Slashdot Mirror

But the main point is that this corporate officer is twisting company policy to his personal benefit of $77 million/yr and the majority of owners of the company don't like him screwing around with their investment that way.

What? A CEO abusing the system to get more pay? Say it isn't so. Who would ever do that? Certainly no one as saintly as Steve Jobs?

It's funny because Friedman was far from laissez-faire and believed in central control of the money supply.

"Central control of the money supply" just means he favored central banks like the Federal Reserve and the ECB, not that he though some government bureaucracy should be in control of everybody's money. Friedman recognized that the free market was not perfect, but he recognized it as the best and most efficient system we have available.

And it's not "laissez-faire" to think that government has no business decided how much people get paid by private companies. It's just common sense capitalism. Not even a socialist idea, it's something only seen in dictatorships and communism. And Friedman was no Marxist.

There are plenty of ways to criticize Friedman's ideas, but mischaracterizing his beliefs is wrong.

And... your wrong.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/05/24/who-is-the-smallest-government-spender-since-eisenhower-would-you-believe-its-barack-obama/

Obama has actually spent significantly less than any of the presidents since Reagen. Bush Junior has has been the worst offender when it comes to spending.

Try again.

.... with a vengeance. And this time, its personal .... health insurance that's at stake.

At least the stakes are low. No worries.

Obama Officials In 2010: 93 Million Americans Will Be Unable To Keep Their Health Plans Under Obamacare

They've Still lost the desktop wars [...]

Except that Apple takes 45% of the profits in the PC market.

Better to lose than to win, it seems.

Ah, might you be a so called "Sovereign Citizen"? That probably won't end well.

Great post.

The death of Mao brought China to a major fork in the road. It look a couple of years before their new direction became clear.

Getting out of poverty and become rich is inviting all over the world. Especially in countries like China, which “has been poor for too long,” to use the words of the country’s legendary leader Deng Xiaoping.

“To get rich is glorious” he declared in 1978 — injecting a dose of capitalism into the country’s communist system, unleashing the ingenuity and creativity of the Chinese people. -- Two Ways To Become Rich In China

I do believe the slides Snowden released showed they were paying the telcos at least

http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2013/09/23/attverizonsprint-are-paid-cash-by-nsa-for-your-private-communications/ /this is really off-topic though. Good on Apple for this.

On most news sites where this argument pops up, one of the more common arguments is sadly enough "Why should my tax dollars be used to keep this guy alive in prison for decades with a life without parole sentence when we can just kill him now for far cheaper?"

Of course those people don't realise that prosecuting and executing a death penalty costs way more than locking someone up for life. So if minimising the amount of tax dollars spent is the goal that actually argues against the death penalty...

you are confused on what is barbaric.

Not at all. Human beings have no moral authority to kill other human beings. To do it anyway, premeditated and intentionally, when there is no immediate danger to anyone else, is barbaric. It's what barbarians do. You are lowering yourself to the level of the very people you are punishing.

for example, child molesters and rapists and murderers get out of prison and commit their crimes again.

So lock them up for the rest of their lives. It's cheaper too.

putting down a monster is not barbaric,

They are not monsters, they are human beings. You may be able to lull yourself into acceptance by demonising human beings and pretending that you're in a fairy story, but I don't think that is fair or productive.

it is the merciful thing to do

You are confused on what is merciful.

In addition, you are ignoring the fact that many of these "monsters" of yours turn out to have been perfectly innocent. Fuck you for being perfectly OK with calling them monsters and taking away their lives after years of psychological torture, destroying the lives of their friends and family in the process. And fuck the US for doing it.

Nothing. It stands for "Ballmer Is Not Good".

Ballmer has been fired from Microsoft, but given time to leave while the Microsoft board of directors looks for someone equally incompetent. The punishment for being incompetent? Read this article: Ballmer Quits, Instantly Makes (Almost) $1 Billion. Investors are so happy he is leaving, the stock has gone up, so Ballmer profits.

Nothing. It stands for "Ballmer Is Not Good".

Ballmer has been fired from Microsoft, but given time to leave while the Microsoft board of directors looks for someone equally incompetent. The punishment for being incompetent? Read this article: Ballmer Quits, Instantly Makes (Almost) $1 Billion. Investors are so happy he is leaving, the stock has gone up, so Ballmer profits.

