Majority of US Healthcare Costs Are Caused by Bad Eating Habits - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/opinion/10pollan.html <comment><USER2> _There's lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes._

All the more reason for each of us to take more personal responsibility for our food and our health. I wouldn't count on anyone else helping me much with either any time soon.

<comment><USER3> Most health care spending in the US is caused by aging. Most heath care spending is paid for by the state, local, or federal government (50%+). Most heath care spending is caused by people living longer. Most heath care spending is caused by better and more expensive treatments that we did not have 100 years ago. Smokers have shorter lives and spend less on heath care over their lifetime. Smokers cause a huge short term spike in heath care costs.

PS: There are plenty of ways of slicing it, but excluding sudden death we are all going to spend a lot of money on heath care and we are all going to die.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I work in healthcare and this is my understanding from the responses of patients that I encounter - fast food is cheap. One of the families I work with, both parents are diabetic and the children are all overweight. I asked them about their eating habit and the answer was : McDonalds for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Why? Because it's cheap to eat at McDonalds for a family of 4 than it is to buy vegetables at the market....for 3 bucks, you get a whole meal for one person. $3 at Safeway, you only get..a cabbage and some tomatoes?

They didn't understand that their eating habit is going to cost them much more in health expenses

<comment><USER5> I've heard this before, but it isn't true. I make one cup of Quaker oatmeal most mornings - cost is around 11 cents. I buy tea and coffee in bulk - another 11 to 25 cents or so. My entire breakfast costs less than 50 cents, and all it requires is boiling water or 3 minutes in the microwave. It's faster than a drivethrough.

Rice and beans are practically free they're so cheap. I buy turkey or chicken cold cuts, again very cheap. I buy "turkey dogs" (hot dogs, but made of turkey) when they're on sale for something like $2 per six. 3 of them is 210 calories, almost all protein, for about $1. I buy whatever fruit is on sale, fruit isn't so expensive either. I don't like bread, but wheat bread is cheap. My girlfriend sometimes cooks a huge pot of stew that sits on the stove for 3-4 days and serves 10+ meals for under $10.

I'm not sure how much eggs are per dozen - maybe a dollar or two?

It's possible to eat very quickly and inexpensively. The problem isn't cost, it's a mix of education and being willing to forsake convenience/delay gratification. Our culture is decent at the former, but quite bad at the latter.

<comment><USER6> I agree, I find that going to the grocery store and paying upfront for my meals to come is more cost effective than constantly buying fast food. Fast food is not very cheap at all actually. Unless you're buying from the dollar menu, in which case it's $3... for your kids. It's hard to get full on 99c fries and a mini burger.

<comment><USER7> To provide a single anecdote, I am able to get full on two dollar menu items. You don't have to stick to what they define as a "meal" (i.e. burger, fries, soda). If I'm short on time or cash, I can get two double cheeseburgers, or a chicken sandwich plus a salad, for less than $3, drink a glass and a half of water with it, and be full until the next meal. Whether just anyone can do that is another question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The headline "Majority US Healthcare Costs Are Caused by Bad Eating Habits" is not the headline of the article, nor is this supposed fact stated anywhere in the article.

I very much doubt it's true, and I don't think it's well-defined enough to even be false.

<comment><USER9> _(...) the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet._

This is a key argument in the article and the headline seems like a reasonable paraphrase of that.

<comment><USER10> At the minimum, a lack of physical activity has to be included as a factor in this along side diet.

<comment><USER9> Haven't you heard? The new wisdom is that exercise makes you even fatter. Well, I exaggerate, but I'm referring to a recent Time story saying 'exercise won't make you thin' (the idea being that you still need to eat less or you'll just get hungrier and never lose weight).

You are quite right, but 'pin the tail on the donkey' seems to sell better :-/

<comment><USER11> It's not actually new wisdom.

We are just going back to what we knew 40 years ago.

Basically, between 1960 and 2009 we thought exercise will make you thinner.

Outside those times exercise was thought to increase appetite.

<comment><USER12> The somewhat confusing thing is that people focus so much on "losing weight". Even if exercise makes you hungrier, it's been shown quite conclusively to make you _healthier_.

If you really want to _lose weight_ without regard to any other factors then take up smoking as it reduces your appetite. Or just cut off your legs. Certainly don't build up any muscle mass as that will only make you heavier.

<comment><USER10> Also, lack of exercise is correlated with weight gain in larger population and consequent lack of health.

People confuse this the statement that later exercise make up for a person's lack of exercise at a given period. This might or might not be true but it doesn't follow from the first statement. Lack of exercise over longer periods might screw people in ways that we have no idea how to fix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are American eating habits really that significantly different from Canadian eating habits to explain the fact that the US spends twice as much per capita as Canada spends - notwithstanding the 50 million Americans without coverage?

<comment><USER14> Comparing Canada vs USA obesity rates shows that YES indeed eating habits seem to be very different:

[http://eaves.ca/2008/07/08/fatness-index-canada-vs-united- st...](http://eaves.ca/2008/07/08/fatness-index-canada-vs-united-states/)

<comment><USER15> As a Canadian living in the USA I have to say, we don't eat that differently in Canada, the big difference is we eat _less_.

Canada is just as full of greasy, nutrtionless, processed-to-hell food as America is, but we simply do not consume as much of it, from my observations.

When I moved to the USA I immediately (over 4 months) gained a buttload of weight (both figuratively and literally...). This is due to my bad habit of finishing everything on my plate. I've since fixed this and my weight is rapidly decreasing. Yay. Serving sizes in the USA are simply ludicrous and completely out of step with reality.

Before talking about high-fiber, low-fat diets, Americans need to do one simple (but difficult) thing: _eat less. Eat way less_.

A friend and I (both Canadian) paid a visit to the Cheesecake Factory this last weekend - when our plates landed on our table our eyes bugged out. There was enough food to feed 4 people in a standard Canadian restaurant. I'm not even exaggerating :S The table next to ours polished their food single- handedly and then ordered dessert. We were shocked. How any single person can consume that much food in one sitting is unimaginable, and somewhat disgusting.

<comment><USER8> Well, the Cheesecake Factory is a bit of an outlying case -- those portions are ridiculous even by American standards. But as an Australian living in the US I agree with you -- I find it hard just to get a normally-sized meal for breakfast or lunch.

In Australia, if you order a ham and cheese sandwich, you get ham and cheese. In America if you order a ham and cheese sandwich you get a huge stack of ham, a bit of cheese, lettuce, tomato, pickles (!?), maybe some sprouts, mayo and a bright yellow mustard-like substance. If I tell them I just want ham and cheese they look at me like I'm crazy (and I am, cuz I'll be paying about six bucks for this sandwich anyway).

On the other hand, last I heard Australian rates of obesity have overtaken US rates. On the _other other_ hand, Australia probably has more of the slightly- fat people (ordinary folks with big beer guts) and fewer of the ridiculously- fat people (acres of waddling flesh or too-fat-to-walk electric wheelchair folks).

<comment><USER16> _"Well, the Cheesecake Factory is a bit of an outlying case ..."_

I'm not sure about that. Cheesecake Factory, Claim Jumper, you name it.

Even the fast casual restaurants like Chipotle. They tout the "freshness" of their ingredients–despite the fact their burritos weight as much as my laptop.

Of course, every restaurant now is on the "hamburger slider" craze ... even though the slider is probably the size a normal hamburger _should_ be.

Don't even get me started on the Midwest. When I first started visiting Oklahoma regularly, I was a little shocked. You'd almost think there was a state law that every restaurant had to be a buffet.

<comment><USER17> Restaurant meals have grown so large that I only order an entree if I'm planning to take home a doggie-bag.

