The Japanese meal you describe sounds somewhat healthier than the American fast food diet of:
Two beef patties slathered with carbohydrate-rich condiments sandwiched between carbohydrate-rich bread, served with a side of carbohydrate-rich french fries and a 32 oz. cup of high fructose corn syrup. All super-sized because the marginal cost of the ingredients is so low, it is profitable for the restaurants to offer extra portions for a premium.
The innocuous-seeming bun, even, is so loaded with refined carbohydrates that you might as well be eating your hamburger in the middle of a donut sliced in half.
I know you're kidding, but prior to 9/11 the Justice Dept. did seem to be transforming itself into a federal vice squad, wiretapping a brothel in New Orleans and cracking down on medical marijuana clubs in California--clubs that state voters and local law enforcement approved. Their emphasis on "moral" crimes was unprecedented. I have no doubt medical marijuana clubs were a higher priority for the senior leadership than counterterrorism. In their minds, those dirty marijuana-toking, pornography-loving hippies *are* "the terrorists."
There is very little that you could say about this administration that I would find too insane to be plausible.
And from recent testimony re: the NSA wiretapping it appears that Ashcroft was actually *less* disrespectful of the Constitution and rule of law than Gonzalez.
Remember as the IT Guy that you possess specialized knowledge not unlike a doctor or a lawyer: professions where making stuff up is a time honored tradition.
What are you, like, 16 and you just got off your shift at Fry's? You might get away with this a couple times, but as soon as you get caught--and you will, installing MS Office is not a skill on a par with being a doctor or a lawyer, or even high-end janitorial work--you'll look really, really bad, and you'll be the first person they layoff when your bosses need to trim expenses. Comic Book Store Guy and Nick the Computer Guy are funny on TV, but they're funny precisely because no one wants to work with someone like that.
From the article: Case declined to provide specifics about the health care ventures he intends to pursue. He said 90 percent of health care expenditures go to treat sick patients while only 10 percent are earmarked for keeping people well. His comments, and early investments, suggest that he will focus on the wellness business.
What the hell does this even mean?
There is no shortage of healthcare business models that involve extracting money from people who aren't sick. The problem is in transferring that money to actual health care, which gets more complicated when middlemen like Steve Case, not to mention the for-profit HMOs and for-profit pharmaceutical companies and the doctors from the AMA (world's most powerful trade union) start wanting their cut. Trust the former chairman of AOL, architect of the disastrous Time Warner/AOL merger to reform health care? Bring the same brilliant technological innovations to health care that AOL brought to the Internet? Pah!
This train traveling at more than 300mph requires around 10mph to stop. Therefore, it is less than ideal in extremely dense corridors like the northeast USA and closer to ideal in California, where the major population centers are separated by hundreds of miles of farmland where few stops would need to be made.
Because it shows precisely what I am talking about - the population density and short distances of the area the OP describes are the exception, rather than the rule.
What's your point? That a maglev across the Dakotas would be impractical? Because you seem to be expending a lot of energy trying to make a point that everyone has already stipulated.
If you get south of that line, you pretty quickly run into a lot of nothingness too. The triangle bounded (roughly) by Baltimore, Chicago, and Boston is quite dense - and you flew right up the middle of it. But outside of the (rough) triangle, population density drops off dramatically. (And even so, there are good chunks of that dense triangle that aren't particularly crowded.)
15 percent of the US population lives within 300 miles of Chicago, not all of that to the east. Or did you forget about Milwaukee, St. Louis, Louisville, Minneapolis, Madison, Des Moines, Springfield... The midwest is less dense than the East, but the Great American Desert doesn't really begin until you get west of Omaha.
Need I drag out the satellite imagery of the United States at night?
*California* is probably too large for a HS rail network - large parts of it a pretty close to empty. The bulk of the population is in three centers, fairly well clustered together.
Are you kidding? California is practically ideal for high-speed rail. North-South travel is already highly concentrated through the Central Valley along I-5. On either side of the Central Valley there are mountains: scenic, but not exactly conducive to speedy travel. Consider that for people in the Bay Area, it's faster to travel out of their way to I-5 before heading south than it is to head due south via some winding coastal road like Hwy. 1. So from Sacramento to LA you have a corridor that is densely traveled, but sparsely populated for long stretches. The route is just barely long enough to be worth a plane trip. But it's far enough, and enough people do it often enough, that it would be a great benefit to shorten the trip by a couple of hours, as is completely feasible by high-speed train.
