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Except that we only have Warren Buffett's word for that (he has not released his tax returns). When we look at the numbers from the IRS, we discover that the high earners do indeed generally pay a larger percentage of their income (even when capital gains are calculated in) than those who earn less.
The problem with the original poster's idea of a flat amount that everyone pays is that if it is set at an amount that everyone can pay, it does not add up to anywhere near enough money. The federal budget is somewhere around $3 trillion a year. That means the tax bill in order to get a balanced budget would be about $10,000 for each American (including children). If we were looking to just match current income tax revenue the tax bill for each American (still including children) would be about $3,000. For a balanced budget that would mean a tax bill of $40,000 for a family of four. For a tax that just matches income tax revenue it would mean a tax bill of $12,000 for a family of four. Considering that the median household income in the U.S. is somewhere in the vicinity of $50,000, I think it is pretty obvious that there are a large number of people who would be unable to pay the tax..

It's not a total media blackout. It's just not front page news.

But probably not in the way they wanted it to be. It was a success in making Facebook to improve their service. Facebook has now taken all the good things Google+ offered - including improving their games platform streams and just last week they added circles (and it goes both ways, Google+ also completely ripped off Facebook's look and feel)

What's even more worrysome for Google, and not just for Google+ but their entire search engine usage and YouTube, is that this week Facebook will announce a huge upgrade with among others music and video services inside Facebook. This means less time spent on YouTube listening to music (yes, people actually do that, a lot) and more time spent on Facebook. When you're listening to music on Facebook, your friends also see what you listen to - a feature teens especially love. Google+ is missing these things entirely, among the other ones Facebook has had for ages.

Now that Google opens up the beta it means they've lost the PR effect of being somewhat mysterious social network. And frankly, it's quite dead there. I've said about this before too on slashdot, and then people suggested some random people who to follow (mostly IT geeks). The thing is, I don't want to follow those random people. It's not interesting. I want to follow my friends and relatives, and maybe some pages of my interest (like games, tv shows, bands etc). Which is yet again another aspect that Google+ is missing - pages. And event planning, and countless amount of other features.

They had a good PR idea of keeping it mysterious in the beginning, but I really wouldn't want to be the guy who decided it's a good idea to go compete against Facebook with an unfinished product. They killed all the potential Google+ had.

But they don't always work: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-23-samaritan-accident_N.htm

Moral of the story is to familiarize yourself with the laws in your state.

The old way: You have to have invented the product or process and reduced it to practice, you have to file a patent application, and you have to have invented before other inventors.

The new way: You have to have invented the product or process and reduced it to practice, you have to file a patent application, and you have to have filed before other inventors.

Bullshit;

    Sony patents technique of beaming info into brain
    Posted 4/6/2005 3:02 PM
    [...]
    The U.S. patent, granted to Sony researcher Thomas Dawson[1], describes a technique
    for aiming ultrasonic pulses at specific areas of the brain to induce "sensory
    experiences" such as smells, sounds and images.
    [...]
    A Sony Electronics spokeswoman told the magazine that no experiments had been
    conducted, and that the patent "was based on an inspiration that this may someday
    be the direction that technology will take us".
    [...]

1. Method and system for generating sensory data onto the human neural cortex
        United States Patent 6,536,440

The real difference is that now the poor bastard who actually invents an implementable mind
beaming device will actually owe Sony Electronics every cent the invention makes.

He has a significant financial interest in climate science reaching a particular conclusion.

Do you really believe that Al Gore is motivated by money? Think about that for a moment. What evidence is there for it? I don't even know if he has stocks in renewable energy research companies, or the like, but isn't it plausible that he has invested in said (theoretical?) companies because he has lots of money, and believes that this is a good thing to do?

Can you support your point a little better? It sounds like you are just casting unfounded negative aspirtions.

Clearly you have not followed Gore Jr's life much. His family continues to make millions off of oil stocks given to them as a bribe by Armand Hammer.

Here's Gore sort of being disclosed in 2000:

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=468

Here's Gore being called out for more faux caring:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-08-09-gore-green_x.htm

Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.

...and now Gore Jr. is playing both sides.

