I have found that in recent (say 10 or so) years dealerships have become a lot more cost competitive; at least for some types of repairs and maintenance procedures. One example I have noticed is with oil changes. My car uses synthetic oil, and a lot of it. I priced out what it would cost me to change the oil myself if I bought the appropriate oil at the local parts store, and the filter. I then called the dealership and their cost to me for the same was only $5 more. If I had done it myself I would have spent $5 running the used oil somewhere for disposal, and likely had to spend time afterwards cleaning up part of my garage. it was well worth the $5 to let them do it.

I have found other similar situations with brake jobs (I would normally do these myself but in situations involving stuck calipers or parking brake pads that won't release, I call and price it out at the dealership and local brake shops).

Now, I haven't encountered the need for a really large repair yet. I don't know if this scales or not. But it does suggest that the dealerships are aware of consumers pricing out these things and have brought their charges down in response.

.. and then back to your regularly scheduled program. I suppose somehow, that is my fault.

That is the closest you've come in a long, long time (possibly ever) to actually supporting an argument with something vaguely resembling a fact. Let's see if you're willing to flesh it out, eh?

So tell me, what did he do - or who did he associate with - that showed he actually wanted to bring about Reaganomics 2.0 instead of Camelot 2.0? And if his record in the senate was so completely counter to his campaign, why did nobody call him out on it while he was on the campaign trail? By comparison, when John McCain was campaigning as someone more conservative than this record, he was routinely called out on it both by his own party as well as by people outside the GOP.

If President Lawnchair was campaigning as someone far more liberal than the person he was in the senate, please show it.

He did more than just pay off sponsors for their investment. Hell, if that was the explanation for everything he's done then he's been paying off some sponsors who didn't contribute to his campaigns. Certainly, the insurance industry dumped huge piles of money into his campaign, but they did that for politicians of every party across the country to ensure that they wouldn't be cut out - however some of his other actions if viewed in that prism involve payments to industries who did not contribute.

So then you were either expecting him to be more conservative than Reagan, or not paying attention. Which was it?

I will admit that while I was not optimistic enough to expect a great heroic liberal leap forward from his administration, I was not expecting a great conservative fall backwards, either. If he did something during his campaign to clue us in to his intent to turn Reaganomics up to 12 (after seeing his predecessor fail at 11), I missed that.

Sometimes the WD vs Seagate bit mirrors the Ford vs Chevrolet arguments of days gone by. While I have my preferences on both, there are plenty of others who will proclaim to no end that the opposite is best.

This seems highly unlikely given the pro-monopoly stance that the administration of Barack Hussein "Lawnchair" Obama has taken up to this point. They didn't stop any of the airline or bank mergers that we have seen since 2009. They didn't reign in the massive control that the insurance industry has over the consumer (indeed they gave the industry more power). They didn't stop telecoms from merging either. Why would they get involved in this?

This looks like window dressing more than anything. The Administration is trying to get some positive PR but eventually they will let it slide through because the free market is teh awesome!

They are still working on better chemical cocktails for cryopreservation. We know we can do this with single-celled organisms and there is some evidence it works on organs as well. It might be questionable science, in that you might pay in and never wake up again, but it isn't really junk science.

It gives them hope. Does it harm you for them to spend their money this way? Sure there are other things they could do that would likely be more beneficial for mankind as a whole, but there are worse things, too.

The medical device companies (Medtronic, Boston Scientific, et al) have been putting a lot of effort in to this field. Engineers - Biomedical, Electric, and others - have lots of good opportunities from this right now.

In fact, I've used both the WD MyBookLive (at work) and the WD MyCloud (both at work and and home). I've been pretty happy with them; they both run Linux of some flavor (Debian I think). It was pretty easy to turn on ssh on them so I could use scp and/or rsync to backup my linux laptop automatically.

I can tell you that the WD MyCloud has one USB connector on the back as well. You are supposed to be able to connect (just about) "any" USB drive to it and it should be able to play with it. I did discover though that the Linux distro these ship with does not support ZFS, which can be a problem if you like to format your large USB drives with it.

One downside of the WD drives though is that the web interface (which you are required to use, at least to get started) has a poorly-worded warning when you go to turn on ssh that implies turning on ssh might - or might not - void your warranty. Oh well.

So far, so good. The MyBookLive at work is a 2TB, it's coming on 2 years old and running well. I have a 3TB MyCloud at home and it passed its first birthday last fall and is doing fine. The MyCloud at work is 4TB and approaching half a year now. They all stay on 24x7.

I do wish the warranty was longer, though. The consumer models only get 1 year warranty.

Has the government - beyond just the white house - been inclined to revoke any tax exempt statuses in memory? I don't recall a single one. Just because Scientology has only a slightly higher public approval rate than ebola doesn't mean the government is likely to take a stand against them.

Besides, even if it was revoked, they would likely just find a really good accountant / lawyer team and end up paying the same amount (or less) in taxes. Last year Prudential insurance paid no corporate income tax and received a $106 million rebate. Time Warner cable paid no taxes on $4.3B in profit, CBS no taxes on $1.8B. Scientology could probably do better on their taxes by registering as a corporation anyways.

Tenure is rapidly going away, partially as more universities are replacing regular faculty with adjunct faculty and using the availability of the latter as justification for worse treatment of the former. Go look at the closest 4-year school to where you live and see how many tenure-track STEM openings they have. Then look this summer to see how many openings they have for adjuncts.

How is my faith in that voting is worthwhile and important any more significant than your faith of the opposite? For that matter, your persistent campaign against voting is really a more profound endorsement of the existing system than any encouragement of voting could ever be.

It would appear your "solution" is to keep coming here and encouraging people to be like you and not vote. Because obviously if you don't vote, then the government knows you are unhappy and needs to do something different, right?

If a preventable death were to ever hit your world, you would likely think otherwise. Or maybe even think about the issue, period. But go on, keep brushing off the discussion. Those kids wouldn't have voted GOP any time soon so they deserved to die, right? Death saves them from being indoctrinated into the Obama-verse.