The train could travel at top speed from Sacramento to somewhere south of Bakersfield, probably, stopping only a few times to pick up people connecting from the major population centers along the way. That would easily shave several of the most boring hours off the trip from Sacto/the Bay Area to LA/San Diego and vice versa. Bravo.
It's a pity that although this is completely feasible right now, it's unlikely to happen until my yet-to-be-born children by the wife-I-have-yet-to-meet are off to college. (Which is to say... at least 20 years from now and possibly never.)
George III wasn't an absolute monarch. England had the Magna Carta, a Parliament that wasn't a rubber stamp, and a well developed legal system well before the American colonies existed. When the American colonists rebelled, they were demanding the rights they felt they were entitled to as Englishmen, having lived under representative governments their entire lives.
Checks on royal authority and the existence of a broad middle class helped the British monarchs keep their heads while absolute monarchs on the continent were literally losing theirs.
It's because Proposition 13 and the Tax Revolt in the late '70s gutted financing for K-12 education. That, along with California's constitutional requirement that tax increases pass with a 2/3 majority. The teachers unions can be somewhat too inflexible, but they're no worse in California than they are in any of the top-ranked states. It's the underfinancing that's has been killing California's schools for the past 30 years. Thank your antitax crusaders, the progenitors of the modern conservative movement.
Apple is located in Cupertino, CA, in the middle of Silicon Valley. It is not a "good location". Silicon Valley is endless, boring, ugly suburban sprawl.
Cupertino is an urban oasis compared to the gargantuan office parks of South San Francisco, where Genentech is located. It took half of my lunch break just to walk from my office building across the parking lot to the office building with the sandwich shop that is similar to a concession you might find in an airport. There are tens of thousands of people working in this area and none of the usual amenities you would find in an area with tens of thousands of people. The company where I work has a break room with video games. Very cool, eh? It's a small concession to the fact that this is in fact a very uncool location. There is *nothing* in this area but huge, soulless office buildings and parking lots.
When my university newspaper decided to go online back in 1994, there was a serious debate about whether to use the web or gopher. The web was a cool new toy (Ooh! *Pictures*!) but hardly anywhere on campus except the computer lab had a connection fast enough to make practical use of it. Plus people were vastly more familiar with gopher.
A year later every dorm room was networked and gopher was history. It was a pretty stunning shift.
I'm pretty glad the newspaper didn't invest a lot of time and effort, in 1994, building the Daily U gopher site. That would have been... embarrassing.
I believe so. And Battlestar Galactica was a coproduction with SkyOne (?) But it's first run is in the US (Or co-first-run, with the UK). So it counts. It's not like it's 10-year-old episodes of "Are You Being Served" or something.
You must have missed the first adjective in the phrase current American television.
The Wire, Deadwood, Rome, the Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, Good Eats...
These are just some that I like. Others could probably name a dozen more of comparable quality. Granted, Deadwood and the Sopranos will be off the air soon. Also granted, the cable subscription required to obtain these legally from basic cable + premium cable (HBO) costs at least 6 times the BBC license fee.
Sadly, the closest US-equivalent to the BBC news is... BBC news. It's why we're going to hell in a handbasket. Even NPR doesn't compare. It doesn't do much for the credibility of a news organization when they have to begin and end each broadcast with an advertisement from their underwriters in agribusiness, defense contracting, and charitable trusts managed by the heirs of deceased robber barons.
God, I hate these obnoxious "trend" stories in the Wall Steet Journal and the New York Times. They're always designed to inflate the reader's ego. Some evergreen "trends": it' getting harder to get into the right preschool, it's hard to get into the right co-op in Manhattan, $100,000 weddings are becoming the norm, prenatal preparation for the SAT is becoming the norm, etc. etc. You're supposed to develop some sort of tribal identity around these problems.
So here we have the Blackberry. Ooh, ooh, that's me! I have a Blackberry! I have a Blackberry and I live in New York! I'm busy and important too!
But what's the real news here? People who place a high priority on their work have trouble balancing work with family. Big frickin' deal. What's the evidence that a generation of "Blackberry orphans" is emerging? Zero. It's all anecdotal--designed to make you feel like you must be important because you have a Blackberry. I suppose it's also there so the reporter can let it slip that he knows the creator of Entourage.
