That's assuming, of course, that the government is honoring the ballot box. If they don't, then you will need your guns.

Which is why we should immediately put our tyranny-preventing firearms to use shooting every legislator who votes to pass a "voter ID" law.

Oh wait, we're not using our guns to fight a tyrannical government that oppresses those who don't agree with us? Shoot. Guess I'll just store this AR-15 where my mentally unstable son might find it until I need it to, you know, shoot some people who don't agree with me.

A) You have this wrong. You don't get the military to switch sides by fighting. You get the military to switch sides by dying (aka forcing the military to shot unarmed civies)

B) The trouble where we killed insurgents at a 100:1 ratio? Besides, by the time you're an insurgent, the government has already won - insurgents don't have HBO. How many American's are willing to fight for no HBO? (I'm being a bit sarcastic here, but one of the reasons the insurgents are successful in other areas of the world is they're not losing anything.)

C) Against a similarly-armed opponent (everybody had muskets). That's no longer the case.

There's a reason they don't let the members of the insane asylum have sharp objects.

That's the kind of message I'd like to get through.

Seriously, I don't... I still have my keyboard from 1993 because these new ones stink.

More seriously - I use my computer for work. Not kids, not watching videos, not games, WORK. Windows XP/7 is better at getting work done than Windows 8.

Hopefully microsoft pulls their heads out of their butts on this and allows a quick setting change to "I have no use for metro, thanks."

Best decision I ever made (well, apart from marrying my wife).

Your wife reads your slashdot posts, eh?

There's certainly a continuum. But in Illinois, many teachers are compensated VERY VERY well... many make over $100,000 a year in a job that only has 38-40 work weeks.

Of course, some teachers in Illinois, especially in rural areas, are paid very poorly.

But you can't assume that just because there are good pension benefits that there were not good salaries as well.

Congress is NOT adding a new tax. They are giving the states the ability to collect sales taxes on goods shipped into their states.

It's up to your state legislature whether your particular state actually decides to do this or not, not Congress.

This just puts a state's domestic retailers on equal footing with foreign retailers.

Several people in my lifetime have mentioned to me that I might have Aspergers.

Fortunately I figured out how I could cure myself.

I just stopped caring about anyone else's feelings.

Now I'm just an asshole!

The Civics lesson is that when the government enters into a contract with an individual that it cannot then decide later on that it doesn't liked the contract and legislate to undo it.

Why not?

There's this thing in the world called bankruptcy. It's a backdrop to contract negotiation. It basically says that if I make a contract with you that is so bad that you can't sustain the contract, you get to get out of honoring the contract.

Just because, 10, 15 or 20 years ago, a group of employees managed to convince a politician to give them a contract that no reasonable party could expect to be maintained doesn't mean that now, 20 years later, we can't say, "That was ridiculous. It's going to bankrupt the state and we have to undo it."

Illinois is a particularly good (bad?) example of this. Many years ago teachers convinced politicians to set up a state-paid teacher retirement system. And they put in things like a formula where the school districts pay into the system based on the salary of the teacher that year, but the retirement payments paid to the teachers (and administrators, superintendents and others are in the same plan) are based only on the highest-paid 4 years of each participants career.

I'll give to 15 seconds to figure out what happened.

That's right, unions and administrators all started negotiating contracts where the school district gave participants huge raises in the 4 years before their retirement. Didn't cost the school district much in retirement plan contributions (they're only paying the higher rate for the last 4 years of a 30-year career) and the participants get a huge benefit - a much larger pension for the remaining 20 to 40 years of their lives.... paid for by the state aka the taxpayers.

When you get down to it, it's just a short step away from a conspiracy to steal money from the taxpayers of the state, and at some point the taxpayers are going to put a stop to it.

No, I don't get it.

A socialist can point to successful models of socialism. A libertarian can not point to successful models of no government. Your options are democracies of varying degrees of socialism, totalitarian regimes, or, as you put it, local control.

That's not a straw man argument.

BTW, local control doesn't mean no taxes. The warlords want their money too. Probably less likely to build roads with it though.

Well, you could also visit Great Britain or Germany. Existence of a totalitarian regime doesn't preclude the success of a social state, when there are several successful social states.

Are there any small- or no-government countries you'd like to live in?

Before the government declared they needed to do it, private people and corporations created all the roads that weren't post roads.

Before the government declared they needed to do it, how many roads were there? What was their quality?

Some efforts are just better done by the government. Roads is one of them.

While it is true that the ratio of guys to girls at schools like that is 4:1, what you have to factor in is that because it is a tech school, 3.5 out of 4 of those guys are socially dysfunctional, making the eligible male-to-female ratio closer to 1:2.

So, if you did not have much romantic success, you first have to figure out if you were in the 3.5 or the 0.5. If the 3.5, it's unlikely that going to a different school would have helped.

Shredding paper reduces average paper fiber length and thus also reduces the value of the paper as a recycled material. Also makes the paper take up more volume in transport. Additionally, if you don't trust your recycler to securely handle your intact paper, shredding the paper before you give it to them is a minimal improvement for the same reason shredding the paper before throwing it all over new york city wasn't very secure, and there was far more randomization there than shredding paper into a bucket.

So there's significant practical reasons to not shred the paper before shipping it out - increases costs, reduces value, minimal security improvement.