As it is in the US. But that doesn't mean that teenagers can be forced to actually attend, let alone to learn anything while they're there. Past a certain age, they can just walk away. The alternative would be to run bastions of learning as if they were literally prisons. The point is that in many cases the choice to ignore the opportunity to learn is just that: a choice. Dumb kids don't understand that choice, which is why parents matter.

pays their full-time workers so little that they can't afford food or a place to live without welfare and foodstamps?

Could you please provide a source for this claim? In 2014, the Wal-Mart blog fisked a hit piece that was claiming things similar to what you just claimed, and pointed out that the average hourly wage at Wal-Mart was $12.91 per hour (and that is specifically not including highly-paid management).

http://blog.walmart.com/fact-check-the-new-york-times-the-corporate-daddy

How does it help me that my tax dollars have to subsidize Walmart employees

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/11/13/apologies-but-welfare-payments-to-employees-are-not-subsidies-to-walmart-and-mcdonalds/

Wal-Mart makes about 3% profit. In comparison, Apple Computer makes about 24% profit. Additionally, Wal-Mart has a more ethnically diverse set of employees than Apple Computer has. You seem to hate Wal-Mart; do you hate Apple Computer even more?

https://www.aei.org/publication/every-month-walmart-gets-one-profit-day-from-its-sales-while-apple-gets-7-5/

Also, low-income people like to shop at Wal-Mart because the low prices are a benefit. Some economists have written papers attempting to estimate the impact.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/08/11/walmart-destroys-jobs-yes-but-the-benefits-go-to-consumers-not-the-top/
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11809

So, to summarize: Wal-Mart pays a lot of taxes, employs a lot of people at an average hourly rate 78% over the US federal minimum wage, and benefits the poor by helping them spend less on the things they need.

I just don't understand all the Wal-Mart hate.

They also used them in the recent Delta Force raid in Syria that. They seem to have performed very well.

Why? The "greater society" regularly produces clear-thinking, educated, hard working people for whom minimum wage is a distant memory by the time they're still young but on to their second, better job. The problem actually is constrained to sub-sections of the society. Places where the government spends more per student on education, positions endless arrays of social services, and heaps money in program after program designed to provide the entitled equal outcomes you think should occur. But it doesn't work. Why? Because it's not about how much money is thrown into such programs, or whether the mom and pop store on the corner is suddenly force by the government to pay $15/hour to the kid who comes by for a couple hours a day after school to unload a truck or whatever.

What it's about is what happens when that kid goes home. Do his parents speak English? Do they get involved in his homework? Do they stay away from street crime and other influences that wreck households? Are they giving the kid the huge, proven advantage of having given birth to him in a family that will actually bother to have two parents pooling their time and resources to give the kid a decent start in life?

Should "the greater society" step in and force uninterested, absent parents to spend the 18 years of daily hours needed to raise a productive human being?

You're confusing the structure of the society with the impact of certain cultures within that society.

And I'm always amazed that people think the condition of one American is the condition of all Americans. I have it on good authority that there is homeless street person in Berlin. I'm amazed that Germans have no homes and live in the street! Right? Right.

What you should be amazed by is that there are subcultures in the US that still haven't figured out that treating school like a chore to be avoided, and one's own children like an annoying stray dog to be left outside do its own devices results in ... adults with very poor prospects.

Entry-level, minimum wage jobs aren't supposed to be careers. It's the sort of thing a high school kid or college freshman should be holding while getting ready for a real life. When some poor kid is born into an uneducated household with only one parent sticking around, and attends (for a little while) a school where the kids all agree that learning to do things like communicate clearly and think critically is for chumps, and the real local power structure is a spectrum of street gangs and thugs ... yeah, it doesn't go well. So, Mr. Foreigner Who Comes From A Place Without Any Such Problems, what do you propose? Criminalize crappy parenting and toxic social influences?

I agree with that statement. But one problem is that a president generally tends to push their decisions on other people. If I don't trust the ability of a certain person to make decisions that I agree with, then it's a problem for me if that person becomes president.