What really galls me is that someone got paid to write this shit. It's so, so easy. Make up a trend, call your friends for some quotes, get a quote from one "expert" from your Rolodex. It's like this:
Trend: Farting in elevators Quote 1: I was in an elevator when someone farted once. Quote 2: Me too! Expert: We're seeing a lot of people farting in elevators as Mexican food has become chic in upscale, Manhattan neighborhoods. Quote 3: Yeah, farting in elevators is definitely a trend I've been noticing.
With any luck, if you apply this formula, you'll done with your article by lunchtime. Bad reporter! Go out and find some real news. There are millions of people who would kill to be a reporter at the Wall Street Journal (disgruntled journalism major, here) so go out and earn your place at this respected newspaper! Do your damn job, and stop phoning it in!
If the Mahdi Army ever manages to occupy the United States without benefit of a Navy, Air Force, more than a few thousand regular troops, or really, any reason to want to occupy the United States, I'll be happy to head to the hills and fight them guerilla-style, ala Red Dawn. (I've got my Rambo survival knife with the sawblade edge, compass, and toothpick ready. Wolverines!)
Until then, I think the half a trillion dollars a year we spend on the military, plus the trillion extra we're likely to spend on the Iraqi occupution, is just too damn much. We should just admit that the military is a big Keynesian jobs program and spend the money on park rangers or something. We'd have the most awesome system of National Parks in the history of the world, and it would be a lot less counterproductive than the rathole we're throwing the money down now.
I *like* my country, but I can't afford the health insurance.
I'm personally joining the US Army at the end of this semester, cause I love my country, not to mention the job training and benefits will be great.
Oh hell no. I don't want to pay for your job training, benefits, enlistment bonus, or PTSD counseling when you come home with your legs blown off. I have sympathy for people who enlisted years ago and might have been misled into believing we had responsible civilian oversight of the military, but not for you. If you join the Army now, you're just a dick. Go get a real job and be productive. Stop sucking on the teat of the US taxpayer.
However, when in USA I feel that I am so far away from everything. Manhattan is the exception. In LA I have an hour in a car to anything. In Las Vegas it takes a day to get anywhere else.
I would say this is true of the American West, even in the big cities on the coast. I feel disconnected from the rest of the country out here in San Francisco. Maybe it's because the population is stretched out along the coast. Inland it's just... farmland... then about 1,000 miles of nothing until you get to someplace with enough water to support civilization. If you've ever driven coast-to-coast on I-80, about 9 million of those miles seem to be in Nebraska.
I felt more connected when I lived in Chicago. Although Chicagoland no longer has as large a population as LA, it's the hub in a wheel of fairly large cities. Something like fifteen percent of the US population lives within 200 miles of it. This is also where (if you're traveling West to East) it becomes possible you might encounter something resembling public transportation and walkable neighborhoods. Cities east of here were mostly planned before the invention of the automobile--a really good thing.
<troll>
Chicago also has the best pizza and hot dogs in the world. Suck it, New York.
</troll>
The Eastern seaboard is more dense yet. Still, it's not quite like being in continental Europe and being able to visit another country with a couple hours of travel (via train! We lack those too.) Surely the US East Coast--not just Manhattan--is more dense and varied than Scandinavia, though. Just no fjords.
I guess I could have saved a couple of paragraphs by just linking this satellite image of North America at night:
While it is in their interests to eventually carry over into alternative fuel markets, taxing the crap out of them to force it defeats the free market and ultimately ends up punishing the consumer.
If we allowed market forces to determine everything, we'd still be choking on smog like 30 years ago. But we decided to regulate it instead, and things are (not ideal, but) a lot better. There was no free market reason for any individual company to cut down on air pollution. But through government regulation, we can do something in everyone's interest. The economy in California is better for the fact that Los Angeles doesn't hav smog as bad as Mexico City's.
While they're at it why don't they tax Coca Cola so that we can find soda-alternative drinks! Or maybe tax Silicon Valley itself a little higher to fund research into alternative computing?
Slashdot Mirror
The Japanese meal you describe sounds somewhat healthier than the American fast food diet of:
Two beef patties slathered with carbohydrate-rich condiments sandwiched between carbohydrate-rich bread, served with a side of carbohydrate-rich french fries and a 32 oz. cup of high fructose corn syrup. All super-sized because the marginal cost of the ingredients is so low, it is profitable for the restaurants to offer extra portions for a premium.
