Believe me I troll, and when I do troll it is pretty damn clever. I've got effective trolling down to a science, and what you did there when you took my name isn't effective trolling - after all, nobody bought your ruse and your sock puppet account was banned.
Or perhaps everybody from the dock workers to those who stock the shelves full of goods have to be paid twice as much there as they do in the USA. Somebody will bear that cost, and it's usually the consumer.
In addition to that, people tend to value money less when they have more of it. Imagine going to a movie theater and seeing the price of a soda being raised from a dollar to three dollars. A poor person would simply go without soda, whereas if a rich person wants a soda they'll still have one because they value their money less. That effectively makes the poor poorer.
Executives are paid high salaries because (good ones at least) are sought after. Companies have to be able to offer incentives to attract talent, and you can't just set laws saying what incentives they aren't allowed to offer.
You know what happened in America last time we tried to set wage caps? The health care industry became permanently entangled into employer benefits.
Anyways, slashdot seems to have a very short memory, because only a month ago there was an ask slashdot talking about how it is hard to afford certain luxury goods in Australia that even low income people can easily obtain in the USA, so Aussies resort to looking for package redirection services in America.
The cause of this is actually Australia's ridiculously high minimum wage of $15 an hour. You can't sell common goods at low prices if you have to pay up the ass to have them distributed. Poor people tend to have the hardest time affording common goods, whereas the very rich don't have any problem at all affording them. If you make them more expensive, all that does is reduce the purchasing power of the poor.
The other problem stemming from the accumulation of wealth is the divide in economic power that, beyond a certain limit, starts to spill over into the political sphere.
Actually that doesn't happen in practice. I think you're confusing wealth and money (they are very different things) but when I see, for example, people decry about how some rich folks have trillions hidden in offshore accounts and are therefore "hoarding" wealth, that doesn't hold up.
Money sitting in some offshore account doesn't in any way equate to wealth. It's just a number on a ledger. There was some marxist group a few years ago who released a study indicating that all of this money could end world poverty 4 times over....only it can't actually do that. You see, they based this study purely on government figures that say "if you have at least x money, then you are above poverty" and figured that they could reach that amount four times over with this money.
Perhaps the math works, but there's a big huge hole in that reasoning: Money can't just magically turn into material wealth, it has to be traded. Somebody somewhere has to actually farm food or manufacture useful things. Pulling that money out of those accounts doesn't do that - the fundamental problem of scarce resources hasn't gone away, rather the medium of exchange has expanded. The actual result of that would simply be inflation, or that since there's more money in more people's hands, the money itself would now be worth less, and those government figures about what constitutes poverty would simply rise.
Here's a nifty car analogy: You own a car. Would owning another car exactly like it add to your personal wealth? (presuming you weren't going to sell it or allow anybody else to use it) Not really. Why would you want a second car after you already own one? That concept applies to money as well. Adding more of something one already has plenty of simply brings in diminishing returns of actual worth. This is simultaneously why minimum wages don't increase wealth, and in fact have the opposite effect.
Another consideration to make is how poor people who win the lottery seldom remain rich. The fact is that most people don't know how to manage money. I myself actually live better off than many people who make a fair bit more money than I do, and it's entirely due to how I manage my personal finances.
Unions can be both beneficial and harmful. Their original purpose was to organize workers so that they had bargaining power that was on par with that on their employer when the latter is a major business. When they go beyond that level and monopolize the labor market, they are just as harmful as business monopolies.
That's a common misconception: The very first labor unions were intended to stem the growth of "yellow goods"; goods that were made by "chinamen". This was later extended to stemming the growth of black made goods in order to keep the wages of white people high. The original labor unions were very much rooted in racism. It wasn't until about the 30's that the modern impression of what most people think of as labor unions began, though most of the things that you hear "thank a union" for weren't actually brought about by labor unions (think this list which is just flat out dead wrong for almost all of these, for example Henry Ford started the 5 day 8 hour work week, not labor unions.)
