A lot of Monday morning quarterbacks on this one. Yes, they might have been able to cut lots of corners and gotten Atlantis up, at a significant risk to the Atlantis crew. What then? Do we have the Columbia crew spacewalk over to Atlantis with instructions for the last astronaut to turn off the lights? Aim Columbia at the ocean and hope for the best?

If they had had such a plan in place and executed it, and some other loss of life had happened because of the increased risk, everyone likely would have been up in arms about how NASA had cavalierly risked additional crew when they could have just reentered Columbia.

You've got questions?

We've got cell phones!

As many people have pointed out, regulated banks in the US have the FDIC behind them to give depositors a warm cozy feeling when they drop off their money. In exchange for that backing, the banks agree to abide by a set of rules to safeguard deposits and pay into the fund that is used to reimburse depositors of failed banks. MtGox (and every other Bitcoin exchange) has none of that. Their biggest asset is their reputation, which will never recover from this even if they could scrounge up the money to make whole all of their accounts.

I suppose a better example would be asking your frat brother to hold onto your cash for you. Maybe he could keep it in his glove box, if we really need a car analogy.

Just about any scenario where money is held as cash or a deposit in a bank account could apply equally to Bitcoin. You give a stack of $100 bills to a bank, they give you a slip of paper showing they have your money and will give it back when you ask. If the bank president or a crooked teller then puts everyone's stacks of $100 bills in a suitcase and disappears, your slip of paper isn't worth much.

In the case of the Pirateat40, it was a classic Ponzi scheme. The fact that it was done with Bitcoins instead of pieces of paper with pictures of dead Presidents and statesmen on them doesn't change much.

Is there a possibility that a change is possible within your current company? It sounds like you're not unhappy with your employer, just your position. If they are a great company to work for, maybe you should bring up your concerns with them about making a move within the company to stretch your wings a little.

The best way to make that happen might be with the new job offer in hand. Ask for a meeting with your manager, and stress that you're not unhappy with the company, but that this opportunity came your way and it gave you a chance to reflect on what you want out of your career. Lay out what you would like to see change in clear, concise language. If you can't put it into words, that tells you that you need to think it through some more to make it clear to yourself exactly what you are after.

If they can't meet your needs where you're at, then it's time to give notice and take the offer. If they get all offended and fire you, then it probably was time to go anyway and you can let the new company know that you want to get started immediately.

Just remember: the grass on the other side of the fence might really be greener, but it could just be because of the extra fertilizer.

Do they still have the ridiculously cheap Volt leases? Last year there were times when you could drive a Volt for $199/month with something like $3k down. For a $45k car, that was crazy cheap. The speculation was that GM was subsidizing the leases to get them out of the factory and on the road, so they could point to the numbers and show that the car was a success.

Doing a quick Google search shows there are places offering $249/month 36 month leases today. Whether or not there are cars to actually be had at that price may be a different story...

I don't think your idea of "just going about your day" would work in my area. Looking for a parking spot where I can pull an extension cord out of the trunk and plug in with every stop I make seems like a major PITA, and there just don't seem to be that many places to plug in around here. Granted, I may just not be noticing them since I'm not looking for them.

I love the idea of an EV and really wanted to like the Prius that I test drove last year, planning to do a plugin conversion. My wife didn't like the interior of the car, and I was concerned about voiding the warranty with the conversion, so we continue to look for a solution that makes sense for us.

Wow. Just wow.

I've heard of states (or counties or cities) giving breaks to corporations for income, property, or other taxes, but I've never heard of an arrangement where the company is allowed to keep any withholdings from employee's payrolls as you claim... do you have a concrete example you could share?

No, this is not a good idea, this is an idea that seems good and laudable on the surface but starts to fall apart under examination. You've already identified one huge problem: "free money" is a large part of the tuition problem now; schools are not motivated to keep costs in check, since a potential student can just get a loan to cover the costs. Distancing the cost further from the individual student to a pool of all former students is even worse.

From the summary:

Higher education has always been primarily an individual good. Sure, society benefits from education too, but the real reason to get a degree is to get a job.
If the goal is to get more people through a college or vocational program, this will have the exact opposite effect. I can't think of a worse way to encourage people to become educated "for the public good" than to tell them as soon as they're educated "society" will be taxing them extra.

My previous employer was self-insured, a fact that they liked to remind us of each year when premiums went up. But even self-insured companies can purchase reinsurance to back catastrophic losses.

"The government" may not make any money off of insurance companies, but lawmakers sure do.

With all due respect, "Large successful companies" don't do layoffs. Large struggling companies do.

And they need to be able to do it. If companies are told they can never let excess employees go, they will be all the more hesitant to hire when they need extra labor.

I have dreams about past jobs where I wasn't 100% sure if leaving was the right decision. Coulda/woulda/shoulda haunts my dreams.

eInk could be updated every minute for a (wait for it) 60x power savings over updating every second, but even running an LCD all the time is possible with only solar, there are watches that do that right now.