only thing that can provide industry with proper incentives in this regard is government regulation.