when people text questions like this

Someday you're gonna be a fat, balding, pale ugly son of a bitch married to a fat, wrinkly old broad (or vice versa). Your kids are gonna hate interacting with you, and your house, car, clothes, and body will smell like the slow march of death. You stopped caring about how you look, and you haven't gotten laid in years (and you probably couldn't get it up if you tried). You're retired, but even if you wanted to go back to work your experience is so obsolete that you'd probably end up a cashier at Walmart. You hate your life but can't find the motivation to die. You wear knee-high white socks and old New Balance tennis shoes with every outfit, especially at home.

How does this make you feel?

Paraphrase of a recent Jacobin article titled, "Crash and Burn: You can't have capitalist growth without environmental destruction".

I'm not sure how many of you read Jacobin; it's a very liberal journalism magazine covering the spectrum of politics and culture. As always, I strongly urge you to stop right here and read the article, but I've pulled out some important sections to comment on.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/04/fossil-fuels-decoupling-growth-oil-climate/

In fact, a close look at the decoupling studies shows how misleading they are. Global emissions have dropped, but they’re falling far more slowly than they should to cap warming at the 1.5 degrees called for at COP21; the studies’ carbon budget does not include aviation or transportation, artificially inflating decoupling’s gains; figures in both reports do not count methane, the greenhouse gas being released with new abandon by the global fracking boom; and with the exception of the United States and Uzbekistan, every country listed in the WRI study is European.

Emissions, in other words, aren’t plummeting — they’re being offshored. Old-fashioned, carbon-hungry growth has moved south as finance capital and a poorly-paying service sector bloom up north, made possible by armies of low-waged workers up and down commodity chains. The spoils of this low-carbon growth are reserved for a wealthy minority.

Capitalist growth has never been green or just. The decoupling studies are poor evidence that it could become either. Why not, as British economist Ann Pettifor has argued, abandon the concept of growth entirely?

As she explains, growth — as the go-to metric for economic prosperity — was invented in the 1960s to replace the Keynesian focus on “levels” of factors like unemployment and inflation.

Full employment in the United Kingdom was seen as insufficiently profitable, so “growth men” set new targets to be met with credit booms and deregulation. “While markets, banks, firms, and millions of individuals ‘crashed and burned,’ the economic theory and policies behind limitless growth were untouched,” Pettifor writes. As the planet itself threatens to crash and burn, benchmarks for growth remain intact.

Austerity, justified by capitalism’s growth-fueled booms and busts, could prove as harmful to the planet as climate-change denialism.

There are many more things wrong with the economy than its reliance on fossil fuels. Capitalism’s addiction to dirty energy is just one reason it is deeply unsustainable.

I was considering putting this in Serious, but it's fine here.

I'm thinking about buying a house when I move to Norfolk, VA in June. I'll be there for about a year, and could continue to stay there another three years. I know that monthly payments tend to come out a few hundred dollars less than rent, and we'd rent it out using a property management company when we leave, rather than sell it. Norfolk is a huge military town so we'd never have a problem with finding reliable renters. Right now we're DINKs and intend to stay that way for at least 4 more years.

But still, as a 23 year old it's a huge responsibility. We're looking in the $150,000-$250,000 range, using a VA loan for the down payment and a 30-year mortgage around 3.75%.

I know there are only a few homeowners here, but any advice would be appreciated.

t4r

List horror movies in which the protagonist(s) would be able to quickly save themselves by having access to a gun.

I'm watching Hush right now, and it's a great movie, but it's just silly for someone to live in the remote woods without a means of protection.


The Purge movies are the first that come to mind.

This is relevant to Jews, Christians, and Atheists interested in theology, cultural history, and particularly Ancient Near East studies.

In college I took a course on the Hebrew Bible, where we went through the Tanakh (Old Testament for Christians) in a couple months and analyzed its stories, characters, and themes. I've attached a Dropbox link that will show each lesson plan, the syllabus, and some various stuff like my homework and final exam. The homework each week was an abstract summary of our reading assignments from the Tanakh and our textbook, so you can read those for some quick info, bearing in mind that it was the work of a student.

Dropbox

Our textbook: The Hebrew Bible: A Comparative Approach

The course and textbook were designed to be objective, rather than teaching from a religious perspective (though there may be highlighted examples of how some of it is reflected in later religious works; I honestly can't remember).

The PDF lesson plans may seem a bit confusing because they're not just a script of each class. They start with a movie clip and a few questions to help the class relate to the stories being presented (and our professor really liked films). But generally they provide a lot of different sources of information for each section.

Any finally, my favorite Biblical scholar has openly published a vast amount of notes on the Bible, which can be read here. Bear in mind that these are from a Christian perspective, but in general they're very reliable and tend to stay objective from a cultural standpoint as well.

RIP small retail stores

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01BH9EQL6/ref=s9_al_bw_g570_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-3&pf_rd_r=13RP6103HP92VM0D566K&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=2452416802&pf_rd_i=10667898011

So apparently now you can buy little wifi-enabled devices that have a button you press which, when linked to your Amazon account, will automatically order and ship the corresponding item. So for example, you'd put the one I linked in your bathroom and press it when you're down to your last roll, and the next business day you'd have more toilet paper delivered free to your door (assuming you're a Prime subscriber). They have this for dozens of common household items, from paper towels to condoms. And another item that's currently being privately tested lets you do the same thing but by scanning a barcode, so it works for basically anything.

The futer is now.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-costs-of-mass-deportation-1458342018

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz say they’d deport all of the 11.3 million or so undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. They don’t say how they would pull off this forced human exodus. But new research shows that executing on this promise would require at least $400 billion in new federal spending and reduce U.S. GDP by about $1 trillion.

