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Why is everything couched as if it's either; a tiny pittance of responsibility or "they go out of business -- JOBS - OMG!!!"? That was a rhetorical question. It's advantageous to companies like Exxon that the argument always be; Free Enterprise vs. No Enterprise.

Exxon got the contract to extract the oil from the Inuit because they PROMISED to have radar and warning systems set in place and not crash their tankers. The "big lie" is that a one drunk captain crashed the ship -- and he went along with it. There are more than one person driving that tanker and warning alarms should have gone off -- if they had not powered down their expensive warning system to save money.

After all the stalling and court cases -- Exxon still saved more money than if they had made good on their original deal. And a lot of Inuit lost their only source of income and died bankrupt while asking Exxon to pay up for their cost cutting catastrophe.

The Exxon Valdez was preventable pretty much like the BP oil gusher under the Gulf was preventable -- but actuarial science says it's much cheaper to do nothing and argue in court -- and spend money on lobbyists and a-holes to champion Torte reform.

It's amazing that the information is readily available on the TRUE CAUSES:
http://www.adn.com/evos/storie... >> they skimped on staff and not following requirements for double-hulled vessels.
http://www.evostc.state.ak.us/... >> The Radar didn't work because they didn't MAINTAIN IT -- not because of design flaws; Government negligence in oversight is a direct result of company influence on them.

-- criminal negligence by the company and lax supervision by the regulators (who were known to not only sleep with the corporate reps, but have meth filled orgies with the corporate reps). (no really, not kidding; http://www.motherjones.com/blu... )

The media of course, doesn't bother to investigate crap if they already have a great story to tell about one drunk sea captain -- truth be damned.

American Exceptionalism strikes again. How many invasions and regime changes has Russia performed over the last 10 years compared to your government? Is Putin asserting he has the right to have anyone murdered, anywhere in the world, based on his say so alone - and acting on those claims? How many military bases does Russia have around the world compared to the United States. Does Russia have special forces operating in more than half the world's countries?

Anyone with a half-functioning brain can see which country needs to have it's imperialistic wankers put in check first, and that it's not Putin.

The Romans used lead to flavor food. But they ended up collapsing. We can understand that now. Lead in gasoline explains the crime wave of the seventies. http://www.motherjones.com/env...

... issues like "dizziness, heart palpitations, chronic depression". The US RDA for vitamin D for adults is several times too low, and people in solitary confinement indoors are unlikely to be getting enough sunlight to make up the difference. The isolation itself is no doubt harmful to many people too, but the vitamin D aspect could at least be addressed easily even within the current system. The nutrition issue is even larger; see for example:
http://www.psychologytoday.com...
http://www.theguardian.com/pol...
http://www.naturalnews.com/039...

And environmental toxins contribute too:
http://www.motherjones.com/env...

Ironically, corporations get to repent by "restorative justice" (paying reparations or fixing what was broken) while real people are hit with "punitive justice".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

US prison population stats:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
"In 2008 approximately one in every 31 adults (7.3 million) in the United States was behind bars, or being monitored (probation and parole). In 2008 the breakdown for adults under correctional control was as follows: one out of 18 men, one in 89 women, one in 11 African-Americans (9.2 percent), one in 27 Latinos (3.7 percent), and one in 45 Caucasians (2.2 percent). Crime rates have increased by about 25 percent from 1988 to 2008.[18] In recent decades the U.S. has experienced a surge in its prison population, quadrupling since 1980, partially as a result of mandatory sentencing that came about during the "war on drugs." Violent crime and property crime have declined since the early 1990s.[19]"

Recent incarcerations for drone protesters, but presumably not in solitary:
http://www.syracuse.com/news/i...
http://www.syracuse.com/news/i...
http://www.syracuse.com/news/i...
http://www.veteransforpeace.or...