By tor I mean an indexing site run over tor with the actual torrenting happening over the regular internet. Think moving tpb into tor while leaving everything else the same.
Pfft, my ISP gives me notices up the ass, though not all of the are copyright specific.
I get at least 4 data overage notices per month, some months I do over a terabyte and my supposed limit is 300GB, but they don't enforce it. I've been ignoring them for years now.
No you can legally fudge the odometer, you just have to mention that on the title when you sell it. It varies by state, but in Arizona they call these "box c" cars (Box C is a portion of the title that indicates that the actual mileage of the car doesn't match what is listed on the odometer, and so writing down the mileage is optional.)
Used car dealers do this all the time, though they tend to sell the cars as box A when they do so (box A is where you list the actual mileage.) Box B is where you put so many miles on it that the odometer rolled over past zero.
There's a car dealership in the Phoenix area who when customers came to test drive, they literally threw their keys on the roof, and if the customer wanted to leave they made them sit down for up to 8 hours while they "find" their keys, meanwhile putting sales pressure on them the whole time to buy a new car.
My media player of choice these days is MPC-HC for casual listening with XBMC for dedicated playing. MPC-HC, while not a perfect interface, does the job and doesn't have these strange delays and buffering that VLC runs into, while at the same time supporting bit perfect playback via WASAPI.
XBMC is beautiful, but if it had a minimalist mode in addition to its 10 foot UI I'd probably use it exclusively. It also does an amazing job at cataloging your media if you want it to.
That's asking for a lawsuit because SCOTUS has ruled that even if you pass through a DUI checkpoint deliberately, they're only allowed to ask for your drivers license; anything else you do is voluntary. You're not required to answer any questions or even get out of your car unless you've actually broken some sort of law or ordinance. You can quite literally tell them to go stick a finger in their ass and play "hide and go fuck yourself", show them your license, and then leave.
It's a bit vague, but the contractors could just be there to do the actual sampling, and it's the police officer who forces them to submit. Probably better that way as I wouldn't trust cops to be phlebotomists (not because they're cops, but because even actual dedicated phlebotomists tend to miss veins too much IMO, and somebody who does it less often would probably be worse. I should know as I have to make frequent visits to get blood work.)
Also, and while I'm not trying to justify the situation at all (it actually stops being justified at a point long before the contractors are involved,) it's less wasteful if you contract somebody on a temporary basis rather than hire them full time for a project that you have no intention of running for a long time, only to wonder what the hell you're going to do with them when it's over and they're still getting paid with full time benefits.
Of course, if the government didn't make it so damn expensive to terminate employees that you no longer have a use for then it would be more attractive to actually hire people directly instead of so much contracting, even if it is only temporary. At least that way you could get benefits while working and/or don't have to work through a third party company who gets paid more for your work than you who are actually doing the labor.
TFA and TFS are both confusing, because in one sentence they say it's CC licensed, and in another they say public domain. Those are two very different things.
What, usenet? It's already practically dead anyways, or at least it isn't what it used to be. And not talking about something isn't enough to protect it.
But that no longer matters, I've been using both sickbeard and couchpotato for well over a year now with just transmission, nzbtomedia, and tpb. I don't even use private trackers. Worst case scenario TPB goes down (good luck with that) but even if it did, something tells me tor is underutilized in this department (drug websites are even more hated by the government than tpb, and they aren't going anywhere any time soon.)
The only thing it doesn't do that sabnzbd did is automatically prune the files when they are done seeding, and stuff on usenet always utilized my 50mbit pipe better (but still not enough of a difference that I miss paying for it.)
I don't think that's what he's saying; rather, he's mocking those who do make that kind of argument.
I've seen it happen on slashdot where an article about chinese censorship brings posts (that even get high moderation) that talk about how the US government is supposedly worse.
