Once they have located an attacker, having privately owned armed drones would be very handy. if the attacker is a nation state, even more aggressive measures could be used.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership gives them the right to use "even more aggressive measures". It's called "corporate sovereignty" and it will be our undoing. Basically, it says that a corporation can sue governments for damages for any law that might conceivably cost them money.

We already have a mercenary military. Imagine the armies the Fortune 500 will put into the field, and the mischief they could create.

No, and I would greatly prefer if people the Clintons and Obama didn't hand these people trillions of tax payer dollars.

You mean Obama's the one paying all those Wall Street bonuses?

Damn, no wonder we got us a deficit, amirite?

If that were true, why haven't Chromebooks taken over?

The power of marketing.

There are a few people who believe that we don't need a government; that the free market can solve all problems up to and including national defense.

And all of those people are running for the GOP presidential nomination.

Maybe now, we can build some more dams

California? Dams?

I thought hydroelectric dams need water to operate.

Clinton also announced a new initiative to replace the warplanes of the American air force with modern and environmentally sound flying pigs.

We already have the F-35.

Obama: "sea level rise" is "hitting ... across the country". Absolute bullshit. Sea has been rising at exactly the same rate for 300 years. [Lonny Eachus, 2015-08-03]

Absolute bullshit. Once again, I did the math by calculating trends and accelerations for Church and White 2011 reconstructed sea level data. This PDF was made using my R code which accounts for autocorrelation- the red lines are 2 sigma uncertainties. The trends and accelerations all end at 2009.5.

If the sea "has been rising at exactly the same rate for 300 years" then the estimated trends on page 1 should have exactly the same value regardless of the starting year. But that's not true. More recent trends are higher than trends starting in the 1880s.

The second page also fits an acceleration term to those sea level data. If the sea "has been rising at exactly the same rate for 300 years" then those accelerations should be zero or at least average to zero. But that's not true. Every single best-fit acceleration is positive. Using the entire dataset, the acceleration since ~1880 is positive and statistically significant.

But as usual Jane/Lonny Eachus just makes up numbers to support his baseless accusations rather than actually doing the math.

I wish I could vote for the real Al Gore.

It wouldn't matter unless you could get the Supreme Court to vote for him too.

About half of my power bill is the cost of generation, the other half is transmission...

He didn't say "price", he said "cost". Because "transmission costs" are how power companies raise rates. The transmission costs have not gone up, but they've raised to transmission price as an end-around local consumer groups that have gotten laws passed to limit energy cost increases.

Transmission "costs" are actually a profit center for companies that really should be regulated utilities instead of one-way piggy banks for billionaires.

Let me know when they make a Soylent that tastes like Harold's Fried Chicken (One Bite and We Got'Cha).

https://farm6.staticflickr.com...

Seriously, let me know.

[By the way, if you're ever in Chicago and looking for some terrific, delicious chicken or cat fish - and I mean really really good - try Harold's. Stuff is amazing. But be careful the really hot sauce is really hot. There are a bunch of Harold's around town for your late-night post Hawks/White Sox/Bulls game enjoyment.]

I did: The claim is bullshit because it computes meaningless numbers ["hourly wage"] for a meaningless group of people ["all workers"].

The NELP paper is misusing that number in its own analysis, by multiplying by the nominal number of work hours to arrive at an annual full time income and then reasoning about that.

Furthermore, if the number meant what the NELP paper implies it means, it completely contradicts their argument for raising the minimum wage to $15/h: if in some sense "40% of workers" already make that much money, then $15/h is a solid, middle-class income, not a sign of poverty.

If you think the number has meaning, why don't you clearly state what that meaning is.

No matter how you slice it, rationalize it and just straight-up bullshit about it, more than 40% of the people who are working are working for less than $15/hr.

then $15/h is a solid, middle-class income, not a sign of poverty.

What part of "40% of the workers make less than $15/hr" do you not get? The "less than" part is kind of important.

The current minimum wage is less than half of your "solid, middle-class income" of $15/hr. And if you add up the incomes of everyone making minimum wage in America it comes to a little more than half as much as the bonuses that get paid out to Wall Street bankers in one year. And we're talking about full-time minimum wage workers ($7.25/hr). And by "Wall Street", they don't include investment bankers in Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, etc etc. We're only talking about the swells that do their business on a few square blocks on Manhattan island. And we're not talking about their entire incomes, but just the bonuses. So they find more money in their Christmas fucking stockings than all the full-time minimum wage workers in the United States put together. And don't forget, Wall Street bankers don't produce a goddamned thing.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

And we need to keep in mind that the fundamental characteristics of these countries is not that they happen to have socialist policies, but rather that they have capitalism, rule of law, and democracy. The combination of those three pretty much guarantees that they'll have comfortable and to some degree, affordable socialist policies.

Did I just get khallow to endorse some level of socialism? Please wait a second while I skypoint for a bit...

Unfortunately for those European Socialist countries since the EU was formed, the new late-stage capitalism financial aristocracy is using disaster capitalism to create all sorts of havoc. I don't know if they're taking after us, or we're taking after them.

You still have not provided a single bit of evidence that the statement "Over 40% of US workers make less than $15/hr". This was a statement you said was so ridiculous as to be laughable, so put up or shut up.

*rolls eyes* WWII ended 70 years ago; Stalin's gone, Putin's here. Do you have an actual point to make or are you just farming karma from the Europeans?

Yes, so where do you get this "Pax Americana" baloney? The Cold War? Please.

That statement, while probably true, entirely misses the point.

Since I was responding to the guy who claimed the effective US corporate income tax rate was over 50%, I'd say it's exactly on point.

Now we have a situation where the US receives zero tax from multinationals instead of 13%. If the US had lowered its corporate income tax rates, perhaps the US would actually be receiving 13% from those multinationals instead of 0.

I guarantee, if we were collecting 13% from multinationals, the line out of the American Enterprise Institute would be, "This is unacceptable! We need to make the tax rate 0% on corporations so we can be just like Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba, where rich people are left alone and colored people serve them drinks!"

Here are some countries that have 0% corporate income tax:
Bahamas
Bahrain
Bermuda
Bonaire, Saint Eustatius and Saba
Cayman Islands
Guernsey
Isle of Man
Jersey
Vanuatu

You know what they all have in common? You or I can't live there unless we win the lottery, and the only jobs in those countries are hotel maid and lickspittle.