Right - he's never brought it up or acted to change it, like he has so many other things that he has decided are important to him. So, you DO know exactly the story. He thinks it's just fine.

And ... presidents can't "change the law," just in case you're forgetting basic Civics 101.

1. Start your own computer consulting business.
2. Charge $50-$150 per hr, and collect all of it, rather than the paltry $20/hr or so equivalent you'd get as an employee with the employer skimming the rest.

As long as people want to take the "easy" way out and just be an employee so they don't have to deal with administrative tasks, there will be an excess supply of employees, and employers can get away with paying low wages and demanding excessive overtime. Finding clients on your own and doing your own accounting is a PITA, but the increase in your compensation far, far exceeds the pain.

Just be sure not to call yourself a computer consultant. Form your own corporation with at least one additional employee (spouse as secretary or buddy who also wants to do computer consulting), or work another job as an employee. Along with screwing computer professionals over with FLSA, Congress also screwed them over by making it impossible for them to work as independent consultants. You have to do it working for a company with 2+ employees, or do it part-time as a second job.

So, you work for an imaginary cartoon character?

Of course what you really mean is that our current president also thinks it should be that way. Right? Right? Ah.

Spoken like someone who has never done the actual math (let alone paid self-employment taxes, spent time arranging for that next contract, buying your own health insurance and all the rest). People who bill $600 a day are lucky to take half of that home at the end of the day.

You're doing it wrong.

If you feel pinched by the fact that a sick day or a holiday isn't a billable day, then you have made some very poor choices about what you're selling, and how much you're charging for it. Why should anyone take advice from some one who hasn't done a little basic math before signing a contract?

The problem is that landfills are too cheap. Every waste disposal stream has costs. The choice is what we're willing to pay to deal with it.

No, landfills being cheap is only a factor if recyclables have negative value (i.e. you had to pay recyclers to take your recyclables, just as you pay them to take your trash). If that's what you believe, then it's tantamount to admitting we shouldn't be recycling.

The premise behind recycling has always been that it's cheaper to harvest raw materials from recyclables than it is to mine/manufacture new ones. That is, recyclables have positive value, and it's higher than for mined raw materials. If this isn't true, then our best strategy is actually either (A) stop recycling and give up on the idea, or (B) to separate out recyclables and dump them into a parallel landfill. In the future when mining/refining raw materials becomes more expensive, it will then become cost-effective to mine those recyclables landfills.

If you want to shortcut this process, then start charging a deposit for recyclable materials. This is already done in many places for cans and bottles - you pay a little extra when purchasing the new can or bottle, and you get the money back when you turn it in for recycling. Although in that case it's mostly done to prevent these items from ending up as trash on the streets.

Also standing in the way are many plastics (thermosets) and rubber (tires) not being easy to recycle. And goods being produced from certain recyclables like paper being inferior to new (even the Sierra Club prints its calendars on non-recycled paper because it's whiter), thus its market being much smaller than the original market - mostly cardboard and egg cartons. Incentives and regulations to encourage manufactured materials to be more recyclable, and R&D into better means of recycling helps here.

Completely different. Uzi Nissan owned nissan.com. Nissan (the car company) owned the Nissan trademark (though it didn't begin using it in the U.S. until well after Uzi Nissan bought the nissan.com domain).

Neither Matthew Lush nor Lush Cosmetics owns www.youtube.com/lush. It's owned by YouTube (aka Google). And Google is allowed to do anything they want with the youtube.com domain. If one of YouTube's VPs has a last name Lush and wants that URL for his daughter's YouTube channel, he can take it away from these guys and there's nothing either of them can do.

If you passed out marketing materials with someone else's domain as "your" URL, it's your own damn fault if something like this happens. Spend the $10/yr to register your own domain and $20/yr for minimal hosting, and set up a 1-line redirect script so www.yourdomain.com forwards to www.youtube.com/lush (or whatever). Some domain registrars will even let you set up forwarding without you having to buy a hosting plan. TFA is like setting your blanket in a choice spot on someone else's private property to watch July 4th fireworks, then getting upset when the property owner moves your blanket and gives the spot to someone else.

It's also likely you were going to feel better again anyway. But more to the point, how are those placebos at treating, say, a raging inner ear infection, or blood cancer?

Someone who uses terms like "feeling down" and "feeling great again" while attempting to lecture other people about how scientifically worthless their opinions are needs to look in the mirror.

"and in your BEST case scenario, end up hurting actual people"

Is this somehow worse than hurting actual rhinos? Is there some reason to class humans as a super species that have a greater right to exist than any others other than anthropomorphic arrogance?

You can try to spin it however you want. The vast majority of the people on earth do in fact see humans as having a greater right to exist than other animals. If a rhino and person were caught on a see-saw contraption on a cliff where the process of saving one would condemn the other to death, 99% of people would choose to save the person.

In that context, you lose the moral high ground if you begin poisoning horns. The poachers are only hurting animals. You are hurting people. Therefore, you will be the worse criminal in most people's minds.

