If that were the case, I think everyone here would prefer to actually have that taken care of at the source, not through filtering Google..

Okay, so it seems to be pretty much only in France, which would explain why I didn't hear about it. It's a shame, as it seems like a convenient way of handling cohabitating couples that are increasingly common here.

Committed monogamy is not the same as marriage, though.

This is interesting, as it seems like something that might interest me more than a marriage. What exactly are PACS?

Unless, of course, you write a will. Granted, there's no solution for the tax issue. That's going to require the government to quit favoring certain lifestyles.

Oddly enough, they seem to ignore all the rules about constitutional limits to their powers, except perhaps for telling a lawyer so he can spin a way that it can be argued to not be breaking the law. Failing that, he'll find a way to pin it on somebody unimportant or already in hot water. And then there's just run of the mill corruption, abuse, and incompetence. They seem to select for a particular mindset far more than they select for moral superiority and genuine respect for law.

Our brains are very bad at handling big numbers, and it is quite often a limiting factor in our ability to grasp certain concepts. If your brain doesn't work correctly (which it doesn't with billions), then you might trick it into accepting the truth, or at least something closer than the truth. Whether or not marijuana or other drugs do that, and if they do, for which people, is a different story, but you are assuming that your sober state of mind is anywhere near rational, which suggests you've never actually been around a human being for an extended period of time.

You are assuming that there is a singular 'correct' perspective, when there can be benefits to taking in multiple perspectives.

It puts you in a different state of mind. You may or may not benefit from that state of mind, but there would generally not be a great risk of harm.

Only if we come to the conclusion that consenting to a search implicitly means consenting to totally relinquishing control of the account, which is not the case for anyone ever. It's also assuming that the consent to search was actually consensual as well, which it likely was not.

There are two sides of this. How much you can make, and what you can buy with it. The latter has improved considerably for everyone, but when adjusted for inflation, the income of middle class and poor households have stagnated despite the fact that the potential workforce has expanded, while the income of the rich has rose considerably. So, if you could have a job today or an inflation adjusted job from the 60s, the latter would be preferable.

If one person can take care of 4 people, carrying 20% of the population is pretty easy.

The problem is that we haven't made technological progress, but rather, that the average person is not keeping up with that progress. If weren't propping up the rich, we could have people working about as much as they did in the 60s, but having more awesome stuff.

The NSA is, for all practical purposes, a military organization, and it seems to have more or less invaded other parts of the federal government, so saying that there will be similar mindsets from the military is not unreasonable.

Increasing the standard of living decreases population growth, especially when women get a piece of that action. Despite your claims, most of the western world actually has sub-replacement birth rates. If your life is awesome, you don't want/need a bunch of kids to feel important and you've got better things to do with your life than just pump out kids.