How is minimum wage relevant in this topic? Generally when you are guarding international borders you don't pay your people so little that they actively seek out bribes. 28K an arrest in the infancy of a program like this is astoundingly cheap and keep in mind that this should include the cost of the manpower behind it so they're washing in some of the already existing overhead to hype up the story. Even if this was 10 years from now after they have had time to discover and implement new inefficiencies in the process and after the cost of the drones has settled then $28,000 per arrest would still be an adequate price tag. Look up what it costs on average to arrest a local drug pusher sometime. Law enforcement is expensive.

One could only hope that if we were to invade an inhabited planet that we would have your military genius and tactical insight at the forefront. What's that over there? A one in a billion planet that has a climate which is accommodating to our species? Oh, I know! Instead of invading it, let's bomb it from space and send enough dust and debris into the atmosphere to kick off a thousand year long nuclear winter so as to make it completely inhospitable it either race! Don't forget to ensure the obliteration of every component of infrastructure that the native species had already built. Because there's nothing like rebuilding civilization again from the stone age to let you know that you've made the right decision.

http://www.firstsolar.com/en/about-us/projects/california-flats

Call me stupid, but is the bird incineration thing an actual concern holding back solar thermal energy? Or is just classic /. sarcasm? The former scenario sounds just impossibly stupid enough to be real

You were close, but that did need a little fixing up.

Maybe because Xzibit isn't the one in charge of R&D for the US military?

Ah, so you are exalting the fluidity of transiatism. Sorry for missing that. It doesn't actually impugn* upon the issue of a localized labor shortage, which is the point that I was trying to extrapolate on. You seem to be suggesting that the upper middle class would fall into hopeless desperation upon the exit of your (constituents?**/cohorts). I want to remind you that every political party have been gunning for our necks for more then a couple of centuries and that we have neither staggered nor fallen in our pursuit.

*: Literal Ancillary Comment: Parlez vous le francais. I'm from Buffalo, Give me a freaking break here!!!

**: Question, not a comment.

Are you even from America? Neither one of those scenarios is what happens in the situation you propose to engineer here. What happens is that the cities form economic enclaves for the lower class that are "separated" from the rest of the city by some subtle landmark such as a city park, commercial\industrial district, railroad track or other non-residential zone. These areas are called Municipal Housing Projects and the properties are ubiquitously subsidized with rent assistance programs such as Section 8 to make the prospect of living there attractive to the point where some people think it's their only viable option. I'm not sure where you got these romanticized ideas of collective bargaining for the unskilled labor market, or why you think that you can win at this game by not playing but you need to drop them while you're ostensibly still young. Now I have nothing against Bohemianism if that's your choice, but remember that literally any other life style is going to require some actual effort on your part

That's only if you interpret the poverty line in terms of individual discretionary income as opposed to a standard of living. A large part of the cost of living is fixed costs such as rent and utilities which would be split among the occupants. In addition, the potentially variable costs of necessities such as food, scale pretty well in this country where whole sale markets are adjacent to pretty much every major city. I'll grant you that things like health care and auto insurance would still be a problem, but that's because they're still broken.

On behalf of Systems Administrators everywhere; I will personally bitch slap the first user that tries to tell me that their preferred emacs interpreter is Minecraft.

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?