What a difference a nun can make even in prison:
"84-year-old nun sentenced for her anti-nuclear activism"
http://www.catholic.org/nation...
"Rice said she learned in prison to see her fellow inmates, not as perpetrators but as "victims" of a system that gave them few options. Walli says that like Rice, he spends long hours talking to inmates to "instill the idea that human life is sacred. "They know that they are the human fallout and the victims of the profiteering by the elite and top leaders of the corporations that are contracted to make the nuclear weapons. It's (the money) denied to human services that should be the priority of any government," Rice said. "

mdsolar nuclear FUD

Hey, mdsolar, the ecotards don't like your solar systems either.

Lazy, lazy people. You'd rather believe your random observations (which are worthless) than actual facts and won't take a minute to just Google it.
Here, bozo, I Googled it for you (try "average fast food worker") and the first page has all the answers (and more):
Take the first result on the page:
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
Median age of fast-food workers:
29

Median age of female fast-food workers:
32

Percentage of fast-food workers who are women:
65%

Percentage of fast-food workers older than 20 who have kids:
36%

Income of someone earning $8.94/hour:
$18,595/year

Federal poverty line for a family of three:
$17,916/year

Income of someone earning $15/hour:
$31,200/year

Income needed for a "secure yet modest" living for a family with two adults and one child
In the New York City area: $77,378/year
In rural Mississippi: $47,154/year

Growth in average real income of the top 1 percent since 1960:
271%

What the current minimum wage would be if it had grown at the same rate as top incomes:
More than $25

The only asymmetry is the USA's defence spend being more than the next 25 biggest spenders on defence put together.

Actually, more than the rest of the planet combined.

The only issue I see is that you use too much italic and it makes you look like a wuss.

And your opinion of me is what I care about most, of course. I'm just crushed. :-)

Also I tried to read the articles you linked, but for the most part they suck.

Actually having to process a "flood of boring information" is too challenging or something? Well... okay, then.

I guess you provided that article to make it clear that people with a Ph.d. are competent only if they agree with your specific vision of the world.

I was interested to see how you'd process it. And yes, unfortunately, it went about like I suspected it would. There's a reason why there aren't any flood geologists in the oil industry.

Finding oil is a very high-stakes issue for oil companies. Literally trillions of dollars are riding on it. When they look for the most likely spots to drill, do they use Flood geology, or mainstream? Which one actually delivers the goods?

Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or perhaps it really did form from plankton (with a few plants and dinosaurs), but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could in those conditions? Any way you look at it, a young Earth and a Flood would imply some very interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?

Why don't creationists put together an investment fund, where people pay in and the stake is used as venture capital for things like oil and mineral rights? If "Flood geology" is really a better theory, then it should make better predictions about where raw materials are than standard geology does. The profits from such a venture could pay for a lot of evangelism. Why isn't anyone making money doing this? (I can suggest one possibility...)

Why wouldn't you build a collector to take advantage of it?

We don't want your Big Solar Death Panels covering the Earth.

AGW causes more snow. http://www.motherjones.com/blu... Really.

Security means encryption + integrity + authentication.

Why? Why should this be the standard for "security"?

Because so far it's the best we have. And because security is only as strong as the weakest link.
You seem, however, to disagree. What would, in your opinion, be a reasonable standard for end-to-end security?

I'm not sure what you mean by Mozilla "blacklisting" basic encryption. As far as I know, self-signed certs work just fine in Mozilla. With a warning, of course - as it should be (and IMHO, that warning should be much stronger than it already is).

Just don't highlight self signed certs with a yellow lock bar was all anyone could want

You seem to forget that the web is not only visited by people like you, me, and most of the /. crew. Average Joe doesn't know how to look at the lock bar, and he doesn't know how to check if a certificate is valid. And this makes him the point where encryption without trust falls apart.

And since you seem intent on throwing NSA around - while it may be easier for them to just sniff traffic, they really have no problem in mounting a MITM attack (see links in my previous post). And while it has not been proven yet, they might just as well have the ability to generate their own certificates, trusted by the major browser vendors (see here - but again, keep in mind that this is just speculation at the moment).

