Speaking objectively, for a stopped clock they sure "happen" to be right pretty often. They were right about Hassan Akbar, they were right about Nidal Hasan, they were right about this. A much more accurate assessment would be that Fox's detractors (including the White House) *WANTED* it /not/ to be terrorist attack, and held off admitting that it was as long as possible until they had no choice.

Accidentally? For a change? Smearing a news outlet for recognizing a pattern that actually exists instead of trying to shoehorn reality into a pattern that would be *nice* to see is akin to punishing the child for pointing out the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.

Never make analogies again.

The reason you can't sell me the Brooklyn Bridge is because it belongs to somebody else. Are you suggesting that teenagers' bodies belong to someone other than them? If so, to whom? There's a very, very important difference between legally incapable and legally forbidden.

Sure. Since you're a fan of Wikipedia, start by reading about Genarlow Wilson, a 17-year-old who did nearly 3 years of hard time for consensual (in fact, passive) sexual contact with a girl just two years younger.

Or maybe you should read about Marcus Dixon, an 18-year-old who was imprisoned for **child molestation** for consensual sex with a girl just shy of 16.

Yes, one of the cases was later overturned and the punishment in the other was reduced -- but not until both of the accused suffered a punishment far worse than statutory "rape" for non-crimes that you falsely claim are covered by "fairly permissive set of exceptions".

I appreciate the rational debate. I can't speak expertly to the comparative cost of education in the U.S. vs. other OECD countries, but I am willing to bet that when we look at spending on universities we're lumping research budgets in with student education. While there's certainly value in research, counting research grants as part of tuition costs is a bit disingenuous and is a likely cause for some of the apparent disparity.

You're moving the goalposts a little with the vacation issue, but fair enough -- although (a) 5 weeks vs. 3 isn't a night-or-day difference and (b) I can tell you from personal experience that it's almost always possible to negotiate a better vacation policy, especially if you're willing to pay a little for it. And let's be honest: whether or not a vacation jeopardizes your job or career is something that you have a LOT more control over than your post would suggest (unless you're pushing the skill, performance, age or compensation boundaries of your role).

More importantly you're missing my main point, which is that it's not a 12% difference like you suggest. It's more like a 15-17% difference in take-home pay (between lower gross salary and higher income tax) AND everything costs (at least) 15% more, so each dollar you do earn is essentially worth $0.87 or less. In other words, the actual difference is more like 25% at the low end.

The reason you haven't seen anything demonstrating that European health care isn't a net savings despite higher taxes is that almost no such comparison presents a complete picture of the taxation differences. Most merely compare one dimension (income tax) without accounting for sales tax (25% vs. ~9% -- and BTW since you brought up regressive, VAT is about as regressive as taxes get), capital gains tax (28-42% vs. 15%), etc. or the difference in average gross pay for the same work (~$10k).

Nevertheless, let's be charitable. Out of the 25% or better premium that Danes pay over Americans, let's allow that 15% goes to health care and the additional vacation time. Mind you, that actually means that the difference in gross wages is really substantially greater than $10k, because employers aren't paying for health coverage -- but let's even let that go. We're now left with a 10% overage that you're paying for life as a western European.

Since the original thread is about paying for education, note that while your 4-8 years of college may be subsidized, you are paying that 10 cents out of every dollar for it for your whole working life. It's a rare American student who can claim to be saddled with such a burden of repayment for his education.

I'm willing to bet that if you actually had that option, you wouldn't take it.

Let's presume that "I do alright but I'm far from rich" means you pull in about $85k/year. An additional 10% means you would pay just over $700/month more in taxes. That's before you take into account that the average gross salary in Denmark is almost $10,000/year lower than in the U.S., so another ~$500/month hit after taxes. That $1,200/month bump in take-home pay that you enjoy over the average Dane could buy you and your family a righteous medical insurance policy, and if you're a smart shopper you'll still have quite a bit left over to save for your kids' education.

That's just the financials. As far as transportation, the idea that the U.S. has an inferior transportation infrastructure is at best an apples-to-oranges fallacy, and at worst an outright myth. The only country in the world of comparable size that has a better-developed system of transportation (or one that even comes close) is China, and you'll note they have the tax revenue from 4 times as many people to pay for it. Western European countries are substantially more compact, in both absolute and per-capita terms (Denmark specifically has 4x the population density of the U.S.), and thus don't have nearly as much ground to cover or face comparable last-mile challenges. Moreover, the price they pay for what you perceive as a transportation utopia is arguably reduced mobility, a more limited choice of destinations due to highly restricted personal last-mile reach, and -- more importantly -- a paradigm where apartment living is the norm rather than the exception. (How many Danes do you think live in single-family homes?)

