That's unheard of!
http://www.damninteresting.com...
Unless you count the thousands of still-living people there that have been declared legally dead by bribed public officials and stripped of their property.

> Why should adultery not be a crime

Because every time people try to legislate morality, it turns out bad, Perhaps if everyone had the exact same religion and same sexual preferences that might work out, but we live in the real world. Some people have mutually consensual open marriages - what would making adultery mean for them? If there is anything that would drive a number of nails into the coffin of the institution of marriage, it would be outlawing adultery. When there's a choice between criminal adultery or worry-free premarital sex, why open yourself up to the liability? On top of the problems with losing half your stuff in a divorce, there wouldn't be enough benefits left to convince all that many people to go for it.

> If they're able to train the replacements then they're clearly qualified to do the job.

Doesn't that actually prove that they're more qualified to do the job than their replacements? They know how to do it already, and they're evidently qualified enough to teach others how to do it as well, while the H1-B folks require training in order to do it.

The problem with that argument is that the "parents" in this case are not qualified to make that decision. They don't have the education nor the data to determine whether or not their child might be susceptible to one of those "serious side effects" that may strike 1/1000 of a percent, at most. When considering that the potential equivalently-bad-or-worse consequences from the diseases themselves have percentages on the left side of the decimal point, they are avoiding a slim chance of something rare by almost guaranteeing a bad outcome if their child gets exposed. And they volunteer their child into the service of exposing other people to that illness.

If we didn't have the anti-vaxxers or the people who think vaccines are a plot for some kind of non-microscopic genocide, we'd probably have a few less diseases in the world to worry about or continue vaccinating against. After all, how many people get a small pox vaccination these days?

Don't forget the Jehova's Witnesses, who believe blood transfusions are against their faith. And celebrating birthdays or other holidays.

I'm surprised they didn't just charge the money with a crime and seize it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...

> suffer the bitching and moaning about "Windows was not shut down properly", and then the "Windows needs to Restart"

You left out the "Windows wants you to use lube next time" and "Windows *really* doesn't like anal - what kind of an OS do you think I am?"

"Benefits society" != "gets them lots of cash". Sure, those two categories frequently overlap, but there are also many occasions where that overlap is mere accident or as a consequence of some legal requirement that isn't that much of a "benefit". There's many occasions where people have been lured from doing something that would be massively beneficial to society to do something that ends up being only marginally beneficial (or outright harmful) by offering them more cash to do it. The ability to extract cash isn't a reliable indicator of benefit. People get more money if the knowledge they have is rare and in short supply - passing that knowledge on to others and training them how to use it is of a huge benefit to society. Holding on to that knowledge themselves preserves that shortness of supply and will get them more money, but at the cost of many other advances delayed because the company (in this case Uber) paying them the money wants the benefits for themselves. Please, try thinking outside of the patterns of old, trite memes coined by pessimistic opportunists who can't see the value in things that don't benefit themselves immediately.

This seems like a ready-made tool for blackmail and extortion. It creates a list of everyone in the country that wants access to online porn of any sort. What are the odds that no one with access to such a list would ever have any inclination to misuse it? For example, threatening to leak a relevant portion of the list to a local church group or to your employers?

Society doesn't need to construct more barriers to use to separate people.

Wouldn't we be better off if we outright banned mergers involving companies that hold (at least) double-digit percentages of their market? (with a possible exception in case of bankruptcy on a "likely to destroy the company" level) The biggest benefit of mergers, aside from cash infusions, is removing competition - which is rarely (or never) in the interests of the customers.

It seems like you are cherry-picking some notable failures and extrapolating that to mean the entire classification is rotten to the core and incapable of doing hardly anything successfully. That's not wisdom, it's pessimism. You're not going to find private enterprise with lower rates of failure and obstruction, only lower rates of press reporting on it. While I'm not in a position to use the services of the VA, they are the source for much of the systemic improvements in health IT we benefit from today. Here's a source for you on that, which also features how they were the first to call attention to the thousands of people that were being killed by Vioxx. https://books.google.com/books...

When you make assertions that are also blanket statements, shouldn't you be providing some sources that back up your claim on something similar to that level?

Is some inefficiency in government really any worse than private industry attaching profit to everything that is done and denying service if you can't pay? Defense, education, environmental protection, etc. - getting those things done only when there is profit to be made from them is a certain recipe for disaster. We've already seen that with for-profit prisons we wind up with those prisons bribing judges to send people to prison for long sentences that would otherwise have been dealt with through counseling. And that was with children.

The single largest problem with government is that private industry is getting their fingers into it and corrupting the process. i.e. bribes, lobbying, unlimited political contributions.

If you look at Chattanooga, TN, then it seems to be working quite well. http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/2...

Are those "Netflix issues that plagued Verizon customers" the ones where traffic from Netflix was being throttled to force them to pay extra for Verizon's customers to receive the data from Netflix that the customers were already paying both of them for?

Investment in NASA has given our economy a boost of 7-14 times what we put into it so far, and the list of technologies and inventions that have resulted is prodigious, including things like kidney dialysis and fireproof clothing for firefighters. Here's a list of some more: http://www.21stcentech.com/mon...

> "Kids don't express themselves with chalk or in cursive. Kids text."

Kids also scribble and carve into desks and spray paint on the walls on occasion. In the past they passed notes to each other, as well. No one has suggested adopting those as main methods of performing and submitting work. Schools should be getting kids ready for college, where college should finish getting them ready for the workplace. And not many workplaces will do much of their work via texting.

I'm curious what the call rate is at centers like that - what gets portrayed in the media is either a room with 20-40 people constantly taking calls all day long, or a closet with 2 people in it, who get a couple calls a day. The closest one I've actually been in was a backup fire dispatch center that was about to be decommissioned (it was really old) in favor of its replacement, and it had room for 3-4 (uncomfortably). How many calls per hour would you estimate your center receives, and how big is the area it serves, population-wise?