So even if we have encryption+authentication, it still may not be enough. Not when faced with an attacker which has the resources to break the chain of trust.

I won't even get started on the fact that the NSA has knowingly attempted to compromise encryption standards. :)

Feel free to point to a single employment ad for open source code that "pays well."

g e s t a l t _ n _ p e p p e r d spells recalcitrant..

Look what I found on the "internet" (have you heard of it?)

• http://www.indeed.com/q-Open-Source-Developer-jobs.html
• https://osuosl.org/about/employment
• http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/jobs/careers/software/open-source-developer.html
• https://developers.google.com/jobs/

Now you can do your juvenile denial dance about "pays well". There used to be a test administered by doctors - they'd heat a spoon over a flame and offer it to a child, if they refused they were normal, if they grabbed it once they were an idiot, if they grabbed it twice they were a moron - do you remember it?. You've been grabbing that hot spoon your whole life. Don't take this the wrong way - but kill yourself. You're lowering the standards - on /. no less.

Right, and they(the 1%) know that.

That is why they have been successfully dismantling the unions in the US and the rest of the world since the 1980's.
Unless more of this information comes to the forefront of American culture and Media, it will slide in "under the radar" and then it will be too late to bring back unions.

The problem is states like MS have low value added economies, poor residents and crummy education systems.

Their residents have very limited class mobility.

http://www.motherjones.com/fil...

Yea, I concur. Great story/idea. I think Marshall Brain's ideas and writing about how our society will be changed by computers, robots and AI is the most accurate portrayal I've read.
It would be a great film, but the idea behind it is too radical, to close to home, as it were.

It would be a wake up call for the working people of the US, and that is the last thing the Kochs and the Devos family want...

Jobs? They will go away, along with what is left of middle class prosperity and the "American Dream".

Who will benefit from such a change in society? The ones who always do, the 1%(or whatever you want to call them)

Hey, Jedidiah, as a fellow Slashdot user who used to have a 4-digit ID, I remember you. As I recall you are kind of a dick...which I can see from this posting here. Not surprising, actually; Slashdot encourages technical people to post here and a lot of people are pretty high up on the Aspergers/Autistic spectrum ... so the lack of empathy you have (as evidenced in your post) and need to wag you dick around do not surprise me.

The fact of the matter is this: Income inequality *is* going up in the US and it's not workers' fault that there are plain simply not enough jobs for them paying a living wage. Out society has been making the 1% richer and richer at the expense of everyone else: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

There's a reason Slashdot has been in decline (when was the last time someone like John Carmack posted here)...it has become a place for posts like your post, Jedidiah. Oh well. As for me, well, I took the Slashdot ideals to the next level and dedicated my life to a notable but not famous open source project. I made the world a little better place for open source.

Meanwhile, I just got laid off. Like you, my boss was too busy wagging his dick around, screaming at and humiliating subordinates, to build a company that could pay everyone a living wage. I put up with it for too long. So, yes, I'm pretty pissed at the world and especially know-it-all geeks like you.

There's a reason I'm posting this anonymously (and, quite frankly, I don't think Slashdot posters have enough collective empathy to give a rat's ass that I'm now having to hit the street in a tough economy).

orly?
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/12/gates-foundations-24-most-egregious-investments

Sigh, I shouldn't post here, but since no one else on Slashdot has two working neurons in their head to refute yet another right-wing idiot reguritating Fox News talking points: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/irs-tea-party-scandal-congress-nonprofit-obama

Global warming propagandists would take any support — whether it comes from a heatwave-induced swing or real understanding of their theories.

Meanwhile, the inconvenient truth that those theories aren't really explaining the available facts , is explained only by lack of funding and failure to communicate...