Doesn't happen a lot these days, but during the Bush years it was obligatory as part of any post about foreign government censorship on slashdot.
See! If the US embraces a Ponzi scheme, it MUST be okay!
Actually this is very much true. Social Security actually meets all of the definitions of a Ponzi scheme, and likewise it is the only Ponzi scheme that is not illegal.
One would have to wonder whether Google already holds everything they need for this tech given they are entrenched into the self driving car industry. You'd figure 3D scanning is very much obligatory for that.
NIMBY isn't associated with the hydro, which is far from Phoenix in terms of production.
Not sure what you mean here - SRP alone operates 7 hydro dams, several of which are notoriously large, and include the Roosevelt Dam, and several other dams that are located just on the outskirts of the valley.
There's a lot of NIMBY north of Phoenix (Scottsdale, Cave Creek), try installing solar in a neighborhood (obviously if you have acreage no one will care). HOAs are terrible in the Phoenix area. Been there, done that.
That's more a symptom of newer developments. For whatever god awful reason, (pretty sure it has to do with realtors trying to keep property values up by keeping neighborhoods "forcibly clean") new developments everywhere are being run by HOA's for the most part, and the Phoenix area (Chandler in particular) saw the fastest growth rate in the world during the last housing boom. There are plenty of HOA free areas though, I just recently moved into a neighborhood without one. I probably hate HOA's more than you do by the way, they remind me of labor unions. They claim to help you but they just take your money and dictate terms to you.
Wage floors and price controls have worked. And some haven't.
When? I haven't seen a single case of a price control that has made things better than before they started.
Wage floors (aka minimum wage) only result in reduced purchasing power for the poor. That is, they make the poor poorer. They do that in two ways: First, they increase unemployment in the short term (long term not so much.) Second, they make cheaper goods become more expensive.
Think of common goods like say food. A minimum wage hike might make a tomato go from 60 cents to 90 cents. For rich people, that 30 cents difference is somewhat meaningless. For a poor person though, that difference is a lot more noticeable. Sure you've offset the wealthy by reducing their purchasing power while temporarily boosting the purchasing power of the bottom wage earners, however in the long term as prices rise to compensate, you've hurt the buying power of the poor a lot more than you've hurt the buying power of the rich. In the end everybody has less buying power and everybody is less wealthy, but the poor even more so.
If you want proof of that, look at some of the comments on this page from actual Australians:
It doesn't matter that the exact amount that is skimmed off wealth generated by other people is established in a free market - it's still a person appropriating wealth that someone else has produced.
That's the nice thing about a free market though, is if you don't like your compensation and you are good enough at your job, you can find somebody who will offer what you want. The whole reason most of us take weekends off is because Henry Ford wanted to reduce employee turnover, so he offered incentives beyond pay (which by the way, pay isn't actually a good work incentive, rather if rank and file workers aren't being paid enough then they tend to be more dissatisfied, but raising their pay doesn't raise their satisfaction in most cases) and part of those incentives was a fixed work schedule. It worked extremely well by getting him both the type of employees he wanted and got to keep them. Other employers caught on and soon it became the mainstream.
Now keep that in mind and then keep in mind what happens in a planned economy. In a planned economy, it's pretty much you just do as you're told. Poor saps are often given illusions of everything being perfect when it's all centrally planned, and start their wars against the "bourgeois". Every single time in history when "the people" "the poor" or "the downtrodden" win these wars though, without fail, when their revolutions succeed they always end up worse than before they started that war. This is why I mock the occupy movement for example - they foolishly know not what they ask for. Most of them are very ignorant of history, and are even more ignorant of economics (seriously, pollsters have found them heavily lacking in education.) I'm very much pro free speech so I'm in favor of them being out there, but I'll be ever vigilant in opposing their ideals.
Really? Is the interstate highway system a waste? Is public healthcare (in all the other countries where it's present and working) a waste? Is ITER a waste? How about public schools?
