That would be great, if that was how municipal governments actually worked. However, local elections in 2015 are based on the race of the person running, and race-based voters only know "my people". A bad record of repairing the utilities isn't really an issue at all and certainly does not make local politicians unelectable.

That would be a great idea if it was reality. In reality, socialists don't desire to benefit from capitalism, they want to eradicate it and return the entire population to utter poverty as it was in the 20th century. Talk about a lack of critical thought! It's as if critical thought is only a weapon that is only meant to be used against the enemies of socialism. Two legs good, four legs better.

"I believe that now, immediately, there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them."

-- Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood

The Tea Party are whites. The President is a black man. He represents his own people and no other. He has openly stated this and is proud of the fact.

Lots of people play games because they can't stand not having control over whatever happens. This is the dice-hating player. These people are also the worst at separating the game from the players (they get really mad when someone else conflicts with them, can't understand "it's just a game"). European style games are widely regarded as soulless and being nothing more than a couple hours of doing arithmetic. Fine for people with no imaginations.

People don't buy Monopoly for themselves. It's usually bought as a gift for someone else, and it is perhaps played once before being stored in the closet. It's not popular because it's a good game, it's the Paris Hilton of board games: popular because it's popular.

Another ignorant Westerner projecting her own values on a foreign society. Being paid "peanuts" in Western currency is actually quite a lot in Chinese yuan. It's certainly more than they could make back on the farm. Maybe we should actually talk to these people instead of assuming that we can hold opinions on their behalf?

Workers are mobile and they know it. Wages are up across the board in China, and not going down anytime soon. The workers will move across the street to a new factory at the drop of a hat. "We are holding a knife to their throats"? WTF? Are we in Bizarro World? Have you even been to China, or talked to a single worker? Who is "we"?

I'm curious: did anyone ever notice how Chile is a modern, safe country while the rest of South America is stereotypical? What happened in Chile that was different?

More importantly, what do Chileans think? Would they rather have followed the tide into far-left government and shared the fate of the rest of the continent? Or is the attitude, "Well, Pinochet was bad, but the alternative was much, much worse." Hmmm....food for thought. On second thought don't think - let's just uncritically parrot what we read somewhere, because it MUST be right.

Big deal. I'm an American and I can do the same.

Oh, I WISH I got paid by the ticket! But that's an ordinary job, being an author isn't. It's basically a sales job where you create the product. Like any sales job, you get paid according to sales. Boo-hoo, if you don't like it get a wage or salary job like the rest of us.

"For me, "hobbyist" refers not esthetics so much as *origin*. That is, whence did game X or module Y come? Was it created to fill a slot in a production schedule or did it arise out of play? That's the big difference between, say, Gygax's Giants-Drow series and the Dragonlance modules. The former were professional write-ups of adventures based in actual play, whereas Dragonlance was conceived from start to finish as an effort to sell modules. Certainly Dragonlance borrowed elements from adventures and campaigns that were actually played (like Jeff Grubb's deities), but there was no such thing as a Dragonlance campaign prior to its being written up for sale, unlike nearly adventure Gary Gygax wrote during his time at TSR."

-- James Maliszewski, Grognardia.blogspot.com

I would just like to say that is one of the most remarkably racist posts I've ever seen on Slashdot. You'd think in the wake of Micheal Brown, people would be more sensitive. But no.

"It's too bad the Soviet Union didn't survive" is an odd phrase indeed. Is this the first time it has ever been used?

The Soviet Union couldn't have gotten on the internet, there would have been too much free information floating around. To heck with the internet - the Soviets couldn't even sell Xerox machines to the general public, they would have been used by the people for anti-Communist activities. But don't trust me, listen to one of the Soviet leaders (and, by extension, one of the smartest people in their entire empire).

In a remarkable tete-a-tete with a US journalist and former arms control official, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, First Deputy Defense Minister and Chief of the General Staff, interpreted the real meaning of SDI:
"We cannot equal the quality of U.S. arms for a generation or two. Modern military power is based on technology, and technology is based on computers. In the US, small children play with computers... Here, we don't even have computers in every office of the Defense Ministry. And for reasons you know well, we cannot make computers widely available in our society. We will never be able to catch up with you in modern arms until we have an economic revolution. And the question is whether we can have an economic revolution without a political revolution."

What were those reasons that everyone knew well? Ever heard of samizdat? No, eh?

Can't you ever see anything positive about the Obama administration? You're just dead-set on opposing them, no matter what they do. Your racism is showing. Go home and sleep it off, and do a better job of disguising it next time, because everyone in the world just saw through you. +5 Insightful my ass, more like +5 Racist.

Clearly you have never been to the UCLA campus because, if you had, you would have known this isn't true in the least. You can walk all over that place.

The problem in LA is the culture. People believe they are to be seen in their automobiles and they buy or lease expensive cars and drive them ridiculously short distances for that sole reason (if there is another reason, please do share but nothing really makes sense).

I worked for a company based out of LA for 2.5 years and we were there often. One guy lived a 10 minute walk from the office but chose to drive each and every day. He didn't buy an M3 to have it sit in his garage, after all. Nope, it sat in the company's garage instead.

SMH.