Part of what determines pay is
1. how difficult is it to find qualified people
2. does the position help you make more money, or is it an expense

Software developers help companies make more money. It is the Add in Value-Add. They are the equivalent of the machines in a machine shop. Without them, what is the point in being in business. If you are a software company you pay what you need to pay, to recruit and retain the best developers you can.

Teachers work for a government agency. It won't turn a profit. The agency collect tax dollars for existing and teachers are an expense. There really isn't any competition to recruit the best ones. People pay lip service to the idea of recruiting the best ones, but they really don't. Education wise, it compares to nurses and architects. Benefit wise, it is one of the best in the country. Some parts of the country have trouble recruiting new teachers. But others don't . A school district will never pay more than required to have a teacher in the classroom, talent be damned. In fact, I think school districts would rather hire fresh young faces out of college, and pay them starting wages than experienced master teachers who will cost them 2x-3x as much.

I have always felt the problem of fission waste disposal has been overblown.

If the goal is "walk away safe", then fission fuel is walk away safe in about 300 years too. The high level radiation emitted by the fission products comes from cesium and strontium and in 300 years, it will all be gone. Leaving low level radioactives, Uranium and a tiny amount of plutonium. In 300 years, the used rods will emit the same level of radiation as the unused rods. Since plutonium is an alpha emitter, the used rod will effectively not emit any radiation from plutonium. You could store one under your couch and not suffer any ill effects.

Reason why the US doesn't reprocess nuclear fuel rods anymore is that the Dept of Energy realized that as long as the fuel pellets remain intact, the uranium and plutonium is entrapped in the metallurgical structure of the fuel pellets. For the uranium and plutonium to be released back into the environment they will have to be melted down. If the pellets are unchanged, we could probably recycle them back into a new reactor in 300 years even.

The subsidy is the thing I hate the most about Fair Tax.

It perpetuates the myth that Money comes for free from the Government. Develops even more people that budget their expenses around their government check

yes, 8, typo, 2 per engine room

Part of that was for redundancy. They didn't know how reliable they would be long term. Over engineering at it's finest

The Enterprise used very small reactors, which is why they had 9 of them.

Nimitz and later classes used larger reactors, which is why they only have 2

I agree with his contention that we need to start teaching people about password managers.

I have been using one for 2 years, my wife just found out last week. She was furious. She struggles with trying to come up with good passwords all the time. Based on past experience, she does come up with good ones. The last one I know about is 13 characters long.

Password managers make the process of having a different password for every website trivial. Some of them will generate random usernames too.

Mine generates 10 character passwords, by default. Capitalization, Symbols, Numbers and lower case randomly throughout.

In a National Sales Tax plan

It doesn't matter how much Wealth someone has. Who cares how much wealth someone else has? We don't tax Wealth in the US. We tax Income

Wealth doesn't matter with Sales Tax, because we would be taxing spending. That inherited wealth that moves from generation to generation? Who cares how much money someone has in the bank doing nothing. When they spend it and try to improve their quality of life, it gets taxed.

It is a shallow and covetous person who cares about how big someone else's bank account is. What we really care about is how that person spends their money to give themselves a better standard of living than their neighbors.

I've always said the exceptions in a National Sales Tax would be

1. Food - All Food
2. Health Care/Medicine, including OTC
3. Clothing under $100
4. Primary Residence - have to apply for refund, demonstrating it is primary residence, this one will get complicated

Those things take care of the truly poor.

This is an amazing water bomber. It drops from so high, the water just mists down like light rain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Because it is a pressurized system, they can control how much they dump where.

For example, maybe they do 4 drops from 1 tank load, 25% on each drop in 4 different locations

Yes, I am a wildland firefighter, I have been on fires where these planes were working
(Engineboss, Strike Team Leader in Training)

I love the courts logic.

Dealer Franchise Laws were prevented to promote the Franchise model.

If a car company sells franchises in the State, it can't then open Company Stores and undercut their Franchises.

But if the Car Company has no franchises, there is no one being hurt.

Car Dealerships can't sue because they don't like a new Car Company's Sales Model.

Reality is the Franchise owners were licking their chops thinking of all the money they would make selling Teslas in their dealerships. They got butt hurt when they found out Tesla wasn't going to sell them Franchises.

I was in a meeting with our Workman's Comp Carrier recently

A representative of the carrier said "If a person doesn't return to work in 6 months, the odds are they will never work again in their life".

Made sense, 6 months is the disability term required to get SSI

Israel's pre-1960 borders? The ones were the West Bank belonged to Jordan and Gaza belonged to Egypt?

If it brought a real chance at peace, I believe Israel would agree to that. But Jordan doesn't want the West Bank anymore. Egypt doesn't want Gaza. Israel's pre-1960 borders still would not create a country called Palestine.

Jordan and Egypt don't want to deal with the Palestinian problem anymore than Israel does.

Since GM runs ads about how they can remotely kill OnStar equipped vehicles, I am sure that if the capability exists in Tesla Cars, they wouldn't need a warrant to do it. They would only need authorization from the owner. Only time Tesla would need a warrant from the police is if the police are chasing the Owner and the Owner won't grant authorization

I believe that this is a split from the 5th Circuit who ruled warrants are not required for this data because 3rd party doctrine. It can''t be a search of your private information because it isn't your information, it is Verizon's or AT&T or Sprint. It is about you, but it isn't yours.

Thereby increasing the likelihood that this will eventually make its way to the Supreme Court

It may be time for the Supreme Court to address this issue directly. But they ruled just a few years ago that pager records didn't require warrants.

Every year there are devastating fires somewhere. But we have to look at the acreage and number of fires.

Last year was a light fire year. About 20% lighter than the 10 year average.

So far this year, we are about 15% behind the 10 year average in the number of wildland fires. And we are about 50% behind in the number of acres burned.

http://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/n...

Honestly, I still expect overall the world's climate will be getting wetter with global warming. There might be some regions that will get drier, but warmer oceans mean more evaporation. Warmer temperatures mean the air can hold more moisture resulting in higher humidity. Eventually that higher humidity has to result in more rainfall somewhere. But even if higher humidity doesn't result in rain, higher humidity does result in less aggressive fire behavior.
      I am not a climate scientist. I have a lot of people scoff at me when I say this, but they never explain how I am wrong. I can read the projections but the projections never seem to include the increased levels of ocean evaporation that I expect.