You made up the "for the better" part. That was not in the script.

Well how did they get out of it when the rest of us are working for the Federal government for almost 5 months?

That's not the goal? After all, if healthcare is a "right", you need someone drafted to provide it...

Maybe they're trying to change the system from the inside...

Not really. They haven't gotten what they want from the party for quite some time. The Neocons are firmly in control these days. They are the ones that put up McCain, then Romney (eviscerating the Ron Paul wing in the process). Oh, they get a lot of play in the MSM (easy targets), but influence in the GOP - not so much.

What a horrible job they did of putting that show together. Battles are only 3 minutes, but with all the commentary, backgrounders, interviews and fluff, they can only fit FOUR battles into an hour-long show. Worse, they include so much commentary they actually EXCLUDE about 1/2 the battles, and just show a few highlights from some.

Imagine if a network covered the NBA playoffs like that? Producers at ABC certainly showed a lot of incompetence with that show.

West Virginia doesn't even have access to the ocean or even a very large river, much less a deep water port sufficient for a Naval base.

Well your complaints were all about the commercials, which I agree are annoying, and the same reason I cancelled my Hulu + subscription. I probably would pay more for it without the ads, though. I watch Netflix frequently, it has lots of good content, but the selling point for Hulu is you keep current with shows. It had enough current content it could have actually replaced 95% of my TV watching (only exception off the top of my head being the local morning news).

The ads on Hulu were actually MORE annoying than regular TV, since I could always fast-forward through those (an option Hulu does not support).

Yea, I miss the good old days. MTV actually played music (and no advertising). USA actually had programming all night (and it was weird stuff). TBS had black-and-white movies.

Now, get off my lawn

Well my nipples, in fact, are sexual objects. My wife's were, too, until she had a kid. Then, not so much. Not at all, in fact.

Ant that is why they are using the phrase which are used for online financial transactions as a place to start, and put the system in place. Camel's nose in the tent, as it were. More people will be okay with it. Once the system is in place, it will expand to cover everyone (except, of course, governments, politicians, and large corporations).

Right now, I can pay my ISP an extra $10 - 20 to anonymize my information on Whois. I still have to provide it to my ISP - that has already been made a legal requirement. But with the crackpot stuff I sometimes tend to put on the Intarwebs, I don't want to become a victim of doxing or swatting by some butt-hurt "hactivist". So it's worth it. But when they expand this system, or decide that fee needs to be $1000 or more, well, it just won't be available to me any more.

So, in the long run, this is an effort to end anonymous speech, to scrub unpopular opinions from the Web, and coerce small players into leaving the website business or, worse, further centralizing distribution of content. There are currently only six media companies in the US that control 90% of all media. There are plenty of elitists that would love to see all of the content on the Internet controlled by those six companies. It would make it so much easier to drown out any dissenting voices, wouldn't it?

It's because consulting firms are unable to find high skilled computer experts in the US, so they must expand the H1-B program to bring in more foreigners to compensate for the lack of competent Americans!

You have bought into the administration smear campaign and government propaganda. Booz Allen isn't necessarily lying, here, but this statement, along with the ridiculously picayune reasons for rejecting candidates based on some detail not being perfect, it's likely something as innocuous as listing the wrong day of the month for a graduation, or misspelling of an instructor's name.

You might educate yourself by checking out the form Snowden was required to complete. I challenge anyone to be able to fill it out completely and include nothing that does not "check out precisely".

Not really worth the hassle, considering I'd be paying almost the same thing to Verizon anyway. And I tried the antenna before, many years ago. It works for a few of the local channels, but some either won't tune or are so full of pauses and artifacts they aren't watchable. Easier just to keep the bundle. Plus, I'd end up spending the ~ $10 I would save anyway so the wife can watch her HGTV shows on Hulu Plus...

I decided I didn't need the TV service from Verizon any more, so I called about cancelling that and just keeping Internet. It turns out, that's only a $10 a month savings ("Well you don't get the bundle discounts."). I do watch the local broadcast stations, but that package is $12.99, so I would actually pay MORE to cut my channels to just the local broadcast stations. What a scam.

Only for non-profits, and while they were even more focused on limiting expenses (I would think), no one ever suggested getting rid of skilled veterans and replacing them with code monkeys. In fact the one outsourcing attempt (to a foreign company) was such a failure it had to be reversed.

I have been wrong (really, really wrong) more than once, and while I have admitted so in some cases, I've found it's best to shut up and let the correction (often, multiple corrections from many folks) stand on their own.

Then you should change your posting settings to "plain text", so that at least you can put in line breaks. The first post was wall-of-words enough but this one is really painful to pick through.

This is what I had to respond to. I thought it was well known and well-established. 1-3% raises, to only a few, is part of what is keeping wages flat. And while some like to point out that "well inflation is very low", they use only the latest modified CPI, which ignores things like food, energy, and housing costs which have all risen even faster than CPI. And even CPI shows price increases between 2 and 4% for the last 20 years. That means a 1-3% raise is actually falling income.

You can Google the results of wages over time on your own to educate yourself, but for your edification, I will also provide some references. The first is from Pew Research, which studied wages from 1964. It clearly demonstrates the issue of stagnant wages throughout that period. The most marked trend, though, has been the stagnation of wages since about 2000. An interesting report on the trend comes from the Economic Policy Institute. Of particular note in that study are several very troubling trends:

• Productivity has actually increased significantly during the period. That is, workers are performing more work, while compensation remains flat.
• During the Great Recession, productivity continued to increase (7.7 percent), while wages were flat (0.0 percent) as measured by the Labor Productivity and Costs (LPC).
• Compensation for the top 5% of earners actually has seen growth. The most growth.

The last point is interesting. What is basically means is that as productivity grows, the company executives compensate themselves, while replacing their workers with cheaper foreign labor. The company declines, goes into bankruptcy, the executives bail out with their golden parachutes, and everything from a small block to an entire town ends up in dire financial straights.

I don't know what the answer is for resolving this spiral into a country in decline, but I do know what happened to the leaders of France when it happened there...