More people leaving Oregon == more Oregon left for me. Take a few hipsters with you and don't let the door hit you on the way out.

... cyclists' contribution to road wear would likely be too small to collect.

Oh yeah? What if the cyclist was wearing a backpack, too? What then? Tax them all!

Anything that is in the public domain, and anything that is "basic research", is exempt.

So, if it costs too much they'll automate and you'll pay to support them anyway. Here's the thing - you can either find jobs for people and let them work (or force them to work, Kim Jong Il), you can support them (either in their homes or poorhouses or prisons), or you can let them die of starvation. You can manage the process or let it go on chaotically - that's about it. Which of these options are you going to choose?

Well, is yours? I do own a business and I sort of like the fact that my government sets minimal rules. You, of course, are free to move away from LA should you find their rules onerous, but I have a feeling you don't even live near LA.

Businesses just raise their prices to compensate. The people who really get hurt are the people who make just a few dollars an hour more than minimum wage, because they've worked hard to get raises. Guess what happens to their raises when minimum wage goes up and drives inflation? Yeah.

With that said, I'm surprised California minimum wage wasn't already more than $15/hour. In real terms, that might actually be _lower_ than minimum wage in the Midwest. I say might, because it depends somewhat on exactly what you're buying. Electronics, for instance, are generally the same price nationwide, so your minimum wage job in California could buy a lot more iPhones than an equivalent minimum wage job in Ohio. OTOH, if you are mostly buying food and housing, you'd be better off with $5 an hour in Indiana than $15 an hour in Southern California. So figuring out an exact purchasing power ratio for the general case is not really possible. But anyway, my point is, $15/hour sounds high if you live in a place with a reasonable cost of living, but it's really not high in LA. Money's just worth less out there.

Uber ... is threatening to leave ... Oregon.

Since we've lived without "pump your own" gas for this long, I figure lack of Uber "services" and reliance on old school taxis and mass transit will be fine with our retro/hipster kultur here in PDX.

Actually, it's fine with me, too. I have a car. I know how to drive.

Most gas stations in Oregon don't have canopies. If you want to stand out in the rain to pump your gas, you can always go over the state line into Washington.

So your organization uses process change as a euphemism for "firing bad developers we were too chickenshit to fire for being bad in the first place". Sounds like a well-managed company with a recipe for a happy and productive workforce. I would like to subscribe to your newsletter, Catbert.

If your Scrum meeting takes less than 30 seconds, you must not be doing Scrum either. Scrum is not about rigid time absolutes, it's about communication. Too much? Bad. Too little? Bad. Sometimes you need more, sometimes you need less. By the way, Scrum masters are often bad at determining which communication is important and how long stand ups need to last on both the short and long ends.

Ultimately, the question is not your "One True Scotsman" shibboleth, but what is industry standard. And right now, industry standard is standup meetings that run too long, transmit too little useful information, and take up too much project time as a percentage. Are we getting the transparency "bang for the buck" that Scrum promises from its process or were we better off with half-hour weekly status meetings and dailys when projects were coming down to an end? Are standups what bring value to the process or is it all of the other practices that often get snuck in on the back of Scrum? Strict timeboxing on tasks, TDD, continual improvement, transparent status, all of which actually reduce risk? How much does the standup actually bring to the party? More importantly, why is the Scrum community unwilling to discuss questions like this, simply saying "It's not true Scrum, so I don't care."?

Translating a car chase or an explosion into a foreign language is cheap.

Care to explain what the potential students who didn't get in have done wrong?

How does "a minority group being discriminated against" have anything to do with affirmative action?

The blame for a transactional crime lies with the people with the money who are creating a market for crime to fulfull.

Hand me a white-haired cat and I can hand you back the same cat with pink fur about an hour later. And if his name is Gerald, he may be pissed, but given that the ONLY criteria you have are Gerald is a cat and Gerald has fur and Gerald's fur has color pink, he would not be a figment of the imagination. Of course, a month after that, you'll need to touch up his roots, but that's just quibbling.