I find it funny how you claim a government telling a woman to go home and die is a "somewhat" bad example. What would be a horrendous example of socialistic healthcare, shooting her when she walked in?

As far as "better" health care, using what measure? Do you have any actual objective statistics/sources to back up that claim?

The fact is, what you read is, quite simply, untrue. Any licensed physician in America is required to treat a person in an emergency (you can verify this on the American Medical Association's website). As far as the quality of our care, do you have any explanation why people from other countries so frequently travel to the US to get care? Yes, it costs more, but we get vastly better care than any of the socialistic countries. Our hospitals run 24/7, unlike, say, Japan that closes their hospitals at 5PM. The "America" you talk about does not exist, and I feel sorry for you if that is the propaganda you've been given about this country.

Apart from the exact victims here, there is a huge chilling effect.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/christophersteiner/2012/08/02/knight-capitals-algorithmic-fiasco-wont-be-the-last-of-its-kind/

Knight Capital is a trading company so the money they used belonged to other people.

FTA: "Such an episode would take down not only the traders, but likely the brokerage house that gives them access to electronic markets and perhaps even other clients of that brokerage. It could completely subvert the little amount of trust the public still has in our stock markets."

Sorry, but the news doesn't get better if you change the source. Could the issue be that you need your news politically vetted?

Benghazi Providing Rich Material For An 'All the President's Men' Sequel?

“Since January, some CIA operatives involved in the agency’s missions in Libya have been subjected to frequent, even monthly, polygraph examinations,” Drew Griffin of CNN Special Investigations Unit reported on August 1. (In the same report, it was revealed that 35 CIA agents were at the Benghazi compound that night.) One source, said Griffin, called this “an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency’s Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out.” At the same time, some CIA operatives, it was reported elsewhere, were being forced to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA).

“The reports on the non-disclosure agreements are accurate,” Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) told me at the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi conference, held at Heritage. Additionally, he said, he was called by “a person on the scene in Benghazi, asked to sign another NDA, and he wouldn’t do it, so therefore he has a lawyer downtown to fight this with regard to his career.”

Rep Wolf Says Benghazi survivors were forced to sign non disclosure Agreements

We look forward to you sharing your "evidence", thanks.

I tend to ignore people who can't be bothered to use google on their own, and instead ask for everything to be handed to them...

We're talking about half a century of gun control laws and increasing crime rates. There's no single link to ALL that information.

There's a few quick ones:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/02/21/disarming-the-myths-promoted-by-the-gun-control-lobby/2/

http://people.duke.edu/~gnsmith/articles/myths.htm (See #10)

http://www.liveandlocalenc.com/proof-gun-control-increases-crime/

http://archive.lewrockwell.com/orig7/lemieux1.html

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/04/22/do-strict-gun-laws-really-stop-gun-crime/

http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp#right-to-carry

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/weekinreview/29liptak.html?pagewanted=all

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2013/02/04/gun-crimes-increase-massachusetts-despite-tough-gun-laws/XjlDQLZlUDvsf3KS8PqyGK/story.html

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brad-wilmouth/2010/06/25/stossel-argues-gun-control-increases-crime-i-was-once-clueless-senator-schumer

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/02/17/the-nation-toughest-gun-control-law-made-massachusetts-less-safe/3845k7xHzkwTrBWy4KpkEM/story.html

Actually its not that simple...

It's not as easy as 'he tweeted something bad about the company... fire him.' We have laws about protected speech. It looks like as long as all your coworkers on on board, you can't be fired for bitching.

That seems high, but it's lower than average.

No, they don't. (as your won link shows).

They collectively, get to write off 4 billion of taxes for foreign tax paid, depletion allowance, domestic manufacturing, all of which are tax breaks available to any industry. Depletion allowance can even be claimed by a Gravel Pit owner. The oil industry is Huge, and the total tax writeoff is only 4 billion.

That's less than the cost of one Navy DDG-51 destroyer.

Apple alone wrote off 1.1 billion all by itself.

  You don't get to call a general tax write off a subsidy. At least until you accept the fact that a the Standard Deduction that every tax payer gets to claim is a subsidy.

