It would take 4 lifetimes to review and edit out the 99% crap that you just will never care about (in your life time).

Seriously, it's easy enough to spend more time locating, prioritizing, and cataloging media than simply enjoying it without crap like this.

Music, movies, books, photos, etc. More media is definitely not what I need in my life. I'm drowning in it as it is, and enough of it is more interesting than what I did today that I doubt I'd run out of good media to enjoy (to say nothing of actual experiences in the real world) in a dozen lifetimes, even if no more were produced starting today.

People spend hundreds to thousands of hours and shitloads of money organizing, annotating, and preserving family photos and videos, largely to no long-term end (two generations later, "who the fuck are all these people?" *throws out several boxes of photo albums*).

If you want to record your life, be ready to spend all your free time editing it and adding metadata so it's useful, or before long it'll just be a bunch of files and a hopelessly-large chore to organize it all. If you're an early adopter of this sort of thing maybe it'll be preserved by others (certainly some things like this would be important to historians) but you won't get much use out of it personally unless you're willing to devote tons of time to it.

Ever edit a wedding video? Imagine that, but a billion times more boring.

But if the burglars are too busy stealing your guns, they might skip over your electronics.

So that advice made sense after all!

soory, but my best friend is a teacher...sources?

Sorry, but my best friend is a friend. Sources?

The funny thing is that not that long ago the stereotypical liberal response to a problem was to directly mandate behavior through legislation, while the stereotypical conservative response was to steer market forces through incentives and disincentives.

Now the liberals have adopted the old conservative positions, and the conservatives have decided that in no case ever can government accomplish anything, evidence be damned, so it should stop trying (unless it's blowing people up). At the same time people complain on a regular basis that our country's heading in to looney lefty socialist territory.

US politics are fucking weird.

Or they may decide that it now too expensive to do significant engineering in the US and move everything offshore where they can pay peanuts *and* get 80 hour weeks from their workers.

Why hasn't that happened in Europe, then? 4-6 weeks of vacation + several holidays, long-ass maternity/paternity(!!!) leave, developed-world salary levels, many (all?) countries in the EU having regulations on working hours per week, etc.

YES! UIDs three times as high as mine are now considered low! I knew this would happen one day!

... holy shit I've been on here too long.

I meant complement, of course.

Fucking almost-homophones.

Nothing could have better complimented my post somewhat upthread. Thanks. Only way it could have been better is if you'd responded directly to that one. The first paragraph in particular perfectly illustrates the insurmountable differences in both approach and level of understanding facing anyone who bothers to attempt reasoned discussion on the topic of taxation and government, especially online. The last paragraph's pretty excellent as well. I couldn't have written better.

The solution is probably either fewer two-income households/fewer single-parent households (no idea how you'd manage that), or excellent, affordable (subsidized when necessary), likely state-run day care facilities.

The latter is expensive, but not doing it is likely more expensive. Prisons aren't free, and a workforce full of dumbasses represents lost money, too.

But like most sensible policy that'd be evil socialism or something, I'm sure, so good luck making it happen here.

It's mainly difficult because it requires much greater familiarity with Greek, Latin, and Euclid than most high school graduates possess these days.

I do wonder what percentage of students studying Greek and Latin back then ever achieved the ability to read long works in either language with good comprehension and with little enough effort that it wasn't a chore, i.e. how many practiced it enough in school to use it through the rest of their lives, rather than just getting by well-enough not to look like dumbasses in class, then forgetting most of it and never using it again after graduation, as most of us (even programmers) do with the bulk of our mathematics education, for example.

Of course I'd like for government to be less wasteful. Who wouldn't? Preferring Obama to the only viable alternative doesn't mean one wants the government to spend money to little effect.

Also, the idea of Obama's having a "spell" is something you, or someone who influences your thinking, invented out of laziness.

I've seen many approaches to trying to persuade the anti-civilization, barely-understands-what-government-even-is, taxation-is-theft crowd, but I have to say, yours of simply calling this one a 3rd grader and a whiny little bitch is by far my favorite. It's something about your style—you really sell it.

I'm not kidding.

Bonus: you don't waste a bunch of time trying to bring them up to speed on 2500 years of political philosophy, the history of the last two centuries, and basic political economy.

But can anyone explain why the US Chamber of Commerce is the top money giving lobbyist, by 3x?

Uh, why wouldn't it be?

Regular

I hardly think it's controversial to assert that English grammar is less predictable and orderly than French. I'm certainly glad I didn't have to learn English as a second language.

French probably does have more rules, though, so you're right about that.

OK, that makes sense—I thought you meant that our grammar in general is simpler or more orderly, which is certainly not true.