Amusing that it is posted on the Guardian.

Nope, I use the Catalan sequence, Bell numbers, Fibonacci numbers, and various Mersenne primes. When I have to use letters, I use the letters below the numbers.

Brilliant idea! Get some currency with numbers that the FBI / CIA are really interested in, and send them to the scammers. The FBI / CIA does your work for you!

I agree: Go with whitelisting. You can whitelist entire blocks of numbers (local businesses, for example), and it's unlikely that the autodialers of the scammers would fall into them.

Because he was a useful bat with which to beat the Iranians. And he would have continued to be a useful bat except he invaded Kuwait. Until that time, it was a case of "Yes, but he's our bastard" -- Roosevelt.

Bull. The islands are at: 25.744395,123.469133 Look them up. The closest islands are Japanese (Ishigakis) and Taiwan. Don't even get me started on Taiwan and the Chinese claims on them. The Chinese are claiming every islands in the ocean near them.

Check this out: They are mulling claims on Okinawa. . Why? Because they can, not because there are good historical reasons for it.

Hey, Welcome to Boston!

Seriously, though, you speak as if driving in the US is a monolithic thing; it's not. When I lived in Boston, the motto was 'Don't use your turn signals, you'll be giving away your strategy'. Manhattan was even worse, since rather than dangerous, psychotic rules, there appeared to be no rules at all. On the other hand, in other places I've been (rural virginia, Utah, a couple of other places), drivers have been polite and safe. When I visited Australia, I was surprised at how the country felt the same culturally as I visited different places (Sydney, Darwin, Alice Springs, Cairns, Port Douglas) though the geography changed. In the US, people seem quite different in the different areas.

Like the color of his skin....

We have some good models for how to reduce population growth. The keys are reducing infant mortality, education, especially among women, and access to contraception; there are some other drivers as well but they are secondary. If you look at the projections for world population, they generally peak at about 2050, but it depends on the growth rate of the developing countries, which means that if you want to reduce growth, you work on the keys in those countries.

Just like dealing with climate change, dealing with population growth is not easy. It's expensive, certain groups oppose approaches, etc, but in both cases, I don't see evidence that dealing with it is impossible. They require significant societal changes and allocations of resources, and these take time. But, I'm not ready to give up yet.

I think that there is an age / generational thing going on here. Lots of people complaining about regulations (this one in particular) because, 'hey thing are fine', so we don't need the regulations.

I don't think that they realize that things are fine now because of the regulations.

Taxes are redistribution. You just don't like certain ways that taxes are spent. I don't like how some of my taxes are spent (like paying a rich farmer even more money, like giving huge tax breaks to oil companies, like paying for unnecessary wars). That's also how taxes work.

Air quality is one of those things that crosses local and state governments. What state 1 allows (burning of wood in high-particulate furnaces) affects state 2; so it's a job for the federal government.

This reminds me of the arguments over acid rain (and leaded gasoline, and CFCs / ozone depletion, and climate change). In each case, industry bitches and moans about how expensive it is, how it isn't the fault of their industry (i.e. it's natural, it's the volcanos, it's not really bad for you, etc.), but the evidence is strong and so the government acts. People complain about how government is killing jobs, over-regulating, and intruding on their civil rights. In the later analysis, it turns out that the enviro-wackos were right, and the industry FUD was a bunch of crap.

Do you remember acid rain? I sure do. Industry had lots of excuses, the most strongest being how expensive it would make everything. Heres' a document discussing the current status. Bottom line: things are much, much better; prices haven't gone up due to it; large economic benefits.

Here's an important point: environmental regulation of a particular industry can cause pain for that specific industry. However, we (as a country) are much better off, because we live in a better environment (both medically and economically). The industry complains about being repressed, but it's really about making sure the externalities are included in the price of their industry.

The thing is, countries with national single-payer systems have figured this out already. We have existing models for what things are and are not 'essential'. We could argue about a lot of them, and whatever single-payer system the US end up using people would disagree with parts of it.

But it would still be better than what we have now.

What??? Please show your math. Without it, I'm going to have to believe that you are an idiot.

If you eliminated the entire DOD budget, you would have a slight budget surplus, all else being equal (I know it would not be equal, because of the huge negative effect of lost spending, but please bear with me). However, you still have >3T in spending to account for. Where on earth would that money come from? Some of it is SS tax, some is business tax, but federal income tax is the biggest piece.