If I want to actually eat all I order, I usually get two appetizers, or an appetizer and a salad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Doesn't everyone die? If so, isn't the question what diseases take the longest time to cause death, and thus require the most medical expenditure? Wouldn't medical expenses be lower if everyone died of a heart attack at 55? That would certainly be cheaper than living till 70 and treating cancer, bone loss issues, bladder issues, and cholesterol issues over a period of several years.

<comment><USER19> _If so, isn't the question what diseases take the longest time to cause death, and thus require the most medical expenditure_

Not exactly. You're missing two variables. The rate of infection in the population as a whole, and the rate of expenditure to treat the disease.

<comment><USER8> How so? The argument is that eventually everybody dies of something, so avoiding one fatal disease only shifts your death to another disease at some point in the future.

I really think it's quite likely that fat people, on average, cost less in health care over their lives than thin people. I don't have any numbers to back this up, but every person who dies suddenly of a heart attack saves an awful lot of money by not dying of cancer, or worse still some degenerative disease.

<comment><USER19> Nothing wrong with the basic gist, but read closely the statement I quoted. Just because something takes a long time to kill you doesn't mean its treatment is expensive. Similarly, just because something is expensive to treat doesn't mean enough people have it to make it worth targetting from an overall cost perspective. That's all I was saying.

<comment><USER20> And if you get less deaths per person-years, you might also save money (per person-year).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> * and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. *

Cancer and heart disease are fundamentally diseases of age. Everyone will die of one or the other eventually. The links to certain dietary elements are almost all a result of a data mining.

</comment><comment><USER22> We are digging our graves with our teeth.

Caring for diabetes and related conditions consumes about 1/7 of all US healthcare spending (could be a little more or less depending on how you count). [http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-statistics/cost-of- diabetes...](http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-statistics/cost-of-diabetes-in- us.jsp) The vast majority of type-2 diabetes cases could be prevented with better eating habits. If the incidence of preventable chronic diseases was greatly reduced, healthcare costs would be so low that we wouldn't be arguing over how to pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER23> Yes, but before advocating any diet please read Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories".

Please. The government already amplified a terrible mistake to colossal dimensions and could do it again.

</comment><comment><USER24> Why is there no mention of the artificially restricted supply of doctors? This fact plainly accounts for a large portion (if not the majority) of US health care costs.

</comment><comment><USER25> A retired gastroenterologist once told me his personal theory: Every human can consume a finite amount of sugar in his/her lifetime - once you exceed that limit, you die. The theory is a bit flimsy but it makes you think about cumulative nutritional choices.

</comment><comment><USER26> Isn't it the same everywhere (assuming there is no war or natural calamity etc like situation)?

<comment><USER9> Not necessarily. For example: <http://library.thinkquest.org/16665/causes.htm> <\- leading causes of mortality in ~20 countries. Look at how big the variations between different countries can be even for coarsely-grained statistics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is a poor headline. I'd say a better one would be. "Majority of US Healthcare Costs are Cause by Not Exercising enough to burn calories from Bad Eating Habits"

<comment><USER28> Well, there is something slightly perverse about eating more food than you need, and then doing useless physical work to balance out the equation.</comment></comment>


Why does Angular.js rock? - <AUTHOR> http://angular-tips.com/blog/2013/08/why-does-angular-dot-js-rock/ Why does Angular.js rock? Is the first article on the new angular-tips blog! <comment><USER2> Angular is god's gift to programming bloggers. The documentation is so famously patchy, contradictory and impenetrable that an entire cottage industry of talmudic literature has sprung up around it overnight.

I've spent the last two weeks slicing and dicing the developer guide and all the directly related API documentation -- this one-page demo is better than the entire Angular tutorial. It also covers the most important 20% of the Developer Guide.

Based on my current understanding, I'd explain Angular in a different direction. Everyone starts with the binding, introduces a few inbuilt directives, then possibly writes a directive.

I'd start with the $digest() loop, then build out to the runtime loop generally, then explain how link()ing makes the $digest() loop possible via $watch().

There is an enormous amount of Angular that is damn near liable to cause you to scratch your head clear through to your grey matter unless you spend 15 minutes reading the $digest() source code and eyeballing the dev guide in a few places. The docs _by themselves_ simply will not teach you how Angular works, which rather falls short of the purpose of having documentation.

<comment><USER3> "The docs by themselves simply will not teach you how Angular works."

Well said, and I agree, but I wonder why this is? There's some cred to be gained by making and using something so impenetrable that only a select handful of people 'just know' how something works, and everyone aspires to be like them?

I've found plenty of people/blogs/sites telling me I'm doing angular 'wrong' (and not just angular - other frameworks/libraries) but precious few people can demonstrate a 'right' way to do things which actually accommodates real world use cases. On top of that, what was canonical at one point is later made obsolete via a single patch/push, but the blogosphere/google never quite catch up.

Less an angular-specific rant, more an observation as to how more projects seem to be heading. As I become one of the 'older' generation, I'm seeing more younger devs (under 25, less than 3 years of professional experience) embracing this code lifestyle, and seem to think it's great, and old fogeys like me just 'can't keep up'. Maybe I can't, but perhaps if you'd document your stuff a bit more, we could just _use_ the library instead of having to read every single line of code, commit, watch for patches, finagle and beg to get pull requests taken and used, and pray that the next point release doesn't break everything. Obviously not all projects are like this, but it seems there's a growing trend among younger projects to work this way. Or maybe I'm just getting old...

<comment><USER4> What these "younger devs" don't realize is that in most cases they are simply reinventing stuff that has existed for years. Even today, the best JS MVC frameworks only just provide the capabilities to build UIs that (for example) were trivial in PowerBuilder 20 years ago.

The fact that it's considered "gee whiz" that you can enter a value into a form field and have that value automatically validated and bound to an attribute in a "model" shows how little we have really advanced.

Web UIs offer a lot in the way of visual styling and easy distribution... but the actual building of apps hasn't really advanced much.

<comment><USER2> I sometimes wonder what the world would look like if somehow it was all hypercards or DCOM or OpenDoc or NeWS or just about anything other than a simple document format painfully hammered into the shape of an applications platform.

<comment><USER5> It's fun to run the counterfactuals, but ultimately, we go to war with the lousy technology stack we have, not the mediocre one we want. I'm just overjoyed that, thanks to Android and iOS, people are writing native applications again.

<comment><USER6> There are known IKnowns: there are APIs we know that we know. There are known IUnknowns: that is to say, there are APIs that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown IUnknowns: there are APIs we do not know we don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am just starting up web development and have decided to use Django for backend. However, this Angular vs Ember comparisons have lowered my confidence as I think whatever choice "I" make, will turn out wrong in the long run. Can the experienced people here tell me what I should choose? I am fine with either style of approach to HTML(template vs declarative) and I just want a batteries included framework, which I can use in production, with no severe limitations which may haunt me later.

P.S I am very new to HN and I cant do Ask HN posts :(

<comment><USER4> _whatever choice "I" make, will turn out wrong in the long run_

Get used to that feeling if you want to be a web developer. You are in one of the most "churning" areas of software technology. None of today's popular JS frameworks were around even a few years ago, and in a few years time I expect we'll see an entirely new set of popular frameworks.

Forget about the "long run." Pick something with a decently-sized community of users and support. Learn it well enough to do what you want to do. Expect to throw that away and learn something else next year. The era of actually achieving "mastery" of any development tools is long gone, at least in the world of web front-end development.

<comment><USER3> " None of today's popular JS frameworks were around even a few years ago, and in a few years time I expect we'll see an entirely new set of popular frameworks."

You're right, but what needs also to happen is for many others to lose the attitude that others are "doing it wrong" if they don't immediately intuit every nuance of some new library that's 3 months old and was only written for one use case, but touted as the latest hotness which suddenly you're forced to use at work (for example).

