It's easy to find teachers in North America making $80k. Sometimes that's just handling cost of living in an area like New York, but frequently it comes from a trick education "reformers" have pushed over the last few decades to gut the unions.

1. Offer teachers per student overage fees to handle larger than normal classes. Teachers agree because, hey, the district is going to screw us on class size anyway, might as well get paid for it.
2. Lay off/make redundant/fire every second teacher, dumping those students on the first teacher, who now makes not-double their salary, but quite a lot more. Bitching and moaning ensue, district makes noise about saving taxpayers money, parents who voted in Republicans say "at least our taxes didn't go up..."
3. Wait a couple years.
4. Run for office on a platform of cutting teacher's salaries and point to the gym teacher making $90k/year because he's got a class of 60 students. Cue outraged parents exclaiming "why does my kid's teacher make more than me! I'm a manager!"
5. Salaries are frozen, or experienced/high paid teachers are laid off, and inexperienced teachers hired in their stead who don't get the overage fee originally negotiated.

Unions are the front lines of the class size debate. Every administrator wants to increase class size to economize on the number of teachers. Teachers want to keep class sizes sane so they can actually teach as opposed to doing crowd control. The union negotiates class size limits. This is how districts con the union into breaking class size limits, and it's a trap.

My mistake: Zimmerman weighed only 42 lbs. more than Martin, who was weighed at 158 on the autopsy table, while Zimmerman was weighed at 200 on the night of the shooting.

Try to catch up.

Do you believe that Zimmerman, who outweighed Martin by 70 pounds, was really supine beneath him? That Martin could sneak up on a man holding a gun in a well-lit intersection, and take him down? That the reason Zimmerman got out of his car was, as he said, to see where he was, which was in the middle of the neighbourhood he'd been patrolling for the last six months and lived in?

I don't believe a fucking word Zimmerman says, in part because the injuries he claims to have don't show up on the video of him at the police station that night, and his visible demeanor with the police indicates that he was uninjured. But more than that, his story just reeks of implausibility.

He didn't shoot Martin for looking suspicious. He followed and engaged because Martin looked suspicious, which in this case means "walking while black in my neighborhood, carrying Skittles".

The purpose of incarceration is more than simply separating dangerous elements from society. It's to punish as well, at least for deterrence, and it hardly punishes Reiser to give him a lifestyle allowing him a monastic devotion (and an appreciative community) to something he feels is important.

You can disagree that punishment or deterrence should be the point of incarceration, but that's the way it is right now.

There's no way for Hans to make meaningful progress without relatively unfettered Internet access, and there's no way any prisoner for his crime would be allowed that.

Not to mention that allowing someone to continue on his life's work undisturbed is not exactly the point of incarceration.

I'm still kinda surprised Hans actually did it

Yeah, you shouldn't be. It was obvious to the police, and to those of us here not in love with the 'aspie geek as lovable, misunderstood misanthrope' stereotype that he did it. The minute the evidence came out, it screamed "he totally fucking killed her!" From Nina disappearing without her passport or money or cell phone, to Hans hosing out the interior of his car, to buying police procedure textbooks, all after Nina started to separate from him... Don't let Alex Belits' contortions confuse you. It was a good conviction based on straightforward evidence of first degree murder.

The underlying story of these mileage requirements is that it's not that hard to make your mini-van that seats seven get 54 MPG, given better engine technologies and design. The car companies, with no market incentive, don't bother developing those technologies. The last time the government mandated mileage requirements, the car companies screamed bloody murder until they actually kicked in, at which point we got a generation of fuck-you-sized SUVs that met those requirements without difficulty.

Shorter version: You'll still have your minivan, and you'll save money on gas. There's more than one way to improve mileage, than just shrinking the vehicle.

So, for you, merging onto the interstate on a short, curving, blind on-ramp is best done at high speed? Awesome.

most salary gains come through negotiation

No they don't. Nice factoid backing up your biases.

Rather than repeat what I've already stated three times, that you've failed to understand in its most plain form three times, I'll just nod and say to myself "yes, you really are that shit-stupid."

Have you met my friend, causility? He's a really good guy to know!

Your counterexamples make no fucking sense because, as I keep repeating but you're too fucking thick to understand, saying "the US bears some responsibility for the shape of things today" does NOT entail any less responsibility for the Iranians.

You really are that shit-stupid, aren't you?

I really don't know how to express my disgust with what you said. You would absolve history's major actors of any responsibility for the shape of the world, as if they were bystanders. You act like yesterday and today are just accidental neighbours.

I guess in your justice system, the bank robbers do split the sentence.

America! Fuck yeah!

I see how fucking stupid your ignorant bullshit sounds. I don't see how observing that the current state of the mideast is heavily dominated by its recent colonial history is somehow either dehumanizing or infantilizing to Iranians.

Talking about the chain of events and how earlier events trigger or motivate later events doesn't take away anyone's responsibility. Your bullshit does though: It says that America has no responsibility at all for Iranian hostility, which is both fucking incoherent and leaves one with no sense at all to make of why Iran is so hostile now.

Here's the Protip: responsibility isn't zero sum. Saying that "but for Americans installing the Shah, Iran wouldn't be so hostile now" does nothing to inoculate Iranians for funding Hezbollah or DOSing JP Morgan. If you need help remembering this, ask yourself: If two guys get caught robbing a bank together, do they split the sentence between them?