What did the oil companies pay in taxes:

ExxonMobil in 2011 made $27.3 billion in cash payments for income taxes. Chevron paid $17 billion and ConocoPhillips $10.6 billion. And not only were these the highest amounts in absolute terms, when compared with the rest of the 25 most profitable U.S. companies, the trio also had the highest effective tax rates. Exxon’s tax rate was 42.9%, Chevron’s was 48.3% and Conoco’s was 41.5%. That’s even higher than the 35% U.S. federal statutory rate, which is already the highest tax rate among developed nations.

Just the top three alone paid about 55 billion in taxes. Add in the drillers, smaller oil companies, the pipelines, and you are talking serious money.

Note: About here is where someone invariably posts the War for Oil bullshit. But the US doesn't import any oil from Iraq or Afghanistan. The US is a Net Exporter of oil and gas.

Not an option on Win8.x tablets, unfortunately

What, all three of them?

We joke about "all three of them" when it comes to both Windows Phone and Win8 tablet market share and user base around here, but both of them have at least twice the end-user market share of Linux/GNU OS ("all 1.5 of them"?).

Source 1, 2, 3.

From Forbes investigation the issue is that you cannot browse the plans without entering all of your personal information for verification first. The system then needs to cross check all of the info to calculate your government subsides. This causes a major bottleneck which greatly slows down the system. Most would balk at the prices without the subsides.

Quote from the article: So, by analyzing your income first, if you qualify for heavy subsidies, the website can advertise those subsidies to you instead of just hitting you with Obamacare’s steep premiums. For example, the site could advertise plans that cost “$0 or “$30 instead of explaining that the plan really costs $200, and that you’re getting a subsidy of $200 or $170.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/10/14/obamacares-website-is-crashing-because-it-doesnt-want-you-to-know-health-plans-true-costs/

It is not legal, but I doubt we will see any U.S. agent being extradited to Mexico, even for crimes considered as such by both countries.

First the U.S. got angry because a known drug lord was released from prison in Mexico on a technicality. Caro Quintero was accused of murdering a U.S. agent (Kiki Camarena) and running drugs to the U.S.

Then, three U.S. agents came forward declaring to a national magazine (Proceso) that the guy supposedly killed by Caro Quintero, was actually executed by U.S. intelligence agents.

This on top of the Fast and Furious operation from a couple of years ago, on which the U.S government supplied guns and asault weapons to drug lords in Mexico.

One has to wonder, exactly on which side is the U.S. government?

The short answer is because the demands were unreasonable, and ending health care reform to appease a small minority of the country's demands doesn't make sense. The longer answer can be found in across a thousand other websites and is completely off-topic.

After the administration has handed a long list of waivers to the ACA to large organizations, and has now delayed the employer mandate till 2015 (which will have a variety of implications), It isn't clear that delaying the individual mandate, the same as the other delays, for a piece of legislation that is planned to ultimately fail, would be a bad thing at all.

Here's my suggestion: in the event of a shutdown, absolutely no congressional support services will be provided. No staffers can answer the phone from their congresspeople. No electricity in the capitol. No fucking gym open. No paychecks including back pay for congress persons. No security guards will be protecting the reps. None. Congressmen can hold meetings at a starbucks or something if they feel like it. Conversely, science research will absolutely not be affected.

One could get the sense that you consider the Government-Science complex more important than anything else the government does.

I think your comment is more +11 dreamy, not +5 "insightful".

It's illegal to fly an RC model for any kind of pay.

That's what *I* thought, too. So why don't we take a page direct from the politicians: I fly for myself and take pics, and then give them to you because you ask. (Presumably I'd need to give them to all comers, but then again not Every Single Person I meet is my friend. So I don't see that saying "No" is that bad. A judge may disagree.)

You, then, contribute to my fund (charitable, PAC, LLC, something) that I just happen to control. No no -- it's not MY money at all, it's the funds' money; I just happen to be the one in control of it. Or my friend is, whatever.

Now, could the feds come in and take control and arrest me before, during, or after the fact? Yep, because the men with guns always win, especially if they have enough bullets.