The interstate highway is probably a good thing, though it's being misused. Remember how it used to be legal to drink at age 18? Sure as shit you're old enough to pay taxes at age 18, but the federal government holds interstate highway funding hostage for any state that doesn't push that age to 21. They do that and similar things with it.
ITER could very well be a waste. Tell me, what do we have to show for it so far?
Public schools are definitely wasteful. Not that I disagree with the idea of publicly funded education - quite the opposite, education is critical for building strong economies - but ours is perhaps the worst managed one there is, and unions are largely to blame. I really like the idea of a voucher system myself - private schools can reject the problem kids (who caused me a ton of grief during my school years, so I have zero sympathy for them) and the problem kids can stay in the public system where they belong. You can't just let the problem kids drag down everybody else with impunity, which unfortunately we allow to happen rampantly, and it needs to stop.
Private schools have been well proven to provide a superior education at a lower cost, so it boggles the mind why some people are so opposed to making them more available to the public. I agree with the concerns about religious schools (I'm very much atheist) but that problem can be solved by denying vouchers to schools that don't meet academic standards in *all* sciences.
On the topic of unions; I'd much prefer European style unions to what we have in the US. In the US, unions ARE rent seeking businesses in the purest form - they don't give a shit about the workers, they just want somebody to collect dues from and then do just the minimum to make the workers think they're on their side. Look at what the teamsters union did to hostess; I don't think forcing them out of business was exactly in the interests of the workers, but the union leadership declared it a victory anyways,
Slashdot Mirror
Believe me I troll, and when I do troll it is pretty damn clever. I've got effective trolling down to a science, and what you did there when you took my name isn't effective trolling - after all, nobody bought your ruse and your sock puppet account was banned.
Or perhaps everybody from the dock workers to those who stock the shelves full of goods have to be paid twice as much there as they do in the USA. Somebody will bear that cost, and it's usually the consumer.
In addition to that, people tend to value money less when they have more of it. Imagine going to a movie theater and seeing the price of a soda being raised from a dollar to three dollars. A poor person would simply go without soda, whereas if a rich person wants a soda they'll still have one because they value their money less. That effectively makes the poor poorer.
Executives are paid high salaries because (good ones at least) are sought after. Companies have to be able to offer incentives to attract talent, and you can't just set laws saying what incentives they aren't allowed to offer.
You know what happened in America last time we tried to set wage caps? The health care industry became permanently entangled into employer benefits.
Anyways, slashdot seems to have a very short memory, because only a month ago there was an ask slashdot talking about how it is hard to afford certain luxury goods in Australia that even low income people can easily obtain in the USA, so Aussies resort to looking for package redirection services in America.
http://slashdot.org/story/13/10/31/2153223/ask-slashdot-package-redirection-service-for-shipping-to-australia
The cause of this is actually Australia's ridiculously high minimum wage of $15 an hour. You can't sell common goods at low prices if you have to pay up the ass to have them distributed. Poor people tend to have the hardest time affording common goods, whereas the very rich don't have any problem at all affording them. If you make them more expensive, all that does is reduce the purchasing power of the poor.
The other problem stemming from the accumulation of wealth is the divide in economic power that, beyond a certain limit, starts to spill over into the political sphere.
Actually that doesn't happen in practice. I think you're confusing wealth and money (they are very different things) but when I see, for example, people decry about how some rich folks have trillions hidden in offshore accounts and are therefore "hoarding" wealth, that doesn't hold up.
Money sitting in some offshore account doesn't in any way equate to wealth. It's just a number on a ledger. There was some marxist group a few years ago who released a study indicating that all of this money could end world poverty 4 times over....only it can't actually do that. You see, they based this study purely on government figures that say "if you have at least x money, then you are above poverty" and figured that they could reach that amount four times over with this money.
