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The problem is that you're comparing Star Trek (1966 - 1969) to television from this century.

Seriously, compare the role of Uhura to anything else that was on the air or in the theatres at that time.

She wasn't the mom or the maid. She wasn't blonde. She was a female character in a position of responsibility, even if her job was just to repeat everything the computer says, and did things which were more important than baking cookies for the male characters or screaming whenever the villain showed up.

You didn't see much of that on "The Lucy Show", "The Jackie Gleason Show", "The Beverley Hillbillies", "Hogan's Heroes", "Hawaii Five-O", "Casino Royale", "Thoroughly Modern Millie", or "Lost in Space".

But don't listen to me, listen to what Dr. Martin Luther King had to say about it.

People became more productive due to technology. Now you are able to produce enough for you and your family in 40 hours / week. Before this technology advancement, you needed to work 60-80 hours / week in order to produce enough.

WTF are you talking about back in the first half of the last century, unless you worked on the farm, you were able to produce enough for you and your family in a 40 hour week with just one adult working and that was with an average of 4 kids. Today, it takes both parents working with an average of 1.4 kids.

Technology may make us more efficient, but it has nothing to do with the economics of providing for a family.

Jobs are not a scarce resource, labor is. There is always enough jobs for everyone that wants one and then some, even if it means being self employed. The only reason there is unemployment at all, is because of bad laws.

For a look at what really happened to America's jobless when manual labor jobs disappeared, check out a collaborative NPR Planet Money/This American Life expose on this invisible economy: "Unfit for Work: The startling rise of disability in America" The program's podcast "Trends with benefits" is well worth listening to.
In summary, what happens is that manual labor jobs disappear from small American towns and they're replaced with lawyer and bureaucratic desk jobs in large cities, state capitals and Washington D.C. A look at trends in unemployment during the great recession gives us a glimpse of this. But Americans on disability don't appear in any labor department unemployment or employment statistics. What's more, people on disability almost never get off the program. Unlike welfare, people on disability are discouraged from working, their kids are discouraged from doing well in school. Even in comparison the obvious economic mess made by programs to promote debt until death (aka mortgage), the non-productive trillions in the derivative economy, this 200+ billion dollar hole in the US economy is significant specifically because of its social fallout. Uncovering this is the first step in adjusting our economy to a new reality of labor and employment.

Oh, let's see:

IRS Apologizes For Singling Out Conservative Groups
Justice Department Seized AP Phone Records to Track Government Leaks
Women shot by cops were just delivering papers
Man Dies in Police Raid on Wrong House
Student Photojournalist Beaten and Arrested While Taking Photos of Police in Public

This article doesn't say it but they throw in an iPad with their app when you buy one of their guns.

Ummm.... comprehension?

Sounds like something invented by the same folks who did the Zune.

If one looks at the price tag, one would be tempted to compare the folks with the other brand

And

A $500 iPad is an affordable freebie when you are selling a $17,000 weapon.

while TFA states $22k

With price tags of up to $22,000, they're not cheap.

I was converted away from your opinion by this podcast. There are not, in fact, "lots of other materials" with all those properties. In fact, there is only gold. I listened to that with an open mind and I was convinced.

"Buying a car sucks," Scott Painter says. "It's something that most consumers fear."

Back in the '90s, Painter started a company to try to change this. "The name of the company was Cars Direct," he says. "The mission was to sell cars directly."

Painter wanted his company to build virtual dealerships that would let people go online and buy cars. But after talking with a few car execs, he realized nobody would even consider his idea.

Painter was stopped by a web of state laws that make it very, very difficult to change the way cars are sold.
...
Car dealers argue that the laws are necessary to protect dealers' investment, and to protect the jobs of people who work at car dealerships.

"If you just take our organization alone, we employ over 2,000 people," says Tammy Darvish, who runs a group of auto dealerships and sits on the board of the National Automobile Dealers Association. "That's 2,000 families throughout greater Washington that are dependent on us continuing our business operations."

There are plenty other businesses employ lots of people but don't have so much protection from state laws.