The innocuous-seeming bun, even, is so loaded with refined carbohydrates that you might as well be eating your hamburger in the middle of a donut sliced in half.
PS,
If this were fark.com I'd be posting an image macro: "Ceiling Ashcroft... is watching you masturbate"
I know you're kidding, but prior to 9/11 the Justice Dept. did seem to be transforming itself into a federal vice squad, wiretapping a brothel in New Orleans and cracking down on medical marijuana clubs in California--clubs that state voters and local law enforcement approved. Their emphasis on "moral" crimes was unprecedented. I have no doubt medical marijuana clubs were a higher priority for the senior leadership than counterterrorism. In their minds, those dirty marijuana-toking, pornography-loving hippies *are* "the terrorists."
There is very little that you could say about this administration that I would find too insane to be plausible.
More on Ashcroft's Justice Dept. here.
And from recent testimony re: the NSA wiretapping it appears that Ashcroft was actually *less* disrespectful of the Constitution and rule of law than Gonzalez.
Remember as the IT Guy that you possess specialized knowledge not unlike a doctor or a lawyer: professions where making stuff up is a time honored tradition.
What are you, like, 16 and you just got off your shift at Fry's? You might get away with this a couple times, but as soon as you get caught--and you will, installing MS Office is not a skill on a par with being a doctor or a lawyer, or even high-end janitorial work--you'll look really, really bad, and you'll be the first person they layoff when your bosses need to trim expenses. Comic Book Store Guy and Nick the Computer Guy are funny on TV, but they're funny precisely because no one wants to work with someone like that.
From the article:
Case declined to provide specifics about the health care ventures he intends to pursue. He said 90 percent of health care expenditures go to treat sick patients while only 10 percent are earmarked for keeping people well. His comments, and early investments, suggest that he will focus on the wellness business.
What the hell does this even mean?
There is no shortage of healthcare business models that involve extracting money from people who aren't sick. The problem is in transferring that money to actual health care, which gets more complicated when middlemen like Steve Case, not to mention the for-profit HMOs and for-profit pharmaceutical companies and the doctors from the AMA (world's most powerful trade union) start wanting their cut. Trust the former chairman of AOL, architect of the disastrous Time Warner/AOL merger to reform health care? Bring the same brilliant technological innovations to health care that AOL brought to the Internet? Pah!
Why not? Give them the benefit of the doubt. They haven't led us astray so far.
The existence of tags like "duh" and "slownewsday" creates a perverse incentive to approve articles like these.
Er... 10 miles to stop, not mph. I'm drunk. I'm getting "Slowdown Cowboy!" messages from the Slashdot posting system. Count 1-2-3-4...
This train traveling at more than 300mph requires around 10mph to stop. Therefore, it is less than ideal in extremely dense corridors like the northeast USA and closer to ideal in California, where the major population centers are separated by hundreds of miles of farmland where few stops would need to be made.
Because it shows precisely what I am talking about - the population density and short distances of the area the OP describes are the exception, rather than the rule.
What's your point? That a maglev across the Dakotas would be impractical? Because you seem to be expending a lot of energy trying to make a point that everyone has already stipulated.
If you get south of that line, you pretty quickly run into a lot of nothingness too. The triangle bounded (roughly) by Baltimore, Chicago, and Boston is quite dense - and you flew right up the middle of it. But outside of the (rough) triangle, population density drops off dramatically. (And even so, there are good chunks of that dense triangle that aren't particularly crowded.)
a Night.jpg
15 percent of the US population lives within 300 miles of Chicago, not all of that to the east. Or did you forget about Milwaukee, St. Louis, Louisville, Minneapolis, Madison, Des Moines, Springfield... The midwest is less dense than the East, but the Great American Desert doesn't really begin until you get west of Omaha.
Need I drag out the satellite imagery of the United States at night?
http://worldmapsonline.com/SatPosters/NorthAmeric
*California* is probably too large for a HS rail network - large parts of it a pretty close to empty. The bulk of the population is in three centers, fairly well clustered together.