Perhaps the math works, but there's a big huge hole in that reasoning: Money can't just magically turn into material wealth, it has to be traded. Somebody somewhere has to actually farm food or manufacture useful things. Pulling that money out of those accounts doesn't do that - the fundamental problem of scarce resources hasn't gone away, rather the medium of exchange has expanded. The actual result of that would simply be inflation, or that since there's more money in more people's hands, the money itself would now be worth less, and those government figures about what constitutes poverty would simply rise.
Here's a nifty car analogy: You own a car. Would owning another car exactly like it add to your personal wealth? (presuming you weren't going to sell it or allow anybody else to use it) Not really. Why would you want a second car after you already own one? That concept applies to money as well. Adding more of something one already has plenty of simply brings in diminishing returns of actual worth. This is simultaneously why minimum wages don't increase wealth, and in fact have the opposite effect.
Another consideration to make is how poor people who win the lottery seldom remain rich. The fact is that most people don't know how to manage money. I myself actually live better off than many people who make a fair bit more money than I do, and it's entirely due to how I manage my personal finances.
Unions can be both beneficial and harmful. Their original purpose was to organize workers so that they had bargaining power that was on par with that on their employer when the latter is a major business. When they go beyond that level and monopolize the labor market, they are just as harmful as business monopolies.
That's a common misconception: The very first labor unions were intended to stem the growth of "yellow goods"; goods that were made by "chinamen". This was later extended to stemming the growth of black made goods in order to keep the wages of white people high. The original labor unions were very much rooted in racism. It wasn't until about the 30's that the modern impression of what most people think of as labor unions began, though most of the things that you hear "thank a union" for weren't actually brought about by labor unions (think this list which is just flat out dead wrong for almost all of these, for example Henry Ford started the 5 day 8 hour work week, not labor unions.)
By tor I mean an indexing site run over tor with the actual torrenting happening over the regular internet. Think moving tpb into tor while leaving everything else the same.
Pfft, my ISP gives me notices up the ass, though not all of the are copyright specific.
I get at least 4 data overage notices per month, some months I do over a terabyte and my supposed limit is 300GB, but they don't enforce it. I've been ignoring them for years now.
People have done it and posted it to youtube. They don't leave until told to, but they sure give the officers a whole lot of nothing but a hard time.
That argument makes no sense at all because HIV tests have been easy to get for free for a long time now.
No, it's not. It was a free market until ACA. Now it's a semi-planned market. When it was a free market, these people were covered.
No you can legally fudge the odometer, you just have to mention that on the title when you sell it. It varies by state, but in Arizona they call these "box c" cars (Box C is a portion of the title that indicates that the actual mileage of the car doesn't match what is listed on the odometer, and so writing down the mileage is optional.)
Used car dealers do this all the time, though they tend to sell the cars as box A when they do so (box A is where you list the actual mileage.) Box B is where you put so many miles on it that the odometer rolled over past zero.
There's a car dealership in the Phoenix area who when customers came to test drive, they literally threw their keys on the roof, and if the customer wanted to leave they made them sit down for up to 8 hours while they "find" their keys, meanwhile putting sales pressure on them the whole time to buy a new car.
Indeed.
My media player of choice these days is MPC-HC for casual listening with XBMC for dedicated playing. MPC-HC, while not a perfect interface, does the job and doesn't have these strange delays and buffering that VLC runs into, while at the same time supporting bit perfect playback via WASAPI.
XBMC is beautiful, but if it had a minimalist mode in addition to its 10 foot UI I'd probably use it exclusively. It also does an amazing job at cataloging your media if you want it to.
It isn't though.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/12/us-usa-colorado-election-idUSBRE98B01620130912
That's asking for a lawsuit because SCOTUS has ruled that even if you pass through a DUI checkpoint deliberately, they're only allowed to ask for your drivers license; anything else you do is voluntary. You're not required to answer any questions or even get out of your car unless you've actually broken some sort of law or ordinance. You can quite literally tell them to go stick a finger in their ass and play "hide and go fuck yourself", show them your license, and then leave.