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/11/03/al-gore-the-worlds-first-carbon-billionaire/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/6491195/Al-Gore-could-become-worlds-first-carbon-billionaire.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/business/energy-environment/03gore.html

Clearly your blinders are locked if you do not understand the clear conflict of interest here. I'm sure the slightest bit of investigative journalism could produce much more incentive.

Governments funding of projects, any projects, is mis-allocation of resources. If the project in question has any reason to exist, then there would be private funding for it, private lending, private interest.

Government can push agenda, but they can't make it work nor should they try.

Either there is a reason for something to exist in the market or there isn't. Government commanding reasons does not work.

It's unfair to compare Apollo and Voyager. They're two completely different types of missions.

The tech gained from Apollo went a long way to pushing main stream computing through development of IC's, fuel cells, and flight computers.

It would be hard to discern the tech from the shuttle program since much of the data we have now might not have been possible under other circumstances. Take Hubble for instance. Sure, it could have been done right the first time, but it wasn't. It's hard to look at Hubble without also thinking about the shuttle program.

USA Today's top 25 achievements from the last 25 years (from 2007) has 9 from NASA. http://www.usatoday.com/marketing/media_kit/pressroom/2007/releases/082007_top_25.html

The main reason that we can do things cheaper now is that we now know what not to do. That's important as well.

And, in fairness, China has chosen between industry with little or no controls, and pollution/the environment.

For the same reason that a lot of Chinese children fell ill when their milk powder was laced with melamine ... because there are either no controls, or it's really easy to bypass them. Ultimately, they exported this to us as pet food.

Hell, even if Apple (or whoever) had stipulated that they do it all according to the book because they wanted to be ethical, there's no guarantee it would have happened. China is more or less completely unregulated capitalism run amok. I must say, I am completely unsurprised by any of this.

And, really, pretty much anywhere in the world, industry will consistently do things like this if nobody is doing an effective job of policing them ... greed and short cuts for profit know no cultural boundaries.

Corporations in America would burn kittens, babies, and the flag for fuel if it was cost effective and nobody stopped them. Especially if you could bribe the people who were supposed to keep you honest.

So, just to get this straight:

You used the figure of "new york city they get $17,000 per year per student" (2007-2008 figure according to http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-06-29-school-spending_N.htm) as a comparison against "Average tuition at a private school is $4,000".

But, looking around, it seems that New York city's costs have fluctuated from year to year: "New York City, the nation’s largest school district, reported spending $13,755 per pupil" (article from 2008). You also picked the highest-cost per pupil city (New York, a city which has high costs in a variety of ways) to compare against the "average" private school tuition. But, in fact, this isn't the "average" private school tuition, either. According to another article, "Average Private School Tuition: 2007-08, All Schools (i.e. Catholic, Other Religious, Non-Sectarian), K-12 Schools" = $10,045 per pupil (Source: http://www.capenet.org/facts.html)

Chicago Public School, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/580789/posts
MA Public School, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7-I9Qp3d4Y
San Diego Public School, http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0712/p01s03-ussc.html

General, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-07-25-muslim-special-treatment-from-schools_N.htm

Hmm, this has been reported several times previously, starting around 11 years ago ..

http://humanlibrary.org/press-archive.html

OK, only 3 years after USA Today (and NY Times) got to it:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-10-17-1940310534_x.htm

Pretty soon slashdot will be the place to go for news for nerds and stuff that matters. Oh, wait.

People automatically assume it's a guy? That's chauvinistic.
Also, she has been head of security at Mozilla. I guess the summary didn't want to throw a third party into the debate.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/2008-06-17-mozilla-window-snyder_N.htm

And yet if a business ran the same levels of debt it would generally be considered to not be borrowing enough! The govt is running a debt-to-income ratio of right around 1 to 1. For every dollar they make in income they borrow 1 more. Most companies run somewhere in the 2-1 or 10-1 range, with several going much higher.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2011-05-24-Dont-believe-national-debt-hype_n.htm

Excuse me? The federal government has an income about equal to the national debt? Ah, er, not sure where you got that math from but it's not quite right. They have borrowed about $15 trillion to date, and annually take in about $2 trillion (on a good year)... Explain how 15:2 is somewhere near 1:1...