I'm fine with understanding the churn and rapid pace - what I don't appreciate is the attitude that just because everything's not 100% obvious to me that somehow it's my fault, when there's little to no docs, no test cases, and a README file that shows a trivial hello world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands The issue I've consistently had with a lot of the "frameworks" coming out recently, is the lack of subject matter experts. It's like someone throws this stuff together, makes an attempt to sketch out some documentation and then just lets the developers have at it. Most of the developers who make videos or tutorials simply do a few basic ones, and leave the rest up to the community to figure out after that.

It would be nice if there was a team of developers who actually incubated this stuff so they could write some decent documentation, along with a gamut of examples from simple to highly complex so these frameworks didn't always looked like a half baked rush job on getting it out.

I know our industry moves fast, but I think we'd be better served with a complete set of documentation, with people who've been using these for some time and who can lay out a solid road map for developers interested in utilizing these frameworks.

<comment><USER8> That's one of the reasons I prefer Backbone. It was born out of a business project, still maintained by it's creator, and usage examples and production apps abound: [http://backbonejs.org/#examples](http://backbonejs.org/#examples)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Certainly amusing demo.

What might actually have a chance at winning me over (having deep real-world experience with and trust of other tools) is an account of more complex usage:

\- deep look at componetization/composition techniques,

\- how it plays with CommonJS/AMD/Harmony,

\- honest accounting of drawbacks, pain points, non-ideal usage scenarios,

\- explanation of all the magic, e.g. what's happening under the covers to do data-binding, does the global namespace get polluted by DI features, etc...

</comment><comment><USER10> I spent most of the last 4 months doing all my front end work in Angular. The biggest problem I for me is that A) there are a lot of nooks an crannys and B) the views end up being pretty ugly.

I've been doing more with Ember recently, and while some things are not as easy, some other important things are much easier. On top of that the views are easy to read. So at least for now I feel like Ember is better for me.

<comment><USER11> i've found i prefer angular + ui-router to plain old angular routing, it makes the views much easier to handle. That said, i could never put enough time into ember to really understand it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12>
        It works great but what if we want the input to have the focus when the page loads? jQuery right? We grab the input and we call the focus() method in it. NO.

        With directives we want our HTML to be as self-descriptive as possible so we are going to create a focus directive.

Or you could use html5's autofocus

[http://davidwalsh.name/autofocus](http://davidwalsh.name/autofocus)

and cut the JS

\-----

Otherwise great article, I'm really leaning hard towards angular now, over ember

<comment><AUTHOR> True, but the directive will reach to those places where html5 is not a welcome guest.

But to be sincere, I picked one thing to a directive, there are infinite ideas but I needed one easily enough for a "hello-world" type of post.

<comment><USER12> Is there some way to make a shim with angular, that only applies the directive if autofocus is not supported

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Once, just once - I want to read an article like this and in the conclusion read "It doesn't rock. This framework just really sucks."

Anyway, I've been using Angular for a couple of weeks now, and happen to really enjoy it.

</comment><comment><USER14> So those are some neat features but I guess my overall question with all these client side frameworks is: what problem are they solving? I see like these lists of interesting features but I don't see a coherent message behind "why I need this".

Usually I go seeking out a library when it does something that I really don't want to have to do on my own, so what's the thing this is preventing me from having to do?

<comment><USER15> Here's the brief answer, as I understand it: they're frameworks that provide model-view data binding, ease data/presentational decoupling, and (in some cases) provide single-page app (SPA) infrastructure in the mode of MV*. In short, they're designed to tackle some of the common complexities that arise when writing feature-rich multi-part SPAs.

You can do it all on your own, for sure, and I actually think that writing a complex front-end-heavy application without anything but jQuery is a really great way to show yourself the potential use of these libraries. It's not really super hard to write decent, well-structured and segregated code... but it does begin to feel, after a while, like you're spending your time hooking up wires you've hooked up before.

At that point, you either write your own abstraction, or you go looking for an abstraction that someone else (preferably smarter than you) will maintain.

<comment><USER14> That's just more buzzwords though. I mean, why do I even need model view data binding? I'm not saying it's not nice to have, but I've written some pretty complicated applications and I never really found data binding to be some sort of killer feature. It's generally struck me as a great demo feature that in reality I'll pretty much never use.

I guess I'd find these things more convincing if they showed me some sort of problem they're solving by showing how awful it would be without what they're doing -- because without seeing the actual problem they're solving, it kinda strikes me as the work of architecture astronauts. It all sounds great on paper, but when I go to use it I can't imagine even needing most of the features this article describes.

<comment><USER15> Well, they are buzzwords, yeah, but it's important to note that buzzwords become so because of their popularity and prevalence.

Why do you need model-view data binding? Emulating the responsiveness of desktop apps, for one, or having live-update capability. I wrote an app recently that let you add line items to an object, and the client wanted the cumulative fiscal information to auto-update without reload. I'd agree that the standard 'Hello, <your input content here>' example is overly contrived, but what about a field that calculates and updates tax owing as you type? That's not hard to write with just javascript, but when you do that about fifty different times in an application, having a convenient data binding mechanism is really convenient.

The other utility that I find quite convenient is DRYing up insertion logic--I hate that I often have duplication between server-side templates for existing objects, and some sort of client-side template for dynamically inserting new objects. Rendering it all client-side makes my life a lot easier when I want to add or change the surrounding template, and having the ability to do the initial render with a minimum amount of boilerplate is phenomenally helpful.

Those are two very real, very frustrating problems with which I feel any one of these frameworks helps a lot. I'm happy to go into greater depth if you'd find that helpful or revelatory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Angular has a lot of built-in services, managing $http requests, $q for > promises, etc. But in this part we are not going to talk about any built-in > service, because they are more complex to explain and that belongs to a new > article.

Statements like this worry me. Authenticated requests to REST API's should be drop dead simple in any JS framework.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, not that complex, I just tried to show the minimum things possible. My first idea for a service was a twitter search but that implies an explanation of $http and things related with it. Auth request are not that bad, it is certainly not as simple as we want (but that happen in every client side framework) but not bad. I want to cover auth in a future article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What are the alternatives to Angular.js that does not use this Dependency Injection magic?

<comment><USER18> Dependency Injection can really be done in a dark magic way (the java / spring way), but after reading the source code, i can tell you angular.js way of doing it is really not that dark. More importantly, is extremely easy to use. No .xml file, no configuration file, just put the service in that function signature, done (unless you want to minifiy, which means you'll also have to add it as a string right next to it).

<comment><USER19> Well, in my option DI is one of the worst parts of Angular. It's a module system which can't be integrated with anything. Doing something like commonjs/amd would be much nicer:

app.controller('Name', function(require) { var $scope = require('$scope'); var y = require('some-service'); });

And suddenly, no problems and no weird syntax!

<comment><USER20> Require is a service locator, so you are getting some of the inversion of control benefits, but I greatly prefer the injections of the dependencies I need instead of relying on a locator.

In practice the DI approach is very nice, and works consistently. It also makes unit tests more straight forward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I like this article - there is a huge need for content on how to do things in Angular.

I personally love Angular quite a lot, and often help people in #angularjs on Freenode - stop by if you ever have a question, a lot of us are helpful!

</comment><comment><USER22> Good breakdown of some of the useful built-in directives as well as an easy- to-understand guide to creating a directive.

Top commenter is definitely right that Angular's own docs create a cottage industry for bloggers and others willing to bang their heads against stuff until they figure it out.

Just started an Angular directive that allows for reusable Flot charts: [https://github.com/ErikAugust/flang](https://github.com/ErikAugust/flang)

I'll be adding the barChart directive as well as adding dynamic option setting in the next day or two.