That may partly be due to the fact that car dealers have a lot political power. Dealers contribute a big share of state sales tax revenues — as much as 20 percent in some states — and they tend to be big local employers. That makes state and local legislators listen.

Scott Painter now runs a company called true car...that tries to ease the process of buying a car. He's now trying to work with dealers not around them.

"There is no argument by which franchise law goes away," he says. "That is purely a fantasy conversation.

Companies like Tesla, Auto Nation, Costco and even many dealers are pushing to innovate from within the system as it is. All the people I talked to for this story — Tammy Darvish, lawyers for the auto industry, and Scott Painter himself — aid a friendlier, more rational car buying experience would come eventually. But it won't come without your local car dealer.

I don't understand the dealership model anyway

It's basically a legalized pyramid scheme, that was created in the hopes of ensuring that the local municipality has some "good" jobs. Episode 435: Why Buying A Car Is So Awful is a very informative listen.

A few months back, NPR's Planet Money did an episode on the car dealership business and how entrenched they are with the government. It goes back for decades. It's worth a listen.

"Episode 435: Why Buying A Car Is So Awful"
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/12/171814201/episode-435-why-buying-a-car-is-so-awful

You may enjoy:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/19/172402376/why-buying-a-car-never-changes

Basically, they've got too much political sway. Now, quite what political sway means in this context bemuses me. Yes, car dealers are big employers and provide a lot of tax revenue, but if you make them mad, what are they going to do? Move to the next state? Stop selling cars? Stop paying their taxes? They might, as a big employer, encourage their employees and customers to vote out the guy who had the temerity to challenge them, but is that really all it takes for a business to coax protectionism out of the government?

No, the $7B gain was *including* "donating" $36B to his "charity"

No, it wasn't. Though if that were the case, then he'd be about $30 billion poorer than if he had done that activity. Keep in mind that $7 billion is a profit over the period of a year while that $36 billion, donated over many years, includes donations from others (for example, Warren Buffet is a very significant contributor as well) and earned income on the donations that were already made.

but your net worth is *growing* faster than you can give away, and your "charity" organization is linked to all sorts of shady moneygrubbing interests --- there's room for quite a bit of suspicion.

For what? What's the actual evidence for a "massive corporate tax dodge"?

People don't want to change so they deny the credibility of the evidence staring them in the face. Are you really that dense that you cannot see the effects of global climate change around you now? Bleaching of Coral reefs[0], Hurricane frequency[1], Shrinking of one of the largest glaciers on earth[2] not to mention the rate of change in global temps[3] for the past century. Yes it's been warm in the past, but the RATE at which warming occurred has never been seen before. These are the facts and they are happening now. I guess for a lot of people it's more comforting to glue their noses to the manufactured reality of Fox News and the like rather than accept what is happening and that change is needed.

[0] - http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/coral_bleach.html
[1] - http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2007/hurricanefrequency.shtml
[2] - http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/science/2013/04/21/tracking-greenlands-fast-melting-ice-sheets.html
[3] - http://www.npr.org/2013/03/08/173739884/since-end-of-last-ice-age-rates-of-global-warming-amazing-and-atypical
[3] -

Much of it goes to need-based financial aid. You raise the stick price so that those who can afford to pay more do, then turn around and take some portion of that extra money and use it to defray the costs of those who can't. See this piece from NPR on sticker price vs. actual price paid. Inflation-adjusted net price has gone up by about 30% for public schools and 22% for private schools over the past 15 years. That's obviously a growth rate that exceeds inflation, but it's a good sight less than the growth in sticker price over that same period.

Low-income high-achieving students at these schools have close to 100 percent odds of attending an Ivy League school or other highly selective college...

"These schools" are "from 15 large metropolitan areas. These areas often have highly regarded public high schools, such as in New York City or in the Washington, D.C., area." It's the 30% of low-income high-ability students outside those metro areas that aren't heading to elite universities. Harvard also claims that 20% of its class falls under the $65k/year threshold and therefore pays nothing.

