cnnsucks

Yes, it's real. Lenders have computers that sum lots of accounts; they're expected to do that and disclose how much they've lent.

$4.1E12 isn't really that difficult to relate to. Just amortize it across the US population of 325 million. That's $12,612 per citizen. It's also about one year of Federal spending.

It's a negative thing. Both individual debt load the and the rate of delinquency has been increasing, with student debt being the worst of these; if you can fog a glass you can make the Federal government send money to some school against your future earnings. There is probably no form of debt easier to assume in the US and upon this river of money floats a horde of careers, bonuses, pensions, endowments and gold plated benefits for The Great and The Good of academe, which makes questioning the value of it all a political third rail.

What do economists think? They're watching the bubble grow and devising ever more contrived ways to pretend it's not a bubble.

Google News...

I follow events in Venezuela. I routinely see teleSUR garbage (Chavista's Pravda) mixed in with credible reporting on Google news. And not just the benign news these state organs always conflate with their agenda pieces; the pure Bolvarian conspiratorial left-wing dreck stuff is there too, offered as "news" by Google News. Been seeing this for years.

One guess whether teleSUR propaganda is going to suffer any "fact checking" downmods as a result of Google's sudden desire to protect us all from Trumpian untruths.

Walther PPQ M2 9mm. We're in the midst of a small arms golden age right now and this pistol is the closest to a local optimum as currently exists.

You asked.

> Did i miss something?

I guess; Trump is thrown out in the context of speculating about where this isotope is coming from, as if the US might be conducting surreptitious tests on behalf of a nuclear war mongering Trump. Timing is way off though; the first reports appeared before he had any authority. It's a gratuitous mention and overlooks the fact that Trump probably ordered the 135 to Europe to investigate, something for which the US deserves credit. But hey, indulging Trump Derangement Syndrome makes for better copy.

Anyhow, the most likely source of lofted iodine-131 is a damaged power reactor. The proximity of the detections to Russia -- a nation with a long history of failing to report their nuclear incidents -- means it's not far fetched to suspect they've melted something down. Russia has an incredible legacy of nuclear facilities, most badly engineered and badly neglected and all very old. Sites like Kola (first gen VVER) and Bilibino (unique EGP-6 reactors) go for years without scrutiny by the outside world. Then there is the Russian nuclear navy and other nuclear assets, such as nuclear ice breakers, some of which have had the barnacles knocked off and been redeployed on behalf of Putin's desire to rattle rusty old Soviet sabers.

Who knows. Unless it gets worse and somebody fesses up we may never know. The world didn't know about Kyshtym for three decades.

>> "patches welcome"

Here we are in a topic that actually documents the hostility people encounter when participating in Wikipedia, a topic that provides overwhelming anecdotal evidence among the comments that people are being actively discouraged from contributing to Wikipedia by hostile admins and topic campers (something I have personally experienced) and you pretend the actual problem is lazyness.

You deserved your downmod.

>> Pensions are delayed payments for work already done.

That's your view, not mine. Bankrupt governments are a fact for the both of us.

>> Someone did a really crappy job of phrasing.

Legal work is an area of life where one should not apply Hanlon's razor by default. Not one comma or period in that work went unscrutinized by highly compensated executive talent at PayPal and any ambiguity you find is deliberate. Assume malice.

>> someone complaining that their local beach is full of trash when they themselves never bothered to help clean it

Here you're shouting others down by trying to shame them. Please don't do that. Being unwilling or incapable of cleaning up the messes others make does not disqualify one from criticizing the mess makers.

"why do people still work 40+ hour weeks"

Mostly it's about upbringing. People are taught to have expectations for themselves and they strive to fulfill them. 15h would be bare subsistence for most, and that's not good enough. The minute they can live their expectations without work they usually check out; e.g. 45 year old "retired" government workers bankrupting their muni/county/state with union negotiated pensions.

>> But

But, but, but...!!1 Now that they are in the field producing results the haters begin retreating to ever smaller and more qualified hypotheticals. I'm pleased with myself for not having participated in the stupid F-35 flame wars that have been raging for years with these people.

> they don't want their kids being part of a failed social experiment.

Indeed. You don't see much investigation on the consequences of these experiments; the state is rarely introspective. If there was any bigger accelerant to the white flight phenomena in the 70's than the `integration' experiment I've never heard of it. It went all the way to the Supreme Court and when it was decided that Detroit (and therefore many other big urban school districts) couldn't force surrounding suburbs to participate in the experiment (Milliken v. Bradley) the fate of that city and many others was sealed.

