Chinese law is arbitrary and selectively enforced, often with no penalty for certain things. For example, smoking in certain areas is illegal, but there is no punishment for doing so, so people just smoke wherever they like.

They nixed breeder reactors because they would put weapons grade plutonium into civilian hands - creating proliferation concerns.

Fission of the nuclear fuel in any reactor produces neutron-absorbing fission products. Because of this unavoidable physical process, it is necessary to reprocess the fertile material from a breeder reactor to remove those neutron poisons. This step is required if one is to fully utilize the ability to breed as much or more fuel than is consumed. All reprocessing can present a proliferation concern, since it extracts weapons usable material from spent fuel.[21] The most common reprocessing technique, PUREX, presents a particular concern, since it was expressly designed to separate pure plutonium. Early proposals for the breeder reactor fuel cycle posed an even greater proliferation concern because they would use PUREX to separate plutonium in a highly attractive isotopic form for use in nuclear weapons.[22][23]

expecting x years with one product, y years with another product, and z years with a third, while specifying that it's an intermediate position

You misread the job description. The JOB is experienced. The salary is intermediate.

Depends on who you're killing with those bombs. Civilian deaths I have a problem with, but I have serious doubts on the civilian death toll numbers provided by our enemies. If we've killed thousands of militants to prevent them from killing, raping, or enslaving hundreds of thousands more, then so be it.

Yeah, you'd think he was in charge of the State Department and the Defense Department, with a constitutional mandate to defend the country and exercise diplomacy or something...

Reagan's justice department broke up Ma Bell, concluding the lawsuit filed by Nixon's justice department.

Blame the following issues on Obama's amateur hour policies:

1. Isis - directly resulted from Obama's premature pullout in Iraq and subsequent flip-flop on intervening in Syria
2. Benghazi
3. Gridlock - if he hadn't rammed through his healthcare bill without compromising with Republicans, they'd be much better at doing the political horse-trading it takes to work across party lines to get things done. By pushing it without any buy-in from the other party - something that has never been done for a law on this scale before - he inaugurated a new era of do-nothing politics. The Republicans have held a grudge ever since. Hopefully when Harry Reid is out of the Senate majority post next week, we'll finally get some bills to the White House, where they're sure to be vetoed. He's been protecting Obama for years, preventing him from taking a formal stance on so many bipartisan initiatives by preventing bills from coming to the senate floor for a vote. O's going to pay a political price for each veto, I'm sure.
4. Mexican drug cartels invading Texas and Arizona
5. Russia's return to cold war stance, thousands dead in Ukraine
6. China's emergence as a belligerent military power in the pacific region
7. Botched diplomacy with China, Brazil, India, Russia, Europe, Egypt, Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the list goes on and on...

Sounds like classic case of voter intimidation - but threatening voters *to* vote is new. Go vote for a third party or something.

That's the Koch Bros. if memory serves..

> American POS systems have no support for chip+pin

My new cards came with chips, and the POS systems that have been deployed to the stores I've visited in the last few months have readers. Chip+pin is coming to the US sooner than you anticipate.