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/03/middle-class-really-three-decade-slump

http://www.businessinsider.com/decline-of-theus-middle-class-2013-10

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/labor/news/2013/09/17/74363/latest-census-data-underscore-how-important-unions-are-for-the-middle-class/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/14/college-costs-median-income_n_3443806.html

http://www.aarp.org/research/ppi/security/impacts-of-rising-healthcare-costs-AARP-ppi-sec.html

I think quoting a single statistic without anything else to compare it to is disingenuous. More people surely are enrolling in college now than they were in my parents' generation. My parents, going to a state school, essentially carried no debt when they finished, and had good middle class jobs waiting for them. It was more likely in my parents' generation that one could be middle class all the way through to retirement without a college degree, as well.

The price of a college education has risen at a rate entirely inconsistent with median income. That's not just for Harvard or MIT - that's for all American college education.

Similarly, health costs have gone up without regard to income levels. Likewise real estate anywhere where jobs exist. Likewise daycare, or elder care. Pensions that were commonplace a generation ago are nearly extinct now, and vilified by a large segment of the population.

Sure, people can afford to have computers and DVD players and game consoles that didn't exist a generation ago, but the essentials of a middle-class life are getting more and more expensive relative to a middle-class income.

"The Pentagon’s strengthening grip on Hollywood"
http://www.salon.com/2011/08/29/sirota_military_movies/
"The U.S. military's Hollywood connection"
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/21/entertainment/la-ca-military-movies-20110821
http://movieline.com/2013/02/06/military-entertainment-complex-hollywood-pentagon-relationship-battleship-zero-dark-thirty/
Operation Hollywood
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/09/operation-hollywood
A script often self corrected until the use of mil equipment works out.
The UK, Australia, Germany, France all have their funding mixes for their own culture. The US mil movie/script 'corrections' aspect is well known, has been reported for years.

That is not 35, but 235. A contractor gig is still a job for somebody. And why don't the initial construction jobs count? They aren't permanent, but are still paychecks for six or eight months for a lot of people.

Most of the contractor jobs are maintenance/security.
I.E. Low paying and not exactly full time.

The local/state governments are handing out tens of millions worth of tax breaks spanning a 10 year period.
The benefits from construction are short term and essentially meaningless over that time scale.

The reality is that there aren't (m)any other non-infrastructure commercial projects that can cost over a billion dollars and generate fewer direct and indirect jobs than a data center.

Does it require a big dongle to make child processes?

http://marketrealist.com/2013/10/shutdown-101-perceived-wealth-distribution-isnt-reality/
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

Health care disparities would presumably reflect that too, to some extent. But a deeper issue is how health is more than access to "sick care", What you eat, how much you worry, where you can live, whether you have time for self-education and exercise, these are also big factors, and those connect to at least a certain level of wealth.

The USA is really confused about that, in part because of decades of propaganda funded by very selfish people.

On global issues, see:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/10/world/gapminder-us-ignorance-survey/
http://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/
http://www.gapminder.org/GapminderMedia/wp-uploads/Results-from-the-Ignorance-Survey-in-the-US..pdf

Meanwhile, China is about to land a robot on the moon!

As George Orwell said:
http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/authors/george-orwell
"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, whene we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, is possible to carry this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

that's my point. After all of this bullshit about how there aren't enough software developers in this country you now have two huge H1B trolls out there banging the drum to get more people to write code. Most people wouldn't want to write code, they'd rather play XBOX or bet on the stock market or do something else. That's the whole point, not everybody is good at a particular field of study or chooses it as a career. What Fuckerberg and Billy Bob want is to say "Hey look, we tried here and well nobody in this country is good enough or wants to do it. Therefore we need more H1B visas so we can import more workers of course at lower wages." The trouble is a lot of software developers have been let go and are still looking for work out there so what's exactly the problem they're trying to solve? Oh they don't want to pay people who are already here or aren't in their mold, so called "overqualified" candidates.. Well forget that you have 20 years of Software in C, C++, Java, we want this H1B that we can get for half of that who won't challenge our business model and will do everything we tell them. Also college students go into fields where they have a good probability of making a living afterwards, if Software is now a low cost talent game where everybody can do it then you're less likely to find people going into that field. They'll probably go into Healthcare where they have a guaranteed six figure income.
There's nothing wrong with teaching CS in schools and trying to promote it, no question about that but it's just these two leading the charge have ulterior motives and that's to force their labor costs down and frankly that's promoting CS for the wrong reason.

