Tell us, friend, who is using more violent action or murder in this country, the left or the right.

Sure, I grant that, but the left is not helping.

Maybe they heard about how IBM made the machines for managing the concentration camps,

Man, I was talking about the hysteria which is becoming so prevalent again, and you brought up the holocaust. That just doesn't have anything to do with it. You are not fighting the Nazis, and it has nothing to do with present circumstances.

I'm aware that IBM was complicit in the holocaust and shipped computers to Nazi Germany in the early 1940s, and this fact must be remembered and not forgotten.

However, what is happening now in this country, from both the left and right, is an outbreak of hysteria. Much of the right is in the thrall of outright absurd conspiracy theories. The younger left has now taken to violent action and murder, and widespread applause of such action. They both get their information from sources online which are obviously provoking them emotionally.

I don't want to get into a nasty argument here, and I realize I'm reaching a very limited audience. However, people on both sides of the aisle need to turn the temperature WAY down now and turn off the twitter feed. Most importantly, do not act violently because of something you read online recently

I've lived in the SF Bay area for most of my life. The far left there is oddly reactionary, and they have a long history of violent and direct lashing out. They scream at techie commuter buses and vomit on them. They put death threats against techies on bumper stickers, etc. They damage or disrupt self-driving cars. They light buildings on fire when the buildings contain new apartments. They gather those little lime scooters and throw them in the bay or in lakes. They shit on things. They destroy construction equipment. Most recently, they were upset over the not-totally-socialized healthcare system, and one of them stalked and shot a CEO in the back of the head, while the rest of them burst into applause online. This kind of thing has been going on in Berkeley since the 1960s and is nothing new.

Back the late 1960s, in an episode that is now forgotten, young hippies didn't want computers at all ("dehumanizing") and they used to destroy things and scream because data about people was being stored on IBM punch cards. The punch card thing was a major issue back then, but is now forgotten. It was a cause of much screaming and occasional violence ("I AM NOT A PUNCH CARD!!!!"). They wanted to stop the computer thing right then. That was a long time before self-driving cars...

[Biden's last-minute pardons] including [a pardon] for Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier.

I can't even believe it. For the last 40 years in Bekerley, there has been a small team of hippies shouting "Free Leonard Peltier!" over and over again, and putting up little signs all around Berkeley and Oakland demanding that he be freed. They've been doing this for decade after decade. All their hard work finally paid off!

Of course, correlation does not imply causation, as I'm sure everyone here already knows. In this case there is an obvious confounding variable.

One of the biggest predictors of success in life and higher incomes is the personality trait of conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is one of the five major personality traits in the 5 factor model of personality. Conscientious people are far more likely to go to college, obtain training, work diligently at their career, focus on long-term goals, and so on. Thus, conscientiousness is a major predictor of life success and also income.

Furthermore, it's a reasonable guess that conscientious people are also more likely to follow their physician's instructions, take their blood pressure medications, exercise, lose weight when their physician instructs them to do so, engage in preventative care, follow traffic regulations, and so on.

It would be interesting if research were published which corrected for this variable. You could compare health outcomes in the highest vs lowest decile of income while keeping conscientiousness the same. This could be done by studying people with a lot of money but who have low conscientiousness anyway (perhaps people with large inheritances).

Was Luigi Mangione justified in killing Brian Thompson?

• * Yes
• * No
• * Unsure
• * CowboyNeal did it

Except he wasn't a psychopath. The article said he broke down crying several times in the office in the months leading up to the crime, which clearly indicates he was not a psychopath. He had some other mental disorder. So we'd have to filter out the psychopaths, the borderlines, the narcissists, the schizotypes, people who have anger management issues or impulse control problems, and so on.

