I remember reading there were some mathematicians working on trying to turn gerrymandering in to a technical problem rather than a political one, but maybe they'll give up that research in order to finance new taxes levied on their PhD students wages, or moving to an overseas university where their PhD student will be allowed to reside.

A mathematician did come up with a gerrymandering metric that has been applied in some Supreme Court cases. I imagine it would require a constitutional amendment to make it mandatory, though.

Regarding new taxes levied on PhD students wages: You can safely knock this one off. PhD tuition subsidies are a grant laundering and tax evasion scam. Universities use it to convert NSF grants into general profits, tax-free. It's a scheme that for-profit universities should never have been allowed to do in the first place, and if a single graduate student ends up paying a larger tax bill because of it, it's only because the university they work for has decided to throw their faculty on a pyre to keep their tax fraud going.

Edit: I actually do enjoy this reasoning. Not, like, literally, but it is a strong signal that someone isn’t worth talking to anymore.

It’s supposedly racist to criticize Israel because it is a Jewish nation, run by Jewish people for Jewish people, a nationality that is indistinct from the Jewish faith and Jewish ethnicity. When you criticize the nation and government of Israel, you are criticizing the Jewish people. It is antisemitism.

Which is, of course, the problem with Israel. But if you talk about this, you're told you have it all wrong. Israel isn’t an apartheid state dominated by a single ethnic and religious group, it is a tolerant nation that includes both Jewish and Arabic people living in harmony, if only the terrorists would let ‘em.

These ideas are so contradictory that it’s hard to know where to begin.

At least the country isn't the world leader in trying to destroy itself and the environment.

It’s possible for someone to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. Interfering with this trend of media/carrier consolidation is a very good thing. Those mergers are designed to extend the last mile carriers’ monopoly rents to content creators, intentionally reducing choice in media sources and blocking out new entrants from the market. ISP deregulation is a key component of this effort. This is intensely anti-consumer behavior, and the Trump administration is right to stop it.

But yeah, they aren’t stopping the Sinclair acquisitions, and they aren’t kiboshing the anti-net neutrality part of the scheme either. It certainly doesn’t seem like anybody in the Trump administration cares about the antitrust aspect of this, so the only reasonable conclusion is that they specifically dislike Time Warner and want to specifically shut them out of the new industry standard business model.

Oh I absolutely agree Trump is right for the wrong reasons. It's that the real issue is Trump is differentially blocking mergers based on who he likes. Not as though it's some sort of economic warfare as Ioffe implies. Like, it's not very much like Putin cutting funding for media companies, it's more like Trump griefing the majority billionaire shareholders of CNN for saying mean things about him.

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn's guilty plea Friday for lying to the FBI is alarming news for Donald Trump. But the first person it's likely to jeopardize will be the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Two former officials with the Trump transition team who worked closely with Flynn say that during the last days of the Obama administration, the retired general was instructed to contact foreign ambassadors and foreign ministers of countries on the U.N. Security Council, ahead of a vote condemning Israeli settlements. Flynn was told to try to get them to delay that vote until after Barack Obama had left office, or oppose the resolution altogether.

That is relevant now because one of Flynn’s lies to the FBI was when he said that he never asked Russia's ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak, to delay the vote for the U.N. Security Council resolution. The indictment released today from the office of special prosecutor Robert Mueller describes this lie: "On or about December 22, 2016, Flynn did not ask the Russian Ambassador to delay the vote on or defeat a pending United Nations Security Council resolution."

At the time, the U.N. Security Council resolution on Israeli settlements was a big deal. Even though the Obama administration had less than a month left in office, the president instructed his ambassador to the United Nations to abstain from a resolution, breaking a precedent that went back to 1980 when it came to one-sided anti-Israel resolutions at the U.N.

