Your original post had an incorrect number. Your reply is wrong on two counts:
1) Gasoline prices for most of Obama's mandate have been lower than during GWB second term.
2) If you are going to add the price of gas, then you need to include the price of public transportation into your accounting which comes, in most cities to around $1.5-2K a year.
This is unadulterated horseshit.
Median gross rent in Pitt is $674, in SF is $1362. source.
A cheap car (like a Toyota Corolla or Honda Fit) costs about $5000+/year to own.
I call BS.
I owned a Honda Civic four door sedan for ten years, which I bought new around $13K, sold it for $3K and paid around $1K in insurance a year and $200 in maintenance.
Total cost of ownership a year: $2,200 which is quite a bit lower than your BS figure of $5K a year.
Just to point out that the Parisian "five story" building will actually be described as 7 using the American count (ground floor+inhabited attic), but otherwise you are spot on. The SF housing crisis is all about height restrictions.
Do you propose that we pay everyone who runs for office too?
We do already. Look it up. If presidential candidates voluntarily sign up they get money from the state to run. In the last two elections both the republican and democratic candidates chose not to sign up, but had they had they would have gotten money.
More than half of the politicians in DC are millionaires, so how might that play into the "incompetents" factor?
In several ways. First many of them are born in third base, like Mitt Romney and Al Gore. Second, this only supports my point. Competent poor people cannot afford to forego the income, so only milionaires end up being representatives of the "people".
Once they are there, they all learn pretty quickly how to get money from lobbyists,
This too also supports my comments, Since they are not paid proportionally the must resort to lobbyists to close the gap. Give them a secure source of income and they are much more likely to ignore the lobbyist entreaties.
Seriously, most people reflexively reject high salaries for politicians, without thinking of its implications. Would you suggest your favorite sports team pay substantially less than market rates? then why do you suggest the same for your city/district/state/country?
If you pay politicians mediocre salaries (which we do) don't act all surprised when we end up with a bunch of incompetents. Any truly good manager/politician would make 10-100x more in the private sector than as a politician.
No decent programming language would read into a buffer without itself testing for a valid length. Such a test has negligible cost compared to actually reading the array, so there is no reason not to make it.
We could fix it and stop this billion dollar bugs or we can carry on "with tradition" and refuse to fix that basic mistake from the C designers.
Women have been, and continue to be, a protected class in the US.
You got that right. I remember how we protected them from the vote, how we protected them from the work place, how we protected them when we declared that marital rape didn't exist, and how we continue to protect them by paying them at lower rates than equivalently trained and experienced males.
Them so lucky.
[citation needed]
Or to be more precise. Some people claim it went down to 2000, but even the larger 100,000 figure is in dispute.
Secondly the few hundred is unadulterated BS. In fact this is one easy way to spot a fake claim of a "lost tribe". If it is below a thousand members with no contact with the outside world it will pretty soon die out from inbreeding.
There have been times where the total number of humans was less than 40k with some speculation that there were as few as 2k for a while.
This is not yet fully settled, as the wikipedia article itself indicates. Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA diversity suggest this, other genes speak to the contrary.
You could say that of any category of death.
Precisely, which is why medical researchers tend to speak of person-years. They also readily volunteer that people dying of cancer or heart attack at age 55 is a completely different thing than people dying of the same illnesses at age 90, since the latter would have died of something else not much later anyhow.
Like politics for example.
The statistic, as I pointed out, is meaningless and it is not used by medical researchers. Who is playing politics you say?
This is a meaningless statistic. Serious medical researchers report this in person-years lost, not in meaningless "millions of deaths". To illustrate, let's suppose those 57 million people were infirm and about to die, but pollution hastened their demise by one second. Then this is not a big deal. Personally I would happily shorten my life for exactly one second in exchange for the conveniences of modern life. On the other hand if these people had their lives substantially shortened then this is a veritable tragedy.
However such misleading headline doesn't surprise me: the UN is a master of over-hyped sky-is-falling chicken-little statistics.
And/ I can come up with a concept in a novel about a very clean, efficient family car that spits into four when needed and rejoins into one when going for vacation.
That took a minute of my time. Still the entire credit would go to whoever actually built such contraption.
This shows how screwed up UI philosophy is among the nerd crowd. What alternative does the user have? Saw off the side of his foot?
Or perhaps you are going to suggest the standard OSF cop-out: well, it's open source, if it doesn't work for you, you can redesign the entire brake and pedal subsystem, since we are all obviously expert automotive engineers with scads of free time.
One small step for man, one giant stumble for mankind.
