I'm not sure that this rail system will be all it's chalked up to be, barring China managing to shut down ocean based freight. The ocean based stuff is slower, but a lot cheaper. Secondly, it doesn't rely on many unstable regions and political bullshit threatening to shut down the system at any moment.

There's a reason the US established worldwide trade through the ocean rather than through europe.

Maybe this will all go well, but I am skeptical. Remember that "sounds good on paper" and "sounds good to the common man" are not "is good for the economy"

I have zero respect for scifi awards of any kind at this point.

I have a laptop with vPro, actually. I can't figure out how to disable it, though. I'm guessing it is off unless you turn it on by default.

I did explore my BIOS, though, and I can make my computer display a custom logo at boot. Super cool, I love these business elite laptops (got cheap on ebay).

Free speech is an ideal, like donating to charity. Government may not restrict your free speech by law. Everyone else shouldn't restrict your free speech because they aren't scumbags. If they do, then they are scumbags, and should be treated as such.

1) The share button is an upvote.

2) Follower counts make you cool.

3) Just repost news articles or blogs and you'll do fine.

Not really saying reddit is dead, just sort of being overdramatic for fun.

If it wasn't, then it's certainly going to become something based on the reaction to this bullshit as trump supporters and the likes adopt the handsign because it's kinda hilarious.

Libertarian?

I'm just waiting for these stupid companies and stupid people to crash and cause the next recession.

Another interesting point is that that graph of the "gap' is worse in cities than in the country, and people have been moving into cities.

Who's we? Americans?

Yes, and the west in general at the moment.

More people are making money all over the world today and Americans already have it much better than most in almost every way. I don't want to go back.

That's a massive excuse. People in the US should be better off today than they were yesterday, even if they were better off than everyone else. Our wealth in the US is growing just as it always has, but it is being siphoned off of us by those who are gaming our systems for their benefit.

Our gain of wealth from those who are at the top is not stealing from the Chinese. The wealth is here in the US already, it's not being taken from China. I'm not saying we move jobs here, I'm saying we change taxes and other systems that allow wealth to accumulate as it has.

We can all benefit from global trade. We should all benefit from global trade. Even if it is the wealthy and the Chinese profiting off the American people at our expense because "well, we have it good already", than we can, we should, and we will, shut it down.

Populism is on the rise for good reason.

However, distributing current GDP growth more equally across income groups as in the 1940 birth cohort would reverse more than 70% of the decline in mobility. These results imply that reviving the “American dream” of high rates of absolute mobility would require economic growth that is shared more broadly across the income distribution.

This is an argument against that. The US is growing, we just aren't getting a chunk of it because it's all collected at the top.

The deficit seems tiny.

Machine learning is a fancy guessing machine. Their job is literally to form steriotypes and biases.

How do people respond to this happening more and more often? Harsher barriers between traffic and citizens? Will we see a sudden push for higher standards to buy or drive a car? TSA for getting on the road where people are checked before they may enter a highly populated area? Banning of cars near public events?

It's interesting to consider, because this isn't like planes where it's already pretty well regulated. Imagine this sort of thing was going on in the US where half of people have huge-ass trucks that can do a lot of damage.

Or, hopefully, we'll just do nothing and laugh, because the damage isn't that high, and at the end of the day it's a terror attack, the best response is to just laugh at how desperate they are and disregard them.

Good. Cross the red line and you should be punished.

Russia was informed before-hand, apparently, and the missiles minimized casualties. This establishes the US as willing to get involved in crap again, and that our lines actually mean something more than a stern warning with no teeth.

Companies don't just explode, they slowly die out, go bankrupt, and so on. The only time companies die truly is when the market for them goes away. If uber goes out of business Lyft will pick up the demand and hire a whole lot more people, likely not selecting the ones who screwed up the last company.

People can be left jobless, they'll find new ones. My worry is not the companies, but the market, and the market for taxis is doing fine.

Also, what have you to say about the taxi drivers left out of the job by Uber who would get their jobs back if they failed?

Shouldn't the people who made the company own it?

