It is about time someone started challenging the extension of existing copyrights as invalid as being ex post facto laws.

Lawrence Lessig did. He lost, as usual. That was Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003)

Start renting out the Parthenon for parties. If that doesn't work, start charging $0.50 each for Thermopylae selfies.

Thermopylae no longer exists. Well, it does, but it's no longer the narrow bottleneck between the mountains and the sea that it was during Leonidas's time.

The British Museum is going to get a chance to buy at auction the Greek cultural artifacts they didn't manage to loot.

Yeah, Jar-Jar was definitely based on Jamaican stereotypes. But there's disagreement over whether Watto was Shylock or an Arab stereotype; I tend to think the latter.

"Diverse" is just code for "Hispanic or non-white" for ethnicity (in tech, also "non-Asian"). In general it means "Hispanic, homosexual, transsexual, or non-white" (or, in tech, "female", and "non-Asian"). Otherwise individuals couldn't be "diverse" or "non-diverse".

There is no where you can afford an hour in every direction in New York, Seattle, LA, DC, etc unless you already got in years ago at the right time or you make $70,000 a year or more.

Less than an hour from NY: Union City, East Orange, Orange, Irvington, and Newark, all in NJ.

Amazon, a large tech company, is hiring a bunch of highly-paid confederate-flag waving gay-bashing white men in Seattle, they're turning the whole county white, and they're going around beating up gay people and burning down gay bars?

Does this even pass the smell test? Of course not. Has anyone involved in this story ever worked for a large modern tech company, or talked to anyone who does? Of course not.

Check the actual references and you get a different story. First of all, King County is not the whitest in the nation. It's the whitest of the top 20 counties in the nation by population. But at 62.4% white non-Hispanic, it's just below at the national average for whiteness (63.7%). Second, "the county's fastest population growth is happening among Asian and mixed-race people."

Third, let's take a look at those attacks. The arson? Committed by one Musab Masmari. White tech company employee? Nope. Unemployed drunk raised by Libyan parents mostly in Libya. Race unclear; Arabs are usually counted as white but Libyans are mostly Berbers who are mixed. The other complaints don't mention the employment or race of the perpetrators, though none of them apparently were traced back to tech company employees.

As the Bloomberg article says, "an industry that's otherwise showering Seattle with jobs and money has become a scapegoat".

Bigots and racists and sexists and fat-shamers and MRAs and moderators and even SJWs pissed of at Victoria being fired. A million special interests standing in the way of the common good.

Did they talk about Sarkeesian on /r/FatPeopleHate? Seems unlikely; she seems a bit emaciated by their standards.

US median rent is $762 ($9144 annually). US median household income is $51,900. Which works out to $117/day after rent, not $20. Federal taxes for that group would be somewhere around 14%, state income tax varies but 6% should be slightly high, so call it 20% for taxes, now we're down to $88/day after rent and taxes. Still more than $20.

If you get a 100K job, it means you are good at it, not because someone handed you that job on a silver platter.

I think some of them -- the ones who went directly from the approved pre-schools to the high-ranking suburban public schools (or less likely, private schools) and college prep courses to the top colleges, did get it handed to them on a silver platter, or at least they certainly didn't notice any difficulties. This makes them easy prey for the philosophy of "privilege" (which they got fed in their electives at that top college).

Then they go and assume it's because they were the right color and gender (because that's what they've been told by those professors, and because they've read and believed all the atrocity stories about how people of the wrong color and gender are treated in tech), and start trying to shove all that guilt off on the rest of us who are of similar color and gender. They make some recruits, but those of us whose life wasn't a cakewalk aren't buying it... and Eastern European immigrants (who typically didn't have it easy) _especially_ don't buy it for some reason.

That's where not being a leftist comes in handy. I get paid well, and don't have to feel guilty about it, nor about wanting more. And I can walk past the beggars in the subway faking disabilities or telling some sort of bogus sob story and feel nothing more than mild irritation.

What's a bigger cost? 100 residents in an apartment building? Or 50 residents spread out among 40 houses?

For schools, the apartment building (assuming same demographics of residents, which is unlikely; there's a reason municipalities love 55+ developments). For police, the apartment building again. For fire, probably the apartment building but I'm less sure of that.

likely to be quietly retracted next week.

To oversimplify: Every time we extend infrastructure, we add two drains on budgets. The first is depreciation - basically a way of budgeting for the cost of replacement years down the road.

Depreciation is a way of accouting for the initial cost, not the cost of replacement. Counting both the initial expenditure and depreciation is double-counting.

Say you put in a big box store such as Walmart. Big box stores, as a general rule, aren't the best producers of tax revenue per square foot. You're frequently better off with a dense commercial or residential development instead - a tall apartment building, or a bunch of small stores.

Sure, if you count only revenue and not expenses. But to a locality, a residential development is absolutely the most expensive. More residents mean more need for police, schools, and other amenities. Fire department too; a big dense apartment building is the worst. And it's these costs which eat up local budgets.