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Does that do any good though? They already do this with other criminals and for other crimes, but that doesn't really seem to stop anyone. To some degree, telling high school kids not to do something is going to have the opposite effect. I remember one of my friends in high school saying that after having to sit through some D.A.R.E. type presentation, that he wanted to smoke a joint just to spite them. Apparently, he may not have been the only one that felt that way.

I don't think you can really tell an adolescent anything that they don't want to hear. Part of growing up and becoming an adult is building up independence and pushing back against authority. I believe that if we want to see better outcomes, we have to provide a more controlled environment to let youth make little mistakes and help correct them. That's obviously a lot harder than it sounds, and maybe impossible without spawning some Orwellian hell, but sending some idiot around to speak to high school classes about the evils of swatting isn't going to do much more about stopping it than someone telling my friend and I that weed wasn't cool.

Everyone I know in Michigan where I grew up pays a higher percent of their income for housing than anyone I know in California where I live now.

That is factually untrue. Plus I very much doubt you have any idea what percent of your friends/family's income they spend on housing - it's just not the sort of thing people share. People in Michigan spend on substantially less both in total dollars and as a percent of income. There are other data sources too and they ALL show California near or at the top of the most expensive states to live in no matter if you are talking in total dollars or percent of income.

The salaries more than make up for it.

The salaries demonstrably do NOT make up the difference.

Are you REALLY gonna sit here and argue that Hollywood and the LA music industry isn't as hard left as one can humanly get....really? Because if you truly believe that I have a bridge you might be intersted in buying, dirt cheap!

For the rest of us that have functioning brain cells we all know that endless copyright is being pushed by The House Of Mouse and Disney has been SJW central for the better part of 40 years. Feel free to look up Disney's donations to political parties, you'll see they certainly aren't friends of the right, neither is most of Hollywood which is who will benefit from this legislation.

A quick look at a map confirmed my suspicion that the airport was just built on landfill. It looks like there is also a significant risk of liquefaction when the next earthquake strikes. https://priceonomics.com/what-...

I suspect George Soros, after all, currency manipulation is his shtick. That guy has truly harmed millions of people over his evil money destroying schemes as he made himself and his investors rich.

Remember when he screwed over the British pound: https://priceonomics.com/the-t...

Or when he screwed over Thailand: http://www.businessinsider.com...

Or when he was caught illegally insider trading: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12...

A small price to pay for annoying the alt-right, as I'm sure you'll agree.

I suspect George Soros, after all, currency manipulation is his shtick. That guy has truly harmed millions of people over his evil money destroying schemes as he made himself and his investors rich.

Remember when he screwed over the British pound: https://priceonomics.com/the-t...

Or when he screwed over Thailand: http://www.businessinsider.com...

Or when he was caught illegally insider trading: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12...

The plucky entrepreneur who strip mined the public domain and made millions (back when millions was a LOT of money) and reinvested some of that cash into lawyers and lobbyists to make damn sure no one else on the planet would every be able to do the same.

https://priceonomics.com/how-m...

Errr, the quote is from this link (another article).

Yes, American taxes are insanely high - compared to what they historically were ....

I guess it depends on what you count as "historically" - from 1932 through Regan's days in office the top tax rate was between 70 and 94%. Under Regan it dipped as low as 28%. The current top rate of 40% doesn't seem that crazy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Simplifying things would be something I would support - This was interesting about a California program available to simplify filing:
https://priceonomics.com/the-s...

While correct, I'd say that the models hired for these events make more money than being a woman in IT. Attractive people always make better sales people. You may not like that fact, but human nature (that fact) does not care how you feel. (Plenty more citations for you to find if you are interested in those pesky things called studies.

Citation? start here [lmgtfy.com].

Sorry, that's not evidence of abuse. There is evidence of people — demos (in Greek) — unhappy with the cameras. Proving abuse is much harder.

Moreover, the people receiving fines — and a camera can issue many more tickets than a police officer — would be most unhappy without any abuse whatsoever. A perfectly functional red-light camera, operated in full accordance with rules and laws, would be a source of much unhappiness anyway.

