This. In school, it was my job to understand and learn as much as possible. It took me a while to realize that learning and understanding are nice in my job, but I'm getting paid to produce solutions. It's somewhat surprising how often I find I can produce a solution without the sort of thorough knowledge of the problem space I pursued in school.

I think it depends on whether you are characterizing Southerners as racist or The South. To my mind, one is a large swath of people that have a wide variety of opinions and beliefs. The other is a historical political/social culture that still has an influence on modern institutions in regions where it was most pervasive at its height. And that political/social culture undeniably has some roots that were planted in racism. Which makes it tricky to distinguish, in modern institutions, what occurs because of the normal stupidity that everywhere is subject to, and what occurs because of the influence of those historical roots.

On the bright side, I do love the irony of athiests letting themselves get drawn into a holy war...

I think this is where a lot of the dispute between atheism is/is not a religion comes from. Non-interested third parties see the rabid fringe of atheists behave as zealous in their proselytizing as any religious zealot, and naturally lump them together as having some agenda around god that they are pushing. When you behave just like the rabid religious zealots, the small detail that your agenda is "No god" rather than "My god" is no more than a technicality to me. The leopard might find his spots to be extremely different than the tiger's stripes, but I'm overwhelmingly more concerned with the similarities between their teeth and their claws.

It's not a slur. The X reference the Greek letter Chi, the first letter of the Greek word for Christ.

Pretty much everything else you said is quite ironic. If you want to have an intelligent discourse, best not to start by taking unnecessary offense at an imaginary slight. If people using perfectly acceptable language that just happens to not be your preferred nomenclature bothers you so much, you should probably reconsider your objectivity.

Ah, and your point is that non US citizens who are admittedly waging a war against all who do not accept their narrow creed

Or even those who are merely accused of such. Or those who are standing too near those are merely accused of such. I'd be all for drone attacks if I believed for an instant that our intelligence agencies were capable of correctly identifying the threats. I mean, who cares if murderers are in turn murdered? The entire problem with vigilantism is its terrible track record of actually getting the right person. And killing someone because you really really believe he is a bad guy, you just don't have any proof, is vigilantism, whether it is Joe down the street or the US president.

So you see, like socialists, and unlike either democrats or republicans, libertarians base their ideas, not on pragmatism, but on actual ideas about right and wrong. Politics are subservient to ethics.

Ah, but you are implicitly asserting that your ethics are superior to mine. What if we disagree on what the ideal good is? In a society of 300 million, that is going to be inevitable. We can't resort to what works best for most of the people most of the time, i.e. pragmatism, because you have rejected that as a valid basis for a social structure. You state that it is evil to force anyone to do anything they don't want to do, as though that is some hotly debated principle. It's not. Most people even accept the corollary, that it is also wrong to prevent anyone from doing that which they want, with the caveat that their actions have no negative impact on others. Which is again where we run into the problem of basing our society on ethics. Take 300 million definitions of harm, with no allowances made for pragmatism, then try to build a society that minimizes that harm. Good luck.

Yup. My job is currently quite different than where I started years ago, mostly because all the tasks I used to do are largely automated now. Funny thing is, the point was to save me time and effort - in reality, I now spend more time and effort at my job, just at different (sometimes more interesting) things. The curse of a job well done and all that.

I think people sometimes want conspiracies to be true b/c that is ironically a more optimistic view of the world. If evil and suffering can be laid to the feet of a small group of evil people, all that it takes to remove that evil and suffering is to somehow defeat those evil people. If most evil and suffering can be laid to the feet of human apathy, ignorance, greed and incompetence multiplied by billions of people, then you have a much more impossible task in trying to defeat it. Plus, in one scenario, you are simply a powerless pawn in the grips of evil. In the other, you are a minor actor that actively (if unknowingly) contributes to the evil.

Slashdot needs a +1 Burn mod....

Just like pretty much every other job.

Bullshit. There are plenty of people out there that do their jobs in a humane, conscientious manner. It's a common belief among psychopaths trying to justify their own shitty behavior that everyone else behaves the same way, but it simply isn't true. Most people would not and do not shit all over their fellow human beings in an effort to "get ahead".

The problem with the people for whom "willpower is not enough" is that they have spent years developing their current lifestyle habits. That is years of repeatedly giving in to their cravings, years of valuing instant gratification. In order to rebuild their willpower, they will have to spend years overcoming their urges, building different habits. Once you have trained yourself to react to instant gratification, restructuring your reward systems to value long term incremental benefits is a large task. Not only is it hard for these people to say no to their cravings for a bad diet, it is hard for them, at the necessary fundamental level, to value the benefit of putting forth that effort. They literally lack the willpower to begin developing the willpower to deny their food cravings.

Very few people have the courage to live by the set of principles which made America a great Country to begin with.
Uh, like self-centered obsession with getting ahead personally regardless of the expense to others? Not that there haven't been some few stellar individuals that stood out, but the overall history of America is voracious greed thinly disguised as "individualism" or "manifest destiny". There are no longer free resources that are easily taken from the natives, or an endless supply of desperate newcomers to step on; we can't even overtly loot Central and South America now, thanks to global international relations. So now, we have turned inward and are eating ourselves. Very few stood on principle when it was every one else being digested, especially since the American middle class got the scraps. Don't pretend that now that it is the middle class that is the entree that somehow the principle of the matter has changed.

Considering the non-renewable resources (oil, helium, probably others I can't think of at the moment) that we have just about depleted in our first trip up the technology ladder, I think your idea of stockpiling resources is the only way we would ever make it back up if we were knocked down a bunch of rungs. If a catastrophic event occurred right now that knocked us back to the Iron Age, I don't think we would ever make it back to the Space Age.

they are by and large legally sound (granted: they are lawyers, so they're good at rationalizing most anything).

And that's the problem. You can occasionally see the cracks in their rationale, like here. I'm not certain this is the Supreme Court, but it serves as a good example of a Federal court deciding what it wants to happen, then rationalizing how the desired outcome is legal. These instances serve to cast doubt on the courts even when their legal logic IS sound. Especially in cases where the issue is complex, necessitating a complex decision. We know they are sometimes willing to pretend the most absurd legal theories are legitimate as long as they advance a desired agenda; this opens ALL decisions (except the trivial) open to accusations of "legislating from the bench". Destroying the credibility of the courts as an impartial arbiter is another giant step towards the sort of social unrest that topples empires. People as a whole tend to demand what they see as justice; if people are firmly convinced they will not receive justice within the system, you will see more and more people seeking "justice" outside the system.

Funny, I have the exact opposite reaction. I am suspicious whenever I hear someone claiming that a complex system, such as economies and human societies, can be explained simply. The real world is not composed of spherical, frictionless cows.