Yeah, that notorious liberal Donald J. Trump came up with "Trump dat bitch!" and "Lyin' Ted" and "Crooked Hillary". They're always name-calling, those filthy liberals!

But we're not doing as we were told, now, are we? We eat bacon and catfish. We work 7 days a week. We don't give a tenth of our income to the church. Maybe you're on to something....

Not sure why you got modded as troll. You've got a pretty good point. The "evidence" supporting a religion has as much to do with the adherents and their "spiritual" experience as much as anything else. It's the whole opiate for the masses thing. Speaking from personal experience, getting high and being "filled with the holy spirit" feel very similar.

I don't think you're arguing that the current religious population is evidence for the literal things the Bible says, rather it's a testament to the generally validity of the religion in the lives of the people who practice it. I don't think that's argumentum ad populum, so much as reframing the debate.

You can't even get staunch denialists to agree on the first four points. On point one they blame evil scientists hiding data, oh and sunspots, yeah, sunspots! On point 2 they do some handwaving about methane (as if that somehow matters). Point 3 is just correlation, not causation. And point 4 is more handwaving about volcanoes.

I've been saying "Trump is the president we deserve" for the last 10 months. He represents everything Americans stand for these days. Just look at the comments section on any public news site for the last 5 years. We are a fact-averse, hypocritical, writhing mass of bigotry and ignorance. We value fame for fame's sake. We value money for money's sake. We entertain ourselves with the suffering of others. We fail to take responsibility for our mistakes, and seek to blame others preemptively. We cloak our hatred of people who are not like us in the trappings of righteousness. We use pithy, short generalizations to allow us to rationalize ignoring anybody who disagrees with us.

Obama represented what we thought we wanted to become. Trump will represent us as we truly are. Whether that's a good thing or not, depends on your point of view.

No raindrop thinks it is responsible for the flood.

He has shunned the limelight from day one, and anybody familiar with the case would see your "fame" comment for the flamebait that it is. Nevertheless, I feel obliged to respond. The few interviews he gave, he gave grudgingly. During them he would consistently try to turn the focus from himself to the illegal NSA spying. The secrets that he revealed had been held secret for a decade. You really think it was a "minimally faster revelation"? You really think the NSA would respond to FOIA honestly and timely? Are you that naive, or are you just trolling? If what the NSA was doing was perfectly legal, why did they (at least claim to) stop collecting data after the pressure put on them from the public.

I've been saying from the get go that most of these stories had to be fabricated. There's probably one or two legit cases of overheating, causing a fire. But there's simply not enough energy in one of these batteries to explode a car. It makes no sense. Further, these devices go through rigorous MTBF accelerated lifetime tests. The failure rate is known ahead of time to within a few per million. They know they'll never get it down to zero, so they find a threshold they think everybody will be OK with and shoot for that.

The problem is now, with Facebook and the 24-hour news cycle, the few actual failures out of the million devices will "go viral," and everybody freaks out. People have no understanding of statistics, so they have no way to deal with it. I think these are the same people who go buy a lottery ticket when the news runs a story about PowerBall being at eleventy million dollars. They don't understand that the odds dictate that they are not going to win the lottery, and their phone is not going to blow up.

This innumeracy has real ramifications for public policy makers, too. Police shootings are comparable to previous years, yet people think there is a sudden spike. Kidnappings are rarer than ever, yet moms are afraid for their children "in this day and age." People just need to chill out.

In all fairness, there are a lot of Europeans who get confused by these things, too.

You paid 2k and expected to be able to use it indefinitely. We didn't know back then that computers would become obsolete so fast. We thought they would be like the washing machine that lasted twenty+ years and could be repaired ad nauseum, passed on to the kids, that sort of thing. We were told you could just update components. I remember when we bought our first hard drive and upgraded the ram, and got a new video card. Making the old beast better one piece at a time. It wasn't until the mid to late 90's that it became clear you would need to upgrade frequently if you wanted to be able to use current software.

Of course, I'm something of a luddite. I miss my old flip phone, and bemoan the loss of my optical drive. People at work were amazed that I was on an 8 year old laptop back in 2013. The replacement one really didn't improve my productivity, since all the software was bigger and slower. And two years later I had to get a third one. Same story in 2016.

But now we know better. Now we know that the thing in our pocket will be in a landfill in two years. That's why when the accelerometer goes out, we don't stress about it. That's why when an app stops working, we assume it's our fault for having an 8-month-old dinosaur. Oh well.

Also, I think super-thin phones are stupid.

THIS! All the focus on tax rates ignores the biggest two facets of tax code, income and deductions. Getting rid of the mortgage interest deduction is an economic no-brainer, but it's a political third rail. Basically, poor people pay me to give interest to my rich father-in-law (or pay you to give money to banks). It makes no sense. The other way the big dogs reduce taxes is by hiding their income.

America: where the "silent majority" is neither.

I wish it were that simple, that a beating heart and formed brain is what defines human-ness. Most pro-lifers (speaking as a recovering Pentecostal) believe that the instant sperm meets egg you have a new soul that must be treated with all human dignity. Never mind the fact that it isn't even a zygote yet. What really boggles the mind is the people who think it's OK to murder abortion providers or bomb Planned Parenthood clinics. Makes me wonder if the study also calculated how much religions take out of the economy.

Off-topic rant: Funny how those guys who do shitty things in the name of Jesus never get called what they are. Always "attacker" or "shooter" or "bomber" but never "terrorist." Yet you never hear the right wing whackadoodles moan and complain about "Why don't politicians say 'Christian terrorist'?"!

It may not indicate what you think. It's possible that Tesla drivers are just bigger d-bags and worse drivers than the average joe blow. It might have nothing to do with autopilot at all. In my part of the country, it's generally assumed that if you drive a fancy car, you have to drive it like a complete asshat.

Except, from TFA, "The data I see suggests China, an assessment shared by the people I spoke with."

But that's impossible in your mind...it has to be the US. It could never be a US adversary with principles that run decided counter to internet freedom, human rights, and so on. Clearly this is a US effort to leave itself a capability to "take down the internet", when we are the ones ceding control of ICANN and IANA.