By the way, I think that's great: "I use it to troll 'real world' groups... Completely legal as I'm doing it for fun." But mightn't fun have consequences? Just because you're having fun doesn't mean everyone else is. Aren't you responsible if you hurt someone else? And if there's not some kind of ID (owner sticker, serial number, etc) on it, how are they to know who owns it? Do you walk up and say "Sorry about that" and claim ownership and responsibility? Or do you just write it off as perhaps a bad battery and disappear?

Fun is by yourself or with friends, and perhaps with a few strangers accidentally nearby. Fun does not consist of ONLY strangers. Then again I'm an old fogie, so get off my lawn. And by the way: I'm practicing.

How close would a terrorist have to be? I mean antennas are great and you can hide them in other devices or out in the open and relay your cracking from a distance. That's the advantage of wireless isn't it.

Imagine a scenario where a terrorist gets a hotel room in the same hotel he is staying at. Would the security detail turn off the house WIFI so I couldn't access his pace maker from the hotel's WIFI in my room or the lobby or something? What if he visits a company that has wifi and I have a remote connection into the building?

perhaps we just aren't there yet, perhaps we already are.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2012/12/06/yes-you-can-hack-a-pacemaker-and-other-medical-devices-too/

Fair point, but you've not responded to my central argument: one cannot simply allow personal consumption to be exempt from copyright law without demolishing whole industries

I disagree. How will people get content if not through commercial distribution? Who is going to run a free server at their own expense, with no expectation of reimbursement? YouTube spent an estimated $300,000 just to stream "Gangnum Style".What selfless person is going to do this for free? Even completely free and open source P2P software would be limited by the same types of agreements that Comcast and Verizon and friends have today - what company wants to risk being sued for contributory copyright infringement?

I'm not a copyright opponent. I think (though I cannot prove) that there is probably some value in letting people have a temporary monopoly on an idea as an incentive to create new content. I just think the current copyright duration is ridiculous, and in practice I think the laws are too complex to burden the common man with. I'm amenable to simplifying the rules, but I'm not sure it is possible to invent a whole class of property without complex rules.

Nope, in real life too.

Looks like a job for grad students, like this guy:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/04/18/that-reinhart-and-rogoff-committed-a-spreadsheet-error-completely-misses-the-point/

Bin Laden's stated goal was not to turn the west to Islam. Why would he want a bunch of white devils screwing up his precious Islam. He hated us remember?

His goal was to destroy Wall St and the US/Saudi economy (He was mad at his rich family and their rich US friends - Like the Bush's and Clintons!). Hence crashing planes into our primary economic hub. Remember that part? Makes much more sense as a tactic for financial ruin opposed to a recruiting strategy wouldn't you say?

In 2004, Bin Laden released a tape to Al-Jazeera where the former head of Al Qaeda laid out the purpose of the 9/11 attacks, and the organization’s goals. “We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah,” Bin Laden said.

This is why I always laugh at the phrase "Never Forget." Everyone keeps forgetting!

Many people have already had cutbacks on their hours at work due to the law, and many of them lost health insurance in the process.

On this specific point, Walmart (of all companies) is reversing the working hour cutbacks and rehiring 35,000 people as full-time workers, with ACA coverage.

Why? Funny enough, simple free-market principles: "While the company’s trend toward temporary employees has allowed the retailer to avoid its responsibilities under the Affordable Care Act [...] they’ve managed to tank their store sales in the process."

Which is partly due to FUD, partly due to bad math, and partly due to media hype. A quick google search turned up the Why Social Security Won't go Bankrupt and Social Security Reform. The former discusses the thoughts behind Social Security, saying that workers today are paying retirees today. The latter having some of the "truth" (if there is such a thing) of what that money is used for, i.e. Congress borrows and may or may not pay back from the SS fund.
  The former article doesn't go into much detail about how it works if the balance of retirees to workers starts tipping steeply toward retirees, but it does comment that some of that fund is from overtaxation of all the people. It's near impossible to know how many pennies each person should be taxed so we can have a zero balance sheet for the millions of people working and millions retired. This article doesn't have any solid evidence of anything, but it is more of a conceptualization of how things work than a hard-facts document. So the idea is perpetuated that Congress is smashing the social security piggy bank to fund some pet projects, or just because a couple members wanted a cookie.
  The second article starts in on the FUD, and doesn't give any hard evidence or supporting references (notice that?) for any of the claims they are making about how the pot of money is going to dry up. So they continue to spew out that Congressman so-and-so was short a couple mil for whatever reason, and got a few other senators to buy off that he really needed the money to put some spinners on his cadillac.

