Nonpartisan investigations have debunked the vast majority of these claims. There simply is no evidence for significant voter fraud in the us, and thus all the voterid laws are unnecessary and politically motivated.

In spite of your rant, the actual amount of voter fraud is miniscule, on the order of a few dozen per national election. And no, illegal aliens only vote in the fevered imaginations of the gonzo right, and not in any reality that doesn't involve paranoid flights of fancy.

I should have added "close relatives and friends of the family"

Except that.... The "think of the children" thing is BS.

Well over 50% of all child abuse is perpetrated by mothers, another 30% by fathers. The rest is perpetrated by close relatives (brothers, aunts, and such). The actual "stranger danger" stuff is minimal; about 110 cases a year out of what, 30,000,000 minors.

So for 110 crimes a year we're supposed to "think of the children" and let Big Brother into all of our communication.

Right, like the uproar against the Patriot Act. Oh wait.....

Let's face it, Big Brother Government knows no political boundaries.

Yeah, but it's turning out to be true. Who wudda thunk it?

Translation:

It's such a screwed up mess that we don't know how to deal with it, so instead we're going to pull some marketing razzle dazzle and hope like hell people forget the mess we made.

But the real question is this:

If every other release sucks, and windows 8 sucked, and windows 9 is so good that it can't even be released, does that mean that Windows 10 will suck?

Yeah, a person who can't afford $200 for a car payment is going to call for an ambulance ride to the tune of $4,000 or more.

Do you advise them to eat cake too?

No, lenders need to make responsible loans.

This falls in the "I want to make high interest loans to people who can't afford them because I'm a greedy prick, but I want thumb screws on those schmucks to make them pay."

How about jiust turning away those customers who can't afford the loans?

You missed the point. The US immigration system is broken, badly, and this just demonstrates it. If a company can use a broken system as leverage to get concessions it's time to start over.

We in the US depend on the 10 million or so illegal immigrants to keep our economy going, yet we refuse to revise our immigration laws to make it possible for that labor pool to be here legally.

Not sure what Afghanistan has to do with the whole discussion.

Seriously? I got a 3 year work visa to Canada just by showing up at the border with a letter from my employer. The whole process took less than an hour. Canada has logical, common sense immigration controls, as opposed to the completely broken and non-sensical immigration laws that we have in the US.

In the US, if I got an H1B visa, my wife would not be allowed to work. In Canada, with a work visa, my wife is allowed to work, doing anything she wants. I could go on, but don't tell me Canada has "stricter" controls; Canada has controls that work, while the US has no controls at all - a handful of H1B visas, and millions of illegal workers.

Or OpenWRT.

I can get an entire working distro into 8MB, and it doesn't have any of the stuff he's complaining about.

As someone in manufacturing, you're wrong. Repairable things cost far more to manufacture. I have to have accurate drawings and records of manufacturing processes for parts, I have to have specs for all the little bits and pieces, and I have to have manufacturers who hold that standard.

If I'm not concerned about repairs, I just contract out based on function, bolt the thing together, and run it out the door.

Fridges are a great example. I can buy a cheap dorm fridge for $100, or I can buy same-sized Isotherm with a Danfoss compressor for around $1000. The danfoss compressor comes with all the diagrams you need, it's rechargeable, everything in that fridge is replaceable at a cost.

The dorm fridge - you can't even be sure that the compressor is in the same place from one box to the next.

However, when I'm stuck in port somewhere in Bogata, I can get parts for the Danfoss. I know I can. 10 years from now I know I will be able to get parts.

Does your boss really micromanage your time that much?

Look for a different job. Yeesh.

I have to disagree, even with your "kids in chemistry" example. There are many, many aspects of chemistry that fly in the face of common sense.

You're basically saying that our "common sense" is the equal to hard science, and that by simply applying it to the visible world we can understand the universe and our environment as well as a person who has studied the topic for years.

Bottom line, we can't. There are parts of what I do that would be completely obtuse to a layperson, but are clearly obvious to me, with 30+ years of experience, and no amount of "common sense" explanations can reduce that knowledge to a "geez, that's obvious".