Years ago, in "National Lampoon," they had all the country's gestures for FY. Starting from the American middle finger to the Italian right arm scooping up cradled in the left arm.

I had a back flow device inspected. This stupid thing requires a $500 tester and $200 annual calibrations and additional certifications. While as I agree that these things are needed to prevent contaminating the water supply, I think paying some Joe $75 for 5 min of work is way too much. I would be willing to have the city send someone out to do it. I am sure that the economy of scale is such that if we could have someone do this for $5, but then, the local city council has family who depends on my over priced fees.

I wonder if the $120,000 for petroleum-engineering is not due more to the fact that the jobs tend to be located in harsh climates and remote locations. Yes, the waitresses working in a North Dakota boom town might not be pulling in big bucks, but might in fact be a guy as few women feel safe in these towns. I hear that these rough neck natural gas sites tend to be lawless and full of hidden surprises & toxic spills and fire hazards. I don't know if you will find the girl you want to marry there, if you are interested. Your wife might worry about getting raped going out for groceries. Housing is made up of used FEMA trailers and living amongst people who will rob you at night. The locals know that you have a petroleum degree, so they will charge you more for services.
Petroleum-engineering work tends to be in the Middle east. I have a friend who worked in Abi Dhabi, who said that his wife could not stand to live there, despite the affluence. Maybe the Middle Eastern women learned to put up with outright sexist shit, but she could not. The cops were there to shake you down, not to help you.

I have heard many comments that maybe those rides are unsafe. Well, I challenge that as I once had a ride in a taxi where the driver admitted to being stoned. But not paying him probably was not the thing to do if you didn't want him to come back to settle the score.
But it seems as if all the talk about reducing red tape only applies to businesses and not individuals. Most businesses exist because of red tape to force you to use them. My kid's class parties can only be supplied by store made cakes and snacks. I sort of agree that you might not want to risk causing upset stomachs in kids, but it strikes me as a bit overboard. More kids get hurt via bully violence, but somehow that is not addressed.

Actually, time to fill facebook with lots of people who look sort of like you. I am sure that if you fill it with people who don't look like you, the algorithm will do a good job of discerning them. However, if you put these up, maybe you'll just end up fine tuning the algorithms!

Well, Wilbert Wright died on his third flight. I am sure that the air travel industry had some pretty bad stats. In the 1950's airline attendants were required to train in First Aid and the uniforms looked a lot like nurse's, something that was not just happenstance.

Or the use of depleted uranium in military artillery. What a great way to get rid of it, just shell Iraq, Panama or Yugoslavia.

The FDIC will only pay back the first $250K and can take up to 10 years.

I am sure that if there were evidence that employees were doing something improper, that that would be allowed and announced. Just like during the bank bailout, a lot of talking heads brought up the fact that there were borrowers who provided no income verification for their loans who tended to drive up the market. But very little was brought up about the fact that lots of banks were making lots of money in securitization and repacking the loans as investments. The lucrative money was made in this aspect of the industry. Even CNBC's coverage of the loan crisis put a lot of the blame at the Lebanese clown in CA (who was the principal backer of the movie "Fast and Furious") who was refinancing loans. Well, if he did not have banks willing to buy up his loans, his business would have dried up quick.
Spin everything.

There are so many opportunities to take and retake your photos these days. Every time you come to a traffic light you stand a high chance of being photographed by traffic cameras. I bet that stores and banks provide footage, often done with some tax incentives. Your clothes have RFID tags from the time you bought them. Yes, it can be possible to change clothes or microwave them, but I am sure that there is some error correction going on once these systems have amassed redundant data. Also, there are other systems out there, i.e. your faces's and eye's major blood vessels form a unique pattern for much the same reasons that your fingerprints do. Even people's stride is somewhat characteristic. Apparently so is writing style I am sure that data fusion is on the minds of many a NSA analysts.

Now how about England giving back the land stolen from Irish?

As others have pointed out, the purpose of writing is for effective communications. If there is a breakdown in this communication, then several possible faults exist. There is a problem with the language used in its ability to convey information. Or there is a problem with one or both speakers in his/her competence. Or all three. I have written information that I could not convey, the reader could not understand, and the medium was inadequate for the representation.
There are several jokes that I'd like to share.
1) Don't teach a pig to sing. It annoys the pig and wastes your time.
2) Don't waste your time arguing with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.
Over all, my time is important. If you cannot understand what I am saying, my option might be to not communicate with you. Its not that I am a snob, but I want something more out of a situation. If I feel that I am spending too much time getting you up to speed, then there is something wrong.
For instance, I really dislike discussing religion with people who want to discuss religion. Fundamentally, they don't want to discuss religion, but rather, just want to either convert you to their mode of thinking or find out if you are in their in circle. While as I don't give a shit about their circle, it might be that being outside means that I am missing out on a lot of opportunities. Unfortunately, I don't like playing politics, so I'd rather work somewhere where I am doing as little politics as possible.
The other issue is that if your grammar is bad, then maybe so is your logic and math. By dealing with you, I am not growing and learning. Or not growing and learning in the way that I want to. I have served my time tutoring others, so I am not getting enough of a return on my efforts.

Yes, you can bribe an cop in Mexico for $1000. However, in the US, the lawyer fees are $100K+. For that kind of money, you will tap into the lawyer's network of friends and acquaintances and somehow everyone owes someone a favor or at least favoritism. You might not win the case, but every dollar you spend is to buy yourself a bit of better odds. On the surface, it is all legal, but there is an implicit understanding that these people (in the legal system) work together. Just go and visit a town with a population of Call it irony, but for most laws, there are laws for "conspiracy". To be convicted of conspiring, a lawyer has to show not that the offenders knew of each others actions, but rather that they acted in a fashion that was consistent with having the same goals and purpose. The legal profession is filled with lots of laws. It is only a matter of selective enforcement as to who is charged with which ones and to what extent.
A well established friend of ours son was picked up for smoking weed in public. The cops brought him to his father's house where the father made a scene in front of the cops, so I guess that was as good as "sending him to jail," which they didn't do. I guess if he were black, then that would have been done automatically even by black cops who want to appear to be doing their job.
We should celebrate our more sophisticated system. We have the best form of government that money can buy.

I often think that Mexican day labours have a heads up on this game. Even when they choose a skilled profession, they tend to pick things that will make them money over their lifetime, i.e. plumbing, HVAC maintenance, auto-repair, food service, nursing (mostly female) and landscaping.
Unlike most of my fellow lower middle class college mates who cannot find jobs in their professions even in a good economy. I know of guy why is in "Forestry". Shit, I did not know that one has to go to college for that. After all, isn't that a career that you can learn on the job. Lets not even talk about the ones in Film and Communications.

There are lots of things to be done, however, I don't know if the explanations can reductionistic anymore. I was listening to a speech by DeGrasse or Kaku about this and wondered. There was a book in the 1980s called "The end of Physics."
The easy stuff has been done and is well documented. I read an article of how when quantum theory was first formulated, scientists were able to apply the physics of drum vibrations (done 200 years earlier) towards understanding electron orbitals.
Understanding and predicting DNA/RNA is going to be filled with all sorts of strange heuristics. Sort of like driving around NYC during rush hour during a bomb threat. Physics and pure math have an eloquence to them. Applied Math or Physics and Chemistry don't, or once those parts are teased out, they become pure math and theoretical physics..

Understanding human brain thoughts and artificial intelligence are going to be great areas to be explored.