Those kinds of arguments are uniformly bullshit, because they assume that the construction and decommissioning activities, etc. somehow can't possibly also run on energy derived from the same source!

Equipment used to build nuclear plants can run on electricity generated by (previously-built) nuclear plants.

Feedstock for biodiesel can be harvested by farm equipment running on biodiesel.

Photovoltaic panel factories can run on solar electricity.

Or you can mix and match!

The idea that green power isn't "really" green because you need fossil fuels to build it is fucking moronic.

People defending Snowden as a pro-american whistleblower that should be pardonned by US authorities.

As one of those people, I'm very willing to forgive Snowden (and the journalists who are sorting through/releasing the info) if he accidentally mixed some disclosures of legitimate* NSA actions in with the many, many illegitimate ones.

Important caveats:

1. This assumes that (a) the release is accurate and (b) that Snowden is responsible for it. At the moment, we have no reason to believe that either is the case. In particular, I contend that it's much more likely for disclosures of legitimate* NSA activities to be falsely attributed to Snowden as a smear campaign than to be genuinely done by him.
2. You may notice that I used the word "legitimate" with an asterisk. By this I mean "legitimate from the US perspective." Other countries my disagree, but they don't get to decide what is and isn't legal under US law. They're free to defend themselves, of course... (Similarly: I don't get upset about foreign spy agencies attempting to attacking the US; I get upset at the NSA if it fails to stop them.)

So, let me get this straight: you want to keep the shitty status quo in telecom because "OMG the 'Free Market' is great!," but calling a third-party IT guy (the equivalent of your plumber example) when your router has a problem would be terrible?

I was actually half-trolling (implying that the US is no longer a first-world country), but intentionally wrote it so that it could be interpreted either way.

Besides, the US does use the metric system for a lot of things, including most manufacturing and science. A lot of goods people buy are really created in metric sizes, which are then converted when they print the label.

Zero first-world nations still use imperial measurements.

So would you rather we put a gun to your head and make you cough up $50 and have $10 of it go to waste, or put a gun to your head and make you cough up $80 ($40 plus another $40 to make sure the first $40 wasn't wasted)?

(Note that those are the only two choices. We have a gun to your head, remember? Refuse to choose and we pull the trigger.)

Seattle is a special case: apparently, your Internet access is fucked up because you keep electing shitty city councilpeople who make rules that ISPs hate. You should quit doing that.

IIRC, VB.NET is going away in the next version of .NET. (Good riddance, too!)

I had a sapphire radeon (talk about a nightmare combination)

What do you mean? (I just bought a Sapphire Radeon R7 260x; should I be worried?)

Today, Slashdot disparages narcc for not understanding "damning with faint praise" when he reads it.

So, what, it's written in Lisp with some Fortran libraries?

Why is that modded funny? It's not a half-bad idea!

(Of course, these days when you want half-Lisp, half-Fortran, you use a different syntax and call it Matlab (or GNU Octave). It's better than using C++, at any rate!)

As an MM...

A chocolate candy? A cartoon Martian? Two-thirds of an adhesives company? Massively Multiplayer? WTF are you talking about?

The security wonks find it strange that a person might actually have more than one employer at a time.

That's because it is strange (at least for IT jobs, not McJobs). Having multiple clients at a time, however, is not.

The cops don't come out into the rural parts of the country, and throw concussion grenades into cribs, killing little babies. They only do that in the cities

You really have no clue what the fuck you're talking about. It sounds like you're referring to the recent incident in Georgia, but somehow assumed it was in Atlanta instead of rural north Georgia where it actually occurred. This article about it even has a depressingly-long list of instances where police used grenades like that, including instances in places like Wyoming and Montana.

The cops are goddamn thugs that are out of control, and encouraging private gun ownership is (part of) the answer, but the idea that rural cops suck any less than urban ones is laughable.

Getting divorced isn't dumb luck, you know. The divorce rate "on average" may be 50%, but that's because you're averaging together poor uneducated people who got married as teenagers (high likelihood of divorce) with rich educated people who got married in their 20s (low likelihood of divorce). I'm still over-simplifying, of course, but I assume you get the idea.