Great, go tell that to the people who lost a hand. I'm sure it will make them feel better.

Hurr, stupid idiots, having emotion! Why don't they just stop feeling things!?

The latest CBO report shows that the law is on track to reduce the total number of uninsured people by 12 million this year. Page 8 of the PDF.

And if you check page 14, you'll see that that estimate was based on just enrolling 6 million people in the exchanges this year. The actual number is 8 million.

But keep lying. Maybe if you repeat it enough, it'll turn true!

That sunset clause is the ONLY reason Obama was able to get rid of even a portion of the tax cuts. The whole thing was about to expire, and he was able to force the Republicans to accept some tax increases since the alternative was much larger increases. If it hadn't been for that sunset clause, the Bush tax cuts would have lasted another 50 years.

Even assuming that you get your million dollars forty years before you plan to retire, you would need to pull in returns of more than 18% per year to hit a billion.

No one can do that reliably. It's luck.

A majority of Republicans voted for it as well. The real question is who added this particular provision, and are they still in office? I'm not sure how to dig up that crucial bit of info.

FYI, they've cancelled the policy and are encouraging people targeted by it to contact them for a refund.

They cancelled this policy almost immediately after it was brought to light.

Absolute nonsense. How many wounded veterans are we paying for thanks to Bush? Shall Obama just throw them out on the streets? Even the healthy veterans will cost us a fortune for the next half-century or so. And how much money have we given away under Bush's tax cuts and Medicare Part D? Obama had to fight like hell for years to get rid of even a portion of the the tax cuts.

Obama's not a dictator. He can't just "change a massive deficit to a surplus in a single year just by adjusting the numbers in [the] budget." Blaming him for the Bush deficit is dishonest in the extreme.

The patent is probably a tad more specific than "fingerprint scanner". It's easy to imagine all sorts of novel developments in fingerprint scanning technology that would absolutely deserve to be patentable. Not saying that's the case here. I'm not familiar with the case, and don't particularly care. But I see this on Slashdot all the time -- people simplifying a patent down to a single phrase, and then declaring it to be obvious.

Fuck off. That font is hideous and unreadable, and I shouldn't need to go digging in any settings to fix the mess you created.

You don't even seem to understand why a fixed-width font would be useful. It "mucks with your text the least"? You realize that you're writing in paragraphs, right? And that not everyone in the world is going to have their browser window at the same width?

You're just trying to be a special snowflake and show everyone how smart and techy you are.

When the mine gets low, people will shift their investments back to basic research, and start looking for new mines.

That's already happening. The transistor was game changing, and drove several decades of the most rapid advancement in human history. Now that we're getting near the end of what silicon can do, people are performing serious research in things like graphene.

I happen to own a book that contains all the secrets of the universe. Everything you could ever want to know is within its covers. The only catch is that you can't read it. No one can, and no one ever will. Is my book worth anything?

Information in and of itself is worthless. Knowledge that's never put to use is worthless. That doesn't mean basic research is worthless -- we just don't know the applications yet. But the eventual applications are what ultimately brings value. Understanding for understanding's sake is just an amusement. If that's all you want, you may as well study some high school witchcraft book. If you never try to put it to use, what's the difference?

No, I don't think the US should have 10x the standard of living of a small European country. Why would you expect such a thing? We don't have 10x the resources per capita, and even if we did, there's the question of diminishing returns. Additionally, we're still people, with all the murder and rape and greed that entails. You have these absurdly high expectations, and then get all upset when we can't live up to them.

For what its worth, I think you and I are very alike in our politics. I agree with pretty much all your points, just not the conclusion you draw from them. For all its faults, America is still pretty great. I'm certainly glad I was born here, and all of the immigrants I know are extremely thankful to have been able to come here. It could be better, and we should strive to make it better, but acting like its some horrible place doesn't help. It only leads to people giving up.

Has it occurred to you that maybe you just had unrealistic expectations?

America was and is great. How can you judge a country's greatness, if not by the quality of life it affords to its people? And the average person born in the US has a significantly higher quality of life than at least 80% of the world's population.

The US could certainly be a lot better, but to say it isn't and never was great smacks of knee-jerk cynicism masquerading as wisdom.