Lets just clear something up right now, gun bans have NEVER worked and will NEVER work

Funny, the NRA backed 1986 full-auto gun ban in the USA seems to work out just fine at keeping full-auto guns out of the hands of virtually all US criminals. In America people simply do not get shot by full-auto weapons, and it is all thanks to the fact that they are banned here. Collectors and enthusiasts can get permits to own old machine guns, but you can not buy or own a modern machine gun in the USA and as such criminals do not have access to them here.

You can not say gun bans never work because frankly they work quite well. The '86 ban is factual demonstrable proof of it.

we should be teaching people how to defend themselves

Absolutely we should. Gun advocates are generally the first to claim people banned from guns just resort to alternative weapons like, "if guns are banned people will just kill each other with knives". Since gun advocates so quickly admit that guns and knives are equally deadly, why not train our citizenry in the art of using cutlery in self defense? In a home invasion a gun is of little use anyways since you are in close quarter combat. You can shoot a guy 5 times as he closes a 15 foot gap and stabs you to death before falling dead himself.

Unless you live in Russia or Syria, it's not, and shouldn't be, your problem.

And if a large majority of Syrian citizens are against further arming Assad's regime? Whose problem does it become? If they ask or beg for the UN to impose a no-fly zone to counteract the Assad regime's airstrikes, whose problem does it become, these new(er) anti-aircraft missiles?

Was Rwanda and its internal affairs just a problem for Rwanda and Uganda? Was the breakup of Yugoslavia merely a problem for the Serbs, Croats and Muslims to duke it out?

Just curious at how far regimes can descend, before action is taken. Is it a utilitarian argument, where the balance of lives saved must outweigh the lives lost in escalating the rebellion or outright toppling the regime? Is it an argument for means justifying the ends, that there's a tipping point where offensive military action or aid is justified (Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey already think so)? Does it change the equation if not stopping the Syrian conflict will inevitably draw Lebanon, Israel and probably Iran, Turkey and the United States into a wider and messier conflict? Would it change the equation if Assad had 10,000 artillery pieces aimed at Istanbul?

The point of all these questions is foreign policy is difficult and nuanced. No two situations are alike, and although we'd like it to play out like a domestic law enforcement problem, it never does and it necessarily can't be. Leaders and nations following simple rules to a fault, such as "Unless you live in Russia or Syria, it's not, and shouldn't be, your problem" tend to make a fucked up mess of things, either through gross inaction or not-well thought out action, like George W. Bush.

Also last week NPR did a fair piece on the FWD.us agenda to viscerate the current immigration/H1B discussion; in order to except themselves (as a classic lobbyist move). If I didn't hate Zuckerburg enough before, I certainly do now. He's a freaking zillionaire, while having no concept of actually *working* in the tech field, as a career, and *trying* to grow old in this country while supporting self/family. Yet he's all in favor of rolling over older I.T. workers while importing fresh blood from abroad to support his business, at lower costs.

But let's not simply single Mark out. Let's also add LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, Dropbox's Drew Houston and Yahoo's Marissa Mayer to the list of those supporting FWD.us.

http://www.npr.org/2013/05/09/182516877/facebook-joins-lobby-for-overhauling-immigration

Miano is a former programmer. Now he's a lawyer who represents displaced tech workers. He blogs for the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that's decidedly right-wing. But for now, groups like this are just about the only ones opposing the increase in tech worker visas. Miano says with tech giants like Facebook teaming up with well-heeled liberal groups, he doubts his views will get much of a hearing on Capitol Hill. Martin Kaste, NPR News.

Kudos to Elon Musk for dropping out of this %$#@! lobbying group. This is just another example of extremely wealthy people working to buy influence with the best government money can buy.

Also last week NPR did a fair piece on the FWD.us agenda to viscerate the current immigration/H1B discussion; in order to except themselves (as a classic lobbyist move). If I didn't hate Zuckerburg enough before, I certainly do now. He's a freaking zillionaire, while having no concept of actually *working* in the tech field, as a career, and *trying* to grow old in this country while supporting self/family. Yet he's all in favor of rolling over older I.T. workers while importing fresh blood from abroad to support his business, at lower costs.