Back to the balance sheet: note that we haven't even gotten to sales tax yet. So...you're already paying about $1,200/month for the privilege of sharing walls with your neighbors and piling your family onto a crowded train to go away for the weekend instead of hopping in your minivan. Now - on top of that, you would pay >15% more in VAT than you do in the States. Not only that, but you would also pay breathtaking import tariffs to boot: nearly 50% on things like bicycles, and a mind-boggling 200% on cars, should you decide you want one. Oh, and once you've paid 3x for your car, you'd pay about $10 per gallon of gas to drive it.

I really don't think that 10% is as much of a "bargain" as your first impressions might lead you to believe.

Care to name a few? Just because "countries pay", it does NOT mean they don't have runaway cost problems. Single-payer systems just hide those problems better.

They tax the bejeezus out of their people. Danish sales tax is a whopping 25% (second only to Hungary) and their MEAN income tax rate is over 40%. Don't kid yourself (or mislead others) -- a Danish student pays more dearly for his "free" education over the course of his life than even the most debt-saddled American student ever will.

I'd rather we didn't.

1. What were you doing with the camera at the time? Did you snap a flash picture? Keep in mind that the (momentary) EM burst from that is orders of magnitude higher than anything that a mobile phone or other PED is capable of putting out, so it's an apples-to-submarines comparison.

2. How far did your VOR needle jump...more than it does during moments of turbulence? And more importantly, how quickly did it return/stabilize? Was your VOR even set to an actual beacon at the time?

3. If this had been in IMC (instrument conditions), would this have actually influenced your flight, even on an instrument approach? Be honest.

The goal of terrorism is instability, either political or economic. "[M]aking Israeli credit cards untrustable in the world, like Nigerian credit cards" certainly qualifies.

Sure - AS LONG AS the "fixes" (e.g. antidote or vaccine) are engineered, produced and ready for distribution BEFORE such info gets out.

Moreover, if you're going to take the prerogative of developing a bioweapon with the capability of causing mass casualties, it's also your responsibility to secure funding for inoculating or treating everyone affected. Just recently there was an outcry here about the government spending $433M on smallpox treatment in the event of an outbreak. If this is as dangerous as they claim, the treatment cost would be orders of magnitude higher than that. The UN will inevitably come to Washington cap in hand, but we're broke. Who's going to pay for it?

This gave me pause. On what planet is it your problem if a stocking distributor voluntarily buys more of the widgets you're manufacturing than he has buyers for? Best Buy (and other retailers) buys stock based on their own projections. HP didn't owe it to them to "take back" a single unit (unless it was defective) - that's like a grocery store demanding that General Mills buy back cases of Lucky Charms because customers turned out to prefer Honey Nut Cheerios.

Problem is, it's a different KIND of pressure. It's one thing to work under a deadline. It's another thing entirely to work under a microscope. I perform at my absolute best when I'm working against the clock (most people do). I perform at my worst when I have to second-guess every thought and word as I try to read the interviewer's mind AND solve the f*cking problem quickly and elegantly at the same time.

It's extremely rare in a production environment that someone is looking over your shoulder as you do your work (other than to help you debug). If you want to see whether I can write a piece of code, give me the specs, watch how I go about asking questions and gathering additional data, and then leave me alone for however long you've determined/decided the assignment should take - after all, that's how it's going to work once I'm on the job. If you want to see my communication and team skills, send another developer my way when I'm done and have us step through the code together as I articulate what I did (and debug, if necessary).

Honesty time: how many people have you ever met who ENJOY being scrutinized? Who enjoy not knowing what someone else in a position of power thinks of them before, during and after a conversation? Who enjoy trying to read between the lines under pressure to try to infer what's actually expected or being asked of them?

When I'm interviewing someone, my point -- outside of a few very specific situations -- isn't to figure out if the candidate is Iceman. It's to determine whether or not s/he is a competent pilot. Engineering isn't a game show; what's the point of structuring our interviews like tryouts for one?

Anybody else see the utter irony in this (arguably true) statement, recalling that Firefox was introduced as a solution to the problem of feature creep (as a lightweight alternative to Netscape, which had turned into a "huge complicated mess")?

That's disingenuous fear-mongering, not demonstration. If you try to educate people by screaming, "OMG the earth is becoming Venus! 0.0388% is higher than 0.0387%, and that much closer to 96%!! We're all gonna fry!!!", don't complain when they don't take you seriously - you've invalidated your own point.

Just to be clear, you are referring to climate scientists like Stan Goldenberg and Kiminori Itoh, the latter of whom began voicing his skepticism a full 13 years before Fukushima out of concern that "it was dangerous that the Japanese society was going to increase nuclear power plants to decrease carbon dioxide"...yes? If so, your assessment is correct.

The USPS isn't losing a battle against the "E-mail Age" - it's losing a battle against organized labor. As is every other productivity sector in the U.S. And so long as we have a government that unconditionally supports one side of that battle, productivity -- be it mail delivery, manufacturing, education, etc. - will continue to lose.