His name is Kunte Kinte.

I hold out hope that the two of them are getting air time not because they could win, but because they are more interesting than Clinton v. Bush. Plenty of time for that boring crap later.

Vendors cannot be held responsible for stupid (or non-existent) engineering and policy.

Without knowing the GS/contractor divide at OPM, it's hard to say who is ultimately to blame. If OPM gave carte blanche to the contractor, the latter is generally the one at fault. If the government micro managed the contract and ignored suggestions, the blame is back with them.

Jim Webb doesn't strike me as particularly interested in the office.

That Goldwater girl was never liberal enough to want it.

Let me guess: It was a '67 Chevy Impala?

The Bugatti Veyron Super Sport supposedly does 0-100km/h (62mph) in 2.2 seconds. So you can get substantially faster acceleration than this Tesla, for a premium of a couple of $million. (I guess that makes this battery pack look like a bargain.)

Yes, because our food was not being directly soaked in the chemicals. Now it is.

So what?

Farmers used to have to be careful to not poison their crops with whatever chemicals they used. Not so any more.

Nope.

It was so that massive quantities of glyphosate and 2,4-D could be dumped directly onto the crops with impunity.

I have lived in numerous major cities, and have not owned a car in about 10 years. I bike, I walk, and if available I take subways/trains. I try to avoid buses as much as possible.

Why? They are the worst form of transportation I can imagine. They are slower than driving (since they have to stop more often than a car on the same route), and only go on pre-determined routes. Subways and trains, while limited to a certain route, at least are quicker than driving. Taxis and other forms of automobile transportation are more expensive, but are faster than a bus. Making a bus free does not change its limitations.

I believe that all pubic transportation should be free (where "free" is defined as "no admission charge") to encourage public transportation. Asking why people do not take buses, though, is not a financial conversation, in my opinion.

Getting people to take public transportation is much more about making it convenient and fast. Does it pick up near where I am beginning my route? Does it drop me off near where I want to go? How much longer will it take than driving?

If you want people out of their cars, solve these questions satisfactorily. Make more and better bike lanes - and even dedicated bike paths. I would even encourage dedicated bus lanes with enforcement. I lived for a while in Boston, where "Bus lane" meant "double park lane".

Having gone through the hiring process a couple of times in the last couple of years, HR and recruiters are the biggest hinderance to companies hiring talented individuals. For a tech position, HR has become a gatekeeper to the hiring manager. Unfortunately they have no knowledge of the position or the technologies.

Certificates get you past this gatekeeper. They are fairly useless otherwise, but since HR has wedged themselves between the candidate and the hiring manager, they become a bit of a necessary evil.

Iâ(TM)m not blaming âoebankersâ exactly, Iâ(TM)m blaming people who loan money to people who are may or may not pay it back and when they dont get paid back they go running to their central banks or governments and demand they get made whole at the expense of everyone else. Same thing happened in the U.S. in 2009 with the TARP and assorted other bail outs.

Yea the rating agencies really sucked especially leading up to the crash in 2008, but it doesnâ(TM)t relieve lenders of ultimate responsibility for their actions. If the credit ratings are wrong its the responsibility of the lender to figure this out, no one else.

Lenders collect interest on their loans partially to cover the potential risk they wont get paid back, the higher that risk the higher the interest they collect. If they collect high interest rates on risky mortgages and then when someone defaults on them central banks and governments make them whole it creates massive moral hazard.

If the Greeks were a bad risk prior to 2008, which they probably were, the interest rates they had to pay should have been higher and they would have been dissuaded from borrowing or lenders would have been dissuaded from lending to them. Instead the EU created a perverse system where risky borrowers (all of the PIIGS) got relatively cheap money and a lot of it and were incentivized to take as much of it as they could. The EU and the lenders are 100% to blame for this situation for throwing the money at them.

The PIIGS shouldâ(TM)ve never entered an economic union with Germany in the first place, they had no chance of competing with Germany locked in to the same currency. It was a win win for Germany on all fronts.

You donâ(TM)t actually know what you are talking about do you.

Most of the loans in question here were in fact loaned by German and French bankers to the Greeks prior to the 2008, Deutsche bank was one of the biggest. They could get somewhat higher returns loaning to Greece and they had some security because Greece was in the Eurozone. That security unravelled with the 2008 crash.

The ECB, EU, IMF gave massive loans to Greece in 2010, and most of it immediately went to extricate the German and French banks from their bad greek loans. If the Greeks has defaulted on the original loans then there would have been a massive banking crisis in Germany and France. The 2010 EU bailout was to save their banks more than it was to help the Greeks.

The Greeks just got more debt piled on top of too much debt and its totally destroyed their economy. Recently released IMF studies confirm the Greeks canâ(TM)t sustain their current debt load and it has to be restructed or they have to default. If they stay the current course with austerity and more and more bailout loans they are doomed.

If the Greeks had been smart they would have exited the EU and defaulted on the debt in 2009 and the people who made the bad loans, the German and French bankers, would have paid the price. Instead they got off scot free.

Iceland immediately defaulted in a similar situation, they had some short term pain but they rebounded, while the Greece has gotten nothing but worse and worse under the yoke of a corrupt European and global banking system.

For banking and loans to work there is a simple rule, if you are foolish enough to make a bad loan to someone who probably wonâ(TM)t pay it back, then you pay the price when they default. Instead the people who make the bad loans (i.e. bankers) get to keep their bonuses profits and everyone else gets to pay for their stupidity, greed and corruption.