There's lotsa jobs with decent, but not breathtaking pay that don't require accumulating a huge debt - maybe they can be OK with being a welder, or a railroad locomotive engineer

What I always recommend to kids considering IT is to consider training as an elevator repairman. The job is totally protected from outsourcing--you cannot fix an elevator from India, under any circumstances, period, and the job pays six-figures in most U.S. labor markets. Plus, it mostly can't be outsourced to H1-Bs because it's a mechanical skill which does not qualify for an H1-B visa.

Generally, the experience of companies that outsource successfully involves selecting only work that can be made rote (which also means, in a few years, it will be automated out of the hands of the third-worlders it's being outsourced to at present,) and only using roles that don't involve trusted access to sensitive data. I interviewed with a company that outsourced their "rank and file" IT workers to Indiana with one of the big scumbag companies out there (*cough* COGNIZANT *cough*) and they ended up keeping all the real skilled work and the sensitive stuff in house. Because it turns out, people who live in India aren't really subject to U.S. laws. So even though they could sue the pants off of the outsource contractor in the event of a breach, "getting" the person who did it (with a jail term, scarlet letter for life to prevent future gainful employment) would be much more complicated, maybe impossible.

And the other thing that I've noticed: They end up outsourcing at least twice as many Indians for every American, chopping any "per person savings" in half instantly (because there are twice as many of them.)

Maybe this won't ALWAYS be the case, but I think it will be for the foreseeable future because the thing is, the best educated, highest skilled Indians have already come to the U.S. to work, and don't want to be H1-B slaves and/or stuck in India--they want to be here to swing for the fences, economically speaking.

...and that's assuming nobody notices a voter shutting down the machine, opening the case, installing a PCMCIA card, and bringing it back up... Pretty dubious, if you ask me. The level of conspiracy required to give someone enough time to not be detected while doing that would almost require a totally compromised election process to begin with--and if you have that, why bother compromising the machines?

He's not changing the fact that he said anyone else doing what she did would face serious consequences, and that different treatment applied to her.

Could you provide a link or citation for this? James Comey said no such thing.

Then our only choice for moving forward is to take away the GOP's majority in both houses of congress.

It is totally unacceptable for one party to simply choose to "negate" the results of elections that they do not like, and we've already had significant damage done to the credibility of our government, economy, and currency because of it, and another 2-8 years of gridlock would be a huge (yuuuuuuuuuuge) mistake.

Yeah, even in a legalized marijuana society, the smart people won't be paying for it with their debit card, because they know at some point those big data transactions will be used to disqualify them from healthcare, jobs, and life insurance. So, in a word, bullshit Tim, you will never kill cash until you kill the human greed instinct to track and monetize the innoccuous activities of others for your own nefarious ends.

Just like the out of style furniture your Grandma won't throw out in her living room ("It's good as new, only gets sat on twice per year!") why not provide NFL teams slipcovers that make better tablets look like Surface tablets on TV?

Then the NFL can pocket their product placement money, Microsoft can continue to pretend the Surface is not a piece of shit, and teams can have gear that actually works when they need it to.

Problem solved.

Very, very true.

Remember how every TV and radio station, pre-"consolidation era" (i.e. Telecommunications Act of 1996) had some amount of news and/or public service on their airwaves? Remember how, even when the public service stuff was often relegated to 5am Sunday Morning, the news content was mostly pretty decent... Even on stations where the person just read AP news wire copy, there was still decent news programming.

NOW, if you don't seek out news programming on the radio, you mostly won't find it outside of talk stations, news/talk stations, and all-news stations. Besides that, and NPR? Nope. Music station listeners who haven't sought out radio news in the last 15 years probably think the last event of mass importance was 9/11, because that was the last time "music" stations had any significant amount of news programming on them--even earlier in the smaller markets.

It's a damn shame, but also the exact desired outcome--because it isn't "efficient" for owners of hundreds of news stations to pay to have "news departments" and "news programming" on every station, they just don't do it anymore and pocket the funds that would have been spent on it. As a bonus to the political class, the information-level available to your average citizen just dropped another few ticks, and people who used to be occasionally exposed to news programming supplemented with wingnut news online, now only hear the wingnut view and get no "mainstream" (i.e. not-made-up from whole cloth) news.

....I'm bumping along nicely on Spotify right now... Must have cached the DNS entries since I go there a lot.

I was in favor of the pipeline until this all started happening. Now? Fuck 'em: Hope they lose their goddamn shirts. Because their investment isn't worth more than the first amendment right to protest, and the first amendment right to report.

It's not just about the video clips, but about the disturbance to the rest of the audience of having a phone screen suddenly light up in their line of vision.

The DNC isn't the only target... We've seen a number of reports of state voter registration databases under attack, and those are attacks on our government.

That seems like a pretty stupid use of the shitload of money that's going to be required to buy this thing. Maybe he could just get therapy for his emotional problems with it and the world would end up a better place, instead of just perpetuating the self-congratulatory bullshit of the "Extreme free speech" community on 4chan.

But that would require the ability for introspection, which this cat clearly lacks. So never mind--buyout 4chan it is!

Most sales at gun shows do require a background check... There is a loophole to avoid them, and that is if you buy from a "private seller," that is, someone who isn't a licensed dealer. In that scenario, if they sell you a gun they legally own they are under no obligation to do any kind of background check and incur no liability if you turn out to be a madman intent on harm.

Originally, private sales were exempted from background checks because they were impractical, but I agree with the notion that sales at shows--whether between two individuals or between dealers and individuals--should always require a check. Maybe a better way to phrase it is "Sales between people that don't know each other should be considered commercial sales by default and require a background check," but I have no earthly idea how you'd write a law that passes constitutional muster and is also practically enforceable, so I think the only real option is to require a background check for all sales, whether they're "private" or not.

the dry ass-fucking should be reserved for people that use "literally" as an intensifier

Actually, my use of "literally" was valid and correct there--people bitching about poor customer service regularly refer to it as a "Dry ass fucking." The device Mr. Garrison invented on South Park had an actual phallus that was shoved into the operators ass--an real (cartoon) ass-fucking.

But it's not valid in the following sentence:

I literally hate it when people waste their breath bitching about other people's word choice. Did you understand what I meant? Yeah? Well then it doesn't matter if it's "correct" or not. (Although this time, it was, I'm wrong all the time, I freely admit.)