This was the context of Kushner's instruction to Flynn last December. One transition official at the time said Kushner called Flynn to tell him he needed to get every foreign minister or ambassador from a country on the U.N. Security Council to delay or vote against the resolution. Much of this appeared to be coordinated also with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose envoys shared their own intelligence about the Obama administration's lobbying efforts to get member states to support the resolution with the Trump transition team.

(Kushner's lawyer, Abbe Lowell, did not return an email seeking comment for this column before deadline.)

For now it's unclear what to make of all of this. Lying to the FBI is a felony and always a serious matter. We also know from Flynn's "statement of the offense" that he lied to FBI agents as the bureau was investigating Russia's meddling in the 2016 election and any links between Russia and the Trump campaign in this period. Nonetheless, nothing in the Flynn plea sheds any light on whether the Trump campaign actually colluded with Russia to influence the election.

ABC News reported Friday that Flynn is prepared to tell Mueller's team that Trump had instructed him to make contact with Russia during the campaign itself. If those contacts involved the emails the U.S. intelligence community charges Russia stole from leading Democrats, then Mueller will have uncovered evidence of actual collusion between the president and a foreign adversary during the election. Impeachment could then be in the cards.

But it's also possible that the Justice Department became interested in Flynn's initial conversation with Kislyak on other, less explosive grounds. One leading theory pushed Friday by Democrats involves a violation of a 1799 statute known as the Logan Act. A relic of the John Adams administration, this discredited law makes it illegal for a private U.S. citizen to undermine the foreign policy of a sitting president in contact with a foreign power. No American has ever been successfully prosecuted under that law. Some conservatives urged the George W. Bush administration to prosecute former House speaker Nancy Pelosi under the Logan Act in 2007 when she visited the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, when the White House was trying to isolate him. Nothing ever came of that.

A Logan Act investigation would explain the bureau's interest in Flynn's conversations about the U.N. Security Council resolution on Israel. This is what Senator Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on Friday: "This shows a Trump associate negotiating with the Russians against U.S. policy and interests before Donald Trump took office and after it was announced that Russia had interfered in our election. That’s a stunning revelation and could be a violation of the Logan Act, which forbids unauthorized U.S. citizens from negotiating with a foreign power."

If that's all there is, then the whispers of collusion will look foolish. Nonetheless, it may be enough to take out not only Flynn, but also the man who married the president's daughter.

Has Trump implemented those new Russia sanctions congress ordered yet?

Your lower bake element is a piece of wire which creates heat when you run electric current through it. Around that wire is some insulation and a thin metal tube. The tube/cover is always electrically connected to the frame of the oven, which -- if your stove was installed correctly -- is connected to electrical "ground."

Over time, the heat of the element degrades the insulation, and on that spectacular day the wire inside was able to touch the metal tube surrounding it. In an instant, your lower bake element turned into a mini-arc-welder, creating the shower of sparks and electrical fire you witnessed.

Always check for dark spots or bubbles in your stove and oven elements.

https://www.quora.com/What-happened-when-my-ovens-lower-element-spewed-sparks

So the problem is that there was less resistance, not more like I suggested. Which makes sense, since heating elements are basically giant resistors anyway.

USians are aware that $30 trillion in wealth is going to evaporate overnight when the next financial crisis rolls in, right?

And the federal government will be further in debt from lost tax revenue.

Is that the day when we finally do that whole 'austerity measure' thing that the rest of the world seemed to be doing when the financial crisis of `08 hit?

The US can’t implement real austerity policies the way other countries can because US policies do not exist to provide services, they exist to transfer taxpayer money to the rich. There is too much money torrenting through education, the military, farm subsidies, etc.; eliminating any of them would piss off the oligarchs too much. I think the only things they can safely do are defunding Medicare and defaulting on the debt they owe to Social Security. The GOP is already talking about doing this, so if they can get fhisntax bill passed they’ll surely pull the trigger on this too. But lol if you think FICA taxes are gonna go away.

Pretty much the only way the US can get more austere than that is if they start forcing people into slavery. I mean, they already do, but you have to be indebted first.