How is it relevant? It points to his decision making processes, among other things. He looks at science and religion and concludes that creationism is a real thing that actually happened. I think that's relevant. I want a leader to be able to look at the same set of information that I have and reach a similar conclusion. When someone looks at the same information that I have and they come to a conclusion that is wildly different than my own, then obviously one of us is seriously mistaken. On this issue in particular, I think that all available evidence is so overwhelmingly on one side that I find fault with the decision-making abilities of people who take the opposite conclusion.

There is a fairly large group of people in this country who will not vote for an atheist for whatever reason, maybe they just don't trust them. I'm in the opposite camp, when people hold religious views that I find to be frankly ridiculous, and even contrary to physical evidence, I have a hard time trusting their decision-making abilities. I doubt that they can be trusted to make a good decision when they are faced with evidence that goes against their religious beliefs.

Paul's belief in creationism I believe is also tied to his views on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion. If he is president when a bill comes across his desk to legislate things like that, I don't think he's going to represent my views. At best he's going to say to leave it to the states, and at worst he's going to make something illegal on a federal level which I do not agree with.

I don't know the answer to that, but I know this for a fact: both the Republicans and Democrats have proven, year after year, that they do not give a shit about neither civil rights nor personal choice. Both of them are in bed with corporations and lobbyists, and that's where their loyalties are. Are Libertarians going to be any different? I don't know, but I'm not willing to cast my vote for one of the actors that has already proven to be at fault. I would rather vote for an unknown then get another 4 years of the same old bullshit.

That being said, if Bernie Sanders ran with Elizabeth Warren, under any party, I would vote for them.

It just takes a little education. In the 2012 election I had a few friends wearing their Ron Paul shirts and things like that, expecting some sort of revolution if they voted for a Republican. I pointed out that Ron Paul is a creationist and suggested they look at Gary Johnson instead (most people hadn't heard of him - thanks, media!). My friends who appreciated the more libertarian views of Ron Paul decided to vote for Johnson instead, contributing to Johnson's 1.27 million votes (more than all other minor parties combined, the most successful third party since 2000, and the highest total for the Libertarian party ever).

I think that if younger people see the bickering and fighting going on in the 2 major parties, and they notice that when either of them are in power the people get fucked in some way or another, then they'll consider a third party a viable vote. People who have grown up watching the past 10 elections or so may be of the mindset that a third party vote is a wasted vote, which is complete bullshit and hopefully the younger folks won't be afflicted by the same kind of apathy. I don't expect to see a groundswell of support for third parties in 2016 necessarily, maybe they go from 1% of the vote to 2%, but I think that the numbers talked about in TFA are unrealistically skewed in suggesting that new voters will automatically vote for one of the major parties. They aren't affected by the same kind of thinking as old voters, and they very might well believe that neither of the major parties really represents them. They would be correct, also.

Which is why some idiot will find a way to complain that using a shorter/faster path to overwhelmingly popular name servers (like Google's, as opposed to very sleepy servers run by smaller operations) will some how be Eeeevil, despite it greatly speeding up life for all sorts of people and services.

Like Enron? Or Arthur Anderson?

Wait, you can do that?

I wonder what would happen if such a referendum passed in a state capitol.

Also, what other laws can you opt out of?

No, you see, "local municipality" is just a codeword for "big government", so the problem is that you don't want big government doing things like running utilities, because fascism, and when you have big government (i.e. a council of a town with a population of 1,000 people) competing against the free market and small business (i.e., Comcast), then that's unfair because monopoly. Not Comcast's monopoly, the monopoly that big government would have (because it's the government, duh). Also, small businesses like Comcast could not compete with big government like the council of a town with a population of 1,000 people.

Hope that clears it up for you.

I believe the DDG-1000 series was supposed to address that, I remember reading about the power system and how it was modular enough to allow virtually all power to be directed to any particular system. "All power to weapons."