How would we determine that an employee has any of those things? Force them to take a psychological test, which intrudes upon their privacy, and then fire the 20% of the workforce with serious psychological problems? Fire them all, even though they have no serious criminal records and 99% of them were never going to commit a crime? In which case, the company would be massively sued, over and over again, for each wrongful termination. What's worse, they would be sued for discriminatory wrongful terminations. Each of those wrongful terminations would warrant massive awards. You could easily forsee the kinds of awards handed out for those wrongful terminations: "The jury awards the fired plantiff one GAZILLION dollars, which ought to teach those corporate bastards a lesson they won't forget". And so on.

Furthermore, you wouldn't even need to have a serious psychological problem to be fired. Apparently one of the enormous "red flags" in this case was him complaining of financial problems beforehand. Of course that is approximately 90% of the world population, and virtually everyone who works as a cable installer. The other big "red flags" were that he once used company equipment for personal use, and that he had once been previously fired, each of which would also cover more than half the population.

Bear in mind that we are dealing with cable installers here, which is a crap job, and more than half of them have something wrong with them: prior or current substance abuse, prior criminal behavior, psychological problems, impulse control problems, high school dropouts, and so on. Any one of those would be a bigger "red flag" than what was identified beforehand in this guy.

The settlement for the forged document was possibly justified, but the idea that they should have foreseen his behavior and are liable for it is just so preposterous, in my opinion.

Spoken by someone who thinks it's terribly witty to point out a typo. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the below-average slashdot poster...

This CO2 neutral burning is a new argument for me: that it's okay to burn plants because they would rot if you don't. Hmm. Not sure about that one. Could the same argument be made for burning wood? Pretty weird to be filling the atmosphere with smoke and claiming CO2 neutrality. A bit counter-intuitive.

The argument is correct, whether it's intuitive or not. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is the same whether you burned the material or not.

The crucial thing is avoiding methane leakage. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Methane leakage can easily negate the climate benefits of burning biomass. For example, if biomass is grown on cropland, converted to methane in a digester, and fed into the gas distribution network, and then a few percent of it leaks as methane into the atmopshere, then the methane leakage could negate the CO2 advantages.

In some cases, burning biomass can reduce methane leakage, as when burning the "cow or pig shit" which the parent poster suggested. In that case, methane was entering the atmosphere otherwise and we get CO2 instead, which is a much less potent greenhouse gas.

Most important is not diverting food or high quality cropland to biogas production. It could make food more expensive for poor people, which obviously is ethically unacceptable. Perhaps this could be avoided by growing energy crops (such as switchgrass) on marginal land that would otherwise be uncultivated.

Bio gas is not necessarily made from plant left overs. There are farms for energy crops. There have been proposals for energy crops like switchgrass which grow only on marginal land which is unsuitable for agriculture.

Heat energy creates hot water and steam which spins a turbine to create electricity. Heat is the point of burning stuff.

Well, you got that right.

This CO2 neutral burning is a new argument for me: that it's okay to burn plants because they would rot if you don't.

That's not the only argument for CO2 neutrality. Crops are grown for the purpose of burning them, on land that would otherwise not be used for that purpose. Cropland has a far higher density of vegatative matter than wild growth. CO2 is sequestered in plant tissues.

Yeah I know, he was quoting JFK. This is different from a moon landing program. Nobody would tolerate a "moonshot" style program which was rushed right from the beginning when it could melt down.

Sure, but there's a difference between hard and unrealistic. Even if Yang initiated a massive research and development program, it would be several years before it even got going in earnest.

Also, engineering projects do not necessarily go faster just by throwing money and resources at them. There are still unsolved issues regarding thorium reactors.

Two months would make no difference here.

"For Christs sakes - use BinGoogle before you prove that you are an idiot."

Why don't you stop acting like a child, and learn enough grammar to appear like you passed 6th grade.

If Yang won, he would become president in November 2020, leaving just over 6 years for the reactor to be designed, approved, and built--a timeline which is highly unrealistic. It would take a few years at least just to design the new nuclear reactor. An NRC approval of a new design often takes longer than a decade. At present, the lead time for nuclear reactors which are already designed and approved is more than 14 years. Presumably, Yang wants to streamline some of these things, and a thorium reactor could be faster to build. Still, the timeline seems highly unrealistic.