<comment><USER2> There's something about those docs that seem to inspire blunt skull trauma analogies. Me the other day, for example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140406](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140406)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Good article, interesting site, terrible choice in background. Every time I scroll it flickers due to the pattern.

<comment><AUTHOR> It came with the theme, I lack design skills but so far is not that bad and I don't have any flickering...

<comment><USER24> Fair enough, I get the flickering too. Firefox 22 on Ubuntu 13.04 if it helps at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Similar article about why emberjs rocks:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6153917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6153917)

[https://kerricklong.com/articles/why-ember-js- rocks.html](https://kerricklong.com/articles/why-ember-js-rocks.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> This is actually the best and simplest introduction to Angular.js I have ever seen. You rock too!

</comment><comment><USER27> A good summary, although I found a title a bit misleading - expected some sort of comparison 'why it's better than XYZ'

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, I am the author of the post.

I think that there is a lot of comparison out there to create yet another one.

On the other hand, I don't have a deep knowledge of the competence to compare and I don't want to shot myself in the first post :P.

About the title, something can "rock" by its own.

Thank you for the comment :)

<comment><USER27> I am not saying that it's bad that it's not a comparison, I love it!

Thanks for your post!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> great post!, keep going :)

</comment><comment><USER29> I love AngularJS

</comment><comment><USER30> Because you have not heard of Knockout.js?</comment>


A court case so secret, US Govt says it can't go on - <AUTHOR> http://m.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11424037 <comment><USER3> Let's place the blame where it lies -- with this idiot judge. If a plaintiff has a legitimate case, and the goverment has a legitimate reason for secrecy, then it's the job of the judge to navigate these waters so justice is done. The judge has a ton of tools at his disposal. He can exclude certain evidence. He can review the evidence himself, which is probably what he would be doing in a bench trial anyway. He can give an indication of how he is likely to rule, knowing what he knows, and push the parties to settle. He can tell litigants that their chances would be better if they used lawyers who were cleared to have classified information. There are hundreds of things he can do, and he is required to do them, because _it 's his damn job._

We give way too much deference to federal judges.

<comment><USER4> It's the judges fault? Yeah, its pretty hard to 'support the common good' when you have a 'gun' put to your head.

<comment><USER5> I think this is a little too much conspiracy-mongering. Three federal judges have been killed in office, none of them seemingly assassinated by the US. government. Federal judges also have good job protection—"federal judges have perhaps the best job security available in the United States", and only 15 have ever been impeached in all history (it would take a session of Congress). Judges are also socially well-respected, so it'd be hard to find social attacks on a judge.

What exactly were you going for with your comment? What sort of illicit pressure were you suggesting?

<comment><USER6> I can't speak for the U.S., but I do know of (as it's someone I know - <USER2> because it's been in the press, apart from the character assassination bit) one case in the UK where, behind closed doors, a senior QC opposed the machinations of a secret court... And then totally unrelatedly the press _and prime minister_ come forwards to slander him, and his wife is found at home brain dead, apparently having tried to commit suicide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When the Government invokes the state secrets privilege in a lawsuit to conceal evidence, it should _lose_ the case, not win it.

It seems to be an open secret that UANI is a front for the CIA and/or Mossad. Until now, that info only appeared in fringe blogs. Now it's in the mainstream press. So the coverup effort may have backfired.

<comment><USER8> > it should lose the case, not win it.

Problem is... the government is _not even a party_ to the case! They can't win or lose; they're like the guy objecting at someone else's wedding.

<comment><USER9> That is a bit of a wrinkle, but it's easy enough to extend the basic principle to that type of situation. If the government objects to person A suing person B for $10 million, it should have to pay person A the ten mil to make the case go away.

<comment><USER10> And if A sues B not for money, but for some kind of action? Or injunctive relief?

<comment><USER11> The government can either take the action itself if it makes sense, or compensate B for its costs.

<comment><USER10> So the government can somehow hack into the NYTimes editing process and put a retraction of some earlier claim into the newspaper, all without the NYTimes staff cooperating?

Similarly, if A is constantly harassing B, B should just shut up and take the money the government pays him in compensation, along with the harassment that isn't being stopped?

Are you sure that is the outcome you are advocating for?

<comment><USER11> > _So the government can somehow hack into the NYTimes editing process and put > a retraction of some earlier claim into the newspaper, all without the > NYTimes staff cooperating?_

Can you come up with a concrete example of how such a court order might come about in a case that the government is intervening in in this manner?

> _Similarly, if A is constantly harassing B, B should just shut up and take > the money the government pays him in compensation, along with the harassment > that isn 't being stopped?_

See above.

> _Are you sure that is the outcome you are advocating for?_

It's difficult to know, since these seem to have no relationship to any hypothetical case I can come up with.

<comment><USER10> You're moving goal posts.

My example is: A sues the NYT, demanding that they rescind something.

Your solution: The government steps in and takes the action itself.

 _You_ want the government to get involved. I don't. I want A and the NYT to fight it out in court.

<comment><USER11> No, I don't want the government to get involved. I hold the (probably far more radical position than you) that government is not entitled to secrets at all, and that all government employees should be live-streaming their activities to the public Internet at all times while on duty.

I was presenting an alternative on the assumption the government would anyway.

<comment><USER10> We're not talking about secrets and government employees!

You have expressed your desire to not have any judgments except monetary compensations.

And I'm pointing out that harassment victims would rather live in peace than get some money in exchange for their state-sanctioned(!) victimhood.

<comment><USER11> > _We 're not talking about secrets and government employees!_

Actually, that is the core premise of the conversation I am having.

You probably have a reasonable point, but I'm disinclined to discuss it if we're not actually having the same conversation. All the more so since you have made a false accusation about my desires.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't know why everybody's assuming that the reason the government interfered is because the United Against organization is a front for a US intelligence agency. Here's an alternative theory with just as much proof (ie, none): maybe the CIA impersonated this shipping company to sell some sabatoged centrifuges or whatnot to Iran. Maybe United Against really is what they say they are, and since they're ex-spooks, not current spooks, they dug up the cover story but not the real story. Explains why the shipping company is pissed about being blamed, why United felt the need to publicly shame them, and why the CIA might not want the world to know about it.

The real point is... we have no idea why the government cares. Don't assume it's the most obvious reason.

<comment><USER12> If the CIA impersonated the shipping company, Iranians now already have that info, that the real company claims that it did no wrong. The government intervention is then not for Iranians, but to prevent the disclosure of the things the government did illegally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Be afraid. Be very afraid. This is such a frightening precedent. Sounds more like the USSR than the US. Sad to see what is becoming of the great US.

<comment><USER14> _...precedent._

"You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

As terrible as I, too, think this decision was, it was a decision by a _trial_ court judge. "Precedents" don't attach to trial court decisions, only to appellate court decisions.

If Restis appeals, and the dismissal is upheld by the appellate courts, _then_ there will be a precedent, with everything that implies. Similarly, if he appeals and the dismissal is reversed, a much more favorable (to your and my tastes, anyway) precedent will attach, which can be used to argue against any other attempts to toss suits to which the government isn't even a party on the basis of the State Secrets Privilege.

For the moment, however, this is an "isolated" incident, and can't be used precedentially in any similar cases.

EDIT: Yes, follow-ups, there are other definitions of the word "precedent". In the discussion of a _legal_ decision, however, the _legal_ definition takes ... well, precedence.

<comment><USER15> ...and you've gotten the legal definition wrong.

That precedent only applies to appellate court decisions is not true. There's persuasive precedent applies amongst courts of the same level.

