I agree with what most of what you're saying, but something can't be "highly deterministic." It either is or it isn't. It is very, very difficult to show that a system is deterministic and chaotic rather than just random, but there *is* a distinct difference between the two.

Just think of how hard it would be to prove a software random number generator is deterministic if all you have to look at is the output. Even computer algorithms like that, which are provably deterministic, observationally will still have some fluctuation in their output due to uncontrollable variables (corrupted ram, design limitations, hardware errors a la Intel floating point thing) and that's in an environment that is precisely engineered to produce such determinism. Then contrast that with all the millions of social, behavioral, and environmental factors that are throwing noise at observation of the human brain and it becomes mind-boggling very, very quickly.

Any possible proof of the determinism of the human brain would first require that we come to a complete understanding of the chemical and biological processes that control human thought in addition to how environmental and genetic factors influence those internal processes. I think this particular question will stay in the realm of philosophy rather than science for an extremely long time.

You're absolutely wrong about this. We have succeeded as a society in bringing a massive caloric surplus to bear, but we have not in any way solved hunger.

It is possible to be starving while your neighbors are over fed, and indeed that is exactly what is happening. There are approximately 50 million people in the US that still deal with chronic hunger. There's a documentary out now called A Place at the Table. I highly, highly recommend that you check it out.

And you present it as an either/or, but it is possible to be both obese and malnourished. That is exactly what you find in a large percentage of the US population. If our poor are chronically malnourished because the only food they can afford makes them fat and sick, then what use is there in making the distinction between a nutrition problem and a hunger problem? In reality they are two sides of the exact same problem.

I can certainly imagine life without iOS, if that's what you mean.

All of those $500 wines or $500 whiskeys are aged. It's less a matter of quality and more of rarity. And for the most part, those bottles are not worth what you're paying for. If you know what you're doing you can find a $80 bottle of whiskey that tastes as good as the $500, or a $40 bottle of wine that tastes as good as the $500. Most wines don't actually benefit by aging much if at all, and unless you have an incredibly well-developed palate you probably can't taste the difference between a good wine and an excellent one.

Beer, by its nature, is more ephemeral than wine or spirits. The best beer you'll ever have is fresh from the barrel at a good brewery, not stuck in somebody's cellar for 30 years.

Hitler was nominally a socialist, but that means a different thing than you seem to think. He was certainly not a Marxist. Remember that North Korea is nominally called the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea. It doesn't mean that they are a democracy.

And Germany implemented social security and universal health care in the 1880s. Hitler wasn't even born yet. If you want to avoid the more negative connotations of the word fascist, you could call the Nazi government a militaristic autarky. That's way more closer to the truth than socialist, but the word fascist exists for a reason.

The worst was Ann Romney. At the RNC last year, she got a fucking standing ovation for saying that women work harder for their families than men.

Gas is cheaper in inflation-adjusted dollars than when I started paying attention to it. Commodity prices are cyclical. Fearing that they will go to infinity because you've only experienced on upswing is just like fearing the oceans will all boil during the first Summer of your life.

When did you start paying attention, 1980? That's the only time in the last 40 years the prices have been similar, and that was caused by decreased supply due to the Iranian revolution, subsequent embargoes and the Iran-Iraq war. We are at similar inflation-adjusted prices now with the whole world producing at maximum capacity. Imagine how high prices would go if we completely removed Iranian and Iraqi production from the market!

And commodity prices are not always cyclical. If production can not keep up with increased demand (as has been the case with oil for over a decade now) prices will continue to rise. There aren't going to be any more dramatic increases in oil production like we saw in the 1980s and 1990s as offshore platforms and Arctic oil came into their own. We're sucking it out of every place on earth. Demand will continue to outpace production until something displaces oil.

Your guess is as good as mine when that will happen, but it certainly isn't going to be any time soon. Even if the entire world decided to switch to some other technology *tomorrow* it would still take decades to get the infrastructure in place.

Actually, LA does have a much more dense population than Orange County, particularly around downtown. Orange County is similar in population density to The Valley or the western parts of IE. And if you drive into downtown from other parts of LA County on the 10, 5, or 405, you'll notice the same phenomenon you described coming up from Orange County.

And I don't have any data to back it up, but I guarantee that the number of cars going into LA proper is a lot smaller than the number leaving during the morning commute. Traffic is always always easier to manage the further you get from a major city center. If you look at other cities like Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, DC you see exactly the same problems.

Or maybe it's because there are 7 million more people in LA County than in Orange County?

