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It's not about revenue at all. The goal is a federal government so weak that "we can drown in a bathtub". If that means bankrupting the federal government, so be it.

The tax cut serves two purposes:

- To hasten the process of dismantling the only power capable of holding the wealthiest Americans in check: the US federal government.
- To further consolidate power into the hands of the wealthiest, whom can then live with complete impunity, as was the case a century ago.

Not very original, are you?

Please, don't hate.

As Goldfinger was written in 1959 that quote is a paraphrase of a much older saying.

It’s unclear that the saying’s origin is from Chicago; Fleming was probably thinking of Chicago’s gangster years of the 1920s-1930s. “Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a habit” has been cited in print since at least 1921. “Once is nothing, twice is coincidence, three times is a moral certainty” has been cited in print since 1923.

That seems to be a big reason for wanting to be rich and powerful. You get to flout the rules. You see this mentality all the time, from buying a license to speed to Leona Helmsley's assertion that only the little people pay taxes.

Zappa also said “politics is the entertainment branch of industry” in a 1987 interview with Keyboard magazine. The quote means that industry runs government, and all politics (such as elections) are strictly for the public’s entertainment, fooling voters into thinking that the elections matter. The term “military-industrial complex” replaced “industry” in Zappa’s quote ("Government/Politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex") by at least 2002.

This "doomsday clock" hasn't ticked in years. The Atomic Scientists bulletin has used it for every Cause célèbre since the day it was invented. No amount of change will ever move those hands again, because there will always be another issue to adopt, another bandwagon to jump on, another social issue to champion.

Once the threat of nuclear war subsided from the fever pitch of the 60's, they, like most anti-everything protest movements, had to find other horses to ride, preferably one that couldn't reject them. So climate change it is. And cyber technologies!!

And if we don't heed them, we are reminded (annually it turns out) that We are DOOMED, Doomed I tell you!.

Q. Does Macy's tell Gimbels?

A. No, but they tell everyone else!

It's a joke? No, it's not. The National Education Association, Michelle Obama, and many others fervently believe in this concept. Where'd you get the idea that it was a joke?

Bakunin saw that Marx was right in his analysis of capitol, but did not appreciate the dangers of the state either. He famously said "liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality". Marx accurately predicted the end state of Capitalism. Bakunin accurately predicted the end state of Marxism.

To put it more succintly, "Under capitalism, man exploits man; under communism, it is the other way around."

bit of bored googleing

Agreed. The source is the Salmagundi Papers, 1807.

Huh, also popularly attributed to Will Rodgers. There weird bit is all the sources for both are second hand.
http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/buy_land_they_aint_making_any_more_of_it/

Lacking direct citation for Twain is pretty odd because he was a writer. Rodgers mostly did stand-up and radio, so I'm leaning to think he was the one who actually popularized it. (I can hear him say it, holding his newspaper open as usual, but at my age yeah that's just as likely creative memory. Anybody else still have the vinyl/tapes?)

Interesting story, but I'm calling shenanigans because your story sounds a whole heck of a lot like Joseph P. Kennedy's story.

From the story...

He found a brash young bootblack who fished for big tips by rattling off ... ... the New York Stock Exchange, Kennedy was surprised to discover that the shoeshine boy called the turn with amazing accuracy. I a mere boy could predict the movement of the market, Kennedy concluded, then it certainly was no place for a man with plenty of money to lose.

Of course, I could be wrong...but it's immediately what I thought of when I read your story.

Sorry, but as a mechanical engineering (who works with a lot of civil engineers), I can't let this one pass. You wrote:

I lie awake at night dreaming of only having to solve a problem as simple a bridge. It has only one use case: vehicles of a known weight with a known wheel surface traveling in predetermined paths at a predetermined rate of speed.

and then you wrote:

people would be in an uproar about all the deaths that are only possible because of the bridges: people jump off of them, cars crash over the guard rails, tornadoes and hurricanes wipe them out, and if they are not maintained properly they eventually fall to the ground under their own weight.

All of those factors do need to be accounted for in bridge design, along with many others (including wind loading, vibration, earthquake stability, pedestrian 'missiles', grade, water control, surface icing, freeze/thaw cycles, underbridge clearance, sewage & water/hazmat runoff, traffic flow, sight lines, and so on). Go read up on your state building codes. Or better yet, go down to your local college engineering library and have a look at SAE/ASTM/ANSI engineering standards for bridge design.

As for:

Books could be filled with the death stories of people killed by bridges

Amazon gives quite a few hits when searching "bridge disasters" books. Also, check around the NHTSA site some time.

And lets not forget that if a faulty bridge does fail (even in a non-fatal incident), the engineer that stamped the design may very well go the jail.

Is bridge design harder/simpler than software design? I don't know, but I do know that it's far from "simple."

[As an aside, you wrote:

Also, if you dig down deep enough on the Earth, there is always something solid to anchor the bridge.

While it's true that you can always reach bedrock if you dig deep enough, a lot of times it's not practical to dig deep enough to bedrock. For example, the Big Dig slurry walls go down more than 100 ft in some places and don't hit bedrock. In those cases, you have to different techniques (tiebacks, heavy masses, soil mixing/grouting etc) to anchor your structure. Not every location is like Manhattan]

An unoptimized site is the equivalent of Spanglish. Yes, it's written in a way the audience can understand, but it isn't written with proper Spanish grammar. So, going through a site and making all the verbs and nouns agree and removing all of the slang is really all optimization is:

-make it valid HTML
-add your metatags
-link to other valid sources of similar data
-get them to link to you
-add yourself to http://dmoz.org/

While, yes, I admit that the skill is in getting the site to be standards compliant while not breaking the design, and in knowing how to write the best metatags, anyone offering anything more than that might as well be selling the Brooklyn Bridge.

I love how people still refer to Cleveland as this only because it shows how little they actually know about the city. The phrase itself is now ALMOST 40 YEARS OLD and refers to situations that aren't relevant anymore.

I mean, come on folks, you're referring to CB slang for cryin' out loud.