I'm going to call myself a wise skeptic. Someone else provided the missing link to the original story which points out that the plastic volume is derived from a 40+ year old estimate of how much plastic washes into the ocean (0.1%.) This estimate, doubtless taken as an article of faith in the published work, is from a time prior to widespread recycling, the EPA (and its analogs in other industrialized nations) having teeth, bioplastics that are designed to degrade, improved waste management, billions spent on public awareness, sponsored programs such as Adopt-a-Highway and other environmental measures. They disregarded all of that, took the 0.1% figure from a obsolete study, multiplied it by the quantity of plastic being manufactured today ran with the figure.

This stuff is so transparent it's laughable. It deserves ridicule. Instead it's blessed with the benefit of the doubt because the worst case fits the narrative to which you've been trained to adhere.

Bingo. The problem probably isn't hippies underestimating the ability of the oceans to consume plastic. The problem is probably just hippies wildly overestimating the quantity of plastic escaping trash collection/recycling systems.

But this simple hypothesis won't be welcome among hippies because it fails to comport with the contaminated planet narrative, so it won't be considered or analyzed, and Obama help anyone among the researchers that dares to suggest it. Instead, theories about contamination of the food web will be indulged and, based on zero actual evidence, the fear mongering has now commenced.

We call this process `science.'

No. Ridiculing "the race card" is important. Don't leave it out.

Those companies are a nightmare. GM is a lender and healthcare provider with car manufacturing as a side business. Between the Treasury department, the NLRB and DOT the domestic manufacturers are practically quasi-government, and the part that isn't government is run by employee unions that do their level best to ensure failure every day.

People like Brin and Page want nothing to do with these legacy hell holes. They went to the meeting, got a big whiff of the stench, and walked away.

Their solar deployment does successfully shave off a large portion of the the peaks of electrical demand during the the hottest part of the hottest days of the year, which makes for headlines that impress the naive. At all other times solar contribution is somewhere between small and negligible. And yes, this outcome does produce extravagantly expensive electricity.

As for the supposed shutdown of nuclear energy in Germany; Sweden has gone through the same process twice now, once after TMI-2 melted down and again after Chernobyl nailed Sweden with a heavy layer of radioactive isotopes. Initially the sound and fury of anti-nuclear activists in the minor parties in Sweden made a big splash and Sweden was supposed to decommission everything nuclear via public referendum. Eventually, as the practical reality of actually doing that weighed in the policy was set aside and nuclear now has sufficient and growing public support. Support that was apparently unaffected by Fukushima.

The same will happen with Germany; some uneconomic low-hanging fruit was shaken off the tree by Fukushima, and politically easy proclamations about the distant future have been made (similar to 10 year balanced budget plans in the US,) but as the day approaches and the reality of replacing the German nuclear base load supply with Russian gas, gigawatts of domestic coal expansion and French nuclear exports sets in the policy will probably be set aside.

Or not. Either way Germany won't be replacing its nuclear base load with solar panels, wind turbines and fictional energy storage systems in 8 years. That's pure fantasy.

Muricans that don't get enough sleep aren't not sleeping because they work too much. They're not sleeping because they're playing any one of a couple hundred MMOs and watching exabytes of Netflix videos in 20 hour Soprano's marathons and billions of hours of porn from tens of thousands of adult sites.

Work too much my ass. The parking lot where I work is mostly empty at 9:00 AM, mostly empty at lunch and mostly empty at 4:30 PM (earlier on Friday) and not a soul comes here on the weekend. They might do 7-ish hours a day, and probably 40% of that screwing around on the interwebs. The construction workers building the house next door don't start much before 10:00AM and they're long gone 8 hours later, never put in any weekend time, and half of them aren't even citizens.

The whole image of the 60 hour a week death-marching 'murican worker is a fiction. And their self-inflicted sleep problems have got jack shit to do with work.

This is why Bush gave China Most Favored Nation trading status which eliminates almost all finished-good tariffs and port authority scrutiny.

Wont this mean the river and atmospheres and everything in Alabama is BEING DESTROYED by CHINESE CAPITALISTS? The industry is supposed to be moving OUT OF THE US not in. We don't want your dirty contamination industry in our environments! Stop Chinese exploitation of our environments now!! Those rednecks little people were just fine in their trailers with SNAPEBTSSDI stuff. If they start working and earning money they might buy things and then they'll want to have a house and a car AND EVERYTHING to ruin the planet.

And screw Poe with his stupid laws

This whole voting thing.... It should really be limited to non-profit employed Portlandia types, shouldn't it?

Bitcoin is not a place one goes to enjoy the protections of traditional state issued currency and state regulated banking. Twitter is not a place one goes to find sincerity. Slashdot is not the place to indulge your fake outrage.

GM is approaching 50% foreign manufacture for the entire company. Their most popular trucks are 60% foreign now.

Lots of cars in the US already have Chinese parts. Japan has been outsourcing major drive train components to China for years. Chinese manufacturing is sufficient for automotive work. Even hotrod builders in the US use Chinese parts for legacy US designs; Scat and Eagle engine components are very popular.

We've got politically motivated BOLO lists, a political appointee hatchet-person taking the fifth, a government agency bullshitting the nation about "crashed" computers and "lost" emails....

There is a turd in here somewhere. Let a special prosecutor to sift through the IRS back up tapes, and subpoena all the other agencies for Lerner's mail. Let's find out why all these motherfuckers are stonewalling and lying.

It's personally offensive to me; to be told they can't recover the mail. I know that's bullshit. It's not even vaguely plausible. It's an insult to my intelligence and it deserves to be persecuted if only to expose and humiliate the fuckwits that have the temerity to make such a stupid claim. Letting that one slide just isn't tolerable. Let's kick open the door and find out what in the hell is going on here.

lost the emails............ I know that's bullshit and so do you.

Having read the statute, prior to hitting my crack pipe, I see no such "White House" criteria.

You may read the latest revision of the IRS interpretation of the statute here, where you will learn that e-mail — all e-mail — that meets that statutory definition of a "record" must be preserved within either an "electronic recordkeeping system," as defined by the IRS manual and well beyond Lois's broken computer, or "must be printed out and placed in the appropriate record system." Any e-mail communication Lois made regarding the disposition of some non-profit's status would obviously have qualified as a "record" under the plain language of 1.15.6-1.

And yes, we do prosecute people for destruction of government records. Probably not the protected political appointee hatchet-people of the powers-that-be, but it does happen, because it's criminal.