WTH are you talking about? Unemployment right now is 5.5, which is well within the range it sat at from 2002 to 2008 before the recession started. The recession ended back in June of 2009 (6 freaking years ago). Our GDP (how recessions are officially measured) has been in the same range it was from 2002-2007 since then.

Most of the rest of your comment doesn't feel right to me either. I see no reason why sociological forces that built the USA would have suddenly stopped working the way they always did before. Normally I wouldn't bring up my "feelings", but since you seem to put more stock in how the economy feels than how it is really provably doing, perhaps that's relevant too.

Interestingly, this is my /. quote of the day at the bottom of the page:

So clearly he wants the kid to do that so that his 7 year old's life can finally begin. Are you anti-life, sir?

...but the problem is that number, like most numbers about this, is complete BS. Nate Silver's website has several articles up about how hard it is to get legit numbers about police shootings.

... but only in Holland?

It is most certainly noticeable when you go over there. I'm 5'11.5 (that 0.5 is important, damnit!). That isn't huge, but most people are shorter, and I'm considered a "big" player on the soccer field. I went over there for business, got off the train in Leiden, and felt generally short for the first time since I was in 6th grade.

They were also ludicrously thin by US standards. At first I was like, "where are the older people? Where are the 40+ year olds? Do they euthanize them all? Should I go hide?" It took a while to realize than everyone looked younger that I'm used to, due to being so slim. I put it down to much less motorized transport use, and smaller portions. But perhaps there's some natural selection going on there too?

• Theorem 2c: Dutch women are unusually financially independent, and thus don't care as much as other women about the wealth of their mates. That leaves only height as the prime selector.

• Theorem1: Richer men get more girls the world over. Wealth being roughly equal, the tiebreaker is height.
• Theorem2a: Wealth is distributed unusually evenly amongst Dutch men, so height becomes the main selector.
• Theorem2b: For some reason height in Dutch men is unusually strongly related to income.

Clearly more study is needed.

If the video you are recording is a murder, and your video will have a direct impact upon the murder's ability to get away with the crime, it most certainly does make you a hero. If the cop had noticed, he could easily have made it two killings, "accidentally" smashed the phone, and got away with both. Afterwards, the videographer's got a murderer and an unknown amount of his buddies pissed off at him. And these are people skilled in investigation with the full power and resources of the state behind them. They WILL find out who he is and where he lives.

I had a relative who reported a cop for assault once. For her troubles, she got to suffer months of pointless traffic stops, parking tickets, and car vandalism. If a murder was involved...I don't know that I'd want to expose my family to what could happen.

This person was either amazingly brave or amazingly stupid.

I bet that came as a line item on the bill, saying something like "government fees". So not only do they pass the cost on to customers, they try to blame them for it as well.

That's a switch...usually they just give that information away for free to criminals.

This isn't an improvement for customers, but at least its better for stockholders.

English

To misquote Tony Hoare: I don't know what the language of the future will look like, but I know it will be called English.

What does that really hurt? I suppose if a neighbor mooches off my wifi, that hurts my ISP, but not really me.

If it becomes a problem, at best I might wanna put up a wifi password to keep my neighbors off, but I don't really understand why my wifi (not the computers on it but the wifi itself) needs to have industrial-strength security.

I worked at the time for what is now Lockheed-Martin. So as someone who was an indirect beneficiary of the "Star Wars" $'s, perhaps I can pipe in too?

Sure, the free money for engineers (and their employers) was nice. But you know what else would have been nice? Spending that exact same amount of money on NASA, for stuff that we might have had something to show for at the end. Maybe something that might have accomplished something (eg: a visit to mars), or advanced science a bit (better space propulsion, habitation tech), rather than just blowing it all on something that everyone involved knew going in was a total waste, just to make some politicians feel better about their personal constructed reality.

That's what I would have liked to see.

If they wanted the minivan to go faster, they just hit the PC's "turbo" button.

No, they aren't. They've done nothing to ban alcoholism in general. During the exact same period my state went from being a dry state (yes, we still had those in the '80s) to a liquor-by-the-drink state, and MADD didn't say "boo" about it. There is far more drinking and drunk driving in Oklahoma now than there was when MADD started.

All they did was get the rest of the electorate to gang up on 3 years of it. That was just as effective for getting drunks off the road as if they'd banned drinking for anyone 28-30, or 38-40. Heck, we could probably save a lot of lives by banning anyone over 68 from having a drivers license period. It would be an appalling abridgement of rights, and seniors PACs would (rightly) scream bloody murder, but we could do it.

MADD only picked on 18-20's because that's the group of the electorate with the least power.