If it fails at their hands, then it fails, oh well. If you don't like Uber, use Lyft.

My pebble watch is a huge deal for helping with driving, mostly because it means I can change music tracks and see/hang up on people or answer things in speaker with the tap of a real physical button.

High recommend it to anyone, super cheap too since the company went bankrupt, which is sad. Best living company is garmin IMO, if you want to go that way.

You know how people always say that politicians suck and it would be so much better if someone just did what seemed right?

Here we are.

I have empathy, but empathy is something that is triggered when you look at someone sad and dying on the streets, not numbers and abstract concepts. Empathy keeps us from murdering one another, it keeps us helping those who are sick, because we feel their pain when we see them.

What you refer to is not empathy, but "social requirement to express empathy based on abstract concept." I will not claim to feel something I don't, and I think all of the people out there who work themselves up with all their "empathy" on things like this are telling a lie, and a dangerous one at that.

Until we understand that people really don't care when you present them with statistics like this, that our empathy is not this thing that persists in our entire world and thoughts, we will never recognize that we can't rely on it to kick in when dealing with the "big picture." We cannot rely on empathy. It can be overridden by as little as fear of standing out from your group, or the orders of authority. It can be turned to hatred and scorn that leads to genocide. We must rely on knowing how we think, how we act, and arranging our society so that it works as well as possible using that fact, rather than denying it exists.

Empathy doesn't back all human action, and it shouldn't. If it did, we'd have gone extinct long ago when we were starving in an ice age and refused to put our own lives over that of the cute animals we'd have to kill for meat.

My concerns are practicality. Do you seriously think I said what I have because I think trans people don't need help? Do you think I want trans or gay people to be in bad situations?

I agree that helping those who are homeless, and those who abuse opioids also helps those who are gay, trans, minorities, and in all other sorts of negative situations. That's the point. We don't help these groups by giving lip service to how horrible it is that "oh no 50% of trans people die due to murder every year" we do it by helping and building a strong, stable society where all prosper and do well.

And, yes, I don't do shit to help people around me. I don't go out to help the homeless, or fight drug epidemics. My point is not that "Oh, I do so much better", my point was "You can do so much more with your time than this". My point is "I was reading this and it sounded like there was some severe epidemic I needed to care deeply about, and it turned out to be literally 50 people dying".

If we all devoted our resources as a society to fixing the fact that a disproportionate number of trans people die every year, we wouldn't get anywhere. If we instead focus on the issues that aren't founded in identities, races, or cultures, and pushed everyone behind means from which we all benefit and we all cannot deny are important, we all succeed and we all can get behind any issue.

I do know a young trans woman who

I'm not talking about people in your life. I'm not talking about individuals. I'm talking about a system of 300 million individuals, and of which all are of equal importance.

If you know someone in a bad situation, you can and should do what you can to help them. That's my fucking point. Those 50 trans people the article talks about are so far distant from me, and almost everyone, that it's hard to summon any level of care for any of them. It's a stupid little statistic that gets repeated over and over to make people go "oh wow, they have it tough."

If you are there, if you are seeing it in front of you, then it's a different story, and that trans person is no different from the homeless person you can go out and help. I'm not criticizing the helping of people in bad situations, I'm criticizing these moral-pandering campaigns to care about something that doesn't effect almost anyone in the nation.

Opioid abuse? Homelessness? Those are everywhere. They are universal issues that cut across lines and allow us to share a common enemy which we all benefit from if we defeat. If we want broad information campaigns, we should be informing people how to deal with those situations, and correcting the many, very shitty impressions people have of those who are homeless, abusing drugs, or otherwise.

Focusing people's efforts to something so distant, so irrelevant, takes it away from the issues that do effect their community and their peers. You proposed the question of what I could do to prevent opioid abuse. The answer is that I could probably connect to my family and find, in a very short amount of time, someone who I am personally close to and connected with that could use my help. I can make a small, but significant impact by taking 1 away from the tally. I cannot do that for trans people. I don't know any trans people in a situation where they would be, and I don't have the resources to even begin to help someone in a bad condition. If you do, that's great, but you aren't in the majority.

