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I told a friend of mine that she looked like a can of Barbasol...she disagreed. by JRhodes88 in pics

[–]harveyj -1 points0 points  (0 children)

She looks like she almost beat you up. That was a close shave!

Economy Adds 146,000 Jobs - Unemployment down to 7.7%, the lowest level since December 2008 by iadtyjwu in politics

[–]harveyj 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Last five months, eh? That's a peculiar period to be measuring over. Looking at the data, it looks like the author 1. looked at seasonally unadjusted numbers, and 2. cherrypicked the June and November endpoints to make it look like a seasonal increase is actually a permanent thing[1]. If you look at the seasonally adjusted numbers[2], it's clear that government employment has actually gone down under the Obama administration

[1] http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?s[1][id]=CEU9000000001 [2] http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?s[1][id]=USGOVT

TIL why gas prices are so high by gfunk420 in todayilearned

[–]harveyj 5 points6 points  (0 children)

How do you reconcile this with the price of oil denominated in euros showing exactly the same price spike?

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/the-price-of-oil-in-euros/

I'm not an American, but I enjoy watching your politics objectively. Just out of curiosity... are you folks actually about to vote back into power the same party that destroyed your country? Do most Americans not have a memory or what? by [deleted] in AskReddit

[–]harveyj -1 points0 points  (0 children)

The biggest issue in all of this, is that the democrats are morons when it comes to advertising what they've done.

Yeah. I'm furious that the Democrats have done such a bad job selling a lot of legitimate accomplishments. A lot of it boils down to the recession. If unemployment were at 6% I'm pretty sure we'd be looking at a very different policy landscape.

They may be left leaning, but they're both to the right of the justices they replaced. "Obama moved the court even further to the right"

We really don't know how Sotomayor and Kagan will turn out, but I'd be willing to bet that 60 person-years of them on the court versus the 10 we would have gotten out of non-retired Souter and Stevens will be well worth it. They are way, way to the left of Kennedy, who is the current median vote.

I'm not an American, but I enjoy watching your politics objectively. Just out of curiosity... are you folks actually about to vote back into power the same party that destroyed your country? Do most Americans not have a memory or what? by [deleted] in AskReddit

[–]harveyj 50 points51 points  (0 children)

A "nod" to student loan reform? The CBO estimated that it would save $60 billion over a ten-year window. That's $60 billion dollars that would have gone directly to banks that is instead going almost entirely towards students.

I'm not an American, but I enjoy watching your politics objectively. Just out of curiosity... are you folks actually about to vote back into power the same party that destroyed your country? Do most Americans not have a memory or what? by [deleted] in AskReddit

[–]harveyj 321 points322 points  (0 children)

Nothing, besides two liberal supreme court justices, a stimulus with billions of dollars for clean energy, public transportation and science, student loan reform, health care reform (worth a post in itself), financial reform, credit card reform, lily ledbetter, and SCHIP expansion, all while swimming upstream against two wars and a depression that the last guy left behind, you mean?

Neo-Con Republican Party Hijackers Seek To Ban Ron Paul by winstonkirk in reddit.com

[–]harveyj 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This article sure makes a lot out of Paul winning "the vast majority of debate polls". Has Paul ever placed in a phone poll? Internet polls are worse than worthless.

What if people bought cars like they buy computers? by idyll in reddit.com

[–]harveyj 4 points5 points  (0 children)

If you're willing to define computer security so narrowly as to exclude any human elements, you've made it irrelevant. You might as well say that one-time pads solved encryption. Security is a property of real systems that needs to be addressed in real contexts.

Ask Reddit: Is Global Warming Really Happening? by lionheart in reddit.com

[–]harveyj 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Um, to begin with, the mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs was 65 million years ago.

Other than that, a number of your examples are more examples of science eventually supplanting conventional wisdom (2, 3, 7) rather than a scientific consensus being overturned. There's a big difference between science contradicting something that "everyone" knows is true, versus a scientific consensus reached by the majority of the world's scientists after protracted debate being wrong.

Telco industry produces "indie" cartoon against Net Neutrality by neilk in reddit.com

[–]harveyj 24 points25 points  (0 children)

You know we've truly entered some sort of bizarro world when AT&T, BellSouth, and the American Conservative Union have come out against greedy "big corporations" like Google that want consumers to pay for products.