It's not just about auto/non-auto, it's about weapons that can inflict major damage quickly. As far as I know, in the US you can obtain riffles of all kinds with clip sizes above 5. This is where it's different in Canada. The max clip size for ANY riffle is 5 and handgun is 10. In the US many of the states do not have restrictions on this.

Regardless of what anybody here says, I say keep living with your laws and you gun maniacs. I really don't see the need to collect military grade weapons.

Just a few of a killing sprees recorded over the years (That's just the tip of the iceberg)
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map

Mac McClelland wrote a great (if occasionally snide) piece last year on what it's like to work at an Amazon pick-warehouse. Definitely worth a read:

I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave

It's ironic that this Mother Jones article's ads are served by Amazon AWS. Actually, I will go so far as to say it is hypocritical.

I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave

I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave, By Mac McClelland, March/April 2012 Issue, Mother Jones.

"My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine."

I'd like proof that they lie.

http://www.monsanto.com/products/Pages/roundup-pro-concentrate.aspx

The active ingredient, glyphosate, has favorable environmental characteristics such as low volatility and binds tightly to soil.

http://www.cdms.net/LDat/mp8CC006.pdf

Dissipation Soil field :Half life 2-174days

That's some range there. But I guess since it "binds tightly to soil", it will not leach into ground water. Oh wait, it does. Maybe it just washes out and does not "bind tightly to soil" as claimed, which explains that massive, massive range.

Monsanto lies to make money. Their ROE lifetime is 20 years, and damn the rest because patents expire.

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/08/monsantos-roundup-herbicide-soil-damage

hmm, so maybe not that good for stuff in the soil....

The whole anti-GMO "movement" is funded in large part by the organic food industry. Finding themselves unable to win the race for consumer's hard-earned money by being better than their competition, the organic food industry is trying to win by tripping the other runners.

No: it has been found that the yield of GMO crops is not better then that of classical crops. Unfortunately, the original article is behind a pay wall.

Come don't make the idiots at think progress do all your thinking, figure it out and compare to other businesses.

Okay, how many other industries get over a trillion a year in subsidies?

Fuel from corn, and the subsidy for it, was a giveaway to Archer Daniels Midland. The subsidy expired a few years ago, but the requirement that corn be converted to fuel ethanol drove the price of corn up.

Ethanol from corn is probably a net energy lose. Ethanol refineries don't burn their own product for their own process heat. (Oil refineries do.)

Ethanol for cellulose, if it ever works commercially, has real promise. There's so much excess cellulose in the world produced as farming waste, from corn cobs to straw to wood chips. The first big ethanol from cellulose plants are coming on line in 2014. But they need subsidies to survive.

For more details on this, I recommend Kevin Drum's article, which summarizes the research well. (Not just a spurious correlation, although it's good to be skeptical.)

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline

They'll probably just get zombies to float it into $20 and under anonymous donations, much like the last two national elections.

Dead People Have Donated Nearly $600K to Campaigns Since 2009

Anonymous Donations Can Remain Secret Despite IRS Requirement to Disclose

If the issue was actually insurance like we issue for cars, then the costs would be trivial. There are really good reasons why this stuff is so expensive.

I think I'll trust an actuary to calculate the actual cost. Put in a reasonable mark-up, and you have: insurance. If the market is, well, efficient, then the mark-up will be reasonable. So let's apply those good-old liberal ideas of free markets, and let the magic happen.

Otherwise, the bill should be in the mail.

And if you can't pay, and declare bankruptcy? Who pays then? You pretending this isn't a problem?

