It's $4, it's practically free. Just wondered if one had any special features. I get them in batches of eight, so I have lots to play with...

I can get AA batteries for free in practically unlimited quantities. What's the best USB charging device based on them?

Which I didn't do. Funny that.

The qualifier "generally" was there for a reason. My wife has raging asthma, and I have not enjoyed paying the higher prices for her inhalers. But that's the price of progress.

It's not the industry that provides the product. The entire global economy is dependent on energy inputs, which we have been able to exploit most efficiently since the Industrial Revolution, when we began to be able to use energy sources other than people and animals. CFC's were nasty chemicals, but they weren't generally crucial to modern life.

I'm not in love with the fossil fuel industry, but for all their problems it's also dangerous to assume that installing wind farms on every decent hillside won't have climatic effects. Go nuclear or give up.

Not only that, all of the laws involved are state-level laws, not federal.

If you've never heard education talk during elections, I can only assume that you aren't listening much. No Child Left Behind? Common Core? These are big news items all the time.

Conspiracy aside, there is little reason to expect major educational improvements to be possible. You get huge benefits from teaching literacy and basic arithmetic, and almost everyone is intelligent enough to do them, at least at some level. By the time you hit the level of a rigorous high school, though, you have either abandoned standards or winnowed heavily. Most people can't do calculus. This doesn't make them worth less as human beings; it just means that trying to teach them calculus is a waste of your time and theirs. All you accomplish with more years of "schooling" is warehousing.

If part of your government needs independence from "the mob", and it's the part of your government that's hardest to overrule, perhaps you live in less of a representative democracy than you think.

You think appointed judges are a legit part of democracy if the person who nominates them is elected, even if they can't be fired by their successor in office?

Christ on a crutch, that's a stupid answer.

I'm not a fan of democracy in general, but assuming you accept it as legitimate - on what planet is a decision by seven unelected judges "democracy"?

Thus the parable of Solomon, the baby, and the two claimant mothers. Family law is among the oldest parts of the law.

Because it is one of the very few institutions found in all human cultures. Any legal system that doesn't deal with marriage in some fashion is profoundly deficient. I'd prefer that we separate the legal and spiritual aspects, but that's a separate argument.

This, this, a thousand times this. Telling people "fuck you, that's the way it is, and no you have no choice" is why the US still has a huge anti-abortion lobby.

Cops almost always know who the Bad Guys are. Being able to prove it in court is an entirely different matter. But possession with intent to distribute? Trivial to prove, just have a couple of cops testilie that the defendant was acting strangely in their presence, justifying a detention and search, which led to the discovery of a large quantity of illegal narcotics. No witnesses to be intimidated, no real chance of escaping conviction, he takes a plea deal and does some time. One Bad Guy off the streets.

Some would say that the latter is a direct cause of the former, in which case it needs no further explanation. You just put the Bad Guys in prison, on whatever charges you can make stick (even if non-violent), and violent crime goes down.

The experience of Memphis, Tennessee, as reported in The Atlantic, with breaking up high-crime neighborhoods and redistributing their inhabitants to other places: the bad guys quickly find their feet and begin preying on a broader class of victims, while the decent-but-poor find their social networks shattered.

The port's no longer standard, but still readily available, and it's not like regular USB (the other end of the cable) as a charging standard is going to disappear any time soon. I agree - the RAZR is an easy choice here: cheap, readily available, still an aesthetically attractive phone, good battery life. The only possible knock against it as a dumbphone is that it has a camera, which will keep you from taking it into a federal office building.