> more discretion

Discretion is a big part of how we ended up with "three strikes" and mandatory minimums. People have not forgotten the outrageous abuses of discretion that were common in the '70s and '80s; activist judges abusing their discretion are not a figment of the right wing knuckle dragger imagination and it was routine for some judge to create a headline with lenient sentences that offended all sensibility.

The problem extends to prosecutorial discretion as well; this [1] sort of headline from this past Wednesday -- again illustrating the failure of the justice system and reinforcing our current state of affairs -- is still very common and does not escape notice, no matter how much you might wish it would. Then you have the abuses we see on the national stage regarding "prosecutorial discretion" in immigration policy, selective prosecution of violations of classified information handling we've seen recently, and many, many others.

It only takes a few activist judges or prosecutors to polarize an electorate. Right or wrong that's the actual world we live in and ignoring that reality won't ever work.

[1] http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/drunk-driving/thirteen-t...

My state has cut rumble strips down the middle of many roads. The Amish are up early and travelling around on Sundays in buggies on the shoulders. It use to be easy to give them room; no traffic that early so you swing out across the line and keep away from the horse. Now if you do that you hit the rumble strip and the horse will panic; rear up and try to see what terrible thing is coming up from behind.

Yet we're told Obama doesn't do that sort of groupthink, and given as example his opposition to the Iraq war; talking point #1 when campaigning against Hillary.

>> after hearing about the Russian hacks of the DNC

Fictions built upon fictions. Assange has stated again in another interview, airing tonight, that it wasn't Russia. It wasn't any 'state' actor.

    "Yes. We can say, we have said, repeatedly that over the last two months
     that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party."

The same people that took the fantastic and easily debunked claims of a power company and amplified it into a diplomatic dispute with Russia will not emphasize this; if they can't somehow discredit it then they'll bury it.

>> This "anomaly" caused hundreds of millions...

It also produced a large quantity of nonsense. WAPO kicked that off with speculation of "sabotage." [1] By the time that stuff had finished ricocheting around the echo chamber it was SPETSNAZ snipers. Today WAPO has finally grounded out it's "Russian's hacked the US power grid" fiction. [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12617990 [2] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/12/31/1533245/washington-p...

It would be nice if Elon could take a few minutes and install some grown-up editors at his paper. It's turning into a tabloid.

* Oh dear, I've mixed up my celebrity billionaires... Yes, Elon would have to get Bezos to fix the paper.

Ads. YouTube is punctuating every video with ads every few minutes now. It gets tiresome and drives people away.

>> coordinate to manage patient flow

Right there. That's why the costs are so extreme.

Where is it written that someone must 'coordinate to manage patient flow?' Show me what fundamental principle of this nation mandates that some body of colluding apparatchiks are supposed to 'coordinate to manage patient flow.' What great benefit is achieved by subjecting every evolution of the medical system to a horde of bureaucrats?

The entire medical industry is rife with this mentality; that nothing may exist without the blessing of a dozen regulatory agencies and another dozen industry trade groups, all actively colluding to prevent any market forces interfering with their fiefdoms and livelihoods.

>> Hospitals are not something you want competitive churn in.

Why? Where is that written? What makes you think competition would be bad?

You're going to claim something like "churn would make medicine dangerous and put lives at risk." Maybe. That's your guesswork. The last major illness I had -- the only one more exotic than a flu I've ever had in my life -- was C. diff, contracted in a US hospital while visiting a patient. Don't tell me the unbelievably huge costs of our medical system are some surety against risk.

The US medical system is the biggest bubble in the history of our species. At some point the forces of nature are going to pop it. That's not a right wing view or a left wing view. It's just physics. These costs cannot continue to compound unless you're willing to employ gulags.

I'm betting that in the aftermath a full featured ultrasound machine will cost maybe $15k and the biggest measurable effect of that (if anyone is bothering to measure at that point) will be that there are more of them and more people will have access to them. And yes, I'm fully willing to risk whatever parade of horribles you can imagine. I'm also willing to make you risk them as well, and the pressure being created by spiraling costs means that have eventually I and the many, many people that also share my view, will have the power to do exactly that.

You know what else is interesting? The same part of the political spectrum that cites automation as the real cause of working class decline does not hesitate to rationalize mass immigration as necessary to fill the demand for labor. If automation is the problem then what are all the unskilled immigrants for?

