He missed out on the experience of feeling an earthquake and feels let down about that. If you're not from southern California, an earthquake is a novel experience. I felt one in St Louis a few years ago and it was cool and worth experiencing. Of course, having a building collapse on you would be horrible, but that's not too likely in most of the US.

Somehow I'm not surprised.
Asperae facetiae, ubi nimis ex vero traxere, acrem sui memoriam relinquunt.

It's just more blatant to you because you're not one of their idiot constituency. Democrats seem to be less blatant about it because you are one of their idiot constituency.

That you see one as being more blatant than the other says more about you than the politicians.

This entire article is about directly paying for content, instead of having ad supported content. (Well, the article is arguing in favor of ad supported content, but the premises are the same.) This $230/year is, specifically, paying for content. There's no realistic way to collect and distribute this money, so it's posed as an addition to your ISP bill, but this isn't about paying for delivery.

Likewise, the charges for cable TV include their payments to the networks and studios for content. Local ads in the cable feed to your house don't directly pay for content. Just as your ISP injecting ads into your internet connection doesn't pay for content.

If there was a way to directly pay for content and ads were still used in addition, as the GP suggested, the motivator there would be greed. The content was already paid for and this has nothing to do with delivery.

That's just a standard disclaimer. Who doesn't own shares of Tesla Motors? The Motley Fool probably owns some shares of almost every company they'd report on. That doesn't make it an ad.

She carried two phones all of the time, which is why she succeeded. Who's the lunatic now?

Road trains sound like an awesome idea and would be fantastic for efficiently using already available highway space. But without stricter, and strictly enforced, vehicle condition inspections, participating in them could be extremely dangerous. As the driver's interaction with the car becomes more and more passive, people are less likely to notice issues with the car's function. Adding more and more sensors to watch vehicle condition may be a solution, though issues with the reliability and longevity of the sensors in rough environments will piss people off.

The state I live in now doesn't have any vehicle inspections and I've seen several tire blowouts on the highway since moving here. Even with fast computer reflexes, I'd imagine one of those could wipe out several other cars in a train. Without some sort of unified inspection code, your train will have a patchwork of cars from different states in different states of repair.

As the other poster mentioned, and as described in this page, obstructing traffic and driving the speed limit are entirely orthogonal legal concepts.

Almost as important, and exceedingly disturbing, is that this connection (between handling corpses and starting infections during surgery) was only made in 1847.

An arms race between the police and who else? Crimes in the US are not committed with the "latest and greatest assault rifles". They're committed with handguns (mostly crappy old Saturday night specials). The last arms race between US police and citizens was in the 1920's, when assault rifles were banned (as they still are).

"Ex-military" doesn't mean "unhinged violent psychopath". If an overwhelming show of force isn't necessary, like when you're serving a warrant for a nonviolent crime, kicking in doors and invading homes is more likely to cause a bad outcome than just knocking on the door. If the person who's home you're invading has been trained to deal with a similar situation and invading their home isn't necessary, you shouldn't go in with SWAT unless you really want a bad outcome.

This is an excellent point. The only functional difference between a poorly defended unpopular position and a troll is the intent of the poster, which is often impossible to determine from the post alone (Poe's law and all).

The broken window fallacy describes spurring economic activity with destruction. While that is what Zorg is describing, it actually works as a means to maintain "life" with busywork jobs. It may not create any economic value overall, but it certainly allows people to thrive.

A better way to describe destruction encouraging life is through competition of resources and culling the established players every now and then. If a particular species (or whatever) is allowed to establish dominance over a resource to the exclusion of others, diversity in that arena diminishes (though diversity in other arenas may increase). Destruction changes things and allows resources to be exploited in new ways. In this way, Cornelius is also stifling life by protecting the status quo and trying to preserve the current order.

We don't need leaders. We need representatives.

"Leaders", who treat the country and its citizens as their plaything, are what got us into this mess.

Well, you'd ramp up the number of representatives, too. (Both to dilute the extremely stupid, corrupt, overbearing and to make bribery more difficult.) If we scaled up Congress to the same levels of representation (congresspeople per citizen) we had when the country was founded, we'd have over 10,000 congressmen today. At 25k unique congresspeople per decade, you'd run out of seats on your board pretty quickly.

Even sticking with the current number of representatives, the complete turnover every four years (staggered, but on average) would overwhelm available board positions pretty quickly.