I live in snow country (Colorado)... and I've never bought snow tires or chains. 20 years and I've never had a need for them. No 4x4 either, I'm fine with front wheel drive. I don't think I even know anyone who owns a set of chains for their daily driver.

In other words... it's not the failure of vehicles to be equipped that's Atlanta's problem. It's people who don't know what to do or how to drive on slippery roads. And true, it's not like people who've never left the deep South have any reason to have ever learned those skills, so it's not some kind of failure on their part. That's just how it is.

Yes, and now all the Venezuelans dance and sing Kumbaya, there is love and joy and peace and freedom for all!

Or is it a country run by a dictator who seizes private assets; beats, kills, or imprisons political opponents; and the paramilitary police run rampant over the populace that's starving because their currency has been ruined?

Gosh, I can never remember which it is!

Tell you what, AC, if you think post-Chavez Venezuela is a nice and safe (because no guns right?) place to live, feel free to move there, and I'll give you a swift kick in the ass to send you on your way.

And at the same time, the other guy, who was supported by the 1%, won.

You're seriously kidding yourself if you think there's any difference between the two major parties at the federal level. All you have to do is look: has the policy changed from Bush to Obama? Is the war over? Is Gitmo closed? Are the Patriot Act and the TSA gone? Your "liberal" president has upped the spying, fed the "defense" contractors, sent more troops overseas, and cut NASA. The previous "conservative" president raised taxes and vastly increased the size and scope of the federal government.

Nothing changes. The person who occupies the White House is merely a figurehead, and whether he's called a Democrat or a Republican, he works for the same people, and those people ain't me and you.

And you know what? It's not going to change, either. Today's wealthy and powerful may fall from their towers from lack of breeding and management (note wastrel heirs and heiresses like Paris Hilton), but there will be more to take their place, because there will always be someone who wants more than his neighbors have -- and the talent and drive, or sheer cravenness, to go and get it. If we divided all the world's wealth equally to everyone right now, we'd be right back where we are now within a generation.

Except, I'd be part of the 1% after. :-)

Your liberal ideology sounds very complex and enlightening. Tell me more!

You are a first-class bastard.

The rich will always exploit the poor to whatever extent they can get away with. In this case, it means that a small group profits from foreign demand while the laborers suffer. It's the same as "blood diamonds" - perfectly normal "free market" foreign demand may send capital to the region, but increases human suffering.

But you're not accounting for the reduced human suffering on the other end. Perhaps the First World benefits from quinoa, so the suffering balances out.

Blood diamonds help the situation of many married men who are suffering from a lack of fellatio. Does it seem right that people die for this? Alas, no, but it does show the true human cost of marital bliss.

So who says the suffering of American suburbanites is less worthy of hand-wringing than the suffering of little brown people on the other end of the world? All things balance somehow.

What you're missing is that these private buses are using public stops. It's a very minor thing, yes. But it's also a perfect symbol of what's been happening in America:

Or, it may simply be that existing places where public buses stop to load and disgorge passengers -- happen to be someone's crazy idea of good places for private buses to do the same.

I've seen places where bus stops have a pullout area so as to be out of a traffic lane while stopped. Don't know if that applies here, but think about it... what sense would it make to deliberately stop somewhere other than a bus stop, for the express purpose of avoiding bus stops?

If you think the private companies should put in their own bus stops, grand. But they can't just go out and tear up streets without permission from city and/or state governments, which may or may not ever accomplish anything anyway.

We put up public infrastructure for people to use. I'm reasonably certain we can't discriminate against people with too much money.

The truth is he can't write decent software and never could, is no visionary, and merely saw the potential of applying the Mafia business model to a software company.

Point 1 there, true or not, is irrelevant, and I doubt Bill Gates lies awake nights worrying about all those software development skills he missed out on learning.

But not visionary? I'm sorry -- I'm no Windows fanboy -- but you do not get to where he's gotten without a vision. Even if you have help, and step on everyone on the way up, it still takes a powerful vision and sheer force of will to carry it out. Hell, I bet even Stallman would give him that.

Well, okay, you may exist... perhaps I should instead question your taste in music... :-P

Yes, nullification is frowned on by judges. That doesn't mean it's wrong; it means that many judges do not like anything that curtails their power as the black-robed potentate at the head of the room.

Jury nullification is a sacred part of Anglo-Saxon law, and everyone needs to know about it. As far as I'm concerned, it should be a part of jury instructions every trial, or included in high school civics classes, because the number of Americans who know this simple concept is vanishingly and frighteningly small.

Your last sentence there is NOT an example of jury nullification. In fact, it's pretty much the exact opposite.

It is, fundamentally, the job of the jury to decide law as well as fact. It's why we have juries -- it doesn't take 6 or 12 people to decide fact, after all -- a computer could do that. The jury exists to check abuse by the state, as a final stop to the application of bad law. This is so important because the state holds all the power (police, judge, prosecutor, jury pool, etc) to the point that without jury nullification, even the most innocent of the "innocent until proven guilty" of accused doesn't stand a chance against the system -- a system we ALL know is corrupt and dangerous.

So let the judges squirm. We, the people, have ourselves to protect.

That is all so... sad.

Everything runs on energy, us included, and we have to fuel up. It's not optional. It's going to take up a certain amount of our time.

I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would want to substitute real food for fast food, let alone this liquid-diet nonsense.

Hell, we really have adjusted misery down, haven't we? Once, it took ALL of our time to stay fed. Now the occasional trip to the store and a bit of chopping and cooking are too much for some lazy twats. Get a grip.

Why not just hook up an IV for nutrients, a catheter, a bedpan, and your virtual reality goggles... and just become a being of pure experiencing? Maybe you could upload your brain, a la "Lawnmower Man" so the real humans around you won't have to listen to how terrible life is for you any more. Won't it be great to not be inconvenienced by breathing and the occasional bladder-voiding?

WTF? No one enjoys those things.

Find a way to work all that into a trashy romance novel, and I'll read it!

You could have just stopped right there.

Flu vaccines have done exactly fuck-all to stop the flu, and that's all they will ever do. What works is supporting the immune system. Eat healthy, get some sun, etc. Flu sucks, it's miserable, but we live on.

Some die, a few here and there. Everyone dies sometime; no one gets out of here alive. People seem stuck in the notion that everyone somehow has a right to live to 100 and die peacefully in their sleep. It just isn't going to happen.

On the other hand, too much vaccination and too much hygiene seem to be responsible for more sickness by keeping immune systems weak. Not only is there solid research on this, but it's quite instructive to watch the farm kids out running barefoot in pig shit... and never get sick. And let's face it: there are worse ways to die, like cancer.

Yeah, probably a vast right-wing conspiracy among all the Republican software developers.

Gimme a fuckin' break.

Obamacare was always a bad idea. That the implementation sucks is secondary to the fact that it was bad law to begin with. But you're on the right track -- find anything and anyone to blame but the Obamessiah. Fucking liberals are going to whine about this for years.

It's like those people who tell us that communism was a great idea, but it just hasn't been implemented right.