Yeah, and if you want to be scientific about that, and be honest, you'll see that cops stop a lot more people in high crime areas, and that poor urban areas tend to have lots of crime. And that some of those poor areas have a larger black population. If those areas weren't marinated in serious crime, there wouldn't be so many warrants out, stolen cars, cars full of contraband, and the rest.

What? The people whose lives are messed up are those who have to live in areas like west Baltimore where local thugs make daily life miserable for everyone else who lives there or tries to run a business there. So yes, the cops are asked to "get results," because the absence of any results would make those areas completely lost to civilization, rather than just sucking generally. Would you rather that the cops were told NOT to arrest known violent gang members, serial assault and battery specialists, and the like? What would you have them do?

That's a very insightful way to address the substance of the matter. Obviously you're not willing to say the actual numbers or description of the situation is incorrect ... you're just mad at someone for pointing it out? I get that. But you're not really making any sort of lucid point.

What? Each year, people's wages are taxed into those programs, and funds are transferred, that year, to the people who receive it. There is no "savings account." There is no "I paid into Social Security, so I'll get X when I retire." The amount that retired/disabled people get from that entitlement program is determined legislatively each year, and if you bother to read the fine print in your SS statement, you'll see that they explicitly remind you that there is no guarantee you'll get any future benefits.

Each year, funds are transferred from the people who pay to the people who collect.

Nonsense. It's not a distraction, it's different topic than the ebb and flow of entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare (which are transfer welfare taxes). Income taxes are what pay for all discretionary spending (the military, federal agencies like the EPA, the FAA, the FCC and a jillion other activities). There's a good reason we look at all of those differently than we do the entitlement programs.

And ... capital gains? You do realize that a whole lot of middle class people also earn capital gains, right? Directly or indirectly, through things like mutual funds. Warren Buffet's secretary can put a pizza's worth of cash every month into some investments when she's young, and can and should be looking forward to earning some money from that. You know, just like him: taking money on which she's already paid taxes, and putting it entirely at risk in an investment that stimulates the economy and if and when it happens to pay off, paying more taxes on that activity.

If Warren Buffet loses money in an investment? He doesn't get to write that off against his income taxes - he just loses it, plain and simple. But he's smart, and usually makes good investments. If he's making money, the money he risked is being put to very good use in an active economy. That's the entire reason why we reward that risk taking with a lower tax rate - because we want more of that risk taking to happen.

All of which has nothing to do with transfer entitlement taxes.

Nonsense. Well-off people pay the vast majority of the income taxes in this country. Nearly half the people in the country pay no income taxes at all (though they still get to vote on what happens to the money collected from the other people who do).

The top 5% of earners pay almost 60% of the taxes. The top 25% of earners pay over 86% of the taxes. The bottom HALF of the country pays under 3% of those taxes. So how do you come up with "never actually do pay" - ? These numbers come from the IRS. The people who cash the checks you say aren't being written.

Gore LOST in every carefully examined recount conducted in exhaustive after-the-fact tests run by a panel of journalism outlets (including some that actively opposed Bush and worked to get Gore in office). Most importantly, Gore lost in studied recounts that followed the capricious guidelines he tried to get the Florida supreme court to enforce.

No, the Supreme Court stopped a corrupt recount process, aided by a partisan state court, from continuing under unreasonable and unfair conditions. They didn't "appoint" Bush the winner, they called out Gore's cherry-picking, standards-shifting strategy for being the craven election-grab it was trying to be.

So, the corruption you're worried about is something that you think will be fixed by trashing a liquor store? By looting and burning the local CVS? By burning down an almost completely senior center being built specifically to improve the local quality of life in that crappy neighborhood?

Yes, the democrats that have been running that city for decades have plenty to answer for in the way of imperfect services being rendered. But unless you think it's the city government's role to step in between two people and prevent pregnancy from occurring, or to follow thousands of kids around to make sure they actually bother to go to school, then what exactly is it you're proposing? Who is it that starts and populates violent local gangs? Who is it that kills the vast majority of those who die in that area, and scares those who aren't involved out of doing anything about it? Why is it that businesses don't see any point in risking their money to launch a venture in such a neighborhood - perhaps because they can't find employable local people to actually work there, and can't find a market for their goods and services in an area that's filled with abandoned buildings and fatherless kids running drug markets?