But let's not simply single Mark out. Let's also add LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, Dropbox's Drew Houston and Yahoo's Marissa Mayer to the list of those supporting FWD.us.

http://www.npr.org/2013/05/09/182516877/facebook-joins-lobby-for-overhauling-immigration

Miano is a former programmer. Now he's a lawyer who represents displaced tech workers. He blogs for the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that's decidedly right-wing. But for now, groups like this are just about the only ones opposing the increase in tech worker visas. Miano says with tech giants like Facebook teaming up with well-heeled liberal groups, he doubts his views will get much of a hearing on Capitol Hill. Martin Kaste, NPR News.

Kudos to Elon Musk for dropping out of this %$#@! lobbying group. This is just another example of extremely wealthy people working to buy influence with the best government money can buy.

I would argue that social standing and that of your parents is a better predictor of your future success.

http://www.npr.org/2012/10/16/162936707/movin-on-up-that-may-depend-on-your-last-name

There has already been experiments that show that this is a good idea. Children given access to computers/knowledge WILL learn and exceed expectations. http://www.npr.org/2013/05/03/179828483/can-schools-exist-in-the-cloud

And earlier.
"The steam engine and the other associated technologies of the Industrial Revolution changed the world and influenced human history so much that in the words of the historian Ian Morris, they made mockery out of all that had come before. "
TED Radio Hour on NRP just did a cool interview on this

but insurance records of storm damage are probably a better way to detect any meaningful change in storm damage.

In studying hurricanes, we can make rough comparisons over time by adjusting past losses to account for inflation and the growth of coastal communities. If Sandy causes $20 billion in damage (in 2012 dollars), it would rank as the 17th most damaging hurricane or tropical storm (out of 242) to hit the U.S. since 1900—a significant event, but not close to the top 10. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 tops the list (according to estimates by the catastrophe-insurance provider ICAT), as it would cause $180 billion in damage if it were to strike today. Hurricane Katrina ranks fourth at $85 billion.

To put things into even starker perspective, consider that from August 1954 through August 1955, the East Coast saw three different storms make landfall—Carol, Hazel and Diane—that in 2012 each would have caused about twice as much damage as Sandy.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204840504578089413659452702.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Here is one thing the industry agrees is true: The cost from hurricane damages is increasing. That's largely because population density and the cost of coastal property increases every year.

[---]

"Are we really seeing more storms, or are we just recording more storms? That's the big question," says longtime expert Karen Clark, who runs her own risk-management consultancy.

Clark says the problem is that hurricane prediction is a very young science. She notes that records documenting hurricanes go back only about a century, a data set far too small to draw big conclusions.

She says after Hurricane Katrina — the most expensive of all documented storms — some predicted a warming cycle would produce more powerful storms. That forecast did not bear out.

"It just shows you that we just are not that smart, you know, when it comes to what's really going on," Clark says.

Bill Keogh, president of Eqecat, one of the major risk-modeling firms in the U.S., says that despite what it may seem, we are now in a statistically low period of hurricane activity. After Katrina, few powerful hurricanes have made landfall in the U.S.

http://www.npr.org/2012/11/04/164185424/insurance-companies-rethink-business-after-sandy

(Observations trump models. Always)

I'd argue for scientifically rational policies but people seem to disagree as to what those are.

I just listened to a debate about abolishing the minimum wage, and fundamentally it wasn't a moral debate so much as a wonk debate. The libertarians arguing that abolishing the minimum wage would bring more people into the work force and help the poor, the opponents claiming that studies suggested a more complicated relationship and that the minimum wage didn't cost many jobs and transferred more wealth to the poorest part of the population. Fundamentally I don't know which argument is the right one.

For a real party I would suggest two bedrock principals:
1) Clearly identify that your party works towards moral goals, a policy is only a tool to achieve those goals. ie you're not interested in "Open Government (data) access" but the public being able to act as an effective watchdog over government.

