Agreed. So how about we crack down on NON-law abiding gun owners, i.e. those owners and dealers who funnel guns to criminals? Require firearm registration, and we could easily trace back weapons used in crimes to the people who supplied them. I understand why the gun industry (and their mouthpiece, the NRA) objects to this, since from their perspective a sale is a sale, and guns that are funneled to criminals increase sales both directly and indirectly (by creating concerns about violence and driving law-abiding people to purchase guns). It makes no sense that the rest of us have to accept it, though.

He went on to say "I'm very skeptical, since the background in a lot of those moon photos looks just like the set we used to film those attacks on defenseless Russians by Ukrainian thugs...uh...um...I mean...nevermind."

The gov't guarantees the loan? You mean the loan the gov't issues? Kind of hard to guarantee a loan that you yourself issue.

As to the "going after the person," you can't get blood from a stone. Default rates for federal student loans are high, and a lot of those $ never get paid back. Further, "going after" someone costs money, plus you've got the time value of money factor.

Except that:
(a) the Federal Gov't is the one issuing the loans in the vast majority of the cases
(b) the default rates are 10-15% (compares to 3-4% rate for auto loans, where, again, you can repo the car)

"That's the problem. Interest rates on student loans are usury. Higher than most mortgages and auto loans"

Of course they're higher! Student loans are:

(a) unsecured (you can foreclose on a house or repossess a car, you can't take back a diploma and resell it)
(b) not based on creditworthiness/ability to pay (it's not like the Feds say "we'll lend to people getting CompSci degrees at Stanford, but not to people getting French literature degrees at second-tier state schools")

For another example, open a lunch counter and try to refuse to provide food to African-Americans. See how the courts view that.

It does happen, but it's not common. They end up on opposite sides of the judgment about 5% of the time. If you exclude unanimous cases, it's about 16% of the time.

http://sblog.s3.amazonaws.com/...

The quick data I could find on this is a couple of years old, but as of 2011, 93% of people who made less than $16k/year paid zero federal income tax. Heck, 60% of people making $17-33k pay zero income tax. So it's definitely not true that "everyone" making over $14k pays federal income tax.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes....

Advertising isn't big $ for cable companies. For every $10 in video subscription revenue they generate, they get about another $1 in advertising revenue, of which they keep around 75 cents.

On their conference call, they said that, since they were essentially tied at the end of 1Q, it's reasonable to assume that, by now, they have more Internet than TV customers.

2-10Mb/s download? You're kidding, right? Average Comcast customer is getting 44Mbps down (actual output). http://www.speedtest.net/isp/c...

Internet is a MUCH more profitable business than cable television. For every dollar a customer pays for TV, Comcast pays ~60 cents right out the door to the content guys (Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, etc.).

Actually, that's not that hard. Getting a slice of hamster is pretty straightforward. It's unslicing the lemon that's challenging.

You only get billed for cellular data, not Wifi. From the official announcement:

"and then it's a flat $10 per GB for cellular data while in the U.S. and abroad"

http://googleblog.blogspot.com...

That's the FireTV _box_, not the stick. The Stick is 35 pounds. You give up the voice remote and a bit of processing horsepower, but unless you really want to use it for gaming, it shouldn't make a difference.