There were issues that could have been addressed by our government that could have actually helped.

Right, like an almost-single-payer system, like what works in most of the OECD. Instead, in an attempt to compromise, we get a regulated insurance market and a mandate, just like leading conservatives supported up until 2008.

What happened in 2008? Obama was elected, adopted the GOP healthcare plan, and was promptly labelled a tyrant by an apocalyptic cult. Just the opinion of a 20+ year GOP insider who knows a hell of a lot more about what happens on the hill than you do.

Now we know the president either lied outright about what would happen to existing policies

You _can_ keep your policy if you like it, so long as you've had the policy since before the ACA was passed. The fact that insurance companies are changing the policies and then trying to up-sell clients onto more expensive planes: who would have thunk it, that businesses would act this way. I agree that Obama shouldn't have used the language he did, because it is too easy to pick apart. But it is hardly the lie you WANT it to be.

From Kevin Drum's blog:

Over the past three years, insurance companies have swapped their plans around so fast and so often that virtually no one today has a plan more than a couple of years old—something that seems an awful lot like a deliberate effort to evade Obamacare's original intent that most individual policies would be grandfathered and therefore remain available to existing customers who wanted to keep them. [Footnote: Plans in existence before March 23, 2010, are grandfathered, which makes them exempt from most of the new requirements of Obamacare. However, if your insurance company switched you into a "better" plan after that date, it's not grandfathered and can be canceled at any time.] Now, having engineered a situation where most current policies aren't grandfathered, millions of people are getting letters canceling their existing plans and being told that the replacement is far more expensive.

So basically, these insurance companies sending out these cancellation notices were gaming the system so that they could both undermine the law and blame it for "forcing" their customers to buy more expensive coverage.

The Tea baggin' Koch Bros...

"The utility, the Arizona Public Service Company (APS), outed itself as a funder of two secretive nonprofits fueling the anti-solar fightâ"and revealed that it had funneled its anti-solar money through a political operative associated with the Koch brothers and their donor network."

Pretty much the entire Act as it currently stands. There's a lot of vaguely-worded clauses that grant nearly limitless authority and do not require disclosure of the reasons for many police actions. It would be relatively easy to stitch together what is being given up by these politicians from other parts of the Act and have yourself a new Franken-agency.

By removing permissions to do those things?
How does that get stitched into another agency?
You removed the permission, and you add a whole bunch of shall nots, so that there is nothing left to stitch.

Most of these things that you object to, limitless authority, gag orders, etc are the spawn of section 215.

This is the first of 12 such bills waiting in the wings.
This bill probably doesn't go near far enough, but Section 215 is one of the most dangerous sections of the entire law. Any amount of crippling that can be done to it is long overdue. I don't trust Sensenbrenner to do enough, and I hope his efforts aren't a sop to divert attention with the appearance of doing something.

If the EU position were a principled one, they would not be sending the same drugs to Iran. In fact, the policy remains popular among citizens in Europe.

H1B's exist to drive down labor rates in the US, screwing over folks who are already here and they're not necessarily getting the best talent either. If you're telling me that Quality Shit Software couldn't find qualified candidates in the beltway for this project, then you're full of crap. That's not racist by the way and I object to the use of the term, but since QShit was looking for Business Analysts and Engineers, I know that there are plenty of those in DC who could have done the job. There's lots of these outfits out there, WiPro, InfoSys, Tata and others who use the H1B and pay less than other companies for the same work and sell themselves as saving money for the companies they work for. These are Indian outsourcing firms and they get called out even in their own nation. If we're going to have H1B Visas in this nation, then we damn well better insist that 1) Companies who are sponsoring H1Bs have done their due diligence in trying to find a qualified candidate already here. That means verification with screening results not just Taleo bullshit disqualification. 2) That the wages the H1B employee are paid are at least above the 80% percentile for the work, in the area where they're working and only for the duration of that work. 3) Once the work is finished, if the H1B candidate doesn't have a Green Card or is not on the path to citizenship, they need to go back and not job hop. Did you also know that the top ten sponsors of H1B visas or offshore outsourcing companies? That's another gap that has to be fixed, specifically companies that are in the body shop business need to be excluded from sponsoring H1Bs. I'm for letting people work in this country but the playing field needs to be a bit more balanced and indexed on unemployment figures as well, if that's racist to you then fuck off.