They do not make the observation that the city rigged the yellow lights to be impractically short

A city could do that without a camera. Indeed, there are credible reports of cities rigging speed-limits that way — some more outrageous than others. Small-town governments always had an incentive to prosecute out-of-town folks for every infraction — for such drivers do not vote in local elections — while letting the locals through with a warning or without even being stopped.

Cameras — too stupid (or "impartial") to distinguish — interfered with that approach, fining locals, who represent the majority of drivers, along with out-of-towners and -staters. And that is, most likely, why they've been pulled back... Hence my blaming of Democracy.

Why? Its safer.

No, it's not.
http://priceonomics.com/is-eve...

Do the math on how fast inertia grows.

Oh. "Math". Meanwhile, back in the real world..

I loved Mad Max, but it's in the same blue and orange palette hollywood is obsessed with. Mad Max scenes were shot in full [Namibian desert] daylight, so it looked brighter, but undeniably blue and orange. Read here: http://priceonomics.com/why-ev...

Except copyright only protects...copying verbatim or making derivative copies, still significantly like the original text/work. A character is also an idea - it's protected partly by trademark. Paramount could license these characters for little to no money and still be "protecting" their trademark.

There's no one who knows better than Disney. A lot of Mickey cartoons would likely enter the Public Domain, were it not for them using their character as a trademark. Time will tell whether it's even possible to distribute those easily without a trademark lawsuit.

I don't know why this hasn't been mentioned until now- "the most important meal of the day" thing was popularized in Good Health in 1917.

But in 1944, Grape Nuts made it a thing with General Foods' "most important meal of the day" campaign. And the meme has stuck since then.

citation needed. What I can find says that while yes bulbs would last very very long, they produced less light per watt so over time cost MORE to operate than to buy 'normal' cheap incandescent bulbs. Hence them not making a good long term solution.

link 1

link 2

the second link talks about a supposed 'cartel' but says there's no evidence supporting that it was formed to introduce planned obsolescence.

Let me know when you find the median price of a new car. I half-heartedly searched a couple times a few months back and got nothing. I looked again, just now, and found a chart of used car median prices by city from 2012 and something from the Boston Herald that is probably wrong, since it quotes the same number USA Today says is the average.

In a group of 4 cars, a single $90k luxury model can bring the average up to $33k when the three others cost $15k. That's why nobody cites the average home price, but somehow the median car price is impossible to find. You'll notice, if you go searching, that there are a bunch of articles bemoaning how the "median" American can't afford an "average" priced car, but that's a ridiculous comparison. If a person had the "average" wealth of all Americans, s/he would easily be in the top decile, and probably higher.

You could have, you know, asked for citations?

Speed Variance and Its Influence on Accidents. - Citation that variations in speed kill more than speed itself, that highway speeds tend to have more to do with design of the highway and not posted limit, and that as you move the speed limit signs away from the design speed, variance in driving speed and accident rates go up.

Montana: No Speed Limit Safety Paradox Montana highways at safest without speed limits

Is Every Speed Limit Too Low? - again notes that changing the speed limits doesn't actually change the median speed people drive on the road.

people say this a lot. Got any data on that. And citation if you will.

Just for speeding tickets: 6 billion dollars: http://www.statisticbrain.com/... An average of $152 seems a bit low to me.

If you look at parking meters in San Francisco http://priceonomics.com/san-fr... you'll see they get about $50 million for paid parking, and get $80 Million in parking violations per year.

http://priceonomics.com/how-a-...

Read the article to see that the woman did not just "win hundreds of millions when she got burnt from McDonald's coffee".

Do you have any proof to back that up? Citations? Recent published accounts?

Have you been living under a rock? There have been SCOTUS cases about this. Yes, colleges and universities lower their standards for African Americans and have stricter requirements for Asian Americans. And the African Americans that are admitted are served poorly by this kind of affirmative action: they do worse than if they had gone to lesser institutions and (apparently) don't get hired at the same rates afterwards either.

http://priceonomics.com/post/4...

Or are we suppose to believe your racist banter as is.

Why don't you tone down your own racist banter and get some facts?

