I don't agree that there are no tools a government could employ here. A government could create a tax bracket of 70% (or some other arbitratily high number) and make the bracket begin at a number high enough that only those pooling money would be effected(including corps). The government could then spend that money on public infrastructure, employing people in the process. Think power plants, government rollout of highspeed fiber, high speed trains, or hell if you get enough money how about a space elevator?

A government, such as the US govt, could prevent companies by sending all their money oversees by penalizing companies which don't base themselves in the US. A govt could institute a tax on assets upon death. A government could institute tax brackets which target your existing wealth as well as income. A government could redefine corporations in such a way that it is no longer possible for the insane abuses they perpetrate to continue.

I am not saying any of this is easy. However, we aren't trying any of it, and all of it has the potential to help (if not solve) the problem. I also fully realize why we aren't trying any of it: All of it affects the wealthy, and the USA is an oligarchy.

The SCOTUS army is The People of the United States of America. In the event the balance of powers established by the constitution are found by The People to be circumvented by some branch grabbing power not allocated to it, you basically have as close as you are going to get to legal grounds for revolution. To be clear, I mean "circumvented" in a very strong sense. Not simple political dickery, but straight up defiance by the Executive or Legislative branch of a finding by the Supreme Court (or the same sort of activity being taken by the Supreme Court in defiance of the other branches in the sphere which is relegated to them by the constitution).

You probably haven't lived anywhere with a high cost of living while simultaneously attempting to create a lifestyle that is sustainable and will secure you for your retirement years.

Let's do some napkin math.
1 bedroom in San Francisco in a good area is about $3500/month = $42k per year

But of course "middle class" means you should be able to pull off raising a family with 2.5 children. For that you would generally want a house. You aren't going to find a livable house in San Francisco under 1 million, but let's move out to the suburbs since that is traditional middle class practice. How about mountain view? Oh crap, average price there is over a million. But mountain view is google, so of COURSE its expensive there. Let's try Redwood City (which is a shithole). Uh oh, average price is 820k as of january 2014.

Without factoring the myriad other costs of life and family someone making $100,000 per year can't even afford *housing*. If you make less than 100k in that city you can't afford to be there. That means poverty. If you make less than $200k you can't afford anything better than an apartment or condo. That means lower-class. Middle class in the bay area is 400k to 800k income per year, where you can buy an average house.

Part of the reason academia no longer garners respect is because it doesn't deserve it. I went into college foaming at the mouth for serious science. I was excited to do research, pursue professorship, the whole nine yards. What I encountered completely rocked me. Researchers in my field were only given an ear if they were essentially "towing the party line". Anything you found in the journals was just a natural evolution, or some trite spin, on the same theories the discipline had been running with for 30 years. This sucked, but I guess I could forgive it if the science was sound.

The science was horrifyingly, clearly, absolutely not sound. Articles regularly publish results, but do not clearly provide the steps necessary to reproduce them. Further, they rarely publish their raw data.Their power was entirely seated in the name of the researcher presenting the article. They were essentially no better than the websites you refer to.

There are reasons for all this. Researchers are pushed to publish publish publish no matter what. Large class sizes. No room to try experiments that might fail. The list goes on.But just because there are reasons doesn't make the situation excusable.

Academia today in the US a joke. It absolutely deserves to be regarded with scorn.

There is a huge amount of land in California the middle class can afford: the Central Valley. The air is so bad you are almost guaranteed to experience asthma or allergies, but you can swing it on as low as 30k per year in my opinion. Those kids living in LA, SF, SD who make 30k per year? They basically live in squalor(for America). They value the coolness of those cities so much they are willing to live 4 to a 2-bedroom, or get their own place and live paycheck to paycheck, or live with their folks.

Middle class can't afford San Francisco. A cheap house there is 800k. It isn't a question of sacrificing on a cell phone plan. The values are stratospherically out of reach for middle class earners.

Almost all problems experienced by groups of humans are self-inflicted.

The coworker of a friend of mine was hired because he had a masters in CS. One day my friend had to tell him about this great thing called "regular expressions".

Do you seriously believe there is any reason for open floor plans other than that companies want to save money and don't see the connection between working conditions and the performance of their employees? No one wants to work in an open environment. Companies do it because they can put up four walls and a ceiling and call it done.

It is sophistry to say that both gay and straight individuals have the same rights when pointing out that gay people can marry people of the opposite gender. Some people regard marriage as an institution which expresses their love for another human being in the strongest possible terms. Some of these people are gay. Some are straight. The straight ones have the right to marry the person they love. They are guaranteed the pursuit of happiness, in this pursuit at least. Gay people are not.

You might respond that this is not a "right". If you do, you would be forgetting the philosophical commitment underlying the enumeration of powers in the US constitution. There are an infinite number of rights, just as there are an infinite number of powers. It was an absurdly enormous mistake to title the first 10 amendments the "Bill of Rights", because many people mistake this for suggesting it is possible to enumerate all the rights which individuals possess. Rather, all people retain all rights and powers unless they are explicitly removed from them (in the case of rights) or reassigned (in the case of powers).

This is why those who appose the right of gay people to marry must pass laws to prevent it. Gay people's rights in this matter are being denied by law.

It is not intolerant to call something a human rights issue. It cannot possibly be argued that gay marriage is a *civil* rights issue, but if someone wants to assert they think all humans should be guaranteed this right then those asserters are not being intolerant. They are expressing the strength of their conviction.

