Algae for one. They also happen to live in an area of the planet that we don't, and I for one am pretty confident in our ability to suppress fire in their natural habitat.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against trees so plant as many as you'd like. But don't put all of my eggs in one basket and tell me that it's the only way to get things done.

It looks like somebody needs to look up the terms liable, slanderous and more then likely falsifying and suppressing evidence. The correct thing to do for anyone caught in the scenario you are describing is ... nothing. Just sit back and let them dig a hole so deep that you can comfortably retire.

That isn't even close, income tax in the US is paid by the employer and credited back to the employee as a tax credit. People not physically present in the US would fail the substantial presence test and so would be taxed as a non-resident alien. This severely limits the deductions that they can take (number of deductions, marriage status etc) but they still pay in at roughly the same rate. I've never had to deal with in myself but from what I understand you would have to be a complete idiot to take up a contract like this since you'd be effectively paying the US government taxes on top of any applicable taxes from your home country.

No it won't. Some of us will always want more then what our neighbors have and that right there will be our incentive to work. If everyone around me is supplied with enough money to live comfortably and take one vacation a year, then I would work for two or maybe three vacations a year. Not to mention the boredom factor of being at home all day, social interaction at the workplace, the sense of accomplishment that some of us are lucky enough to get from our jobs. These are all positive reasons to work that people take for granted. While it may be true that you can get most of these from school, there's a certain point where you would want to apply your knowledge instead of just reading about theory. In my experience forcing people to work just makes them miserable, and they are almost universally the worst employees no matter what the job might be.

The biggest problem I see with just handing out a comfortable life style to everyone would be managing crime. Some people just do stupid things when they have nothing better to do with their time. If their quality of living is guaranteed because they don't have to worry about losing a job that they require to survive then consequences like prison are going to mean less to them.

Wow, it's a good thing that absolutely none of what you mentioned any where in your post has any impact what so ever on what is in effect a real estate agreement between two private entities. Unless Comcast suddenly qualifies for some kind of federal housing allowance that I want to allow them to use, the average square-foot rate for real estate does not come into play any where at any time. If I have no interest in charging a rate that is "competitive" for use of my property then I don't have to, if they do not agree with my rates then they are free to go somewhere else. The law is quite simple in this case, it's "pay up or fuck off" in other words capitalism at its finest.

This isn't about how insignificant the price of electricity might be, or what a fair rate to reimburse customers is or any of that crap. This is the fact that their company wants the ability to use property I own to make a profit. The physical location that I own has a value to them and they have to pay the rate that I charge (which by the way would be a hell of a lot more then 50 cents a month) because without my cooperation they would not be able to offer coverage for this service in the immediate area. Give it a minute, some idiot right now hasn't read to the end of this sentence and is thinking "Well it would be unreasonable for Comcast to negotiate private contracts with each of it's customers blah blah blah...". My preemptive response to this oblivious person is simple, I don't give a damn. I simply don't care about what is or isn't reasonable to expect or economical for Comcast to do, their convenience is absolutely none of my concern. My concern is the use of property I own to make a profit. Can you see the flaw in your retarded excuse of an argument yet?

How many engineers redesign the wheel for each and every problem? Competent engineers know when the tools they have are adequate to address the task at hand.

What are you talking about? The only thing Tor does is add layers of indirection between the client and host, the data still needs to eventually be able to find a viable route between A and B. When a large percentage of connections using the TOR protocol end up at the same hand full of places, which is something that you can determine when you have access to a Tier 1 service providers records btw, then it helps narrow down the number of suspects you need to investigate. The only way to remain secure in that world is to remain small.

Nor does it preclude the possibility. The entire concept of insurance is cost distribution to begin with, by taking a small portion of the income of all of those involved so as to mitigate the large expenses when those in the group require them. Now this law has made it mandatory to include more people in these groups. More people means more risk, more risk means more cost, that cost is distributed among the group by taking more of their income. Ergo, more income is being redistributed. So although you are technically correct in your statement about causality; in the context of this scenario your statement is wrong.

And everyone of those crimes are accounted for in already existing laws. So political peacocking for the sake of their constituents, or whatever they are known as over there, doesn't do anything productive. All they are doing is fuzzing the line of demarcation for what is a crime and what isn't in the hopes that they can grab more supporters or hold on to the ones who are already there.