It the facts and law are the same, a similar lower court decision could indeed be introduced in a similar case. The precedent isn't necessarily binding, but courts will generally defer unless there is a pervasive reason not too.

This is seen when the Supreme Court defers to its previous decisions (stare decisis)

<comment><USER14> Do you mean " _persuasive_ precedent"?

If so, you're right that it's not binding. Higher courts can, and do, defer to lower courts — where the higher court concurs with the lower court's legal reasoning. But that requires the case to have appeared before an _appellate_ court.

The reason for this is simple: trial courts consider questions of _fact_ , while appellate courts consider questions of _law_.

Similarly, so-called "horizontal precedent" applies between peer _appellate_ courts — and, again, isn't binding.

To my understanding, the only way this becomes more than informally precedential is if it's legitimately a "case of first impression" — and that would apply IFF this case is legitimately the first place this question of law was asked, and only until it's heard and ruled upon (or not taken up) by an appellate court.

<comment><USER15> Yes corrected to read "persuasive" (phone auto-corrected).

Non-binding precedent is still precedent. And as you've said, in the absence of an higher court opinion to the contrary, lower court decisions can be taken as precedent and can be considered at the lower court (trial court level).

Lower courts consider new questions of law, otherwise new questions would never be able to be addressed (with some state level advisory opinions aside)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "United Against was founded in 2008 by a former CIA director and a group of retired diplomats to advocate against the nuclear Iran. Its board includes former directors of foreign intelligence services including the U.K.'s MI-6, Germany's BND - and Israel's Mossad."

So basically the defendant, "United Against Nuclear Iran", is an extended branch of several governments' spy agencies and enjoys all the protections that result from that status.

<comment><USER17> Not quite retired, WHOIS shows Henley MacIntyre as their contact, who also appears in their 2008 990: [https://www.unitedagainstnucleariran.com/sites/default/files...](https://www.unitedagainstnucleariran.com/sites/default/files/ACANI_2008_IRS_990.pdf)

Seemed she worked for them to get everything set up (which makes sense as Wallace seems to describe her as his right-hand woman [https://books.google.com/books?id=v5owKbDSg7kC&pg=PA125&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=v5owKbDSg7kC&pg=PA125&lpg=PA125&dq=%22henley+macintyre%22&source=bl&ots=DW0npF7_0x&sig=iPl2789kvGdUQM-M1XdblI07Tz4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jnQYVcjwFdGsogTI5YCIBQ&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAw) ), and is now working for the State Department but has a long history of roles high up in the last administration.

[https://www.linkedin.com/pub/henley- macintyre/3/b95/a69](https://www.linkedin.com/pub/henley-macintyre/3/b95/a69) [http://www.williscommunications.com/who-we-are/henley- old/](http://www.williscommunications.com/who-we-are/henley-old/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What the flying fuck. Basically, party A sues party B, and party B has the back of the government, so the court tells party A to go away. Reasons undisclosed.

Wow. Talk about Kafkaesque justice.

<comment><USER19> isn't this worse than that? party B also doesn't get to know what's going on and also doesn't get a chance to win the case.

<comment><USER20> Of course Party B knows what's going on, they are high rank spies (and there is no such thing as "former" spy).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Looks like this has been going on for a while[0] and that Restis tried to quash the whole thing with, effectively, a bribe[1].

Shortly after filing this complaint, Restis was arrested for money laundering and embezzlement[2]. It's not clear whether those are legitimate allegations or themselves evidence of government gone wrong.

If this were a US citizen and it was clearly a case of the government wanting to avoid some embarrassment, it would be worth getting angry about. But in this case, where it's related to Iran and would have bearing on ongoing dealmaking, etc. it seems like asserting state privilege might actually be a good thing.

[0] [http://fas.org/sgp/jud/statesec/restis/](http://fas.org/sgp/jud/statesec/restis/)

[1] [http://blogs.reuters.com/alison-frankel/2014/02/18/the- peril...](http://blogs.reuters.com/alison-frankel/2014/02/18/the-perils-of- suing-for-libel-greek-magnate-and-iran-edition/)

[2] [http://shippingwatch.com/carriers/article5762315.ece](http://shippingwatch.com/carriers/article5762315.ece)

<comment><USER22> Although that's a really easy way to discredit someone...

Not that I am positing that's what happened... But the last thing I'm willing to do in a case of government front agency vs anyone, in a case where the government had taken extraordinary measures to protect an agency they deny any involvement with... Is assume it's not a move to further discredit their accuser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Maybe the USA is now worse than Communist Russia. Maybe so.

But it sure would be nice to for once read a comment section that focus on other interesting aspects, instead of proclaiming for the millionth time that the USA is now a totalitarian dictatorship dystopia, how the rule of law is gone, and how the little guy has been forgotten.

I'm not saying those are unimportant questions, but if I had a nickel for every time one of those same comments was repeated on these types of articles, I would own several islands in the Bahamas.

<comment> guard-of-terra When you're held at gunpoint, the inner workings of AK-47 don't interest you much. Regardless of how well you understand them, won't save you from bullets.

<comment><USER23> Yes, but I might wonder why am _I_ being held at gunpoint? How might I _avoid_ being held at gunpoint in the future? Can I somehow talk him down or coerce or placate him?

Instead of simply muttering bitter things about how the world has gone to sh*t.

<comment> guard-of-terra It's you because everyone is held at gunpoint. I'm afraid you can't avoid this, but you can evade being at gunpoint by keeping low profile, downshifting and stuff. This of course is only temporary Unfortunately, you can't fix this situation unless democracy work again, and it won't until we figure out how to do it in the world that became a thousand times more complex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "That so-called privilege doesn't come from the Constitution or from statute."

This is highly misleading, as it ignores the role that court cases play as precedent in common law jurisdictions. United States v Reynolds, for starters.

<comment><USER25> Its not misleading at all, there are 5 sources of US law constitutional law, statutory law, treaties, administrative regulations, and the common law. State secrets privilege comes from common law not constitutional law, or statutory law.

<comment><USER26> It _is_ misleading; it's meant to suggest that courts are, extralegally, doing the will of the government.

In actuality, common-law systems draw from additional sources beyond a national/state constitution and statutes. And New Zealand (home of the NZ Herald) is a common-law jurisdiction, so the concept should not be completely foreign.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wish we could sue the judge and request the Supreme Court identify if the behavior is allowed by the Constitution. But of course the Federal Government makes it impossible to get standing when the Constitution is clearly violated. It's like the People no longer matter.

<comment><USER28> The parties can appeal.

<comment><USER29> I have a lot of faith in our judicial system. I think they overall do a good job evaluating evidence as objectively as they can.

Sometimes a lower court makes a mistake, since they have a very broad focus handling the trial as a whole. If an appeal is filed to a higher court, they'll have the much narrower focus of determining proper judicial procedures.

I believe a higher court will take this seriously if appealed, and will issue new procedures for handling classified information if this is a serious concern.

<comment><USER30> I have no faith the judicial system, as a whole, is any less than self- serving. We have a serious problem with overzealous prosecutors enforcing a racist drug war, and judges pretend like their hands are tied every step of the way.

I suppose that's a little bit true. They might lose their jobs if they actually spoke for justice.

<comment><USER28> Federal judges have life tenure. The drug war continues to be prosecuted because people support it. The only legalization supported by the public is possession of marijuana, which accounts for a tiny fraction of federal drug prosecutions. Support for keeping other drugs illegal is still 75-90%, and those drugs are the ones involved in almost all drug prosecutions. [http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5162357](http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5162357)

<comment><USER30> Popular support doesn't excuse the judges who basically look the other way when prosecutors go entirely overboard, nor does it excuse prosecutors who cross the line.