And yet if a business ran the same levels of debt it would generally be considered to not be borrowing enough! The govt is running a debt-to-income ratio of right around 1 to 1. For every dollar they make in income they borrow 1 more. Most companies run somewhere in the 2-1 or 10-1 range, with several going much higher.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2011-05-24-Dont-believe-national-debt-hype_n.htm

Those figures appear to be "actual dollars" uncorrected for inflation. So you're technically correct, but if you want to compare years, the Wikipedia graph is a more accurate way to look at it. And it's not just Wikipedia. Other sources which have corrected for inflation look the same.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/story/Government-Debt-Graphic/39255812/1
http://www.supportingevidence.com/Government/fed_debt_over_time.html

This site looks at the debt in a lot of different ways: http://www.marktaw.com/culture_and_media/TheNationalDebt.html

The reason GDP has plummeted is that high tax rates,labor rates, and costs of massive regulation have encouraged business and manufacturing to leave the country in droves for decades for friendlier business pastures.

Labor rates in the US relative to corporate profits are very low today:

Corporate earnings are the highest they've been relative to worker wages (including benefits) since just before the Great Depression...If earnings were to suddenly revert to their historic average relative to wages...stocks would have to fall about 40% to return to their average level relative to earnings.

Have some companies moved production abroad? Yeah. But there are still 150 million people at work in this country full time. That's a freaking lot of people at work.

USA Today reported on a trend way back in 2010 of companies moving manufacturing work back to the US, despite what you characterize as high labor costs and massive regulation:

Chinese wages and shipping costs have risen sharply in the past few years while U.S. salaries have stayed flat, or in some cases, fallen in the recession. Meanwhile, U.S. manufacturers have been frustrated by the sometimes poor quality of goods made by foreign contractors, theft of their intellectual property and long product-delivery cycles that make them less responsive to customer demand.

With the cost gap between the U.S. and other countries narrowing for other expenses, such as class-action lawsuits, making products in the USA is now about 22% higher than the average of nine of its largest trading partners, down from 32% in 2006.

Extending your logic, the tax bill on an 80,000 lb 18-wheeler that hauls food to your local grocery would be 2.56 million times the taxes paid on a 2,000 lb car.

I oversimplified a little. Road wear is actually proportional to the 4th power of the axle loading, and tire size also comes into play. In the end, a 40-ton truck does as much damage to the road as (only) 9,600 cars.

And because a 22,400-lb axle load causes 6.4 times as much road cracking as an 18,000-lb load, making truckers pay their fair share of the road wear would encourage them to haul lighter loads to save money. In the end, it would save us all money.

, IT DOES NOT WORK, in the real world

Actually, it does. It might not affect you and your 53Km commute, at least immediately, but it doesn't have to affect you. It just has to affect somebody, a portion of the population.

What gasoline is is a fairly inelastic good - thus it takes a relatively large price change to see real changes, it does happen.

Step 1 is people driving less - batching up their trips more, going to the grocery every other week rather than every week. Not driving as far on vacation, etc... Also seen is people driving slower
Step 2 has people buying more fuel efficient cars.
Step 3 is people tending to select homes and/or work that are closer together.

If there really were no waste in the federal government, then please tell me how it is NO ONE got laid off last year?

Oh really? So that's why they 12000 people were fired last year? Yes, as the story says that is less than private sector but is much more than the "NO ONE" you claimed. Plus there are thousands more coming this year as well.

And that they all got raises when the private sector is getting pay cuts?

Actually they had a 2 year pay freeze put on them.

Did you even bother to research a single one of your claims since they were easily disproved in 1 minute of Googling?

Prison rape is more a popular plot device, and cultural running-gag than an actual problem in the US. Aesop's fables are probably the closest analogy.

Studies have shown the problem is, in fact, very limited: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-17-prison-rape_x.htm

Ooh, good catch. (I'm the A/C above, didn't notice I wasn't logged in). I have to wonder what type of info they may have posted to the logged in user at the time when they made the listings. Probably very little based on what you found. I think most of us agree she appears to have approached the whole thing without enough common sense.

I just ran across this usatoday article which had some more info (apparently the 19 year old isn't in SF PD custody anymore...).

EJ claims she hasn't gotten squat from airbnb still, airbnb is saying they have offered all sortsa compensation. Seems like an easy enough thing to verify; I don't get how it's still a he-says-she-says routine.

