These emails are also from the president and founder of the company, not some out sourced customer relations kid. So yea, it probably should ruin it for the whole company.

Well he did like to do secret gift giving while he was alive, I'm not sure I'd wager that Saint Nicholas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas) if very anonymous anymore ;)

Very interesting, thank you for pointing this out. I'll admit I had not before read into the origins of the Christmas tree and simply believed what I had heard about it coupled with what I knew about the protestants in England outlawing it for a time because they believed it to be of pagan origin which cemented it in my mind as fact. While I think the evidence still points to the chosen timing for Christmas being to compete with the pagan festival I thank you for pointing out that I was wrong about the tree being adopted because of this.

More accurately Christmas is a Christian holiday originally timed to coincide and compete with a Pagan holiday which it pushed out though many of the pagan traditions ended up being incorporated by converted followers. There are lots of things Christian about Christmas such as the story, celebrating the birth of Jesus (even tho they don't believe it happened that time of year) ect, but many of the traditions such as the trees and candles are co-opted from Saturnalia.

There's plenty of people work a 6-2 or 7-3 in places where traffic is unruly at conventional rush hour times. There's no reason not to let your employees do this if they're office workers that just need to get 8 hours of work in.

Don't the uranium cores get recycled into nuclear fuel and thus become profitable/useful? Would assume it would get sold to some nuclear facility and thus no longer need upkeep by the government itself. Even if they theoretically boxed it storage of a uranium core should be a far less costly matter than maintaining a functional nuclear warhead.

By recycling it into something useful (weapons into plowshares and all that) instead of it sitting around costing money through expensive guarding, monitoring and maintenance not to mention Russia under the treaty dismantling nuclear warheads that were meant for killing us. Oh, and 0% chance of it accidentally going off once it's dismantled versus the extremely small percentage chance beforehand.

All else being equal, a nation that spends 10% of it's resourced building machines of war will have a lower standard of living then a nation that's able to spend that 10% on things like education, infrastructure, or even private commercial ventures / R&D. Hence war being destructive to the economy in the sense that you're sinking resources into production that doesn't return value to you in the form of making your life better. Sort of like there's money to be made in boarding up houses after a fire but setting a bunch of fires doesn't help stimulate the economy.

Realistically, however; Things are a lot more complex as always and there are other factors involved like the nation that did spend 10% using their machines of war to take what the nation that didn't made or value returned in the ability to exert your will on other nations ect ect. But it's always a net loss for humanity as a whole....until the aliens come

I read that as "I'd hope there would still be plenty of edible vegetarians"

The amount of work and planning that would go into closing those 5 departments, their assets, and signed federal contracts under those departments, would most assuredly increase costs for that first year.

If only there were some sort of organized union of nations that each paid towards operating costs in order to work on world issues of security, health and economic development.

Out of curiosity did you consider that too incredibly outlandish or something? Keep in mind it was written pre 9/11.

Cuba and Hispaniola are not "a small island" nor are they in the middle of the ocean. Cuba alone is larger than England and together they're nearly the size of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales). Furthermore they are both considered part of North America. Everyone else rightly assumed the Earth was much larger and he'd run out of food before he got around to India. In his "wrongness" he ran into a gigantic new landmass full of riches and resources to report home about leading to European Colonization. So yea, he gets credit for starting that time period.

There's a difference between "such a device exists" and "They use a device". I believe those devices are possibly in use in Michigan which the ACLU is suing to find out more about, not in Florida.

Oh, I definitely agree with you there. As more and more of the population stays in school I think there is undoubtedly a pressure on teachers to try to keep average grades up and failure rates down which results in cases of relaxing standards. This doesn't mean the population is getting less intelligent or less educated though, it simply means the average graduate may be less intelligent, but now a much larger percentage of the population is attempting to graduate and learn and the population on the whole is getting better educated.

Imagine if you will that you switched from how cross country teams are now to having everyone forced to be on the cross country team, run and exercise. You might look at average run times for the team and exclaim that the population is getting slower and worse at running and that the system must be broken, but this is not the case. Now you simply have more people being pushed to run instead of the people who were already inclined and in a good position to do so. Forcing all these people to do training runs would mean the population as a whole is getting better at running, even though your average scores for your "team" would seem to disagree.