This all started with concern over the baby boomers (all those blue-hairs terrorizing the roads starting in around the turn of the century) vastly outnumbering their children. The concern, of course, being that there wasn't enough money to fund the retirement of those baby-boomers. Looking at the Social Security website, you'll see that the baby-boomers have nothing to worry about. For the most part, they aren't all relying on Social Security, and many have pensions and IRA's to bolster that income.

Still concerned?

I suspect it will be massaged over the years to work out little wrinkles, with the end result being a single payer system.

Sen. Harry Reid: Obamacare 'Absolutely' A Step Toward A Single-Payer System

Why do you think the penalties are so weak for individuals that don't buy the required coverage while the act made policies so much more expensive? The same thing for businesses. The penalties for not providing coverage are less than the cost of insurance, which has also grown more expensive for them. That is why so many companies have been dumping health plans and cutting workers hours to avoid being responsible for workers health care. Massive incompetence or planned failure? How about some of both?

Because it needs over 300 million bullets to shoot all its citizens?

Not a problem:
      http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2013/03/11/1-6-billion-rounds-of-ammo-for-homeland-security-its-time-for-a-national-conversation/
That way, they have 5 rounds per citizen.

"Huge" part of the marketplace, that you're referring to, has no choice in the matter. It comes from a single vendor who is refusing to play with others because (in my opinion) their main selling point is that they're "different".
And it's not really fair to say that their market share is "huge" with less that 18 percent in EU, this year (source below).

I know that in the past one of my motivators to NOT switch mobile phone vendors was that I had a significant number (home, office, car, travel,...) of chargers available for a particular vendor. And going to another vendor and having to re-stock was an added expense and a bother. Now, I don't have to think about that anymore.

Also, one thing that people seem to forget or misunderstand. The EU directive for micro USB is for charging-only. It doesn't mean that there can't be another connector on the phone for other features. Like connector for car holder on HTC One X, for example.

The only thing that I envy the iDevice crowd is the accessory market, though. Although (again in my opinion) problem with accessories for android devices isn't so much connector oriented, as much as it is location oriented. If all the vendors would put USB port in the middle of the bottom of the phone, then accessories would be able to take advantage of that with relative ease.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2013/09/04/apples-iphone-gaining-share-in-u-s-but-dropping-in-europe-and-china/

From what I've read, there's a big loophole in it so you don't have to pay the fine either:

"Oh, and the IRS has no authority to go after someone’s assets or wages in order to collect the penalty. It only has the authority to deduct the penalty from a person’s tax refund at year’s end. It won’t take long for people to figure out how to fix that problem by trying to ensure they have only enough withheld to meet their tax obligation. Those who are uninsured and successful at hitting the tax mark will face no effective penalty."

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2013/06/27/a-surprising-health-insurance-option-for-those-who-refuse-obamacare/

Interesting Forbes article on how healthcare.gov is designed to prevent people to see the full prices of the healthcare plans which is what is causing the upfront bottleneck. On the one hand it makes sense that you don't want to scare people off with high healthcare insurance prices until you know if they are eligible for subsidies, but on the other hand it means you probably have to verify the data entered against what are potentially hundreds of millions of records just to display a screen with prices for the plans.

Seems a better option would simply to take the persons word for it up front, let them see the prices displayed depending on the personal and family information they entered and then only do the background verification after they "checkout" and actually purchase a plan. That way they just get an email later on if there is a problem with anything they entered or if the prices change based on something determined based on the background check and credit check. Or if as news reports suggest they are going to have to go through an income verification process as part of the Senate compromise, then doing the credit check up front in "real time" is an extra step anyway. Could even make the insurance companies do the final eligibility check as part of their 15% commission.

Trying to process through hundreds of millions of records in less than tens of seconds is a stupid thing to try to do just to keep people from finding out what your prices really are even if you have hundreds of millions of dollars to blow through. They could have fully insured 100,000 more people for the money that has been wasted just on healthcare.gov.