It's a bit vague, but the contractors could just be there to do the actual sampling, and it's the police officer who forces them to submit. Probably better that way as I wouldn't trust cops to be phlebotomists (not because they're cops, but because even actual dedicated phlebotomists tend to miss veins too much IMO, and somebody who does it less often would probably be worse. I should know as I have to make frequent visits to get blood work.)
Also, and while I'm not trying to justify the situation at all (it actually stops being justified at a point long before the contractors are involved,) it's less wasteful if you contract somebody on a temporary basis rather than hire them full time for a project that you have no intention of running for a long time, only to wonder what the hell you're going to do with them when it's over and they're still getting paid with full time benefits.
Of course, if the government didn't make it so damn expensive to terminate employees that you no longer have a use for then it would be more attractive to actually hire people directly instead of so much contracting, even if it is only temporary. At least that way you could get benefits while working and/or don't have to work through a third party company who gets paid more for your work than you who are actually doing the labor.
TFA and TFS are both confusing, because in one sentence they say it's CC licensed, and in another they say public domain. Those are two very different things.
What, usenet? It's already practically dead anyways, or at least it isn't what it used to be. And not talking about something isn't enough to protect it.
But that no longer matters, I've been using both sickbeard and couchpotato for well over a year now with just transmission, nzbtomedia, and tpb. I don't even use private trackers. Worst case scenario TPB goes down (good luck with that) but even if it did, something tells me tor is underutilized in this department (drug websites are even more hated by the government than tpb, and they aren't going anywhere any time soon.)
The only thing it doesn't do that sabnzbd did is automatically prune the files when they are done seeding, and stuff on usenet always utilized my 50mbit pipe better (but still not enough of a difference that I miss paying for it.)
I've gotten DMCA notices when I've torrented older stuff, like movies from the 70's even.
The car collided with an object at 70MPH. Both high speed and a collision.
I don't think that's what he's saying; rather, he's mocking those who do make that kind of argument.
I've seen it happen on slashdot where an article about chinese censorship brings posts (that even get high moderation) that talk about how the US government is supposedly worse.
Doesn't happen a lot these days, but during the Bush years it was obligatory as part of any post about foreign government censorship on slashdot.
See! If the US embraces a Ponzi scheme, it MUST be okay!
Actually this is very much true. Social Security actually meets all of the definitions of a Ponzi scheme, and likewise it is the only Ponzi scheme that is not illegal.
One would have to wonder whether Google already holds everything they need for this tech given they are entrenched into the self driving car industry. You'd figure 3D scanning is very much obligatory for that.
NIMBY isn't associated with the hydro, which is far from Phoenix in terms of production.
Not sure what you mean here - SRP alone operates 7 hydro dams, several of which are notoriously large, and include the Roosevelt Dam, and several other dams that are located just on the outskirts of the valley.
There's a lot of NIMBY north of Phoenix (Scottsdale, Cave Creek), try installing solar in a neighborhood (obviously if you have acreage no one will care). HOAs are terrible in the Phoenix area. Been there, done that.
That's more a symptom of newer developments. For whatever god awful reason, (pretty sure it has to do with realtors trying to keep property values up by keeping neighborhoods "forcibly clean") new developments everywhere are being run by HOA's for the most part, and the Phoenix area (Chandler in particular) saw the fastest growth rate in the world during the last housing boom. There are plenty of HOA free areas though, I just recently moved into a neighborhood without one. I probably hate HOA's more than you do by the way, they remind me of labor unions. They claim to help you but they just take your money and dictate terms to you.
Wage floors and price controls have worked. And some haven't.
When? I haven't seen a single case of a price control that has made things better than before they started.
Wage floors (aka minimum wage) only result in reduced purchasing power for the poor. That is, they make the poor poorer. They do that in two ways: First, they increase unemployment in the short term (long term not so much.) Second, they make cheaper goods become more expensive.
