$2.99 to rent a film for 3 days is a fucking rip off? You lost me there. I would add, the timer on the three-day period doesn't start until you start watching the movie (on Amazon, at least.) You have a month to start watching the movie.

And if the kids are going to watch Despicable Me (for instance) hundreds of times, yes, the studios and distributor clearly *would* lose money by not offering a "buy" vs "rent" scenario. $10 to stream Despicable Me (in SD) as many times as you want! Now clearly this is a value judgment. I can't tell you you're wrong for how you feel about that. But clearly, a lot of people find that reasonable. As someone who lived through the '80s and '90s, and paid $4 to rent a VHS tape at Blockbuster, then often paid an extra $2 a day in late fees on top of that, I find it a hell of a deal. To me, it's not worth pirating a movie to save $2.99.

A bit of a digression though. The issue with Game of Thrones is that you *can't* stream recent episodes for a fee. You have to have a costly cable subscription. Different kettle of fish, which is why the show is so pirated.

Yep. Facebook became less fun the second my parents friended me. And I'm in my 40s! Oh sure I could block them, along with all my uncool relatives. But c'mon, they're still my family. I don't want to do anything so drastic, even if it means I'm deluged with status updates that are less interesting than when I was connected only to my closest peer group.

Moreover, for me it was all about reconnecting with friends in distant places, people I hadn't heard from in 10 years or more. What's the appeal for a teenager? For the majority of them, their friends mostly live within a 10-mile radius. They're not so concerned with whatever happened to that boy who moved away in the second grade.

Oh, and there's Words with Friends. I think the kids are into different sorts of online gaming, however.

Apple has been in *Cupertino* since the '70s. The buses are a relatively recent development. Before the buses, you'd have to be a die-hard city person to make the 50-mile commute every day in your own car or (God forbid) via Muni, Caltrain, and employer-provided shuttle.

Full disclosure: I have commuted to Cupertino via Muni, Caltrain, and shuttle. Yes, Cupertino sucks that bad as a place to live.

The fact that the traders count milliseconds is proof that they are just scam artists. Parasites, producing nothing of value. High-speed trading is nothing but a mechanism for funneling money to the rich from everyone else.

Pass single-payer, as we should have done in the first place, and send everyone to medicare.gov.

What "far left" positions has the Democratic party taken? The Affordable Care Act is essentially what the Republicans were proposing for health care reform 20 years ago.

Precious metals: Bad, unless you like having your business decisions determined by the supply of something your business doesn't actually need to make things.

Base metals: Better than precious metals, but kind of heavy. A close second to paper.

Paper: As in dollar bills. *BEST*. Easy to carry, accepted everywhere, and for the most part anonymous. And for all its flaws, I'd rather have monetary policy set by the Federal Reserve than by the amount of gold governments are able to wrench from dwindling supplies in ecologically distressed areas.

Plastic: I'm not sure what this means. Credit cards = electrons & math. If plastic currency, well that's just like paper but not as bendy. Paper preferred.

Electrons and math: This is what I actually use, for convenience, most of the time, but I'd hate to live in a world where the only currency is one that cannot be used without connecting to a computer network.

As a former print / online journalist who quit the business because he didn't want to take a second job at Denny's to pay the bills, I'll venture a guess that most of these "elite bloggers" would welcome the opportunity to work at an organization that can afford to pay them what they're worth and provide them the resources to do their jobs.

Whether Bezos will offer that remains to be seen. He certainly could afford to do so, if he chose.

On the other hand, Amazon isn't exactly a shining beacon of progressive business and labor practices.

On the other hand, plenty of plutocrats who were not exactly friendly with organized labor have run journalistic enterprises that did MOSTLY good work. I can't think of a single newspaper of record in the United States that doesn't side with the business side of any labor issue, or with the establishment in general.

If you live and work in San Francisco and DRIVE to your job, you're a dick. If you also think that people working at tech startups with fewer than 50 employees are a significant proportion of tech workers, you're dick * 2.

Hey, I get it, I drove to my tech job at a SF Internet startup during Dotcom 1.0. Just passing along some things I've learned.

Same as in Silicon Valley: Proximity to capital. People who fund startups like to keep physical tabs on them. In later stages, they can move operations out to North Carolina and China and other hell holes where land and labor are cheap. But during the incubation phase, the billionaires like to keep their fledgling businesses in their backyard.

Well, anything above $5.25 million. Anything below that is *tax free*. That's a pretty sweet deal, considering how much tax you'd pay if you had to actually work for that money.

But the tax structure is only a secondary factor in the gap between the haves and the have-nots. The primary factor is that wealth accumulates in the hands of those who control the means of production, and we've let the balance between capital and labor get too far out of whack. It's only going to get worse as technology advances. As machines get more efficient, the value of human labor is diluted. The free market value of some forms of labor has already fallen below what people need to live with dignity. We need government to intervene in the economy so that the distribution is more even, if not completely equal. A cap on income and wealth might be a good thing, but I think it is more important to set a floor that no one is allowed to fall beneath.

That's fine in your 20s, but eventually you need health insurance and a retirement plan. And if you live some place where $16k a year is livable, you'll probably also need a car.

Baby Boomers are *supposed* to gobble up the Social Security trust fund! The reason the trust fund was created in the first place was to pre-fund the retirement of the Baby Boomers!

Believe it or not, people didn't just discover the Baby Boom last week. The actuaries of yesteryear were not complete morons. Changing demographics were built into Social Security from its inception.

The AP has really deteriorated. Shame on them for publishing this scare-mongering, disingenuous piece worthy of Fox News.

If by "nuking" the moon, you mean completely obliterating it like some James Bond villain and screwing up our tides, don't be ridiculous. That isn't even within our capability.

They proposed detonating a nuclear device on the moon. So what? Aside from the needless complexity and expense, how is nuking a lifeless rock outside of Earth's atmosphere worse than than nuking the Bikini Atoll, or the desert in New Mexico?

That said, I don't understand what advantage they thought they would gain by having missile bases on the moon.

Feh. The Bible is merely one collection of texts out of Greco-Roman classical antiquity, and not the most influential among them. It is certainly not the work on which Plato, Aristotle, or Homer based their works. And are you discounting the entirety of the pre-Christian Roman Empire's contribution? Because a lot of people would consider that the basis of Western civilization and morality.