2) To achieve 1 write policy with research in mind. If people are considering abolishing the minimum wage write legislation that will help you gather data to tell you if it's a good idea, if you want to promote science and math than apply that legislation in a handful of states and see if it works. It's not possible to do for all legislation but if you approach lawmaking with the idea that it's still an experiment and you have to gather data than I think you can really increase the quality of the governance.

Pebble Bed Reactor?!?
Pffttt....
Didn't you hear were in the midst of a Natual Gas Revolution!

So they can encourage foreign outsourcing?

H1B is already all about out-sourcing. The top 10 H1B employers, accounting for roughly half of all H1B visas, are out-sourcers. They bring people in on H1B, train them up and send them back. H1B is encouraging out-sourcing, not stopping it.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/04/03/176134694/Whos-Hiring-H1-B-Visa-Workers-Its-Not-Who-You-Might-Think

Currently, the Democrats benefit from the voter fraud, nominally through a misapplication of the 1973 Voting Rights Act, predominantly in Florida, but one in eight voting registrations are flawed and/or illegal , while the Republicans benefit from the below market labor costs, so neither party actually wants the practice of illegal immigration stopped. Here is the NY Times article on it from the Pew Center for the States: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/us/politics/us-voter-registration-rolls-are-in-disarray-pew-report-finds.html?_r=0 [nytimes.com]

What a bullshitter you are. The article basically says there are lot of errors in the registration systems to the point that dead people are still in the roles (not that other people are using those identities to vote), that people that move often end up registered in more than one state (not that they are voting in more than one), that a high percentage of registrations contain data errors serious enough that the voter will not receive a ballot (flawed, but not "illegal" as you insinuate), and that approximately 1 in 4 eligible voters isn't even registered. It then says that Democrats want to make it easier to register people, but that Republicans don't want that because of fear that it could introduce fraud. The last election highlighted several occurrences of voter fraud, none of which being identity fraud that the Voter ID laws Republicans have been pushing would have stopped, and the most serious being perpetrated by Republicans.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/25/gop-voter-fraud_n_1990104.html
http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/19/14556980-gop-registration-worker-charged-with-voter-fraud?lite
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/19/gop_voter_registration_scandal_widens/
http://www.npr.org/2012/10/02/162176990/republican-firm-tied-to-voter-fraud-allegations
http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/03/06/the-real-gop-voter-fraud-employees-admit-forging-voter-registration-forms/

There are nuances; the Earned Income Tax Credit, for example, incentivizes people to work by paying them more if they increase their salary (up to a limit).

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/03/15/174358638/a-surprisingly-uncontroversial-program-that-gives-money-to-poor-people

This good you talk about is a smoke screen and a bunch of crap. This is the reality:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/04/03/176134694/Whos-Hiring-H1-B-Visa-Workers-Its-Not-Who-You-Might-Think

How do I know? Because both Cognizant and Infosys are big suppliers of off shore workers to the IT department in my company.

When was this? Recently? He may not have been in the right position. Apparently there are companies now that are paid by states to find people on welfare who can be moved to disability. It essentially gets them an advocate who helps them through the process.

http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

That is one of the NPR stories (which they caught some flak for). I thought the comments of the doctor that they talked to were quite insightful. As sad and bad as I think it is, I actually find myself agreeing with his assessment.....its not the right solution, but the right solution isn't coming, so its probably the best option a lot of people have, and the alternative is even worst.

However, the numbers are absolutely staggering.

They claim to want this, but it's very clear that they prefer immigration authorities to turn a blind eye to illegal immigration. I don't see left wingers cheering whenever INS raid a business that hires illegals.

Damn those leftists like George W Bush! Right wing heroes like Obama are deporting more people than those scummy lieberals ever did!

Here's the link.

http://www.npr.org/2013/04/05/176303594/researchers-question-obamas-motives-for-brain-initiative

Oh we know what we want to do. More basic research.

This, OTOH is just a typical presidential PR stunt. A 'dream team' approach. Well, that doesn't even work so well in sports and science isn't a basketball game.

It's just a way to 1) make noise 2) make some more noise and 3) toss some money to some politically connected friends.

Nothing to see here, move along.