>> And if you think I'm wrong, ask yourself why GDP growth has been so anemic in the age of the Internet.

GDP is the wrong figure. As we've pulled up the ladder and pushed people out of the workforce our net GDP has leveled off, but non-farm labour productivity has continued the rapid pace characteristic of the US economy, hitting an all time peak in 2015. We're getting more value out of fewer people. Some part of that has to be attributed to advanced communications, including the Internet.

Krugman has established a long history of embarrassingly bad predictions; this is merely one of the most demonstrably terrible. Also sometimes cited is his advocacy for 'housing bubble' policy and subsequent denials. Krugman doesn't know whats going on. He writes economic red meat for his fellow leftists inside his New York echo chamber. The real world is paying no attention.

Been to Paris a few times. Second trip someone slammed me into a metro car door and stole my wallet. Each time I went there were more and more immigrants loitering in groups on the streets, facing off with more and more police. Felt like a powder keg.

Most of the people that I worked with in Paris used cars or motorcycles; they earned IT and professional wages and could afford to avoid the prevailing public transport, which they did. Later the company I was involved with moved to a 'suburb' (not sure that's the appropriate term...) of Lyon. Huge improvement in every way and no one at that site used any public transport; all cars.

This was the early 2000's. I imagine the bad parts have gotten worse since then; if you look like a tourist or foreign worker don't go near the metro outside of business hours.

Yesterday I reviewed all the headlines and saw none of the usual political click-bait sprinkled among them with their inevitable 200+ post flame wars. It was wonderful; like having a cast removed or getting a tooth fixed. I hope your experiment leads to a similar policy.

This is WSJ red meat political controversy stuff. The story devolves into the usual "tax the rich" and anti-welfare state debate as any other political click-bait. I thought HN wasn't doing that for a week...

I actually agree with the premise and many of the conclusions, and if it popped up on Drudge or Breitbart or whatever I'd be fine with it, but why here? Why must every popular site devolve into either a virtual political cage match or another addition to the echo chamber?

Changing the headline on HN doesn't redeem this; you'll still being linking the boingboing story with the same false headline. Just delete it and be more careful in the future.

As for my username, that's your call: ban it or don't. I'll call out fake stories with this account or some other either way.

This is worse than click bait; the headline is a falsehood designed to provoke outrage. WF is NOT arguing that customers are bound by forged signatures, despite what this headline implies. This is Fake News making the rounds. Good job HN.

They're trying to develop a rationale for the managed decline. They desperately want this to make sense because stopping everything is a necessary condition of addressing the anxieties they dwell on; primarily their worries about the environment.

Meanwhile, actual citizens have moved on; right or wrong they've empowered people that they think can make more "jerbs," so the ladder removal operation is on hold for the time being.

Ironically you're both in agreement without knowing it. Yes, trust is important and yes, the 'community on Reddit' still trust Reddit.

The bulk of Reddit users don't mind that spez had a momentary lapse of judgement and corrupted some r/The_Donald stuff. They find it amusing; left to them r/The_Donald would have been nuked long ago on the way to making Reddit into the sort of safe space echo chamber they want. The fact that spez had a little fun with it just affirms that he's on the right side of that mentality and secures his trust among these people. They're not proud that one of theirs has been caught so embarrassingly, but he's on their side so it's easy to forgive.

In other words, no, you have no evidence.

>> since as I understand it the tuition hikes track funding cuts at the government level for higher ed. that is the real killer.

No, that isn't the real killer. That's the educrat line you've been trained to regurgitate. The truth is that higher-ed is getting about the same percent GDP it's been getting since the 70's [1]. The "real killer" is the annual 3.5% above inflation tuition increases [2] that are inflicted to fund an ever growing amount of staff and their gold plated benefits.

>> do the taxpayers see the money as reduced sales and property tax?

Are you kidding? Where is the place where taxpayers are liv'n la Vida Loca in their property tax free la-la land? We're paying out the ass. Some RINO manages to cut a half a percent or maybe just not increase taxes as fast and they shout it from the roof tops; HUGE TAX CUT. OMGWTFBBQ I SAVED YOU 1.003% VOTE FOR MEEE!

Please kid; stop drinking the educrat kool-aid. The only redeeming feature of this crazy ass education bubble is that it isn't growing as fast as the crazy ass health care bubble.

[1] http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_spending [2] https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tabl...

That's the thought I had as well. Aside from SJW outrage and grievance mongering I really don't know what liberals offer any longer, and I see no evidence they care to reconsider.