So somebody forgot a hyphen in the "computer code instructions" back in 1962 and it cost NASA $80 mill back then, equal to $630 mill or so today. According to this site:

http://priceonomics.com/the-ty...

The SATs and GREs are not state tests. They are run by private companies.

Distinction without difference — in this case.

Besides, cheating private companies — if they are sufficiently omnipresent to be thought part of "the system" (you know, maintained by "The Man" to keep you down) — is part of Americana since, at least, the hippies.

If it is Ok to squat a bank-owned house or to loot and burn a pharmacy, then cheating on a nationwide standardized exam is Ok too.

Chinese students in particular can further legitimize their case by the racism of American college Admission Boards, which favour Whites over Asians (and Blacks over Whites). This article, for example, provides a table from this book, which calculates the SAT-points benefit/penalty for different races: if Whites are treated neutrally, being a Black gains you 310 points, while being an Asian penalizes you by 140 (out of 1600)!

Cheating to protect oneself from such mistreatment would seem rather acceptable...

Ah, but the science of economics is knowing how to successfully exploit the human response to scarcity, usually by creating some

They're out of toilet paper, just like the Soviets.

Or the US:

http://priceonomics.com/the-gr...

Reinforced by the fact that marketing has convinced Americans that they smell bad, when nobody saw a problem before, and they still don't in Europe.

It's not a million per year

Then one of the FAs is incorrect, because this quote comes straight from this one.

As demand for taxis has increased with supply relatively fixed, the cost of the medallion in New York City has skyrocketed to over a million dollars a year.

Well, I threw the question out because I get it all the time, as if it invalids any criticism I might have. Usually my first reaction to a chronic problem, which is what we are dealing with here, is to yell, Stop! That's all that needs to be done for the moment. But the thing is, the species is flourishing despite it all. In nature that's all that seems to matter. Nobody's going to see a problem while the shelves are well stocked, or rather, if they believe they are well stocked, the shortage is temporary..

Uber, Lyft, Sidecar etc. all avoid the enormous cost of Taxi Medallions (which are hundreds of thousands of dollars and in some places pushing 7 figures) -- PER CAB !!!!

However, circumventing medallions is not necessarily a bad thing considering the downsides of medallions.

Actually, sounds like the LA taxi drivers need a union. Get a load of this crap:

In a study of Los Angeles taxi drivers, UCLA professors Gary Blasi and Jacqueline Leavitt found that taxi drivers work on average 72 hours a week for a median take home wage of $8.39 per hour. Not only do they have to pay $2000 in “leasing fees” per month to taxi companies, but the city regulates things like what color socks they can wear (black) and how many days a week they can go to the airport (once). None of the drivers in the survey had health insurance provided by their companies and 61% of them were completely without health insurance.

-- Pricenomics -- The Tyranny of the Taxi Medallions

Sorry there are too many words in this article for your feeble mind, but you are wrong. You only come off as a jackass.

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

No, there are several competing taxi services and any company that wants to start a taxi company can start a service.

There are huge barriers to entry that have almost nothing to do with safety regulations.

In SF, the price of a taxi license or "medalion" is $150,000-$300,000 according to this story:

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/200-S-F-taxi-permits-price-150-000-4055492.php

Around the country: http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47636506327/the-tyranny-of-the-taxi-medallions (interesting look at ride-sharing disruption of taxi business)
"In Boston, the price of a medallion is $625,000. In San Francisco, you need to drive a taxi at least 10 hours a week if you want to hold a medallion and lease it out. Veteran taxi drivers are able to sell their medallions for $300K...."

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-business/us-business/fare-trade-the-rush-on-new-yorks-million-dollar-taxicab-licences/article12329086/
"In April, the price of a medallion sold to an individual buyer crossed $1-million for the first time (medallions sold to corporations broke through that barrier in 2011). In the past 12 months, prices for individual medallions have soared more than 40 per cent."

Going to buy a taxi license? You'll have to keep your car on the road 24/7 to pay for one of those. You can pull some crap with "ride sharing" applications but look for the power of government to shut this sort of thing down soon.