I'm as big a fan of actual medicine, and opponent of woo, as you're going to find, and there's a reason I'm making the point that I'm making.

If you classify alternative medicine as "stuff that's been proven not to work," then you open yourself up for the "hey, here's a case where it did work/appeared to work, so you're wrong, I love me some woo!" attack. By positioning the argument as "real medicine, proven to work, "alternative" medicine, no evidence it does work, so go away and come back with some if you can," you close off that avenue of attack for the woo crowd, and also remove the "evil medicine is trying to shut us down and won't even listen to our evidence" argument.

This isn't quite right. In reality, alternative medicine has not been proven TO work. That's very different from proven NOT to work. In fact, it's essentially impossible to prove that something doesn't work - any study has a margin of error. You CAN, however, say that there's no evidence that something DOES work, and hence we shouldn't be spending time and money on it (and possibly displacing treatments that HAVE been shown to work).

It's a nuance, but an important one.

$100M over the past 30 years is about 0.00016% of total federal spending over that period. It's really pretty trivial.

There's a famous HBS case study on Dewalt. Black & Decker bought the brand (which was at that point restricted to woodworking tools), and used it to rebrand their Black & Decker professional line. They chose yellow/black as a color scheme since it was familar both from the "safety sign/tape" schema and because blue was Makita and red was Skil or Hilti or probably a few others as well, so the black/yellow would stand out. They didn't change the actual tools (which got good ratings when people didn't see the B&D branding on them, but construction pros didn't want to bring something to the job site that was the same brand as their popcorn popper), just change the color and name. Market share went up about 8-fold in a year.

Really? 25% is ridiculous? The price has been stable for nine years. So, that's a 2.5% increase/year. Quite a bit less than the annualized increase in gas costs (which have got to be have a significant correlation to shipping costs).

Would love to see the math behind this. Do you have a source?

Unemployment peaked at 10% in October of 2009. It's now down to 6.6%, down 130bps in the last year. Still too high, but it has been declining steadily. This chart doesn't meet my definition of "stuck."

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries...

Disagree with you here. A national gun registry WOULD be useful for preventing gun violence. It might not be useful enough to justify the intrusion and confiscation risk, but it would be useful. How? By enabling law enforcement to go after the supply chain that gets guns into the hands of criminals. Typically, guns that end up in the hands of criminals (where we all agree they shouldn't be) were legally purchased initially, but then sold on (illegally) to a criminal. If law enforcement were able to say "hey, we seized seven guns last month from criminals that were all purchased by John XYZ," that would allow them to go after illegal distributors like John XYZ, and reduce the ease with which criminals can obtain guns.

Would it be perfect? Of course not, some guns would still end up in criminal hands through theft, etc. Would it be helpful? Definitely. Would it be worth the confiscation risk you cite? That's a debatable issue. I believe it would be, you clearly differ with me on that.

As I said, the fact that someone is trying to avoid a background check isn't per se an indication that the sale would be illegal, but it does raise the risk for the seller.

True, but it's definitely NOT legal to sell a gun to somebody you know, or can reasonably be expected to know, can't legally buy one. So, if your buyer says "I'm a convicted felon," definitely not legal. If your buyer says "you're not going to require a background check, are you?" you're on very shaky ground, since that's very close to an admission that, were there to BE a background check, the buyer wouldn't pass. Remember, willful blindness isn't a defense.

And, for those on the South side of the line, the color of your skin.

Even if we assume that Brown's lawyers don't prevail in their arguments, the scenario you're discussing wouldn't be illegal under the statute, which requires that you "knowingly" link to the content. So, if you linked to www.slashdot.org/storyxyz, and, at some point, somebody replaced storyxyz with (say) a long list of stolen credit card numbers, you wouldn't be liable, so long as, if you discovered the content had changed, you removed the link.

Certainly. In terms of cost/cup:

Regular coffee at home Keurig Dunkin Starbucks.

Keurig machine is about $120. The pods are about $0.65 each (less if you buy in bulk, or on sale, etc.). Small coffee at DD is $1.49. So, you're saving about $0.85/cup. You cover the cost of the machine after about 140 cups, so you definitely are saving money, even more if you're comparing to buying at Starbucks.

Remember, he settled too. If he had been that sure of his chances of success (and/or that he'd get a lot more if he went to trial), he wouldn't have.