A study released this month by the American Action Forum, a free-market think tank led by economist Doug Holtz-Eakin, walks through the process of evicting 11 million people over two years, a time frame Mr. Trump has floated. The report assumes that about 20% of those here illegally would leave voluntarily once the roundups begin. But that still leaves about nine million to find and deport.

This can’t be done with the snap of one’s fingers. In practice and under the law it requires four steps: finding and apprehending individuals, detaining them while they await due process, moving them through the courts, and then transporting them to their home countries.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can now remove at most 400,000 undocumented immigrants a year, most of whom are turned over to the feds by local police after, say, a traffic stop. Ramping up that goal to millions would require 90,000 federal agents, up from today’s 4,000, the study finds. That number would be even higher if the feds conduct most of the raids instead of relying on local law enforcement that lacks the resources for mass sweeps.

After the roundups, where would the arrested millions await their hearings? The feds currently operate about 250 detention facilities with 34,000 beds, and a mere 58 immigration courts. The average detention time is 28.7 days. To keep that same detention time, the report says a two-year deportation plan would require some 348,831 beds, as well as more than 1,300 courts and about 30,000 more federal attorneys. The effort would be a full-employment act for lawyers, and no doubt the House Freedom Caucus would be overjoyed to pay for all of those new federal employees.

Then there’s the task of sending migrants back to their native countries. Only about half of the 11.3 million hail from nearby Mexico, so the U.S. would have to fly millions to Central America, Asia and elsewhere. The report found that the effort would demand the departure, on average, of 84 buses and 47 chartered flights every day for two years. Is the Trump 757 available?

The most important cost, however, would be the blow to the economy from disrupting such a huge chunk of the American workforce. About eight million undocumented immigrants are employed in some way, and the report estimates that deporting them all in two years would shrink the U.S. labor force by 6.4%. That’s a lot of suddenly unfilled jobs. The report estimates that GDP would shrink by 5.7%, not far from the 6.3% decline from the 2008 recession. The new Administration would certainly be off to a rip-roaring start.

Defenders of deportation say state and local governments would save tens of millions on social services for illegals, but that would pale next to the economic and human costs. All of this suggests that deportation would be one more campaign promise that fails once it hits the, er, wall of reality.

tl;dr

To deport all 11.3 million illegal immigrants, it'd cost:
>$400 billion in additional spending
Reduce GDP by ~$1 trillion
Reduce labor force by 6.4%

Just a reminder that Trump isn't a conservative, and Cruz is a regressive shithead. If you're a republican (or democrat) that supports mass deportation over a path to citizenship, you're wrong.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3109/07388551.2013.823595

Abstract:

The technology to produce genetically engineered (GE) plants is celebrating its 30th anniversary and one of the major achievements has been the development of GE crops. The safety of GE crops is crucial for their adoption and has been the object of intense research work often ignored in the public debate. We have reviewed the scientific literature on GE crop safety during the last 10 years, built a classified and manageable list of scientific papers, and analyzed the distribution and composition of the published literature. We selected original research papers, reviews, relevant opinions and reports addressing all the major issues that emerged in the debate on GE crops, trying to catch the scientific consensus that has matured since GE plants became widely cultivated worldwide. The scientific research conducted so far has not detected any significant hazards directly connected with the use of GE crops; however, the debate is still intense. An improvement in the efficacy of scientific communication could have a significant impact on the future of agricultural GE. Our collection of scientific records is available to researchers, communicators and teachers at all levels to help create an informed, balanced public perception on the important issue of GE use in agriculture.

A portion of the conclusion section:

In the EU, the regulatory burdens for GE crop approval are extremely heavy (Kalaitzandonakes et al., 2007), de facto excluding the public sector and minor crops from the development of GE technology. As a result, the number of experimental releases of GE crops is rapidly decreasing (Löchte, 2012) and even large companies are abandoning GE (Dixelius et al., 2012; Laursen, 2012). This scenario is the result of the interaction of complex sociological and psychological factors, risk/benefit ratios, political aspects and an unbalanced scientific communication.
All these factors have to be considered globally and taken into account in a constructive debate on whether the GE crops represent a strategic resource for the future. An improvement in the efficacy of the scientific communication to stakeholders, as clearly demonstrated in the case of the recent case of GE wheat field trials in the UK (Löchte, 2012), could have a significant impact on the future of agricultural GE.
We believe that genetic engineering and GE crops should be considered important options in the efforts toward sustainable agricultural production. Our collection of scientific records is available to researchers, communicators and teachers at all levels to help create an informed and balanced public perception on the hot issue of GE use in agriculture.

There's a lot of good data in this, and I encourage you to sift through some of it.

A rebuttal:

http://earthopensource.org/gmomythsandtruths/sample-page/2-science-regulation/136-2/

What is it, and why?

Examples:

• The Big Bang is the most complete theory of the origin of the universe to date
• Abiogenesis is the best theory of the origin of life on Earth to date
• Evolution is the best theory of how life developed on Earth
• Young Earth theory and creationism models are not accurate or accepted
• GMOs present no particular danger to consumers
• Anthropological climate change is real and presents a significant danger to humanity

etc. Post others and I'll add them if they can be confirmed.

Nothing requiring lots of grinding like The Division. I was even thinking of replaying some Halo 2 multiplayer on the MCC if anyone's interested. Other than that, any recommendations of some recent games?

Bless this hero cleaning up our streets.

Just heard his speech on NPR.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/us/politics/marco-rubio.html

Fuck.

I'm generally conservative but I don't really care about gun rights much. So for you folks that do, what would it take from the government for you to give up your right to own guns (with exceptions for hunting and stuff like that). Your answer can be anything from monetary reimbursement to disarming of the police. Try to give a thoughtful response, not just "nothing, shall not be infringed", etc.