That was the fallback position to a fallback position. If they'd have done it right like the left wanted it, we'd all be on Medicare right now.

But that's socialism, so we can't have that. We need another kludgy hack to our current healthcare system which itself is a hack in the tax code to make it such that employers would want to pay for their employees' health care.

Yeah, it doesn't work that way here. There is no mechanism to force a non-scheduled election of Senators and Representatives. Right now there is no authority for certain departments that run off of a budget (we have plenty that don't -- Medicare and Social Security, for instance) to spend any money. This can theoretically continue indefinitely. Also in our system, the lower house must originate spending bills, but the upper house has equal rights to amend those bills.

The more interesting crisis is the debt ceiling vote coming up. It used to be that every time Congress would need to issue debt, they'd do it "manually" by voting to do so. When that became too cumbersome, they put in place a limit to how much debt the Treasury could issue. From time to time when tax revenue is less than spending, they have to vote to raise that limit or else we are in default.

It's an odd situation. Congress says $X must be spent on Y, but less than $X comes in via revenue, but they also say that no debt can be issued to make up the shortfall. It's contradictory instructions, and I believe we're alone in the civilized world in this regard.

The horse's mouth says it has dropped since 2009:

2009: 4,430,000
2010: 4,443,000 (the site notes that this includes temporary workers hired for the census)
2011: 4,403,000

So we can conclude that there were less federal government employees in 2011 than there were in 2009 when President Obama took office. Not much less, mind you, but certainly less.

The reason why college sports are such a circus is due to the fact that they are the de facto minor leagues for pro sports (at least as football and to a lesser extent, basketball is concerned). The NFL has a rule that any player eligible for the draft must be 3 years removed from high school. This means that if you are an exceptional football player, you can do one of the following:

1) Don't play for three years.
2) Join a semi-pro league for three years (the Arena League apparently pays $400/game).
3) Go to the CFL (I don't even know if that's possible as I don't know the rules for imports in the CFL).
4) Get a free college education.

I know what I'd do.

The NBA is a bit different because of the D-League and in baseball and hockey, the majority of prospects are not found in college. Figure out a way so that football and basketball have a large minor league system and colleges won't care as much about sports.

I hear you. The only way I can watch Columbus Blue Jackets hockey legally would be to buy cable and get Fox Sports Ohio. There is a way to watch out-of-market NHL games on various devices, but no way to watch in-market games short of routing it all through a VPN or breaking down and getting cable.

I guess the difference with you is that you don't live in the Pittsburgh metro area. It's still a problem for sports/teams that are not usually nationally broadcast. Be happy that your Steelers are good enough that they tend to be on "game of the week" type matchups. I follow San Francisco, and before they were good as of late, I'll bet I didn't watch a game for 2 or 3 years because they simply weren't on TV.

It depends on who "we" is. As others have pointed out, this portion of the law limits how much more private insurers can make smokers pay than non-smokers. This has nothing to do with what the publicly-funded (Medicare, Medicaid, VA, etc.) programs can and cannot do.

Unless your state requires community rating from your private insurers, they already do charge people more for being fat or being a woman, or working in a dangerous occupation. If they could make more money doing so, I'm sure they'd charge people who sleep around more, assuming sleeping around correlates with higher health care costs (I assume it does).

It's just like car insurance, dude. If they decide that you meet a particular risk profile that says you'll cost a lot more in claims, they're going to charge you more in premiums. Hell, if having blue eyes correlated with increased heath care expenses, they'd charge you more for that. It isn't moralizing; it's about being on the right side of an actuarial calculation. If you don't agree with that, you're free to write to your state representative and ask them to require community rating and guaranteed issue from the private insurers that do business in your state (or write to Congress if you want a federal standard).

Really?

I don't have a problem with torrenting stuff, but come on. It's not like 99.9% of the stuff out there can't be found with a minimum amount of effort.

Same here.

The dog chewed a laptop cable. It was cheaper to have Amazon overnight a new one than it was to buy it at the local Best Buy. $20 cheaper. The brick & mortar stores that deal in electronics thrive on the folks who simply don't have enough information to make an informed decision. As soon as they get wise, they order online.

I've been looking for the same, and never came across those. Thanks.

Now I have another quibble. ARM CPUs are always soldered on to the board. They can't be upgraded w/o upgrading the entire board. I'm waiting for the day when you can build from scratch a rig using an ARM CPU just like you would with an x86 CPU, using commodity parts from NewEgg, etc.

I'd be more than happy to short the hell out of Bitcoins if I had the resources. And even if I did, a smart man once said the market can remain irrational longer than I can remain solvent.

That's a feature, but it's not a good feature to have (for Bitcoin). A currency's success is measured by its ability to facilitate commercial transactions, not by its ability to make you rich simply by holding it. That's what *investments* are for. Currency isn't an investment and shouldn't be.

The fact that there could never be any more Bitcoins ever again would encourage speculation and hoarding, which is not what you want from a medium of exchange.

If you're worried about currency devaluation and put some of your money/time into Bitcoins, that makes sense as a hedge against inflation (ie. an investment), but nothing more.

Yes. And you can't have an intelligent designer without an intelligent designer designer.

From there it's turtles all the way down.

Indeed. I'm a bigger fan of the GPL in most cases, but there is room enough in the world for both camps (crazy talk, I know). Now you have your compiler under a suitable license for you and your fellow travelers.

[citation needed]

I think you know the answer to your question of why certain technology must be outlawed or taxed more. It's because by the time the technology becomes cheaper than fossil fuels we will have already done the damage.

I'll meet you half way and say, lets just get rid of all the implicit subsidies for fossil fuels that already exist and then tax people on the externalities they create. Hell, that in and of itself might be enough to make renewables cost effective.

I'm reasonably sure we're past the point of no return, so it might not even matter.