The problem isn't government corruption, the problem is in thinking that what amounts to a poisonous local culture is the government's area of responsibility. Those neighborhoods are crap because the people that live there can't keep their own kids under control long enough to turn them into viable members of human civilization. And those that do have the wherewithal to do so leave (along with whatever economic activity they might have represented) because the local culture is completely toxic to their kids' success.

A few thousand reduced-to-ashes New Yorkers might, if they were alive, argue with your dismissal of their deaths at the hands of radical jihaddis as being non-proximate, and shadowy. They are indeed quite literally dead. Multiple very non-shadowy attempts (some very successful) by the same and related groups to kill other people, in large numbers, have also happened since then.

They didn't know what the judge would rule until he made the ruling, or that there would be a ruling. You talk like it is a cut and dried issue, and it isn't. They filed in the jurisdiction where the alleged damages were taking place, and which is probably also the jurisdiction specified in the contract for carriage that the customers who were buying the tickets were subject to.

The claim that the defendants don't have significant presence in Illinois for purposes of legal action, in the context of an Internet-based service, is just ridiculous. The judge is applying brick-and-mortar rules to a global network.

They may not know you're "not coming" until they do a seat count and see that you aren't there. Then they have to figure out who is missing and maybe pull your luggage. That's a significant delay.

If you've checked a bag, they have to delay. Otherwise they won't delay very long over this and that may keep them from putting someone else in that seat -- costing them revenue.

Wrong. At worst they have an empty seat they could have sold at full price weeks in advance. Usually they can fill the seat with a standby pax who pays less than full fare for standby. Both are losses. At best, they will have a full fare pax who was bumped from a previous flight, and that's when they lose the least.

Include in that loss estimate the lost revenue when a full-fare pax trying to reserve a seat cannot get one on that flight and has to go via another airline to meet his schedule.

While it's complicated to determine exactly what the loss is overall, there are times when they lose a full fare, and times when they lose only the time it takes to deal with filling the seat. On average, that's a loss.

I believe that the rules say YOU cannot cause your baggage to go on a flight you aren't on. I.e., you can't check in and then not get on. That's to keep you from planting a bomb in your baggage and then not being on the plane. But if the airline puts your bag on another plane, you can't plan that.

Airlines do it all the time, too. Weight limits may make your luggage be held for the next flight, or it may not make a connection.

When you're on a stopover with no equipment change, you got on the plane in New York and you might not get off in Chicago. They don't know who got off, the scanners don't keep track of that.

Right. They picked it because they are headquartered in Illinois. It's not some evil plot.

Which, of course, is BS and not at all how it actually happened. Which you know.

They guy who observed the mold's properties was terrible at communicating his thoughts about it, and had trouble getting help from chemists to stabilize the important stuff. TEN YEARS go buy, and other researchers get the work done. Then THEY travel to the US to find drug manufacturers that might be interested in taking on the complex task of mass production.

You know, pretty much the opposite of your troll list.

Just like penicillin.

You mean like the unending stream of "security policy violation" messages that some sites trigger by, IIRC, mixing https and http content? The popups that come so fast that you can't get rid of one and stop loading the page before the next one comes up? And then you need to try to get through a dozen of them before doing anything else, except killing one causes two more to pop up?

That kind of "hardly noticeable"? Firefix has a history of not dealing with "security policy" warnings intelligently.

That's the kind of action that causes websites to stop supporting browsers. If a specific browser prevents the user from accessing a website, then the business will ultimately react, but it can't do it by just waving a magic wand. Their support will be telling people that the browser is no longer supported -- because that's the truth.

They won't have to block firefox, firefox will be blocking itself.

Haha haha. Most people won't understand why, and most people won't care. They'll use a browser that works, and since that browser can deal with it, it will be firefox that's broken.