What was interesting in the article was this bit from airbnb:
Airbnb, while pointing out that the incident was the first of its kind out of some 2 million stays booked since the company's founding in 2008, announced that it would be doubling the size of its customer service staff (42 people at the time of the incident and 88 currently), offering insurance to hosts and creating a "Trust and Safety" department, among other measures.

That seems to imply that they do not currently offer insurance. How naive of them to not consider it necessary in the last 3 years. One of their similar competitors, roomarama.com, also doesn't provide any type of insurance.

Also from that article:
She said was "growing a very thick skin" because of accusations that she was part of a plot by the hotel industry to discredit Airbnb, and because of criticism that she courted disaster by opening her rented apartment to strangers.
That's just harsh. I couldn't find who was supposedly making those accusations, but if it's more than the cynical /. user, that just isn't right.

Here's hoping she at least gets her backup drive back.

Rose lensed glasses for everyone!

This data -- or at least the end-result manipulated data -- has been debunked, and the methods used to manipulate it seriously called into question (see the Wegman Report). But the alarmists just keep going along as though that never happened and nothing is wrong.

Wegman report? Do you mean this Wegman report

The guy has been completely discredited. He is a fraud and a plagiarist, and if GMU has any integrity at all, he will soon be an unemployed ex-faculty member.

BTW, who's paying you come here and spout this propaganda `Jane Q. Public'? Which right-wing `think tank' or petroleum-funded `research institute' do you work for?

This data -- or at least the end-result manipulated data -- has been debunked, and the methods used to manipulate it seriously called into question (see the Wegman Report). But the alarmists just keep going along as though that never happened and nothing is wrong.

Wegman report? Do you mean this Wegman report

The guy has been completely discredited. He is a fraud and a plagiarist, and if GMU has any integrity at all, he will soon be an unemployed ex-faculty member.

BTW, who's paying you come here and spout this propaganda `Jane Q. Public'? Which right-wing `think tank' or petroleum-funded `research institute' do you work for?

My mistake, 53%. But it looks like Carter era rates > 70% are back in, and some democrats (remember, the guys who championed slavery about 100 years ago?) don't see anything wrong with taxation as high as 94% as they were in the 1950s, more great democrat ideas. Conservative Republicans (remember the guys who were founded as the abolitionist party?) want to spend less money and tax you and me less.

Conservatives are not the demons here, they want to spend less of our money on bull shit of any kind. On the other hand, the democrats want to spend more, on anything and everything so much more that we need to continuously raise the debit ceiling without explanation. In the opinion of "progressive liberals" nothing is outside of the scope of "things the government should be involved in". Where money can be spent by the government, outside of defending ourselves from foreign invaders of course, spend it!

The government never has enough power! Liberals opine: If only Obama had dictatorial control over the country! Obama isn't against that, indeed, he argues that Obama can do this debit ceiling stuff himself under the 14th amendment. Of course using this liberal reading of the 14h amendment, why, congress really doesn't hold any power over the spending of the executive branch. Similar arguments have been made, for example a liberal interpretation of the commerce clause in Wickard v. Filburn. And of course they're using the same argument to compel everyone to buy health insurance.

Was I wrong? Ya, I'll admit that, but I'm not crazy by any measure, I was just off by 17%.

We don't expect fools such as you to understand. Feel free to keep living in our shadow, silly internet troll.

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

I had a small amount of sympathy for them.

Then I went to one of their rallies and saw the raw racism and insanity of their followers.

"Taxed enough already" - you do realize taxes are the lowest that they've been since the 1950's, right? That the "top income earners" actually, after you count up all the loopholes and compare how much of their "income" actually gets taxed at the much lower Capital Gains rates, actually pay less in taxes than the middle class do?

This is the problem today. There is so much disinformation and misinformation spewed out there by Rush, Beck, Faux News, and the rest of the insane nutwing noise machine that large numbers of people are willing to give them the "well if even if a little of what they say is true" benefit of the doubt. And then we get people like you who wind up with "sympathy" for the Tea Partiers because you aren't informed enough to realize how full of crap the Tea Party is.