You can't move a population of 10+ million people around every day by automobile without traffic jams. It's an impossible task. You can eke out tiny improvements, but just as quickly they are overtaken by increased usage and then you're looking at an even larger, more expensive and time-consuming upgrade to keep traffic moving . The 405 is a perfect example of this.

Auto travel does not scale efficiently and over the long term LA is going to have to significantly improve its mass transit (ie subway, light rail, street cars NOT buses) to have any chance of improving congestion. Thankfully the government understands this and is moving beyond 1950s urban planning policies.

But it's LA, and no place on earth is more beholden to the notion that a car is freedom and taking public transit is for the unwashed masses. Even when it's obvious to everyone involved that upgrading the freeway system is a huge, inefficient pain in the ass and a waste of public money you still get people like yourself clamoring that they should do *more* of it. It's absurd.

They definitely do. I don't really see the AG's point here. I switched to T-Mobile about a month ago and it was perfectly clear that if I received a phone I would actually be paying for it by installment. Zero complaints so far.

Well, they were white Americans, so I guess the mainstream media was ecstatic, right?

I don't think I've seen a single in-depth article that didn't zero in on the fact that the older bother was Muslim, most going into great detail about his trip to Dagestan. There was a great discussion on the radio this morning about how immigrants from tribal Muslim cultures are particularly prone to alienation and have difficulty adapting to mainstream American culture.

But what do I know? I listen to NPR.

I get your point about gender roles being "normalized" in children, but come on man. This line:

I know 1 female engineer out of the 40+ women I know, all the rest can't stand doing math, physic's or even intense thinking.

is pretty fucking condescending. Grow up.

Don't forget that Eisenhower was the one responsible for transforming the CIA into its modern form (essentially a fifth armed service) with the deposition of the Shah in Iran and a massive escalation of US anti-communist activity in the Caribbean and South America.

And you may praise Eisenhower for staying out of Vietnam, but that is simply not true. He initially denied sending troops in to aid the French, but he did provide air support for them. During the interstitial time between wars the US clearly supported the South diplomatically and monetarily. Eisenhower articulated the "domino theory" policy that would guide the US into direct conflict in Vietnam, and by the time he left office the US had about 1,000 "military advisers" on the ground aiding the South Vietnamese. So the US was already very clearly committed to military involvement in Vietnam before Kennedy and Johnson took office.

Sentences aren't paragraphs.

Typing that way doesn't make your points any more salient.

It just makes it incredibly irritating to read.

The debt actually is being brought under control. Discretionary federal spending is the lowest it's been since the 1950s. We are spending less money than we have since Truman was president! Total government spending is back to early 1980s levels. The economy is recovering, and tax receipts are once again growing at a healthy rate. The deficit this year is 5.5% of GDP, which is a fairly healthy number taken by itself.

The problem then becomes how do we pay off the massive debt we have accumulated over the last dozen years, and move it to a healthier number as a percentage of GDP? Unfortunately there's only two ways: raise revenue or cut spending, and you can only do so much of either. Social security, medicaid, and the military industrial complex aren't going anywhere unless the citizens demand it, and they ain't demanding it. They also aren't demanding higher taxes.

Honestly, we're not in that bad of a position considering how poorly the last decade played out. Our debt is manageable at the current levels. If the economy hits another major recession we're screwed, but if it grows at healthy levels and future administrations don't repeat the clusterfuck that was Bush Jr.'s two terms, we should be just fine.

I think people are a bit more intelligent than you're giving them credit (some at least, I don't doubt that a fair amount of the electorate is truly tribal although that is a difficult thing to quantify). Politics is, well, politics. It's horse-trading. You sometimes vote for a candidate that holds views you dislike because he will advance certain agendas that you care about.

For example, I voted for Obama in the last election. It's not because I thought he was a great candidate. I hate many of his policies. It's because I thought he was the best choice available. On issues that I care deeply about (women's rights, gay rights, environmental protection) he was better than Romney, and on other issues where I have strong enough opinions that it would have changed my vote (the economy, the military, civil rights) I didn't think Romney provided an option that was better than Obama's. If the Republicans had run a candidate that was socially moderate and had a fiscally sound plan for bringing down the federal debt I probably would've voted for him.

So in this situation I voted for a candidate that I don't particularly care for in order to see progress in a few areas, even though in several ways Obama is the antithesis of what I would like (particularly in regards to civil rights and foreign military intervention). Am I part of the Democratic tribe? Honestly, I feel more like a Green or Socialist, but I feel I would be just as likely to vote for a Republican as a Democrat, and have in the past.