They aren't "our" spying capabilities. One of the reasons people are upset with the situation is that the NSA is indiscriminate in their targets. American citizens are just as open to attack as foreign citizens. Those spying capabilities belong to an organization accountable to no one with dirt on everyone alive. If their interests happen to align with those of the American People, great. If they don't, too bad for the American People, because it is damn hard to reign an organization with the sweeping level of knowledge now possessed by the NSA.

The NSA is only still associated with the American people in the sense that it funds itself in large part with tax money taken from those Americans.

The reason I make the claim that it is unlikely any human categorically dislikes music of all kinds is because what we can consider music is incredibly broad. It is like making the claim that there are humans who don't enjoy art. It seems nearly impossible because the nature of art is such that it permeates all human endeavor. Medicine, for example, is art. Lots of science in there of course. But there is a lot of art as well. I don't mean "an art" either, I mean art. When people start doing things creatively according to their internal sense of aesthetics, they've made some art.

"I don't enjoy music" meaning "I don't pursue even a tiny interest in music" seems plausible to me. What seems implausible to me is the statement "I have never enjoyed a work of music in my life". I'll admit that it isn't really based on anything I know about cognitive science, so I could be wrong. There might well be people who actually don't like any combination of melody, beat, rhythm, or whatever. The reason I find it diffiult to believe is because music is just artistic expression, and artistic expression seems to be a part of what it is to be human. I would think that some form of music would resonante with anyone because by the definition of art there are nearly no limits to what one could consider music. If there was no music a person liked, I would think they could make some by just tapping their fingers on a table in a way they find calming/pleasing/whatever.

All the crap I just said in this post is unrelated to my training as a linguist. Like I said above, music doesn't preceed language, and linguists have no need to study it as a foundational sort of thing. I also happen to have a philosohpy degree, so the above is mostly me trying to make clear what we mean by our terms.

I can't comprehend how someone could not enjoy ANY music, music is the fundamental pre-cursor to language, not only is it deeply ingrained into humans but species as diverse as whales and grasshoppers use music to communicate with each other.

IAAL (I am a linguist)

Music is not the fundamental precursor to language. Language is just a fancy way of diong communication. Communication itself is a common thing that organisms do. The likely precursor to human language would be symbolic rperesentation without things like syntax. "Music" doesn't enter into it.

Animals aren't doing "music", unless by "music" you mean a form of communication which depends on repetitive pitch patterns or something like that. If that is what you mean, then you havnen't managed to distinguish between language and music. Language does that too. Most people think of music as an artistic twist on language. Pitches are held longer than is "normal" in the dialect. A prosody pattern is represented with a guitar rather than a human voice doing actual speech. The list goes on at length.

Animals are communicating with one another, and they tend to do it in a very similar way to humans. Most animals aren't doing anything you can reasonably call music if you want the words "music", "communication", and "language" to have any distinction. Your example of a whale using music to communicate is anthropormorphization. Whale speech happens to sound like music to you because your brain is keyed to represent certain tones in certain patterns in certain ways. It isn't any different than an a squirrel chriping, it just sounds more beautiful to humans because the tones are low and held for long periods.

Language is a precursor to music. It isn't the other way around. All that being said, I am surprised there are humans who don't enjoy any kind of music at all at any time. I suspect the results are either being exagerated, the survey results were contaminated, or the people being surveyed had a tenous grasp on language in general

What on earth is "premium android"? Do you mean "custom ROM"? Anyone can install a custom ROM on just about any android device. There is no appreciable software difference between a knockoff tablet maker and samsung. If anything, knockoff tablets tend to run better android mods than samsung devices. Of course this hardly matters since anyone can customize the OS however they like, or install an entirely different flavor of android.

The main difference is in the raw power of the hardware. I realize the power of the hardware isn't something apple people think about... but it is one side of two coins. Software and Hardware make a tablet. Every android user has access to the same software. Better hardware costs more money. Every apple user has access to the same software, and the same hardware.

You're complaining that Android is cheating by inflating its numbers. You are blind to the point that this is one of the very strengths of android. It is an open platform which anyone can employ. As such, a lot of people tend to employ it. To say Apple has less market share than android is surely true. Further, it is not a trivial thing to say. Apple once dominated the tablet and smartphone market when compared to Android. Now they are falling behind. The reason they are falling behind is the same reason they fell behind in the 90s. They sell closed, proprietary tech. This philosophy has been largely abandoned by the market in the 2000s because it has a lot of disadvantages to the consumer, which means the consumer eventually stops buying it.

Apple is going to lose relevance in the USA over the next 5 years and gain relevance oversees (though not at an equal rate). I'm betting that apple is going to start seeing a drop in revenue 5 years from now after revenue growth slowly peters out. They could avoid it, but they won't. Their philosophy doesn't allow it. When I say I'm betting this will happen, I mean it in the strongest possible sense.

10 years from now apple will be right back where it was in 1995. Clueless executives, inferior and overpriced product, and a market no longer willing to buy it because it is chic.

Apple's business philosophy has always been about total control. You will never find Apple sportingly participating in a market, even if it is to their advantage. They built their own maps system in order to compete with a completely free and very effective one(google), they are the last manufacturer of note clinging to using proprietary cables, the list goes one. Apple wouldn't want to do what you are suggesting because that means other systems could participate in the environment. They don't want that. They want all Apple, or they don't want to be involved.

Apple doesn't get it anymore. Five years ago they were cutting edge on trends (maybe not on actual tech). Now they are a little behind. The trend isn't looking good.

This nav system is going to be as popular as the facebook cell phone.