Prosecutors, and I'm pretty sure judges as well (I am not a lawyer) are officers of the court. They should be held more accountable to their obligations in that capacity.

<comment><USER28> What's your contention exactly? That because of prosecutorial overreach drug dealers are convicted of harsher crimes than are justified by the facts?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm fine with the government claiming a state secrets privilege and the judge upholding it based on an in camera review. However, I see no reason for the case not to go forward with the available evidence publicly presented. This is a reasonable check on the government use of the privilege. If the government wants to hold back evidence, then the case gets decided on the available evidence presented to the fact-finder.

</comment><comment><USER32> Saw this earlier via Glenn Greenwald: [https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/26/new-low- obama-...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/26/new-low-obama-doj- federal-courts-abusing-state-secrets-privilege/)

</comment><comment><USER33> If the US is ever to get back its reputation, it will have to stop these kinds of things from being reported on.

<comment><USER34> The best way to do that would be to stop engaging in these kind of practices. But they'll probably try what you said first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is pretty much the plot of the two most recent episodes of The BlackList.

[http://www.nbc.com/the-blacklist](http://www.nbc.com/the-blacklist)

</comment><comment><USER36> I see no reason why DoJ wouldn't, in a case like this, employ some sort of ombudsman or public defender with clearance to argue on behalf of the plaintiff. In some way the two parties should be represented in the decision.

</comment><comment><USER37> {sigh}...somebody send this to Dan Carlin...maybe we can two Common Sense episodes in one week...that's the only silver lining I can think of...

</comment><comment><USER38> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlKEybkVl0M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlKEybkVl0M)

</comment><comment><USER39> Our intelligence services are at war with Iran. Nearly every budget point, every effort, must be justified in terms of our struggle against the Iranians.

This is not that different than when we were in a cold war against the Soviet Union. The support structures of our government change slower than world politics and so our efforts against Iran can seem like a farce with us putting the same effort into their defeat.

We lost our chance to bring the Russians in as our allies and we will probably lose a similar chance with the Iranians with the nuclear negotiations happening in Geneva/Lausanne/Montreux right now. The bureaucracy moves too slow.

<comment><USER40> > Nearly every budget point, every effort, must be justified in terms of our > struggle against the Iranians.

Look you have to supposedly private, non-government parties. They go to court for some reason. But one of the two parties is actually backed by the government, and the court is influenced by that backing to such an extent that it influences the case.

Not only is this a blatant form of government corruption, with private parties receiving government backing, but it also damages the separation of powers.

If you think it's completely justified to throw out the window many written and unwritten laws, elements of the constitution and basic structures of governance, because of negotiations with Iran, then I think you're willing to give up too many freedoms and rights. The real definition of terrorism to me is not when terror attacks kill as many people in a given year as falling fridges or indeed babies as is indeed the case, but when we're so scared of another cold-waresque threat that we're diminishing our own societies preemptively.

That's what this is about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I know this is going to be a controversial opinion, but to me it seems that this is perfectly reasonable. As great as it would be for the government to be completely transparent, that is simply not practical. Transparency would hurt the US's security, so this is simply the best option.

<comment><USER40> I hope it's not lost on you that history is riddled with corrupt regimes who employ that kind of rhetoric.

I hope it's also not lost on you that US history has a fair share of incidents where lack of transparency and honesty led to some of the worst policy one could have imagined. You may think of say, the rise of Iran in an area where its counterweight in Iraq was virtually destroyed, leaving a power vacuum and enough weapons and a lack of proper governance that allowed sectarian violence and the likes of Isis to arise, after a brutal decade long war against people who rightly so viewed the US as invaders into their country. A war which was justified and explained on the basis of evidence that was not public and that a decade later looked unsubstantial and partially fabricated.

But who cares right? We need to elect people who lie to us and keep secrets from us, for our own good. And if we have to let our government affect the courts, the separation of powers, and run policy through supposedly non- governmental government-backed organisations, why the hell not. Not like an independent court or a separation of powers has any value, right?

<comment><USER42> > I hope it's not lost on you that history is riddled with corrupt regimes who > employ that kind of rhetoric.

All governments are corrupt, are you implying governments don't have a need for secrecy?

I don't really have an opinion on this subject, but your response appears to ignore the other side of the issue.</comment></comment></comment>


Trump directs establishment of U.S. force to dominate space - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-moon-trump/trump-directs-establishment-of-u-s-force-to-dominate-space-idUSKBN1JE28D <comment><USER2> Does the President's authority as Commander in Chief extend to creating a new branch of the armed forces? The US Air Force was created by an act of Congress (the National Security Act of 1947), not by a Presidential order.

<comment><USER3> Sort-of, the National Security Act of 1947 created the Department of the Air Force[0]. I've seen previous articles stating that the "Space Force" would become a sixth branch, but it would fall under the purview of the Department of the Air Force. This is similar to the Navy / Marine Corps arrangement wherein the USMC is an independent branch, but under Department of the Navy.

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force#Histor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force#History)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here is a recent quote from by the Secretary Defense on the topic.

"I believe it is premature to add additional organization and administrative tail to the department at a time I am trying to reduce overhead."

<comment><USER5> This directive moves the existing space responsibilities of the USAF (GPS, etc) into its own department so it does not obscure the department's budget and compete with other USAF priorities. You could just as easily interpret the reorg as a clarification of military budgeting and slimming down of the Air Force's appetite.

When there's a nebulous and expensive operation (USAF space operations employs nearly 2x the people that NASA does) it's better for it to exist independently with its own responsibilities than to grow under the cover of an even larger traditional entity.

<comment><USER4> Why not split off the Air Force Global Strike Command (long range nuclear bomber and ICBMs), or the Army Corps of Engineers, or the Navy's submarine operations?

The answer is that what defines "a nebulous and expensive operation" is incredibly vague and if we start splitting all large military operations into their own branches we'd just end up with even more administrative overhead and the designation of separate services would lose distinction.

The big difference here is that Space Force sounds cool.

<comment><USER6> ICBMS, the Corps of Engineers, and submarines have well-defined roles in the American military. Spacecraft, as of yet, do not. If you want surveillance, we have the NRO.

<comment><USER4> We already have the Air Force Space Command, which is the mission that The Space Force is going to take over. I'd say what they'll be doing is about a well defined as any other forces role.

We don't know what a major war in orbit will look like, but we don't know what a major war against modern naval powers would look like either.

<comment><USER6> The great-grandparent was providing a justification for splitting space operations off of AFSC, as its mission is "vague and nebulous" and manages to eat up money and personnel in an opaque manner.

You countered that other areas of the military could also be "vague and nebulous" and could be split off as well.

I put forth that the other areas you mentioned have well-defined purposes, but spacecraft do not.

First: now you have mentioned that we already have the AFSC. Doesn't this seem a bit circular to you?

Second, AFSC already operates satellites, including the GPS constellation. If the Space Command inherits ownership of those satellites it will indeed be "operating spacecraft" without any real or described grandiosity.

<comment><USER4> >now you have mentioned that we already have the AFSC. Doesn't this seem a bit circular to you?

I said it's hard to define what nebulous and expensive means. I don't think AFSC's mission isn't anymore nebulous and expensive than a whole host of other commands.

>operating spacecraft

Operating spacecraft is indeed a grandiose term for maintaining satellites.

<comment><USER6> Alright, how about the X-37B?

<comment><USER4> So they are operating _a_ spacecraft. We don't know what it does but the most plausible explanation I've seen is that it's just a sensor test bed.

<comment><USER6> You've gone from claiming that operating spacecraft doesn't fit what the Space Force would do (in your grandparent comment, before you edited it) to claiming that it's not relevant because they're only operating one spacecraft. I'm fairly certain you're not arguing in good faith, especially given the heavy editing of the grandparent comment after I replied to you.