...er, I mean nuclear industry shills, not coal industry. By the way, where are all the coal industry shills? If Slashdot is overwhelmed by nuclear apologists, it's kind of weird that the coal industry hasn't noticed and sent some of their own.

Local television and radio stations in my city (Pittsburgh) have coal and natural gas shill commercials at least once every commercial break. Range Resource and Consol Energy are the biggest offenders on telling us how fracking and coal power do not fuck up our environment. When documents say otherwise, they dissapear.

Here's one perspective re this issue.

Who's Hiring H-1B Visa Workers? It's Not Who You Might Think

The 10 largest users of H1B are off-shoring contract-houses. Last year, those 10 off-shoring companies claimed 40,000 of the 85,000 available H1B visas.

The way it works is that they low-bid on some project, bring in their people on H1B get them trained up and then send them back home to work on the same project.

Citation: Who's Hiring H-1B Visa Workers? It's Not Who You Might Think

All the PR about H1B says that we have a skills-shortage here, but if that is true, then H1B is contributing to the skills shortage rather than fixing it. Most of what is wrong with H1B could be fixed if the politicians actions matched their rhetoric - instead of being an unofficial dual-purpose immigration visa that typically expires just months before the immigrant clears all the paperwork for an green-card, make it a fast-track immigrant only visa - everybody on an H1B is guaranteed a green-card within just one year of residency. That way instead of being a brain-drain out of the US, we would be sucking in the (supposedly) higher-qualified foreign candidates to become permanent contributing members of US society.

If you scroll through the government's visa data, you notice something surprising. The biggest employer of foreign tech workers is not Microsoft â" not by a long shot. Nor is it Google, Facebook or any other name-brand tech company. The biggest users of H-1Bs are consulting companies, or as Ron Hira calls them, "offshore-outsourcing firms."

For the past decade, he's been studying how consulting firms use temporary work visas to help American companies cut costs. He says they use the visas to supply cheaper workers here, but also to smooth the transfer of American jobs to information-technology centers overseas. "What these firms have done is exploit the loopholes in the H-1B program to bring in on-site workers to learn the jobs [of] the Americans to then ship it back offshore," he says. "And also to bring in on-site workers who are cheaper on the H-1B and undercut American workers right here."

The biggest user of H-1B last year was Cognizant, a firm based in New Jersey. The company got 9,000 new visas. Following close behind were Infosys, Wipro and Tata â'â' all Indian firms.

IIRC, it costs about $1k/yr to operate an offshore shell company, and only took about 30min on the phone to setup. My memory sucks though, so listen to the actual podcast where they report the details of their experience of setting up 2 shell companies for their report: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/27/157421340/how-to-set-up-an-offshore-company

Want to know how the super wealthy "hide" their money in off shore accounts? Call an off shore bank and ask? They'll be happy to tell you. For a couple hundred bucks they'll even set up the company for you and open an account.

Problem is, you'll need to get money into your account somehow. To do so will take a wire transfer that the IRS will be notified about. Going the other direction would also take a wire transfer, that the IRS will be notified about.

Here's a radio show about it:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/27/157499893/episode-390-we-set-up-an-offshore-company-in-a-tax-haven

Also, it doesn't let you magically hide money from the IRS like most people think:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/09/18/161358307/episode-403-what-can-we-do-with-our-shell-companies

Want to know how the super wealthy "hide" their money in off shore accounts? Call an off shore bank and ask? They'll be happy to tell you. For a couple hundred bucks they'll even set up the company for you and open an account.

Problem is, you'll need to get money into your account somehow. To do so will take a wire transfer that the IRS will be notified about. Going the other direction would also take a wire transfer, that the IRS will be notified about.

Here's a radio show about it:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/27/157499893/episode-390-we-set-up-an-offshore-company-in-a-tax-haven

Also, it doesn't let you magically hide money from the IRS like most people think:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/09/18/161358307/episode-403-what-can-we-do-with-our-shell-companies

Stockton is the record holder for the biggest city to go bankrupt, and with USD $900 million in pension obligations alone, it's a pretty nasty deal.