It wasn't "invented" two centuries ago. It may have been given a name two centuries ago, but it taps into a deep and primal part of how our brains work. Go to a public swimming pool. Pee into a bucket. Take an eye dropper and put one drop of the pee into the pool. Everyone will rush out of the water, and you'll probably be arrested.

Our brains are wired so that the loosest association with something disgusting continues to disgust us no matter how diluted. People are grossed out at astronauts "drinking recycled pee," even though the reverse osmosis system used generates water cleaner than you can get from any natural spring. And if a minute quantity of something bad is disgusting, then it's not that far a leap to start thinking that a minute quantity of something good can be helpful.

They're starting to address this. I was shopping for a parabolic wifi antenna recently. Amazon lumps the reviews for 4 different types (different dBi) with 2 different connectors together even though they're all very different products. If you scroll down to the reviews, you'll see above each review is what specific product the reviewer purchased - dBi and connector type.

I'm referring to the fact that we find (and refine, through legislation and court review) reasons to infringe on constitutionally protected rights all the time.

Remember though, not counting people who've been found to be crazy (who also can lose their liberty before actually committing a crime), the people who lose their rights to keep firearms because they're felons are being punished after the fact (same thing happens when they lose their right to vote). Likewise when a judge finds cause to issue a legally binding order that says he/she thinks a person's behavior is looking dangerous enough that they're not allowed to go certain places or see certain people. When you lose the right to purchase a firearm because a judge thinks you're acting like a dangerous jerk, that's still the judicial system reacting to your chosen actions.

This is why we have to turn them into public utilities and abolish all exclusive franchising.

Dear god no. Lots of different companies all trying different things is exactly what you want amidst technological uncertainty. They thoroughly search the solution space, with the companies that find the better solutions becoming more successful. Cellular data is a perfect example. If the U.S. had fallen in line with the EU in mandating the formed-by-committee GSM standard, then CDMA would've been stillborn and we would still be stuck on 56 kbps data speeds. (CDMA automatically divides bandwidth between all users who are actually using data at that moment. GSM is time-slotted, and each device gets a timeslice whether or not they actually use it to transmit data.) Nearly all 3G GSM data implementations used wideband CDMA (which is why you could talk and use data at the same time on a GSM phone - they had to have two different radios for voice and data, while CDMA phones did both with a single radio). 4G LTE uses bandwidth-sharing technology very similar to CDMA (orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes), and its development would've taken several years longer without CDMA to lay down the groundwork, if people had even believed it was viable without real-life trials among millions of users.

Public utilities are good when the technology has pretty much peaked and is stable - the best solution has been found, and there aren't any improvements on the horizon. Long distance electrical transmission initially had people advocating both AC and DC as superior. It turned out high voltage AC as the most effective way to transmit power over long distances, so that standard won out. Nothing better has been found in a century so that's a good service to turn into a utility - the optimal solution has probably been found. Likewise, cable TV/Internet is getting to that point. Initially there was lots of uncertainty about how best to hook up houses and subnet the network, so lots of different cable companies tried different things. But now pretty much everyone is using the same solution (it's even been standardized as DOCSIS), and the only looming future improvement is fiber to the home. So the Cable industry should probably be turned into a public utility soon.

But Cellular is still a rapidly developing industry with lots of technological innovations still being made. Turning it into a public utility would be the worst thing you could do to it.

If you want to fix Cellular, prohibit vertical integration. A company can own towers but can't provide service. A company can provide service but they can't own towers or make phones. A company can make phones but can't own towers or provide service. Then make it so you can buy any phone and subscribe to any service provider (as long as the phone supports their technology). The service providers would lease time on different tower networks. If a manufacturer made a good phone, people would buy it without regard for whether or not a carrier sold it. If a tower company put together a good network, lots of service providers would contract with them. And if a carrier had good plans, people would subscribe to them. None of the current BS where a carrier basically leverages their advantage in tower network into restrictions on phone interoperability and plan selection.

Constitutionally, we also embrace the notion that the government can't infringe your right to speak, assemble, and move about ... but we lock up criminals, preventing them from doing just those things. Your participation in the social (and constitutional) contract goes away when you act to deny its protections to other people. So, you stop enjoying the defense of your liberty when you decide that someone else needs to give theirs up so you can (for example) rob them or whatnot. This isn't an irreconcilable situation - it makes perfect sense.

Of course they can. That's what the courts are for. Just recently, the Supreme Court ruled on exactly this topic, pointing out that some of the local restrictions on gun ownership (like DC's) were in fact counter-constitutional. There: matter resolved.

First, they aren't a matter of law. Amendments to the constitution are a structural change to the nation's operating charter. The constitution's single most important purpose is to LIMIT the power of the government. Changing the charter in order to allow the government to take away liberties is indeed difficult, and damn well should be. Some people on the left are incensed by what some other people have to say (witness what's happening on college campuses, where speech is being censored like never before). Those groups would LOVE to strike down the First Amendment, so that they could use government power to determine what people can say. You should be very glad that it would be so difficult for them to be able to strip away the constitution's protections.