Interesting Forbes article on how healthcare.gov is designed to prevent people to see the full prices of the healthcare plans which is what is causing the upfront bottleneck. On the one hand it makes sense that you don't want to scare people off with high healthcare insurance prices until you know if they are eligible for subsidies, but on the other hand it means you probably have to verify the data entered against what are potentially hundreds of millions of records just to display a screen with prices for the plans.

Seems a better option would simply to take the persons word for it up front, let them see the prices displayed depending on the personal and family information they entered and then only do the background verification after they "checkout" and actually purchase a plan. That way they just get an email later on if there is a problem with anything they entered or if the prices change based on something determined based on the background check and credit check. Or if as news reports suggest they are going to have to go through an income verification process as part of the Senate compromise, then doing the credit check up front in "real time" is an extra step anyway. Could even make the insurance companies do the final eligibility check as part of their 15% commission.

Trying to process through hundreds of millions of records in less than tens of seconds is a stupid thing to try to do just to keep people from finding out what your prices really are even if you have hundreds of millions of dollars to blow through. They could have fully insured 100,000 more people for the money that has been wasted just on healthcare.gov.

And here I was thinking people could check the prices of insurance directly on the website of the insurance providers and purchase directly if they preferred, removing healthcare.gov from the equation...

Apparently, that (browsing costs) was specifically not part of the design. To paraphrase Ms. Pelosi, you had to sign up for it in order to see what's in it. The added cycles required to check your information against several types of subsidies before revealing the price was apparently a major contributor to the crashing.

I was able to register fairly early (around the 3rd) - when the site was still undergoing the initial onslaught of gawkers....

Wow, this is kind of like seeing an endangered species or something.

Only Five Iowans Have Signed Up on Obamacare Exchange - 10 Oct 2013
Hawaii Relaunching Obamacare Exchange After Not Selling Any Health Insurance Due To Software Problems - October 10, 2013
Good news: Maryland has successfully enrolled 326 people in ObamaCare - October 7, 2013

Just 51,000 Americans Have Enrolled in Federal Obamacare Exchanges? - Oct 11, 2013

Double Down: Obamacare Will Increase Avg. Individual-Market Insurance Premiums By 99% For Men, 62% For Women

Even if the stupid thing were working as intended it would still be broken. It's broken by design.

Obamacare is essentially broken by design. They knew it would fail when they passed it. But it does move things closer to their real goal, regardless of the hardships and misery that it causes along the way.

Sen. Harry Reid: Obamacare 'Absolutely' A Step Toward A Single-Payer System

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ ...says no. When people got creeped out by the pregnancy targeted ads, they mixed them with random coupons and people used the pregnancy coupons.

For Cuba socialism was a big improvement over the previous regime. I know, one of my friends in college was a refuge.

The inner cities were crime-infested neighborhoods populated by people born there to parents born there before welfare. All welfare is and ever will be is an effort to relieve some of the pressure. Go read about living conditions during the Guilded Age.

Unfortunately some of your links regarding education don't work because the Teahadists have the government shut down. Really, though it has always been broken in the US. Back in the 1960's it was ineffective too. It isn't a matter money. It's a matter of too much local control. Places like Massachusetts which have a relatively enlightened citizenry do far better than the Red States in terms of the education. In terms of human development and well being it just sucks to live in a Red State.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2013/06/19/red-states-rank-low-on-u-s-human-development-index/

Cherry picking data by city also doesn't change the fact the blue states do better overall when it comes to education.

http://www.topalli.com/blue/

The Postal Service worked better before it was privatized, if you hadn't noticed.

No nation on earth has a working private healthcare system. Even in the US the part of the healthcare system that works best is Medicare.

Apologies for steering offtopic, then. Still, when we exclude the behemoths, "welfare" is still something like $700M a year, which is still larger than the entire DOD budget.