The course articles like these take us on is one of endless worry of a sea of plights to people far away who we cannot effect. We can feel good while we rant about how bad they have it and how good we are for making everyone "think about how bad they have it" while we don't do shit to actually fix anything. These articles make us look at a world where we are one in 300 million, where our lives don't matter and where we are only important if 50% of our sexual/identity/racial group face issues.

That world is shit. That outlook is shit. I will not support or take part in it.

I'm a member of society, not the transgender community. I do not care if a group is getting murdered a whole lot more than other groups if that group has absolutely no impact on my life or any of the structures I rely on every day.

We can and should promote the social progress that enables trans people to live happy healthy lives. A lot of people are reduced to nothing because of how they are treated, and could be so much more than they could today. A change in the way society looks at them would solve those murders along with promoting and progressing the freedom of all people. I'm not saying trans issues aren't important in general, because the general progression of social views is a hell of a lot bigger than the trans community.

But phrase the issue to me as "oh no, 50 people died and because the trans community is so small it's like they have a huge portion of their group being murdered" I'm not going to care, because it just doesn't matter to me at all. Whoever they are, 50 people are 50 people, and the loss of their lives is not more significant because they are part of a minority group.

I just modified my comment a bit.

Yes, every life lost is horrible, but these are 50 people I do not know, in situations all over the country. 50 people is a tiny number among 300 million. Their lives are absolutely important, but I don't care unless I am close to or know them, just like I don't care about the 50 people who die every single day of the year to murder alone. That's about two per hour.

The issues trans people face are bad, sure, but it's no societal plight, and I can't be asked to care about something that is so super tiny compared to the many other issues facing society today. It's 50 people.

Frankly, I said the same thing about the 4 who died in the London bombings. Yeah, people are important and all losses are bad, but the reaction people have to 4 deaths is like going into a crying sobbing fit when you realize the restaurant is out of mayo for your sandwich.

Lives are important, and should be preserved, but we don't live in a world where the resources with which we can use to improve ourselves and save lives and improve lives are unlimited.

I can save 50 lives by going out in my community and feeding the homeless. I can save 50 lives by joining a support line for suicide. If I want to see a sweeping social trend, it needs to be saving thousands of lives, even tens of thousands. Not 50. Cultural pushes like this should be against the ever-rising abuse of opioids, or against repressive practices that lead people to hide away their suicide, or other means, or for healthcare, or for a thousand other BIG issues that effect millions, not hundreds.

How many do I save if I devote my time and effort to changing perceptions on trans people? A fifth of a life? A hundredth? Zero?

All lives are important, but you are one guy in a sea of millions. We matter, but we really aren't very significant in the scheme of things.

Opioids (including prescription opioids and heroin) killed more than 33,000 people in 2015

50 v 33,000

Yeah, those 50 matter, but if they matter just as much as everyone else than they really don't matter.

lol, 24 homicides per year at max in the USA?

That's beyond insignificant. As many people as that, twice as many, die to murder in the USA alone.

If you could help it or choose then you are merely opting to be weird or special and, quite frankly, people who pull that sort of crap deserve what they get.

Straight is defined as a strict attraction to people of the other gender. It doesn't matter what history there is, or what culture changes around us. The core definition of straight is strictly incompatible with people who are attracted to those who are of the same gender they are.

I do get what you are saying, in some ways, but really I think it's less a matter of if these people are "straight" and more a matter of if "straight" and "gay" and "bi" are even functional or reasonable lines with which to group people.

Perhaps they were reasonable in a time where we needed a hammer, but now when we have power tools and all sorts of "social technology" our viewpoints and systems can be far more advanced and nuanced. "Straight" as a classification may be similar to "the element of earth" as a means to understand the composition of wood.

It may well be that "straight" and "gay" are less innate parts of our being and more akin to strong fetishes. That doesn't change what it means to be straight or gay, it just changes what place those phrases has on our views of ourselves and each other.

Regardless, if you are attracted to (having sex with) other men, you aren't straight. There is no way I'll ever accept any debate to the contrary because it just doesn't fit with the term as it is defined.