AFAIC, I don't actually care whether his treatment is fake or not, I really do not care. He seems to have gotten the FDA Trial Phase I and Phase II approvals. So the stuff is safe for consumption, that's all that is actually important to know.

At that point I don't want government being anywhere near the treatments. There are plenty of cases where FDA involvement does one thing only: increase the cost of drugs or worse. If FDA even has to exist, it's role should be limited to questions concerning safety and nothing more, as it's useless in most important cases anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mifepristone#FDA_controversy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QqIN9EfQwM

Hmm... So can we now make bad jokes or flippant remarks about bombs in airports and on airplanes now without getting arrested under federal criminal charges now? I haven't been able to find out the outcome for this guy mentioned below yet, but if he's still in jail maybe he can get his conviction overturned on appeal:

On a recent flight to New York, Draco Slaughter, 75, was arrested on terrorism-related charges. His crime? He made a bad joke to a flight attendant. Slaughter did not exactly slay his audience. The joke not only resulted in a federal criminal charge but could result in seven years incarceration — the ultimate bomb of a joke

US Students Say Press Freedoms Go Too Far

One in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, according to a survey being released today.

The survey of 112,003 students finds that 36% believe newspapers should get "government approval" of stories before publishing; 51% say they should be able to publish freely; 13% have no opinion.

Asked whether the press enjoys "too much freedom," not enough or about the right amount, 32% say "too much," and 37% say it has the right amount. Ten percent say it has too little.

The survey of First Amendment rights was commissioned by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and conducted last spring by the University of Connecticut. It also questioned 327 principals and 7,889 teachers.

The findings aren't surprising to Jack Dvorak, director of the High School Journalism Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington. "Even professional journalists are often unaware of a lot of the freedoms that might be associated with the First Amendment," he says.

The survey "confirms what a lot of people who are interested in this area have known for a long time," he says: Kids aren't learning enough about the First Amendment in history, civics or English classes. It also tracks closely with recent findings of adults' attitudes.

"It's part of our Constitution, so this should be part of a formal education," says Dvorak, who has worked with student journalists since 1968.

source: http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2005-01-30-students-press_x.htm

You're deluded if you don't think inflation isn't a problem. You're also nuts if you think all of these commodity spikes are somehow "speculation" driven.

Did the bank of america stuff ever get released? Wasn't that supposed to shed light on the whole economic meltdown and put people in jail and save the world and shit? Or did it get released and the news never picked up on it?

Didn't get a lot of play in the news, but yeah, they did release it.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2011/03/anonymous-hackers-release-bank-of-america-emails/1

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/mar/14/anonymous-hackers-release-bank-america-emails

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/14/bank-of-america-anonymous-leak-mortgage_n_835220.html

Hmmm, apparently someone actually did die, sadly it wasn't Murdoch. http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2011-07-18-murdoch_n.htm

Mysteries aplenty.

Given the existence of the placebo effect, in what way do you suppose that the market -- consisting of individuals who operate on limited information -- will be able to tell the difference in efficacy between a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory and acupuncture?

- ha ha, the way it was always done, by doctors sharing information among each other, learning what works and what doesn't - the only real way things are found to be useful or not.

Especially given that so-called "alternative medicines" such as Zicam can effectively compete against science-based medicine even with FDA regulations in place? Do you propose we go back to the patent medicine era?

- I am against all patents altogether. There should be no gov't creating artificial barriers to entry against individuals and for monopolies and there should be no special treatment provided to monopolies, like in case with this, falsifying the results to help out some friends in giant pharma. However FDA routinely denies people in US access to drugs, that are used all over the world, for example the drug RU 386, which was used in Europe and was banned in US by FDA.

Why the fuck should some piece of shit government organization deny you access to drugs, any drugs if you wish so and especially drugs that are known to be effective and are in use in the rest of the world?

The reason we have the regulations we have by the FDA is because we tried working without them and, unsurprisingly, people died and a lot of unscrupulous hucksters made a lot of money.

- no, the reason you have FDA being what it is, is because it has enormous power, which translates into dollars for monopolies, who kill off the small competitors and make sure prices never fall.

We have the same thing going on now with homeopathic medicine.

- there is no reason for FDA to get involved into this homeopathic stuff, especially since it is just placebo.

