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Congress cutting funding for non-military basic science.

ObDisclosure: I work for a federal contractor, civilian sector, doing that, and we keep seeing budget cuts. So do other folks I know who work in the civilian sector, so I have direct evidence of my suggestion. I can also email friends who have friends who work there.

                      mark "but the Free Market really, really wants F-35's, they're *so* much more important than space, or
                                                    biomedical research, or basic physics...."

Let's see, it *is* a crime to lie under oath, esp. to Congress.

Next, it's a "witch hunt" or McCarthyism, when it's discovered that someone testified under oath to Congress and didn't tell them that his "deliverables" were funded by the climate-change deniers whose wealth - oil, coal - needs it denied.

So the anti-global warming crowd here is defending biased results based on income... oh, that's right, the Invisible Hand of the Free Market (tm) will show that global warming's not happening, and so it's hunky-dory to build new oil and coal-fired power plants, and prevent solar, wind etc technologies from helping change the field... and take money away from the companies. Presumably, they're investors in those companies, too.

Too bad the Real World doesn't see that Invisible Hand. And how many of them live right next to coal-fired power plants?

                  mark

St. Vidicon of Cathode (go look it up, kiddies).

              mark

Here I was afraid they were analyzing the webserver logs. This makes it look like my habit of *NEVER* even temporarily allowing google analytics in noscript is a good one.

                mark

Let's start out by saying I have grown children. 15 or so years ago, you could meet people. Now.... not so much.

Half a dozen years or so ago, I went on several sites, including craiglist and match. I said that I was looking for someone *over* 40.

And I got... a bunch of responses, claiming to be from women who were allegedly between 21 and 26. And claiming they'd read my profile.

Right. I think I found *one* woman who actually existed, and went on a date or two. The rest... as I said, in annoyance, to several, "no, you're not; you're a fat 47 yr old guy claiming to be a hot woman, the kind you'd like to date, but who will never give you a first glance, and you're trying to make money out of this. Unfuck off.

                    mark "and added them to my killfile"

The Castle that's in the logo of every Disney picture. And then the Fortress of Solitude, and....

              mark

First, the company that replaces you with automation pays your unemployment until you get another job, not just for 20 weeks. If that means you're still looking when you retire, that's how many years they pay. Certainly, unemployment is *vastly* cheaper than salaries (and all you asshole libertarians that wouldn't touch it, let me tell you that a dozen years ago, I was getting the max in IL... which was about $400/wk.; before getting laid off, I'd been making a *lot* more than that).

Second, how 'bout, since stocks and dividends are *so* great... how 'bout the company, along with their taxes, signs over to the government voting shares, and pays dividends; enough of that, and we can have a reverse income tax.

THAT would solve the problem in a real long-term manner.

Now, what you'd do with all that free time, other than play video games and couch potato, is another story.

                mark

Or, lack thereof. We only have three Suns left, and we do our best to convince people not to buy any more. Their default warranties are short, as opposed to Dell's and HP's; dealing with their tech support I refer to as self-abuse (I once spent a month to get a tech out to replace a motherboard, and that includes being assigned an engineer in Chile (I'm in the States), an engineer in the States... who was third shift *only*, and, oh, yes, three days in a row, three separate managers "taking ownership" when I escalated the issue.

As a comparison, Dell, after me running tests for them, had a tech out in 2 weeks, and the *one* manager who took ownership... about three or four months later, we had an issue on another system, and that *same* manager still felt ownership, and contacted *me* to see if I needed more help.

Overpriced, and not worth paying for Larry's fighter jet and Hawaiian island.

                mark

It's been about five years since I've noticed google going downhill - more and more, rather than signal, I get noise in the search results, and that is what it's all about.

1. The companies who pay for sponsored ads are clearly wasting money, when I search for one thing, and explicitly try to filter out
            some of the alternatives that they put in... and get, both in search results and sponsored ads the thing I'm filtering. For example,
            I look for, linux parted -windows, and the third or fourth hit, in the visible paragraph, is talking explicitly about windows. Or the
            time, about a year and a half ago, I was looking for men's high leather boots -womens -ladies, and saw a sponsored ad where
            the text read real leather women's boots....

2. They've taken away some of the search tools - I assume you have to be logged in just to use them? - and still ignore
              things I say I don't want. Why, for example, if I want English results, do I see *anything* that is, presumably, either
              Asian or Hindi?

3. Finally, when I add quotes - and they respect them (which is not always the case), I simply don't believe that I get no results
            for some searches

                mark, trying to find something as good as google was five years ago

That I ought to run out and buy $10,000 cat-6 ethernet cables, because they one let the packets interfere with one another...

                mark "or at least until it hits the router...."

I have a friend. Back when he was building a house, he was fighting the bank for the mortgage. His mom was co-signing... and some moron at the bank (can't remember if it was Wells Fargo or BoA) emailed ALL THEIR DEPOSIT records, with account info, to them in an email.

They got a lawyer. The bank paid 100% to a) change all of their accounts, b) all costs incurred by them to make changes elsewhere.

Call a lawyer. I mean, do you actually *trust* banks (look up "Great Recession", 2008, subpriime lending....)

              mark

Since the GOP wants to unbalance the budget anyway, to "shrink" government, and won't raise taxes for what the government is *supposed* to be doing, why not do it right, and make it a permanent tax. Certainly, we've needed massive infrastructure work since St. Ronnie - a report from engineers, back in the '80's, said half our bridges and dams needed work, and damn little's been done since - and this would help, as well as giving people steady, decent incomes (which helps both government revenue in taxes, and the rest of the economy).

But the unenlightened self-interested libertarians here will freak out....

                mark

And you'll find exactly this thing, purchasable off-the-shelf, no 3-D printing needed....

                mark

I just saw the report of this study... and then saw this:

Excerpt:
There is good and bad news for climate scientists. The good news: Most
Americans (79 percent) say that science and scientists are invaluable.

The bad news: On controversial topics such as climate change, a
significant number of Americans do not use science to inform their views.
Instead, they use political orientation and ideology, which are reflected
in their level of education, to decide whether humans are driving
planetary warming.

This comes from a public opinion poll released yesterday by Pew Research
Center and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
The poll captured a significant split between what scientists and the
general public believe on climate change.

In 2014, the vast majority (87 percent) of scientists said that human
activity is driving global warming, and yet only half the American public
ascribed to that view. And 77 percent of scientists said climate change is
a very serious problem. In comparison, only 33 percent of the general
public said it was a very serious problem in a 2013 poll.
--- end excerpt ---

http: // www.scientificamerican.com/article/big-gap-between-what-scientists-say-and-americans-think-about-climate-change/

                  mark "confused"

Let's see, this is where we spend big bucks raising *crops*, on *cropland*, to turn into fuel, as opposed to the original proposals to use biomass - that's waste, that's *weeds* (that need *zero* bucks on fertilizers and watering and pesticides to raise....

                  mark