Think of common goods like say food. A minimum wage hike might make a tomato go from 60 cents to 90 cents. For rich people, that 30 cents difference is somewhat meaningless. For a poor person though, that difference is a lot more noticeable. Sure you've offset the wealthy by reducing their purchasing power while temporarily boosting the purchasing power of the bottom wage earners, however in the long term as prices rise to compensate, you've hurt the buying power of the poor a lot more than you've hurt the buying power of the rich. In the end everybody has less buying power and everybody is less wealthy, but the poor even more so.
If you want proof of that, look at some of the comments on this page from actual Australians:
http://slashdot.org/story/13/10/31/2153223/ask-slashdot-package-redirection-service-for-shipping-to-australia
Their minimum wage is $15 an hour. Do you think that $15 an hour is really doing them any favors?
It doesn't matter that the exact amount that is skimmed off wealth generated by other people is established in a free market - it's still a person appropriating wealth that someone else has produced.
That's the nice thing about a free market though, is if you don't like your compensation and you are good enough at your job, you can find somebody who will offer what you want. The whole reason most of us take weekends off is because Henry Ford wanted to reduce employee turnover, so he offered incentives beyond pay (which by the way, pay isn't actually a good work incentive, rather if rank and file workers aren't being paid enough then they tend to be more dissatisfied, but raising their pay doesn't raise their satisfaction in most cases) and part of those incentives was a fixed work schedule. It worked extremely well by getting him both the type of employees he wanted and got to keep them. Other employers caught on and soon it became the mainstream.
Now keep that in mind and then keep in mind what happens in a planned economy. In a planned economy, it's pretty much you just do as you're told. Poor saps are often given illusions of everything being perfect when it's all centrally planned, and start their wars against the "bourgeois". Every single time in history when "the people" "the poor" or "the downtrodden" win these wars though, without fail, when their revolutions succeed they always end up worse than before they started that war. This is why I mock the occupy movement for example - they foolishly know not what they ask for. Most of them are very ignorant of history, and are even more ignorant of economics (seriously, pollsters have found them heavily lacking in education.) I'm very much pro free speech so I'm in favor of them being out there, but I'll be ever vigilant in opposing their ideals.
Really? Is the interstate highway system a waste? Is public healthcare (in all the other countries where it's present and working) a waste? Is ITER a waste? How about public schools?
The interstate highway is probably a good thing, though it's being misused. Remember how it used to be legal to drink at age 18? Sure as shit you're old enough to pay taxes at age 18, but the federal government holds interstate highway funding hostage for any state that doesn't push that age to 21. They do that and similar things with it.
ITER could very well be a waste. Tell me, what do we have to show for it so far?
Public schools are definitely wasteful. Not that I disagree with the idea of publicly funded education - quite the opposite, education is critical for building strong economies - but ours is perhaps the worst managed one there is, and unions are largely to blame. I really like the idea of a voucher system myself - private schools can reject the problem kids (who caused me a ton of grief during my school years, so I have zero sympathy for them) and the problem kids can stay in the public system where they belong. You can't just let the problem kids drag down everybody else with impunity, which unfortunately we allow to happen rampantly, and it needs to stop.
Private schools have been well proven to provide a superior education at a lower cost, so it boggles the mind why some people are so opposed to making them more available to the public. I agree with the concerns about religious schools (I'm very much atheist) but that problem can be solved by denying vouchers to schools that don't meet academic standards in *all* sciences.
On the topic of unions; I'd much prefer European style unions to what we have in the US. In the US, unions ARE rent seeking businesses in the purest form - they don't give a shit about the workers, they just want somebody to collect dues from and then do just the minimum to make the workers think they're on their side. Look at what the teamsters union did to hostess; I don't think forcing them out of business was exactly in the interests of the workers, but the union leadership declared it a victory anyways,