I at least have choices, well a choice. I have Frontier 25/5 for $35 a month which is decent, or I could go Comcast (F Comcast). Comcast will never get a penny out of my hands, too much bad history.

Frontier annoys me, hard to get costs without calling. The operator was nice enough, but spew lots of numbers so that it is very hard to figure out a simple speed versus dollars. My service is actually $50/mo, but DISCOUNTS!!! I have no idea what the discounts are, but I had to wait through the guy exuberantly telling me how many he had found only after I started to sound like I was about to hang up.

Google Fiber might be coming to the area. Not sure if that will make things better, or if it will be a repeat of Animal Farm.

Funny, I live way up in Portland and my electricity usage in summer is about 3x what it is in the middle of winter and our summer time is much more moderate than Sacramento's. I would have expected that solar in summer would be perfect for running your AC. What the hell are you doing in winter that burns so much power? Indoor pot farming?

Singling out a single company provides a rallying cry.

I will violate Godwin's law for a second, and point to Anne Frank. Did she matter if the grand scheme of things? Not really, she was just one person. But by putting one little girl's face on Nazi horrors you can send a more powerful message than listing big round numbers of dead victims.

Disney does a good job maintaining their all American family friendly facade, and showing a little of their behind the scenes rapacious capitalism may be sufficiently jarring to cause action. I see them as a very good poster child to beat up on given their high profits, high prices, and desire for a family friendly public persona.

Nobody owes them a tax break, or subsidies either.

Nobody owes them totally "free" trade either.

Yet I had to struggle to get 4 weeks of vacation time.

The obvious medium term band-aid to is start restricting working hours to 45 absolute max a week, and restrict the number of work days per year to make people take time off and regain some mental health. Get rid of the salary sham for all those working for under $100k (indexed to inflation). If your company relies on 60 hour work weeks, then hire more people.

We could soak up huge swaths of idle labor if we prioritized quality of life more.

I tend to agree. When 10% of the class fails, blame the students, when 90% fail blame the professor. I find that true of individual problems, tests, or whole classes.

All that said, sometimes statistics conspire to give you a really cranky/rowdy/rude group of students all in one class at one time. Without being in the room it is hard to tell what is going on. I get the feeling this is an exasperated professor who wasn't getting backup over discipline issues and decided to call the administrations bluff by using the nuclear option.

We've also got some insane history that has caused a lot of the disparity. We still have living people today who had the crap beat out of them just to go to a non-segregated school, to have full voting rights, and so on.

Engineering sticks out as a field that has very few women, which is not really a good thing. My current group has 2 out of 20'ish, while my previous job was 0 out of 30'ish (we did have one female assembler, but I am counting engineers). We whine about the lack of STEM graduates, and even import tons of H1B workers to fill the gap (real or imagined). What is wrong with trying to be more inclusive rather than importing more? I honestly think it would be a positive for most engineering group's quality and productivity to have at least a few women on the team.

Worse yet, PC's today are barely faster than 5 year old ones at similar price points. Moore's law ran headlong into a thermal brick wall. The real speed increases are showing up with SSD's and better GPU's. The GPU's look to be approaching similar issues as intel is, they are just a process generation or two behind them. We can no longer expect a 2x speedup ever couple years, but more half that rate at best.

The net result of this and other trends (brain drain and money drain by mobile) is that we can expect that most home and work PC's will not be worth upgrading much faster than every 4-8 years, while 2-3 was the norm not that long ago.

Make it easy for me to specify I am looking for technical information, or looking to buy something, or what have you. All too often I am trying to do a search for technical information, but if that acronym has also been used by Beiber lately I am SOL. I would love it is I could weed out the pop culture hits when I wanted to omit them.

Similarly I would like a search engine that I could easily specify if I also want hits for related words, or just EXACT match, and whether to ignore capitalization or not. It is maddening when an acronym also happens to be a common word and I get flooded with useless crap.

If the car yanks control out of my hands because it thinks I am about to do something dangerous, who is liable for the results? We've had this discussion for fully automated systems, but it will get more awkward as we start to have a nanny looking over our shoulder second guessing our every move.

It is the latest round of "The door is ajar" warning crap. If I get beeped at every time I look left at whatever bombshell is in the convertible next to me I might end up knocked unconscious by my wife.

Putting a bajillion flashing and buzzing widgets into a car to make it safer will do the opposite. I recently spent a few days driving my old truck to burn off old gas, since it gets used very little. I was pleasantly surprised how much easier it is to concentrate on the road without an infotainment system flashing maps, and efficiency info at me.

If we honestly think that driving is dangerous enough to take action on it, I would argue that we should spend the energy making better drivers rather than trying to wrap layers of technology around crappy drivers.

Please show me at least one example of a society at any time in history that survived for any length of time without some form of taxation. I think you will have to go back to just about the hunter-gatherer days to find an example. You can leave the country and revoke your citizenship if you want (Yes, we should make this easier to do), but in the mean time I suggest you propose a viable alternative before going all anarchist on us.

The pacific northwest is beholdent to a few large companies that use their importance to exert some scary influence on the politics. When these issues come up Microsoft has threatened to move overseas, or to other states. The voters and state/local government falls in line. Same with Boeing, which has moved a lot out of Washington even after getting just about special treatment they could ask for.

Down here in Orygun, Intel and Nike do the same thing. Nike's headquarters is surrounded by Beaverton, but is not part of it because they they have made huge threats to leave if the city tries to annex it into the city, which would result in higher property taxes to help pay for the city services they already benefit from. Intel got a very sweet package during their recent expansion. It is a massive race to the bottom to get and keep these big employers. It is sickening. The rest of us in the area get to pay higher taxes to make up the shortfall, and we have the threat hanging over us that they can crash the local economy and housing prices with it if they make good on their threats.

"Washington would still get the lion's share of Microsoft-based taxes since the lion's share of employees live there, and are well-paid."

What a crock of crap.

My tax responsibility is mine, not my employers. Employers cannot skip out on their taxes just because they have employees who don't have that kind of opportunity. I don't get to argue my way out of responsibility for taxes just because my checker at the grocery store has to pay her taxes. We are all in this together, it is not fair for big enough employers to threaten to leave if they don't get special tax treatment. It is anti-competitive to say the least when the Microsoft's, Intel's, and Nike's get special breaks while the rest of us living in the area have to make up for this tax welfare they get. F' them.

No representation without taxation. Stop letting these moocher companies lobby if they don't pay their share.

Same here. I am happy to pay my taxes, especially if it keeps the schools funded and keeps old folks out of the gutter. I am sick and tired of way too much of my taxes going to the military industrial complex while the rich multinational oil company's whose interests are served by such mis-adventures sit back and dodge their civic duty to pay their fare share like me.

Please increase my tax rate and properly fund our schools. I am tired of all the badly educated dumbasses, and it horrifies me to see kids only 10 years behind me have to rack up much more debt than I did to go to even a low end college.