<comment><USER4> I edited that before I saw that you responded. I said that operating military spacecraft is a grandiose description of what their mission is. It makes it sound like they have a fleet of spaceships fighting other enemy spaceships.

I never said it doesn't fit what they would do. I said it's not what they would do. I also never said operating one spacecraft wasn't relevant.

I said that operating spacecraft is a grandiose and downright pretentious way to describe the mission of an agency with one remote controlled, scaled down space shuttle, testbed laboratory and some GPS satellites. And it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The USAF didn't manage to kill the idea this time, eh?

I remember this (or something similar) being proposed a few times over the last couple of decades.

<comment> 52-6F-62 It started under Reagan didn't it?

"Let's just put some lasers up there"

<comment><USER8> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative)

Lasers, and a lot of other things as well.

<comment><USER9> Which is actually still around, they are just known as the Missile Defense Agency now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _The Air Force requested a top-line budget of $120.4 billion_

Air Force spends a lot of money on "space".

 _The budget supports the goal of maintaining assured access to space and viability in contested and increasingly congested environments by continuing the block buys of the Advanced Extremely High Frequency System satellite vehicles 5 and 6 and Space Based Infrared System 5 and 6; and funding five Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle launch services, three of which are competitive launch opportunities._

[http://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/652961/af- pre...](http://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/652961/af-presents- fiscal-year-2017-budget/)

</comment><comment><USER11> More detail here (but not much more): [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/18/president-trump-directs- pent...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/18/president-trump-directs-pentagon- defense-department-to-immediately-being-the-process-of-establishing-space- force-as-sixth-military-branch.html)

<comment><USER5> Also out of the meeting, AP reports a directive to reduce satellite clutter: [https://phys.org/news/2018-06-white-house-aims-satellite- clu...](https://phys.org/news/2018-06-white-house-aims-satellite-clutter.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wouldn't this be a direct violation of the Outer Space Treaty?

<comment><USER13> No. This would move parts of the military that already do space stuff (primarily Air Force) into their own branch. The OST doesn't ban all military things in space (GPS constellation for example, is totally legal). The OST does ban nuclear weapons and 'boots on the ground' when it comes to certain extraterrestrial environs. But again, despite the name this isn't a Space Marine type organization that is being proposed. Just a reorg of existing capabilities.

<comment><USER14> Yeh. Seems like Air Force is already Space Force.

I have always been curious what boeing X37 does?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37)

<comment><USER15> Given its size and operating specs I'd say it's a space drone designed for superiority in the orbital range. It enables the Air Force to attack and defend at very high altitudes against otherwise unreachable targets and threats. Or, at least now, since it doesn't appear to carry or need any weapons systems, it can tow satellites out of orbit (for security reasons, American or foreign) or run very specific rescue missions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "I'm gonna build the biggest Dyson Wall to keep those loser space aliens out! Believe me, space aliens are bad hombres; they poop out of their mouths and eat our cars at 3am. Those smelly green runts ate my golf cart in the _middle_ of my game! Most come from total sh&thole planets, unbelievable! #MakeEarthGreatAgain!

</comment><comment><USER17> There's nothing in Trumps exec. order about a space force[1]. It's not clear if Trump was speaking extemporaneously about something they aren't ready to pull the trigger on or what.

1\. [https://twitter.com/AaronMehta/status/1008786783436451840](https://twitter.com/AaronMehta/status/1008786783436451840)

</comment><comment><USER18> This is adopting the Jedi "I Have The High Ground" doctrine as seen in that space documentary.

<comment><USER19> The entire space race was essentially that, mixed with propaganda and a wee dash of actual science.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Good. The Air force consistently drops the ball on space. Its needed a separate branch for a long time. Who cares if its Trump pushing it.

Divorce your politics from reality:

[https://medium.com/war-is-boring/america-needs-a-u-s- space-c...](https://medium.com/war-is-boring/america-needs-a-u-s-space-corps- ab79bebe93eb)

</comment><comment><USER21> Setting aside the constant drama surrounding Trump, to me this seems to have a significant positive potential.

See reference [1] below to see how many people are currently in space. I would definitely not call that a "force". A more permanent presence in space for more people would necessitate a lot more scientific research that will likely have non-military benefits (like GPS research did in the past). There is so much for us to learn which is good for humanity and inspiring for young people.

The excitement around space might make it easier to get additional funding approved. According to this [2] the Army, Navy, and Air Force budgets for 2016 weren't too far off from each other. It will be interesting to see at what level the funding will fall for this "separate but equal" department.

According to this [3] the President has announced job one is to declutter space to avoid collisions and spacecraft breakups, which all spacefaring countries will benefit from.

As much as I admire Elon Musk, it would be nice to have a government presence in space for rescue missions, etc. For anyone that has played too many hours of Civilization IV, you might enjoy Baba Yetu performed by the United States Navy Band [4]. The rescue force I would envision would be like the small clip at 2m00s to 2m20s in that youtube video, except in space.

Lots of people talk about things like 'basic income' to protect us when machines watch what we do and then take over our jobs. I would prefer to push that day out a little bit by instead allocating money to us doing totally brand new things, like this in space, that excites me and makes me want to spring out of bed in the morning!

[1] [https://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/](https://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States#Total_budget_by_department)

[3] [http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/trump-space- force-1.471101...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/trump-space- force-1.4711012)

[4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKWQQQjAEBU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKWQQQjAEBU)

</comment><comment><USER22> Can't wait for him to call it "Stargate Command".

<comment><USER23> Is there room under NORAD for their operations base?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe we should work on getting civilians in space first...

</comment><comment><USER25> My guess is that this is a power play - create a new sub-agency of the DoD, move some projects from existing agencies (railguns and DEWs from the Navy perhaps), classify everything, and throw together some patriotically-themed video brochures for Congressional committees.

<comment><USER26> It's a distraction from the fact that Michael Cohen might cooperate with Mueller, Paul Manafort is currently in prison, and it just became public that Roger Stone had another meeting with the Russians.</comment></comment>


Agent-based Modeling of Bee-Colony Nest Choice - <AUTHOR> http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/03/bees_nesting_an.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The full PDF: [http://www.ma.rhbnc.ac.uk/~elsholtz/WWW/papers/papers28liste...](http://www.ma.rhbnc.ac.uk/~elsholtz/WWW/papers/papers28listelsholtzseeley.pdf)</comment>


Data Structures for Disjoint Sets - <AUTHOR> http://compgeom.cs.uiuc.edu/~jeffe/teaching/algorithms/notes/16-unionfind.pdf

<comment><USER2> I encountered this data structure over 20 years ago as an undergraduate, but didn't recognise that it was the same structure used in Kruskal's algorithm until I read this.

The time complexity of the path-compressed algorithm is very nice.</comment>


You Know You're a Startup Founder When... - <AUTHOR> http://youknowyoureastartupfounderwhen.com Some of the best:<p>...You stopped watching f*ing Lost!<p>...Watching Mixergy isn't watching someone mix experimental cocktails.<p>...A Ping Pong Table is an essential form of office equipment.<p>...You check your Analytics every few minutes to see if there's been any activity since you last checked 2 minutes ago… did anyone new sign-up yet!? <comment><USER2> That ad is really making me mad. It keeps moving and I accidentally clicked it twice.</comment>


Natural Language Does Not Emerge 'Naturally' in Multi-Agent Dialog [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.08502 <comment><AUTHOR> At the risk of oversimplifying, limited algorithmic complexity leads to compositional languages. Very nicely written article.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some good topics for undergrad thesis related to Tomography? - <AUTHOR> 	I am in the final semester of my college and I am looking for a topic for my undergraduate thesis, it should be related to GPU Programming. I would like to work on a problem that involves Tomography. I have looked at several research papers but I would like to work on something which is untouched. <comment><USER2> Everything interesting has been touched :-) I'd recommend looking at l1-minimisation methods (which seek sparse solutions) and how best GPUs can be used for those problems.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is tomography? How does a GPU and the existing techniques related to programing one relate to it?</comment>


Dark triad traits may predict PC-authoritarianism and alt-right attitudes [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Moss-OConnor.pdf <comment><USER2> Pretty interesting, I'd strongly suggest anyone commenting read the article because the researchers use two distinct definitions of "political correctness" which they show to be strongly anti-correlated, with the common usage of political correctness being anti-correlated with the Dark Triad and the "authoritarian" one being correlated to both the Dark Triad and alt-right behavior.