Let me ask you for your honest opinion on this; if I anonymously threaten to hurt you, does it make a difference to you whether it's done by phone, Facebook post, Email or snail mail? Is the threat to you any more or less real depending on the medium of delivery? Why then do we have to explicitly state that is a crime if done by a different form of communication and potentially proscribe a separate penalty? Do you think this law actually does anything or helps anybody?

Now let's compare that situation with a list recent failures from say the IBEW: queue crickets.... Maybe this trend actually says more about unions who provide protection for skilled labor and actual talent vs. monkeys who press a button on an assembly line and who don't actually know what that button does.

Here's a hint for all of those who are for a a union to protect their job; if your employer threatens to hire a scab from outside of your union, and your reaction is anything other then either A.) laughing in his face until you need to be hospitalized asphyxia or B.) grabbing a bag of popcorn to watch the inevitable shit show. Then your "union" never had any leverage to begin with.

I don't think that the dogs protecting the white house are trained simply for pain compliance like your day to day police dogs are. I've always imagined them to be German Shepard's that are trained to think they are Terriers and Whippets. When the rep made that comment about not using the dogs when the runner is not carrying a bag, he was probably referring to the protocol that tells them when it is OK to use the dogs, like when the suspect has to be stopped but the risk to the human agent is too great. As for the utilization of snipers in that scenario, I'll admit that I don't know too many snipers in person but I would hope that at some point in their training some one tells them that shooting at a home made explosive device is generally a bad idea.

I personally see this as a failure in the court system that allows an inapplicable defense plea to be submitted. They were correct, they did have the right to do stupid things. What makes that irrelevant, and what they clearly did not understand, is that when those stupid things lead to a fatality then they will be charged with negligent homicide. It's their counsel's fault that they didn't understand the situation well enough to put together a better defense. And now, because the testimony of the defendant is not adherent to any of the same guidelines as say the testimony from a witness or even that of the plaintive, the press is provided with an unlimited range of sound bites to politicize, skew and spin to their black little hearts delight. Call me a liberal if you want to, but I believe that your right to not self incriminate implicitly allows you the right to understand what the hell you're being charged with in the first place! If that really were the case here then you wouldn't see asinine statements like this one made.

In the end though, can you really be surprised at the seemingly insane attempt to defend themselves? How many times have you done or said something stupid for which there was no excuse? Didn't you still try to flounder for an argument that would prevent the backlash at least some of the time?

Normally I wouldn't entertain the idea of politicizing what is clearly an economic and social development issue; but what the hell I'll respond.

I'm not sure how you think that unions work where you are from. But here in the US what they do is monopolize the labor pool for a given trade on a per entity basis; they do not annex an entire cities population all at one a time. But, solely for the sake of your argument, let's say that a labor union somehow actually DID manage to maintain the peoples faith, in a swing state that has been losing jobs and economically depressed for the passed four decades, and which also currently has a Republican Governor, enough so that they still have some semblance of a presence. And just to get it out of the way let's assume that this union also specialized in shale oil extraction, something that Ohio has never exported on any kind of a scale before. That union is only going to concern itself with it's niche in the host entity. Where as the over whelming majority of jobs and wealth being created are going to be from externalities that are not directly associated with this market. Now if you are contending that the unions are the reason that the jobs left this area in the first place then you are making the mistake of assuming that any of the host entities production models stood a snowballs chance in hell of competing with or catering too emerging markets. They didn't, not a single one of them even tried.

Please remember that this is Slashdot, not Facebook. You will occasionally be asked to back up your claims with something that at least appears to be evidence.

From what the article says, this is a bump in manufacturing from short term contracts, this is hardly a sustainable client base. My guess is that at the very most this will be a benefit for one generation, maybe two at the very most. A few thousand jobs is nothing to shrug off but I hope that these towns are prepared for what is going to happen within the next 20 to 40 years. The cheap housing and sharp increase in demand will attract real-estate prospectors; and just like these sociopathic leeches always do, they will start building up their little housing price bubbles and once again the idea that maybe "infinite growth" can be a real thing is going to settle in the backs of peoples minds. I'm not saying that we should stop this kind of thing mind you. The money generated in this way is very real, even if the actual wealth is not. But we should be better prepared for the fallout this time.