What we need are good, functional, and smarter regulations, not merely fewer or more regulations.

- seriously? You truly believe that? You truly want government to regulate your life? To tell you, probably a grown ass man, what you can and cannot use in your life as drugs? To ensure that only monopolies can sell you drugs? To make sure you have to pay a small fortune for any real treatment?

Please check your facts before posting; this took me all of a minute with a search engine to find in PLoS.

- I'll give you some facts.

Here is one. A drug that before FDA approval only cost $10/shot (ten dollars), once approved by FDA was immediately repriced at $1500 dollars a shot (one thousand five hundred dollars), as FDA granted a monopoly to the producer company, so nobody could compete with them. This is for a drug that people need to take 20 times, so that's $30,000 for the 20 times instead of $200 as it was prior to FDA 'approval' - in reality granting a monopoly. The orders of magnitude, by which FDA raises costs to the end users are similar with this drug.

And yes, it only takes an Internet search.

As stated elsewhere, this is exactly what happened with Clear. A laptop containing a large amount of traveller data was lost in a back office in San Francisco. It was later found hidden in a filing cabinet. Nobody knew if it was taken and returned or just overlooked. The Clear program was shut down shortly after this event.

Translated from a conversation with one of the "Republican Libertarian" Tee Tardier types recently:

TT: "The government shouldn't tell us what to do. The people in large numbers will always average out to making the right choice."

Me: Oh? Then how about all the studies showing that, in fact, "cheaper", "easier" solutions that are absolutely ruinous to health, environment, and the national welfare were chosen by "the people in large numbers" over and over despite being the completely wrong choice?

TT: "But but... RUSH SAID SO!"

It IS the government's job to "mold behavior" if there is a problem.
Such as smog emissions causing an epidemic of asthma.
Or the overuse of a finite resource that should be conserved.
Or the wasteful use of a resource that overfills landfills and causes hazardous materials to leak into the water table, which is what happen when you put assloads of crappy chinese-made incandescent bulbs (how Ironic that the Republicans are yet again sponsoring a bill whose major net effect would be a boon for China yet again) into landfills when they burn out after two months or less each.

Still... that strongly suggests to me that the impression that all police are corrupt is an overbroad generalization that borders on slander.

It could be so; however, as you know, one bad apple spoils the whole barrel.

any sampling bias I may have is based only on the cities where I have lived

That is also an important point. A police department in a corrupt city is more likely to be corrupt, see New Orleans.

Farm subsidies in the US aren't a Republican or Democrat thing. The recent vote in the US senate to end ethanol subsidies shows it is more rural farm region versus coastal urban region thing. I blame Iowa for this since they have the first primary and all presidential candidates fall all over themselves to promise more corn, ethanol, and farm subsidies.

In my state, very few lawmakers are lawyers and yet we have laws against the unauthorized practice of law. That's not the main issue. The main issue is that legal rights are so incredibly easy to screw up in a permanent way that accountability is necessary. Licensed attorneys are accountable to a professional organization, normally supervised by courts, that can terminate their careers if they screw up badly enough. They are also accountable to clients for legal malpractice and, in most states, are required to cover malpractice insurance in order to stay licensed to ensure that clients with valid malpractice claims are not left holding the bag.

The concern with unauthorized practice of law is that people without such accountability will screw up people's rights and leave them with no recourse. And if we are honest, the vast majority of people who want to provide legal services without a license are not only de jure but also quite de facto unqualified to do so. There truly are random Joes off the street claiming to be lawyers, getting paid, and ending up providing horrendously bad services that result in permanent loss of others' rights.

LegalZoom presents an interesting part of the gray area. If you utilize their services and get screwed in a way that a competent attorney would have been able to protect you from, what is your recourse?

Unauthorized practice of law prohibitions do have the result of protectionism for the legal industry, but that is not their reason for existence. They also have the result of protecting everyone from being left out in the cold with neither their rights nor any insurance or other coverage for their losses. That is why they exist, which is in stark contrast to truer protectionism laws such as Louisiana's florist licensing law. I'm not sure whom we are protecting by requiring florists to pass a licensing exam before they can sell flowers.

And criminology is still in the dark ages, and we use leeches and blood letting as the main sources of medical treatment today.

