In other professions, you're expected to put in as much time as necessary to get the job done. Teachers do seven hours a day with usually 1 hour a day to "prep" and 30 minutes to an hour for lunch, so 5 to 5.5 hours per day of teaching, not to mention that they work 9 months out of the year. Factor in that an experienced teacher can re-use the majority of their materials from previous years and there's very little truth to the "teachers are overworked" claims.

$800 is the price for the most stripped down model. Most of the models are $1,200 - $1,500.

Honestly, my only issue with them is the price. When you're looking at over $1k, I would prefer to just use a Nexus 7 for $250 and buy a cheap ultrabook for $400-$500.

Assuming you live in the US, buy a gun. Unless you're lucky, even with a 3 minute response time a life-threatening incident will leave you dead. Contrary to what you see on TV shows, the police rarely stop violent crime in progress - they simply write a report after the fact. Even in incidents like the shooting at Sandy Hook, the police where on scene in 2-3 minutes, yet it was still far too late.

Also, SCOTUS has ruled that the police have no duty to protect you, thus they have no duty to show up in a timely manner or actually help once they arrive. I forget the name of the case where this was decided, but it's a truly sickening read where the laziness of officers lead to multiple women being raped and then the court told them "Too bad, police cannot be held accountable for their actions".

Not to mention that the district attorney, public defender, and judge are normally all best friends (not to mention they all are friends with the local police). Both of my brothers are cops and openly admit that our "justice" system is a racket and that being arrested almost always results in a guilty verdict, regardless of the facts. Sadly, most people never have any involvement with the court system / police and thus are completely ignorant to how it works. I took half a day off work a couple of years ago and sat in the county courthouse watching cases being tried - it was a very eye opening experience where. I saw one girl get convicted of theft based purely on the word of another girl and I saw a woman get convicted of theft because she was on a sidewalk about 50 yards away from an attempted theft and she shouted something (unknown words to an unknown person) -- so clearly (according to the judge, prosecutor, and arresting officers) she must be guilty of aiding in the theft (despite no proof that she even knew the man). I suggest everyone spend time watching your local judge go about his daily duties - you'll most likely reconsider voting for them next time.

The problem being that most departments (I said most, not all) are overstaffed for the amount of crime and as a result put a significant portion of their officers on road detail to generate revenue. If they actually had enough crime to justify that number of officers, they sure as hell wouldn't be sitting on the side of the road waiting for someone to go over an arbitrary number.

Why should a car that won't be committing traffic infractions pay a fee for traffic infractions? That doesn't even come close to making sense. That's like saying everyone who puts on a seat belt should pay an extra fee to make up for "lost revenue" from fewer tickets for not wearing a seat belt.

I'd love to see their books. I spent years working as a contractor for a government agency and know first hand how much governments piss away money.

That's a load of crap. I'd love to see a list of these "vital" things - I'm willing to bet most of them are far from vital.

And yet, I'm sure there's money being pissed away on "special projects", cushy retirement funds, expense accounts, etc that could easily be shifted to fix the roads.

Thanks for letting me know that you're just a troll and not willing to have a rational discussion. I'll pull turn your "Somalia" line around on you - "If you love government control over all financial actions, why don't you move to North Korea?"

You're partially correct. The amount of tax that a business will pay is directly related to the elasticity of demand for their products / services. The more elastic the demand (the more people are willing to either buy a competing product or just do without it), the smaller the portion of the tax that they can shift to consumers. The less elastic the demand, the higher the portion of tax they can shift to consumers. If the government decided to levy an additional 10% tax on potato chips, the potato chip companies would have to eat most of that tax because most people would simply buy other snack foods instead of paying the higher price. If the government decides to levy an additional 10% tax on gas / diesel, consumers are going to be hit with all of that extra tax because most people don't have a choice in buying fuel (long term they can make other decisions to decrease the amount of fuel used, but that's a long story there).

How come every time a nation / state / city is overspending, people always immediately turn to how to raise more tax revenues? How come virtually no one ever looks at the other side of the math and looks at ways to cut spending? If you're in a dire financial situation, your first move is to cut all non-vital spending and then reassess the situation. For some reason, people don't think government spending should ever decrease.

I wish I only changed my major once. It took me 6 1/2 years to get my bachelor's because I changed schools and majors three times.

How are managers supposed to hire the right candidates if HR refuses to let the right candidates' resumes through to the hiring manager? HR should have no part of the hiring process, especially since they don't have the slightest understanding about the skills required for the position (any position).

Since your company is big enough to have an HR department, there's probably at least 2-3 recruiters. Even with just two, that's 40 resumes per day - it does not take that long to read a resume and it's really easy to toss the bad ones after just a few seconds. That doesn't sound like they "need" filtering, it sounds like they want filtering so that they don't need to read many resumes.

That's because the crappy filtering software is eliminating the qualified candidates. I've had multiple jobs where I've gotten great performance reviews by my boss, yet I initially got turned down for them because the filtering software eliminate my resume and I couldn't get an interview until I finally got my resume directly to the hiring manager.

Except that over the last few years, they HAVEN'T been moving on to the rest of the pile. You can Google it and find plenty of professors at top business schools railing on companies for demanding insanely overqualified people due to the economy (which is perfectly understandable that they would try to get a more qualified person for the same salary, given the job market) but when they don't find the person with three masters degrees, two PhD's and 40 years of experience willing to work for $35,000, they're just refusing to hire anyone and keep reposting the positing hoping that they'll find that one unicorn. It's like a mental illness where they're so focused on "We can get a better employee for less money!" that they cannot acknowledge that perfectly qualified candidates exist to fill the position but will not meet their absurd requirements for a "dream employee".

"I mean technically every tax payer who gets a refund gets a check from the government, but (barring EIC) it shouldn't really count because that money was never the governments in the first place.

Which is why it isn't in the budget and therefore should not be part of the numbers being discussed here.