Are you kidding? California is practically ideal for high-speed rail. North-South travel is already highly concentrated through the Central Valley along I-5. On either side of the Central Valley there are mountains: scenic, but not exactly conducive to speedy travel. Consider that for people in the Bay Area, it's faster to travel out of their way to I-5 before heading south than it is to head due south via some winding coastal road like Hwy. 1. So from Sacramento to LA you have a corridor that is densely traveled, but sparsely populated for long stretches. The route is just barely long enough to be worth a plane trip. But it's far enough, and enough people do it often enough, that it would be a great benefit to shorten the trip by a couple of hours, as is completely feasible by high-speed train.
The train could travel at top speed from Sacramento to somewhere south of Bakersfield, probably, stopping only a few times to pick up people connecting from the major population centers along the way. That would easily shave several of the most boring hours off the trip from Sacto/the Bay Area to LA/San Diego and vice versa. Bravo.
It's a pity that although this is completely feasible right now, it's unlikely to happen until my yet-to-be-born children by the wife-I-have-yet-to-meet are off to college. (Which is to say... at least 20 years from now and possibly never.)
George III wasn't an absolute monarch. England had the Magna Carta, a Parliament that wasn't a rubber stamp, and a well developed legal system well before the American colonies existed. When the American colonists rebelled, they were demanding the rights they felt they were entitled to as Englishmen, having lived under representative governments their entire lives.
Checks on royal authority and the existence of a broad middle class helped the British monarchs keep their heads while absolute monarchs on the continent were literally losing theirs.
It's because Proposition 13 and the Tax Revolt in the late '70s gutted financing for K-12 education. That, along with California's constitutional requirement that tax increases pass with a 2/3 majority. The teachers unions can be somewhat too inflexible, but they're no worse in California than they are in any of the top-ranked states. It's the underfinancing that's has been killing California's schools for the past 30 years. Thank your antitax crusaders, the progenitors of the modern conservative movement.
2002 is not a bygone era damn it. We haven't even decided what to call this decade yet.
Apple is located in Cupertino, CA, in the middle of Silicon Valley. It is not a "good location". Silicon Valley is endless, boring, ugly suburban sprawl.
Cupertino is an urban oasis compared to the gargantuan office parks of South San Francisco, where Genentech is located. It took half of my lunch break just to walk from my office building across the parking lot to the office building with the sandwich shop that is similar to a concession you might find in an airport. There are tens of thousands of people working in this area and none of the usual amenities you would find in an area with tens of thousands of people. The company where I work has a break room with video games. Very cool, eh? It's a small concession to the fact that this is in fact a very uncool location. There is *nothing* in this area but huge, soulless office buildings and parking lots.
When my university newspaper decided to go online back in 1994, there was a serious debate about whether to use the web or gopher. The web was a cool new toy (Ooh! *Pictures*!) but hardly anywhere on campus except the computer lab had a connection fast enough to make practical use of it. Plus people were vastly more familiar with gopher.
A year later every dorm room was networked and gopher was history. It was a pretty stunning shift.
I'm pretty glad the newspaper didn't invest a lot of time and effort, in 1994, building the Daily U gopher site. That would have been... embarrassing.
I believe so. And Battlestar Galactica was a coproduction with SkyOne (?) But it's first run is in the US (Or co-first-run, with the UK). So it counts. It's not like it's 10-year-old episodes of "Are You Being Served" or something.
You must have missed the first adjective in the phrase current American television.
The Wire, Deadwood, Rome, the Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, Good Eats...
These are just some that I like. Others could probably name a dozen more of comparable quality. Granted, Deadwood and the Sopranos will be off the air soon. Also granted, the cable subscription required to obtain these legally from basic cable + premium cable (HBO) costs at least 6 times the BBC license fee.
Sadly, the closest US-equivalent to the BBC news is... BBC news. It's why we're going to hell in a handbasket. Even NPR doesn't compare. It doesn't do much for the credibility of a news organization when they have to begin and end each broadcast with an advertisement from their underwriters in agribusiness, defense contracting, and charitable trusts managed by the heirs of deceased robber barons.
God, I hate these obnoxious "trend" stories in the Wall Steet Journal and the New York Times. They're always designed to inflate the reader's ego. Some evergreen "trends": it' getting harder to get into the right preschool, it's hard to get into the right co-op in Manhattan, $100,000 weddings are becoming the norm, prenatal preparation for the SAT is becoming the norm, etc. etc. You're supposed to develop some sort of tribal identity around these problems.
So here we have the Blackberry. Ooh, ooh, that's me! I have a Blackberry! I have a Blackberry and I live in New York! I'm busy and important too!