In fact, you should be shitting bricks right now. If US have no problem spying foreing presidents communications or even deviating official presidential planes, you think it will care a lot about the diplomatics implications of sending a drone to you or your approximate neighbourhood?

Put the cover crops down before winter?

Is this guys practice a good idea? Seems to work for well for him.

Shorter version: if you can't afford to pay, go die quietly in the street like the good little serf that you are. It's your fucking fault your last name isn't Walton, or that you

1. Even if we stripped the military budget to zero it wouldn't pay for your entitlements.

If Britain is like the U.S., and their advertized war budget is half of what it actually is, the U.K. could slash their own war spending, pay for the entire UHS budget and still be one of the more heavily armed countries on the planet.

2. As to eating the rich, there are several problems with this little idea of yours. For one, even if you took all their money it still wouldn't pay for your entitlements. There isn't enough. What is more, you confuse wealth with income. If you confiscate their wealth you'll be eating the goose that lays the golden eggs. You'll eat well for a day. And starve there after.

Shorter version: the usual "job creator" bullshit. Rich people don't create jobs. Demand does. Funny how working stiffs have to work hard at crappy jobs even though they pay crappy money, but we just couldn't find CEO's to do the job unless they make in one year what would take their employees hundreds of years to earn.

What happens if we taxed the richest people at Eisenhower tax rates? They'd still be the richest people in the country!

Have you tried calling the helpline:

1-800-F**CKYO (1-800-318-2596)

http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/03/need-health-care-coverage-just-dial-1-800-fuckyo-to-reach-obamacares-national-hotline/

There's also story doing the rounds that if you don't already have health-insurance, then they'll put you on a list, suspend your driving license and place federal-liens against your home.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/10/obamacare-conspiracy-theory-lien-house-debunked

Actually, the Dems have held the popular vote in each election since Obama came into office, and the GOP only held onto house seats by playing with the districts:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/republicans-gerrymandering-house-representatives-election-chart

Hypothetical example: If there are 2 open seats and 100k voters which are 80k Dem and 20k GOP,
you can rearrange the outline of distict borders to put 80k dems in one district, and 20k GOP in another district. Then we have 1 Dem rep, and 1 GOP rep, and there you have a "close" "50%" vote.

Why is this hard for some people to understand?

Politics prevent people from doing math.

the processes of financialization and growth through increased consumption. They will back these trends to the hilt until *after* they start seeing damage, and even then they will limit their cautionary guidelines to very specific circumstances (i.e. beachfront property, and now property with high fire risk).

They remain conservative and give not a damn about conservation, much less the plight of poor and normally uninsured human beings who are in the path of environmental destruction. The people who run and invest in private insurers would switch their operations over to profiting from climate distress tomorrow if the scientific predictions weren't so generalized. They are actively looking for ways to make this transition as we speak.

Can I pay them an extra $1000 and buy directly from amazon? Why get a dealer involved?

(Not that I'm interested in a Nissan Versa. But my point is the same. Car dealers are the scum of the Earth.)

There are laws that prohibit this. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/02/why-you-cant-buy-new-car-online

Until the law changes, Amazon, or anyone else for that matter, cannot directly sell cars online.

I too would love to be able to buy a car from Amazon. I had to buy a new car this year and it reminded my why I hate the process. The sales and manager guys were fine and kept it light while we played the negotiation game, but the finance guy was a tad slimey. He tried to get me into a higher interest rate than what I qualified for and acted like I was killing him when I didn't want the extended warranty.