Here's a bunch of wife-friendly consoles

Why yes, I am single. How could you tell?

Sadly, you are still in Texas.

Youre over-generalizing. Japan has a very diverse climate, from subtropical in the south to New-England like winters in the north. Also, the Japanese Shinkansen stops for typhoons, but not wind or rain. For snow you're talking about delays, not stops. Just as long as it takes to clear thr tracks. There's a difference. And while parts of the Great Plains have extreme weather, they also have excellent weather systems already as a result. I don't think there's real need to blame the weather for not developing to system. And it's not always necessary to go at top speed to be fast enough.

(I happen to have lived in Oklahoma for ten years and Japan for twelve).

... still use Sybase, and not some Johnny-come-lately like Oracle. Even for compliance stuff.

Your signature is profoundly disturbing. Citation, please?

Don't know much about Hungary (*), but if you really think that Merkel is "in bed with the Russians" you have bigger problems than worrying about your fuel security.

Anyway, oil dependence is essentially transport based; more specifically, private car use. So cut or reduce your dependence on that. You live in a multi-storey building of which you control only part - some kind of apartment block - so probably a fairly densely populated area. That makes it simple: If you currently drive a car to work, stop doing that. If you're really lazy, you could get a motorbike or scooter, drastically reducing your dependence; if you're not that lazy start cycling. With a bit of practice, a 20-30K commute on a bike is really not hard, and you'll save money on gym fees. That's oil dependance sorted.

Natural gas is trickier if you don't own the building (or at least apartment). If you can, you should probably install solar panels on the roof - not for your own use, as such, but to take advantage of the feed-in tariffs. And then buy an electric convection heater so you can heat your apartment if the gas gets cut off. And maybe buy a good sleeping bag or extra duvet. That won't save you from a catastrophic meltdown - you'd need a wood burning stove, a cabin in the woods, and a seriously unhealthy dose of paranoia(**) for that, but it will make short outages of gas a lot more comfortable.

(*) Feel free to sing this comment to the tune of Sam Cooke's "Wonderful World" :)
(**) You seem to already have 1 of those three.

So they illegally stop paying their taxes when they pull their kid in a private school? I don't think so.

"The Commonwealth must have the express written assurance from Ark Encounter, LLC that it will not discriminate in any way on the basis of religion in hiring."

Umm... anyone else reminded of this:

Agnes: Pinkie promise?

Gru: Oh yes, my pinkie promises.

Thank you. It's true, although we don't like to brag.

The information sent is anonymous, using an ephemeral session ID, which resets every 15 minutes. The data is sent over HTTPS, meaning it can't be intercepted. No personal data. The only purpose of all this is to improve search suggestions. Nothing to see here.

They tried to ban it in North western schools recently because "it's racist". Obviously the people trying to ban it were idiots.

People were trying to get it banned from the schools because "it is racist". Which suggests they either did not read the book, or failed to understand the entire point of the story.

Spoiler alert (and you should be ashamed of yourself if you had not read the book).

The story is basically about how Huck started as one who "knew" that blacks were inferior and their proper place was in slavery, and anyone who denied this was going to hell. After going through many an adventure with the runaway slave Jim, he came to realize that Jim was one of the finest men he ever knew, and if accepting him as an equal meant he was going to hell, then "fine, I'm going to hell."

It should be required reading in our schools.

A few years ago I was helping a friend do some xmas shopping. She saw a kids chemistry set that was "kid safe" and said, "oh, that's perfect!" I put a quick stop to that, "your husband has a degree in chemistry, and in the army his job was to blow shit up, and he still likes to blow shit up. How long do you think it would take for him to upgrade that chemistry set?"

She got her daughter a telescope, instead.

He's the social media billionaire that went zombie and got blown away by Faith when she boarded his mega-yacht.

The problem is that it is really easy to move "profit" from one place to another. A common ploy is to have one part of a company that is in a low-tax area to charge other parts of the company "licensing fees". In some cases this "licensing fee" means that the other parts of the company now make no profits.

If you try to tax revenues rather than profits, then you wind up really hurting (true) low-margin companies, and wind up under-charging (relatively) high-margin ones.

The best proposal I have seen yet is to tax companies on a percentage of the global profits based on the percentage of revenue earned in that tax district. However this would be really difficult to enforce in a reasonable way because 1) How do you audit all of the books in all of the countries to make sure they are not just hiding things? 2) It is still difficult to define profits, especially when you have multiple countries laws to deal with. 3) There is a major possible loophole in just moving all of the profits from one company to another using the same "licensing fee" trick, and having the licensing company have a presence only in a tax haven country.

Have you ever ridden in a cab? I'm guessing you haven't.