Granted the source here is a Forbes op-ed so is almost certainly is going to slant toward the conservative side (indeed, one of the things it counts as "welfare spending" is the child tax credit. While this may be technically true, it's certainly not what most people bring to mind when the word "welfare" comes up and is more appropriate to a discussion on the subject of tax policy than welfare reform. It's quite probable there are other similar things buried in the numbers that are simply not expanded on in the article) but I think it's a good starting point for discussion. I found the below to be quite interesting:

The best estimate of the cost of the 185 federal means tested welfare programs for 2010 for the federal government alone is nearly $700 billion, up a third since 2008, according to the Heritage Foundation. Counting state spending, total welfare spending for 2010 reached nearly $900 billion, up nearly one-fourth since 2008 (24.3%)

Yet, by 2008, Robert Rector of Heritage reports that total welfare spending already amounted to $16,800 per person in poverty, 4 times as much as the Census Bureau estimated was necessary to bring all of the poor up to the poverty level, eliminating all poverty in America. That would be $50,400 per poor family of three. Indeed, Charles Murray wrote a whole book, In Our Hands, A Plan to Replace America’s Welfare State explaining that we already spend far more than enough to completely eliminate all poverty in America.

The second part (if true) is, frankly, jaw dropping and goes a long way (along with our oversized military spending) to explaining how we got into the mess we're in today. Literally five decades worth of congresses and presidents would have utterly failed in their duty to spend the nation's capital wisely (not to mention the people in genuine need who most likely will have suffered in such a scenario).

has arrived. Android on PCs and Linux on tablets are both wonderful for innovation; and doomsday for Microsoft.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2013/01/12/the-nightmare-that-keeps-microsoft-awake-android-on-the-desktop/

I think this is what you are looking for:

Occupy organizers linked to Cleveland bridge bombing plot
Fellow activists express disbelief at arrest of NATO summit bomb plot suspects
I think there are one or two more, at least, associated with Occupy.

Domestic Eco-Terrorism Has Deep Pockets. And Many Enablers.

Azerbaijan and BP http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/sep/19/bp-azerbaijan-100bn-dollars-gas-deal
http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewhulbert/2012/10/12/is-bp-on-borrowed-time-in-azerbaijan-yes-but-so-is-baku/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/24/us-bp-azerbaijan-idUSBRE89N0PC20121024
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/19/bp_strikes_gas_deal_with_azerbaijan_newscred/
Complex but after fall of Soviet Union the UK got in fast and was very friendly :)
Soviet Union left a lot of oil related factories, workers apartments and did a lot of exploration.

there isn't a country on the planet that could take a US city (in the contiguous 48) by December 1st, and hold it until January 1st.

For as long as there exist the Second Amendment and rednecks who haven't been wussified by the public schools, the citizenry themselves would mount a heck of an insurgency against any invading force. However, a nuclear-armed invader -- say, Pakistan -- would have the means to to cow the insurgents. "Each week that this insurgency continues, we blow up the largest remaining city." That would put them into submission nicely. The U.S. would never use such tactics, and that's why the Iraqi insurgency was never completely eliminated.

The Federal Funds Rate is at 0.08% Of course the target rate is zero to .25 but since corporate stocks and profits are at all time highs it is hard to turn off the spigot so I imagine that is why the rate is near the lower bounds. The federal reserve corporation has conjured up Four trillion dollars in the last five years with no end in sight. Please forgive me, to the novice like myself they would appear to be producing quite a bit of money out of thin air. I am sure if I were a Wall Street investment banker the subtleties of monetary policy would be much clearer to me.

How the heck is text messaging not included in this list?

SMS messages are piggybacked onto existing beacon probes between the cell network and the handset. They cost virtually NOTHING to the carrier. They are 99.9999999% profit. The fact that the general public isn't intelligently adopting iMessages and Google Hangouts for this reason alone is silly. I see the argument though... Short term, the price gouging that occurs in SMS and MMS messages will simply transfer over to the data plans. Long term, the moment SMS is no longer a contract-signing focus, the carriers will become competitive with the data plan fees/restrictions. That's how I see the future anyways. :)

http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/141867-price-gouging-it-costs-more-to-send-a-text-message-on-earth-than-from-mars
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/12/text-messages-c/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/sethporges/2013/03/28/mobile-carrier-are-worried-about-free-messaging-apps-good/


Just sayin'

Not even close. Apple is trying to play catch-up with some petty cash. Starting to build a $100M manufacturing facility? In Texas alone Samsung has an existing $13B investment: http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/10/07/memo-to-u-s-politicians-samsung-is-a-very-american-company/