Trying to lean on emphasis that the city isn't that large is disingenuous; it is in fact the thirteenth largest city in California by population (out of 100), and California is a big state.

There was a story about this exact kind of thing on NPR's Planet Money:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/12/04/166514067/episode-420-the-legal-marijuana-business

They talk to legitimate business people trying to run a dispensary and handling money is a huge problem for them. It's almost nearly impossible to get a commercial bank account and really complicated to try to run it on a cash basis. The banks are paranoid because its illegal at a Federal level and there's all kinds of ways for the Feds make pain -- money laundering laws, revoking Federal bank charters, seizing assets, and so forth. Suppliers, landlords, employees, the government, customers -- everybody wants to get paid and cash is really clumsy and sometimes not an option.

And of course, they want to be consumer friendly and take plastic, but good luck without banking. I may be remembering this wrong, but they use the gimmick of the low-rent cash machine which will also do purchases-as-cash-advance-for-a-fee so credit card users can "buy" without a cash advance from the credit card company's perspective.

At the end of the day, a pot dispensary should be no different than any other specialty retailer -- doing payroll mostly electronically with printed checks for those who want them, a line of credit at the bank, and various accounts to park cash in or fund check writing, and taking all the usual plastic money from customers.

Mod parent up. US Banks have a long history of issuing their own dollars.(This was mainly true before the US Government started issuing paper currency.)

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/12/07/166747693/episode-421-the-birth-of-the-dollar-bill

...and maybe even distorting the truth, but I'm guessing you picked those "facts" from Christians running to the argument of "...but that's the OLD testament".
Which is bullshit.

New testament is ATTACHED to the old and based on it - it does not supersede it. They're in the same fucking book.
And just go ask any priest (or Christian you're not currently debating) if Adam, Moses, king David and the rest of the lot are a part of the teaching of Christianity.
They don't avoid a single thing. They embrace it.

Even this Slashdot topic is about a guy who's betting that everything in Genesis is true.

For fuck's sake, the entirety of Christianity is BASED on Jesus being of Davidic bloodline - through Joseph who (HA!) is not really his father.
Immaculate conception bitches! It means what WE WANT IT TO MEAN!
Maternal what now? Ancestral line who?
Which part of "bitches! It means what WE WANT IT TO MEAN!" did you not understand?
Maternal line is carried on through the father who is not his real father cause that makes Abraham his ancestor.
Are you retarded or something? Who the hell do you think he is? HE'S THE GOD DAMN MESSIAH!

And please don't give me that crap about Bible/Christianity being less violent, misogynist or pedophilic.
You don't need to go further than numbers 31:7-31:19 to fix that:

7They did battle against Midian, as the Lord had commanded Moses, and killed every male. 8They killed the kings of Midian: Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur, and Reba, the five kings of Midian, in addition to others who were slain by them; and they also killed Balaam son of Beor with the sword. 9The Israelites took the women of Midian and their little ones captive; and they took all their cattle, their flocks, and all their goods as booty. 10All their towns where they had settled, and all their encampments, they burned, 11but they took all the spoil and all the booty, both people and animals. 12Then they brought the captives and the booty and the spoil to Moses, to Eleazar the priest, and to the congregation of the Israelites, at the camp on the plains of Moab by the Jordan at Jericho.

13 Moses, Eleazar the priest, and all the leaders of the congregation went to meet them outside the camp. 14Moses became angry with the officers of the army, the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds, who had come from service in the war. 15Moses said to them, âHave you allowed all the women to live? 16These women here, on Balaamâ(TM)s advice, made the Israelites act treacherously against the Lord in the affair of Peor, so that the plague came among the congregation of the Lord. 17Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. 18But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.

Kill ALL the men, take all their possessions and take their wives and children as slaves? Fuck THAT shit!
Moses says fuck slaves!
Kill ALL those women, and all the boys... but keep the virgin girls as sex slaves.
Voices told him that's what should be done... I mean God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.
And there's plenty more where that came from.