Don't sell them short. The FDA cleared them for medical use seven years ago...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5319129/ns/health-health_care/t/fda-approves-leeches-medical-devices/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/leeches.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2004-07-07-leeches-maggots_x.htm
http://www.mnn.com/health/fitness-well-being/videos/leeches-regain-hold-in-medicine

Hey man I'll cut your grass if you let me smoke pot all day and not pay any taxes.

Many people here "illegally" pay taxes. And they avoid petty crimes because of being busted can get the deported.

So, the "lazy illegal" stereotype? Bullshit.

You could.

Which is why it's now illegal.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/2006-12-14-melting-ban-usat_x.htm

There are great ways to fund investigative journalism. Here are a few:

http://homedelivery.nytimes.com/
https://services.chicagotribune.com/
http://www.latimes.com/about/mediagroup/shop-and-subscribe/
http://service.usatoday.com/

More investigative journalism comes out of daily newspapers than anywhere else. Subscribe to your local newspaper.

And our federal government letting everyone who wants one get a mortgage gave us this.

Central planning: "You do this"
Regulated market: "You have to pay me 30% of your money, except those of you who are doing this, you guys pay 10%"

10 feet of rainfall in a week is a wee bit troublesome for just about any ecosystem on the planet.

Not really 10 feet in a week, but probably more than you imagine:

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news/2005-12-28-alaska-precipitation_x.htm

Your math for the distance is spot on, but I checked quickly and even for a compact, the average length of a car is nearly 15 feet according to http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2007-07-15-little-big-cars_N.htm. That makes 88 feet less than 6 car lengths. Regardless I'm nitpicking a bit. More importantly, you don't need to wait a full three seconds after the person in front of you moves.

That would be true if you accelerated at exactly the same rate as them, but if you do so a bit more slowly, you can start much sooner. I do follow the three second rule and recommend others do as well. I've never rear ended anyone, but I have had more than one situation where someone slammed the breaks in front of me and I would have had I been following as close behind as most other drivers around here do.

On the most recent occasion, the person behind me came about as close as you can get from hitting me. If I hadn't inched up a bit more at the last second, he probably would have hit me, and I didn't stop nearly as quickly as the car in front of me did, which I had no trouble avoiding.

You are trying to change the subject once again - why are you talking about the days of communism and the Pravda?

I'm talking about the year of 2010 when a record heat wave hit Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe. You started with this bold-faced lie:

[...] shortages of supply in commodities? On which planet?

I gave you the link: here it is again ("Russian wheat export ban threatens higher inflation and food riots") . That article predicted food inflation before last year's big run-up in food commodity prices.

Here's more pictures from that record heat-wave ("Wildfire Pictures: Russia Burns, Moscow Chokes") , unprecedented in Russia's 200 years history of meteorological record keeping.

The year 2010 was also the hottest year on record, with record low Arctic ice early this year ("Arctic warmth: Sea ice at record low levels in January [2011]") .

Can you read, liar? Can you think? Do you really think that with major wheat production areas on fire or hit by record draught and with population growing ever faster wheat production is just business as usual and prices will stay super low?

Once upon a time there was a country Germany that had the world leading technology in maglev trains. Unfortunately while the Germans had the technology, due to their regulatory system they could not actually build the systems in their own country, so they shopped their technology to a country that could, China.

The Chinese paid for building one demonstration system in Shanghai and seemed to be interested in paying for more maglev business from the Germans. Unfortunately after "public protests" of radiation further projects kept getting delayed so nothing was actually built. Then the Chinese developed their own maglev technology and no longer needed the Germans. The end.

...hackers have been the reason digital systems haven't been adopted sooner.

Here's an idea, let's not connect it to the Internet.

Like the Iranian uranium enriching centrifuges were connected to the Internet?

Or... what? Are they going to relocate microcontroller plants in US... or, for the reasons of costs, will be just produced in... a nation which has a 30-strong Blue Army commando (strictly for defense, of course. It's not likely they'll ever plant backdoors in hardware, isn't it?)? Something in TFA hints the second. Let me see if I can find it... here, just at the beginning:

In a nation where a digital blender can be bought for about $30 at Walmart,

I wonder where that $30 blender was made? In Toyota plants?