But what's the real news here? People who place a high priority on their work have trouble balancing work with family. Big frickin' deal. What's the evidence that a generation of "Blackberry orphans" is emerging? Zero. It's all anecdotal--designed to make you feel like you must be important because you have a Blackberry. I suppose it's also there so the reporter can let it slip that he knows the creator of Entourage.
What really galls me is that someone got paid to write this shit. It's so, so easy. Make up a trend, call your friends for some quotes, get a quote from one "expert" from your Rolodex. It's like this:
Trend: Farting in elevators
Quote 1: I was in an elevator when someone farted once.
Quote 2: Me too!
Expert: We're seeing a lot of people farting in elevators as Mexican food has become chic in upscale, Manhattan neighborhoods.
Quote 3: Yeah, farting in elevators is definitely a trend I've been noticing.
With any luck, if you apply this formula, you'll done with your article by lunchtime. Bad reporter! Go out and find some real news. There are millions of people who would kill to be a reporter at the Wall Street Journal (disgruntled journalism major, here) so go out and earn your place at this respected newspaper! Do your damn job, and stop phoning it in!
If the Mahdi Army ever manages to occupy the United States without benefit of a Navy, Air Force, more than a few thousand regular troops, or really, any reason to want to occupy the United States, I'll be happy to head to the hills and fight them guerilla-style, ala Red Dawn. (I've got my Rambo survival knife with the sawblade edge, compass, and toothpick ready. Wolverines!)
Until then, I think the half a trillion dollars a year we spend on the military, plus the trillion extra we're likely to spend on the Iraqi occupution, is just too damn much. We should just admit that the military is a big Keynesian jobs program and spend the money on park rangers or something. We'd have the most awesome system of National Parks in the history of the world, and it would be a lot less counterproductive than the rathole we're throwing the money down now.
I *like* my country, but I can't afford the health insurance.
I'm personally joining the US Army at the end of this semester, cause I love my country, not to mention the job training and benefits will be great.
Oh hell no. I don't want to pay for your job training, benefits, enlistment bonus, or PTSD counseling when you come home with your legs blown off. I have sympathy for people who enlisted years ago and might have been misled into believing we had responsible civilian oversight of the military, but not for you. If you join the Army now, you're just a dick. Go get a real job and be productive. Stop sucking on the teat of the US taxpayer.
I would say this is true of the American West, even in the big cities on the coast. I feel disconnected from the rest of the country out here in San Francisco. Maybe it's because the population is stretched out along the coast. Inland it's just... farmland... then about 1,000 miles of nothing until you get to someplace with enough water to support civilization. If you've ever driven coast-to-coast on I-80, about 9 million of those miles seem to be in Nebraska.
I felt more connected when I lived in Chicago. Although Chicagoland no longer has as large a population as LA, it's the hub in a wheel of fairly large cities. Something like fifteen percent of the US population lives within 200 miles of it. This is also where (if you're traveling West to East) it becomes possible you might encounter something resembling public transportation and walkable neighborhoods. Cities east of here were mostly planned before the invention of the automobile--a really good thing.Chicago also has the best pizza and hot dogs in the world. Suck it, New York.The Eastern seaboard is more dense yet. Still, it's not quite like being in continental Europe and being able to visit another country with a couple hours of travel (via train! We lack those too.) Surely the US East Coast--not just Manhattan--is more dense and varied than Scandinavia, though. Just no fjords.
I guess I could have saved a couple of paragraphs by just linking this satellite image of North America at night:
http://worldmapsonline.com/SatPosters/NorthAmeric
While it is in their interests to eventually carry over into alternative fuel markets, taxing the crap out of them to force it defeats the free market and ultimately ends up punishing the consumer.
If we allowed market forces to determine everything, we'd still be choking on smog like 30 years ago. But we decided to regulate it instead, and things are (not ideal, but) a lot better. There was no free market reason for any individual company to cut down on air pollution. But through government regulation, we can do something in everyone's interest. The economy in California is better for the fact that Los Angeles doesn't hav smog as bad as Mexico City's.
While they're at it why don't they tax Coca Cola so that we can find soda-alternative drinks! Or maybe tax Silicon Valley itself a little higher to fund research into alternative computing?
OK, I'll bite. Why don't they?
Google "public disclosure of private embarrassing facts".
I'm pretty sure that an e-mail sent to one person would be considered a private communication. I hope many people sue the bastard.