And while one COULD even argue that Islam is a more peaceful religion - that too would be bullshit as it accepts and builds on both the old and the new testament.
Same prophets, same stories, same god - they only wrap it in a new cover and add a chapter or two more.
Abraham 3.11 for Workgroups.

Though, you gotta give it to them for at least making all of those messiahs just mortal men instead of "sons of God", leaving the "Most Arrogant Religion Ever" medal for the Christians.
Though there ARE contenders out there for

Unlikely - the frequencies of the wireless technologies are many orders of magnitude higher than anything associated with a physical wing vibration. The dramatic drop in honeybee population is more likely tied to certain nicotine-derived insecticides. Hmm, an insecticide harming insects? Didn't see that one coming.

"The lab has hired many prominent scientists to work on a variety of inventions including safer nuclear reactor designs and vaccine research"

The 'lab' is nothing more than a patent troll factory ..

"Intellectual Ventures and Lodsys

"this patent also seems to cover a big chunk of what happens on the Internet: upgrading software, buying stuff online, and what's called cloud storage. If you have a patent on all that, you could sue a lot of people. And, in fact, that's what's happening with Chris Crawford's patent. Intellectual Venures sold it to a company called Oasis research in June of 2010. Less than a month later, Oasis Research used the patent to sue over a dozen different tech companies, including Rackspace, GoDaddy, and AT&T."

That's something we already know. It's how humans got viral genes, how cows got snake genes, how a sea slug got algae genes, and how a pea aphid got fungal genes, among other known examples. It's pretty rare unless you're giving things an evolutionary time frame, and has little to do with genetic engineering, either in terms of scientific or patent related concerns.

But I'm also aware without government subsidies,

The problem aren't government subsidies, but simply that companies in China can produce cheaper solar cells then Bosch can. The solar business is full of companies and lots of competition and it's hard to get a lot of money out of that.

Some solar PV companies in China are also exiting the market. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/03/20/174828432/chinese-solar-panel-maker-suntech-goes-bankrupt

Fabrication costs need to go down for makers, and ROI needs to go up for consumers.

cooking things in mugs is easy

You can bake very easily in the microwave. I've made brownies and cupcakes that people enjoy and prep time was a few minutes which results in a steaming muffin in 10 minutes. No,I have not tried a loaf of bread.

I can do scrambled eggs in 2 minutes. Throw it in a pita or a wrap and head out the door. I haven't fried eggs in years. No, I have not used it for hamburgers or steak.

In the hands of a determined individual, some amazing single serving dishes can be made using only a microwave. There are E-books and websites based around the subject. I can survive on a microwave alone and so can you. It's just not preferable.

I usually like your posts, drinky. You seem kind of batshit insane today. I hope everything is ok.

There are some theories that the Neanderthals were actually quite smart, compassionate, and had a sophisticated social system. This is based on burial sites that indicated that they took care of the elderly. Some evidence points to a myth that Neanderthals were hunched over and ape like. It is also interesting that, except for some groups in Africa, most people have traces of Neanderthal DNA indicating that Neanderthals didn't die out, but were interbred with and absorbed into other populations.

I found this story on NPR that talks about one interesting speculation on how this may have happened.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/03/08/173813194/what-happened-when-humans-met-an-alien-intelligence-sex-happened

I think this hits the nail on the head. It's not about lack of focus, it's about lack of interest, and classical music doesn't suddenly get 'cool' because it's on Twitter.

If you want to sell classical music to people, get them interested in it - get them involved in making it. Teach them the history - there's so much history there, and it brings it alive. Listen to Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. Now learn the story behind it and listen again:

http://www.pbs.org/keepingscore/shostakovich-symphony-5.html

Teach them that classical music still gets made, and new things happen:

http://www.npr.org/2012/05/13/151712146/first-listen-hilary-hahn-and-hauschka-silfra

...so in case you can't tell, I'm a classical music fan. I wasn't, actually: like a lot of people, I had nothing against it, but didn't know a lot about it. Getting involved got me into the music. I have my issues with the idea that classical music needs 'saving', but I think more people could be fans and it's only about getting them interested.

By number of cells, the bacteria we carry, outnumber our own cells by an order of magnitude.