For the people I know who play it it's more about giving themselves hope to escape their miserable lives. It's also a social stabilizer, giving the lower classes the feeling that they have a way out.

buy Asus/Acer or even HP for Pete's sake. But Dell has been selling $1200 laptops with laughable specs for 10+ years now.

With a Mac you pay through the nose, but you always get the same thing. With a PC there's so many choices it's easy to drop that kinda money and walk away with something that on paper should rock and in practice it blows. I've got an i7 laptop for work that's like that, and it's the bane of my existence.

True, but it's nice when Americans get reminded just how powerless they really are. Maybe a few more of these and we'll start cracking down on corruption again. For example, that City Manager is almost certainly about to lose his job... and walk right into a nice gig with Comcast. There was a time in the 70s when we threw people in jail for that.

American style health care why not move here? That's one thing that we win out in. If you've got tons of money our health care is great. As someone who's had family who are only alive today because of socialized medicine though I find our system terrible. We've let people die for lack of health care.

Then again, grass is always greener.

and making under $150k/yr wouldn't trade it for private insurance. And we all go single payer at 65 unless we're making 10 times that. While I'm on the subject, I've never met a Canadian or Britain who would trade their health care for ours.

And what world do you live in where Obamacare is single payer? It isn't even close. It's an awful compromise created when the insurance companies spent half a billion dollars in _one_ year flooding every possible media channel with stories of death panels for Grandma (who, ironically, is already on Medicare, a single payer system). It's the best we can get with the current political system and folks like yourself with an irrational fear of a system that works great everywhere else in the world.

without serious medical issues. After that they go on America's socialized medicine program, Medicare. This is by design. The elderly are not profitable to insure and are reliant on health care. They would demand socialized medicine one way or the other. This keeps them from becoming a voting block for broad scale Single Payer healthcare

Now, if you're one of those Americans without a great job and with a bunch of health problems, yeah, you're in for a world of hurt. But by then you're heavily marginalized. You're much too busy surviving to vote...

only matter if you're not willing to let people die. Then again most of Europe has some form of socialized medicine. Here in America we don't need to factor in the cost of health.

who in their right mind would go into computer science in America right now? At the same time Tech Giants are pushing for more CS majors their campaigning hard to bring in more H1-B visa holders. Meanwhile outsourcing continues to eliminate jobs.

Maybe if the gov't would get serious about promoting small software businesses (small 50 employees, and be careful they're not just shill companies for Microsoft et al) and if we had some protectionism I'd say go for it. But right now is not a good time to be a CS major...

Little Chocolate Donuts

but around here we're a representational democracy. Now, when our voter turnout gets above 50% you might have a point, but for now the gov't protects those what put 'em in office, and with our low as crap voter turnout that's gonna be whoever pays for the tv ads and voter reg drives.

Can you convert that to rods/hogsheads?

that since the same amount of wealth is being generated with 1/3 less people, but society at large is no better off. You did good to stem the worst of it, and you should be proud. But now we've got however many people in poverty with little or no way out. It's a race to the bottom, with you and Taiwan both eventually losing. Maybe you'll die before that happens. Maybe you're kids will too. What about your Grandkids? If they're not the factory owners do they have any future? Does anyone but the guys at the top culling 1/3?

I seem to remember the profits being a _lot_ more that a measly $105 billion.

The monitoring software where my buddy works has gotten good enough they don't need teams of analysts to watch over things anymore. Most of the problems I see are caused by cutting corners in programming because there's not computer power. As computer power gets cheaper and cheaper that all goes away, and those tech jobs go with them.

In the 80s Computers and automation were suppose to free us for a 20 hour work week. Now we're pushing 50-60 hour work weeks because the only thing it's done is increase competition for the few jobs left. Productivity America's up something like 80% but real wages are way don. I'm not quite ready to become a Luddite yet but I'd like to see some of this increased productivity show up in my pay. But law of supply and demand says the more work I can get down the less it's worth.

Heck, I'll just come out and say it: Can I has socialism?

Nice to see an American Icon doin' stuff like that. Still, I doubt the customers will care. If you're the sort that can blow $100k on a bike you're probably not going to care much about the ethics of the company making them. I could be wrong, but I don't know a lot of working class guys that can afford a Harley...