The real issue stems from the retarded decision back in the high income tax bracket era of the early 20th century that led to the IRS allowing health insurance premiums to be tax-deductible from payroll. That fucking brain damaged decision led to our current clusterfuck of employer-provided health care.

Note that this was a side-effect of WW2.

During WW2, Wage and Price controls were put into effect for many industries.

Which left companies unable to attract talent by paying them more. So, some bright boy figured that he could offer free health insurance as a perk of the job (instead of higher pay).

By the time the dust of WW2 had settled, the current system of employer-provided health insurance was firmly established. Leading us inevitably to today....

While I believe the first two sentences of this argument are be true, I see no logical reason to infer the final sentence, which I think is false. This being the case, I find entire line of reasoning invalid.

So, you believe that the First Amendment is limited to speech with no artificial aids, eh?

Note that that would allow newspapers and news broadcasts to control information flow during a political campaign. Unless you intend to restrict Freedom of the Press as well.

Note that neither newscasters nor newspapermen are unbiased, and allowing them to decide what you are allowed to know about a particular candidate is at least as bad as the current situation.

Note also that the incumbent has an enormous advantage even if the news people are paragons of virtue to the last man - all an incumbent has to do to get press attention is propose a law. His challenger(s) get no such instant attention.

So, your ideal solution guts the Freedom of Speech, the Freedom of the Press, OR it gives incumbents an enormously LARGER advantage....

Interesting that you don't mention Bloomberg or any other of the left-leaning billionaires who are throwing money at politics....

contrary to that tenement.

Not sure where slums fit into your argument, so I'm assuming you meant "tenet"....

Yes, they could.

And the owners could still spend their money on politics.

Note that stripping corporation status from a business does NOT remove its money. It just changes (possibly) who is in control of the money. And the (hypothetical) new owners of the money can still spend it on politics....

Actually 3/4 of the states can call for a Convention.

2/3 of the States can call a Constitutional Convention.

Which bypasses the need for Congress to act, but leaves in place the need for 3/4 of the States to ratify any proposed Amendments.

What sort of humidity conditions do you have though?

I'm in New Orleans. 80% humidity is considered a dry day. Usually it's more like 90+F/90+% humidity.

We tend to run AC nine months of the year here. It's not all that common to run your AC in December here, but it's not unusual enough to comment on....

While Detroit has a long history of missing trends and stupid decisions, I think this may be as much a case of very different POVs and culture crash.

Detroit, coming from a manufacturing POV, is probably asking themselves:

1. What liabilities am I assuming if I do this? How many, and how expensive, lawsuits will result from this?

2. How do I sustain this in terms of support and parts over the life of a vehicle?

3. What will it cost?

Google is coming from a technology POV:

1. We can do all this cool stuff, don't worry if it's all beta we can iron out the bugs as we go.

2. If it doesn't catch on we can kill it and move on.

3. Don't worry about the support infrastructure, that will eventually come about.

As long as each has a different set of needs, wants and POV discussions will be difficult at best.

I agree, with an added thought. It wasn't just data mining but a controlled experiment that altered the data they received. That, IMHO, cross the line between "let's look at the existing data" to "let's conduct an experiment."

Another part to his argument seem to be "the impact was so small as too be negligible and thus it was OK." However, the researchers did not know the results would be negligible so using that as an excuse after the fact doesn't fly.

Air conditioners use a lot of power in the summer, when its 82F and 100% humidity

82F????

I wish it were that cool here. And we're not even to the hot part of the year yet.

Facebook didn't simply set out to make tweaks and see how users responded; they setup a controlled experiment on subjects without their consent; a practice that appears to violate ethical and possibly legal guidelines for behavioral research. I agree it could push them to continue to do such research and not reveal it; but when it inevitably leaks that they are doing that it will create a PR nightmare. Facebook could have simply asked people to opt in to the study and provide the standard information regarding the study and this would be a non-issue. For those looking for info on humane research protection guidelines in the US google Office of Human Research Protection.

Your reference goes back 1.35 MY.

OP was going back 60 MY.

Note that your period is 2.25% of the OP's period....

Who reads a book twice?

Actually, everyone I know who actually reads for pleasure does it from time to time. Including me.

Which reminds me, we're coming up on the sesquicentennial of Gettysburg. Time to pull out one of my histories of that battle and reread it before the Fourth.

In my county, for every dollar spent by a rider, the taxpayer pays two dollars.

Just read an article about a new bus route being added near where my parents live.

It is intended, of course, to allow for commutes into metropolitan area nearby...

So, the article broke down the costs of the system into Federal, State, Local, individual costs. The individual riders of the system were expected to pay ~17% of the cost of the system. The remaining ~83% was covered by taxpayers at various levels.

Even with that level of subsidization, they were expecting an average of only 30 people per day to be using the system....

Nah, it's MARTA. If the did figure out how to use a computer they'd just use to figure how to make the service suck even more.