In other words, the title has been changed from the original, "The Dark Triad traits predict _authoritarian_ political correctness and alt-right attitudes" and mis-represents the author's findings.

I'd argue that "authoritarian political correctness" is the wrong term for questions such as, "When a charge of sexual assault is brought forth, the alleged perpetrator should have to prove his or her innocence" as that's straight up authoritarianism. While, "There are no biologically based differences in personality, talent, andability to reason, between racial groups." is pretty well aligned with conventional political correctness.

The fact that the researchers themselves show that agreement in one of those statements strongly correlated with disagreement with the other is evidence that supports my opinion.

</comment><comment> tom-thistime For the love of all that's holy, show your scatter plots and let us actually see how well the data matches the claimed fit. My goodness.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Moreover, it appears that the relationships between the dark side of human personality and right-wing political orientation and extremism, respectively, are relatively independent from each other. That is, that the endorsement of extreme political orientations is associated with the dark side of human personality is not a consequence of voters scoring high in the Dark Tetrad being more politically right-leaning."[0]

[0][https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5680983/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5680983/)

This is also one of the references for this study.

</comment><comment><USER4> ABSTRACT:

> It is well established that mainstream personality traits are associated > with moderate, traditional political attitudes. However, very little is > known regarding trait predictors of extreme political attitudes. In the > current study(N=511 U.S. residents), we examined the relationships between > the Dark Triad traits, Entitlement and three extreme political attitudes > that are highly covered in mainstream media: White Identitarianism ('Alt- > Right'),Political Correctness-Authoritarianism, and Political Correctness- > Liberalism. We found that Dark Triad traits and Entitlement had incremental > validity in the prediction of these 3 attitudes over demographic factors. > The Dark Triad traits and Entitlement explained a substantial portion of > variance in White Identitarianism and Political Correctness- > Authoritarianism, and only a small portion of variance in Political > Correctness-Liberalism. Across all attitudes, Psychopathy and Entitlement > were the most consistent, strongest predictors. Results indicate that, from > a Dark Triad perspective, Authoritarian PC advocates have more in common > with extreme right advocates than those holding PC views related to > compassion.

Disclaimer: I haven't read the whole research.

It feels like there's a larger underlying pattern here. I don't know if I can synthesize a good summary of it. Seems like it might be at the intersection of belonging/tribalism, identity, and needing to be "right" and imposing that on others (probably where the authoritarianism comes from).

</comment><comment><USER5> The biggest weakness of this study and anything that I've seen discussing the "alt-right" is their arbitrary and capricious use of the term.

Alt-right is a very simple term to understand: it simply means people on the right of the political spectrum who reject the establishment. This includes: libertarians, monarchy restorationists, neo nazis and other groups.

The two tests for alt-right membership that were done were

1\. Opposition to progressivism (PCA/PCL)

2\. White Identitarianism

Assuming that this paper is actually measuring something (which is a big assumption for social science "research"), it certainly doesn't measure what it purports to measure. At best it measures the attitudes of people best described as "race realists" (their name, not mine) who also self-identify as White.

<comment><USER6> The paper also mentions that the research applies to new-left "liberal extremists" \- not just extremists on the right.

But the hypothesis isn't really about that. It's about the _relationship style_ of authoritarians - not their specific political tribe.

The defining features of authoritarianism are extreme in-group valorisation, extreme out-group hostility, and demands for compliance to tribal authority from everyone - even when that compliance is irrational (at best) or strategically self-harming (at worst).

This is exactly what you'd expect from collective instead of individual narcissism. There's no room for dissent, nuance, or open-minded inquiry, all of which are seen as ego weakness, and must be hidden or punished.

The in-group has to reinforce its own fragile image of superiority at all costs. Usually that means projecting all psychological and emotional weaknesses onto the out-group, where they can be disowned and attacked, sometimes with literal violence, or with verbal and intellectual violence - like brigading, or online trolling.

The tell isn't the tribal belief system, it's the extremism, aggressive token point scoring, and absolute lack of nuance and strategic awareness with which it's pursued and promoted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> While I'm very dubious of this paper in general, you got the title wrong. The full title is "The Dark Triad traits predict authoritarian political correctness and alt-right attitudes" (note 'authoritarian').

Specifically, if claims that 'PC-A' and 'alt-right' people are more similar on dark triad traits than 'PC-L' people. The 'PC-A' and 'PC-L' things are cited as being from an unpublished masters thesis, so... yeah.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tried to squeeze the full title in but it exceeds the 80 character limit. With hindsight, perhaps more judicious editing of the title was called for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Commenting so I can find this again after it's inevitably flagged.

<comment><USER9> What's your interest? edit: it's an honest question.

<comment><USER8> I'm interested in HN commenters' thoughts on contentious issues.

<comment><USER10> HN's general consensus on any political issue is that, regardless of context, the left is the true evil.

<comment><USER9> This is funny. HN's general consensus on any political issue is that, regardless of context, the right is the true evil.

And you can even test this. Support communism in a comment and see how fast you get upvoted. Support Trump in a comment and see how fast you get banned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This seems unsurprising. People with dark triad traits tend to more easily deviate from reality based on the stimulus they receive, making them much more receptive to extremist propaganda of any political leaning.

<comment><USER12> > People with dark triad traits tend to more easily deviate from reality based > on the stimulus they receive

Maybe I'm a narcissist, but is this a scientific statement? How can you falsify it? You'd run into some pretty angry philosophers.</comment></comment>


Lyft IPO puts investors in self-driving cars as well as ride services - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lyft-ipo-investment/lyft-ipo-puts-investors-in-self-driving-cars-as-well-as-ride-services-idUSKCN1C41IY <comment><USER2> What a strange article speculating on a Lyft IPO without adding any substance to the conversation.

Perhaps lyft is putting out "feeler" articles to gauge public reaction to both an ipo and their relative valuation to Uber?

<comment><USER3> I had a similar reaction because the tech savvy investors who are already looking at U/L _know_ that they're a proxy for self-driving cars.

Which makes me suspect that it's not for a them or even us.

I suspect this is for the completely tech-unsavvy investors who need prodding to remember "oh yeah, I can get in on that." If that drives interest and demand for the stock, more power to them.

<comment><USER4> Fleecing the retail investor again. Sigh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is no Lyft IPO (yet), so the headline is worded a little strangely.

There's another realm where this kind of grammatical construction is apparently common, though: sports. There's a so-called "sports subjunctive" / "baseball conditional" statement.

See [http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004521.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004521.html) and [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3808](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3808) for another way this usage has spread a little bit elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER6> That's like viewing Space-X stock as a proxy for real estate on Mars.

<comment><USER7> I think it is worse, self-driving cars change two-way market to one-way market and removes Lyfts biggest competitive advantage. It is like investing Kodak at 2007 because camera phones are next big thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> On Equidate someone wants to buy $1m of Lyft stock from an employee or otherwise.</comment>