Part of the problem is that people who are familiar with "x" will tend to sympathize with others of their kind. Look at the problem we have holding any member of the criminal justice system - from street cops all the way to judges - liable for even the most egregious illegal acts. It's crazy.

Juries should be a mix of experts and non-experts alike, with the experts providing needed information for the others. There's no perfect way around it, but the current method of "throw out all jurors with an IQ over 75" is obviously subpar.

It would have been far less consequential to the economy as a whole to simply let the failed banks fail. I've explained this at length elsewhere but not only do we have the direct harm of paying money to a private entity to keep them in business we have the far larger harm of signaling to other 1%ers that they can do whatever the hell stupid shit they want and then whine until the government saves them. That is a much bigger problem. Much much bigger.

Markets only work when there's feedback, both positive and negative. Do a google search about people who can't sense pain. They harm themselves badly without realizing it. We're creating huge companies that are like that now by taking away their pain. It's a very wrong thing to do.

I grew up in a grocery store, quite literally, so I have way big expertise here. The problem with self checkouts isn't that customers suck, it's that the self-checkout doesn't trust the cashier (that's you in case you missed it) and so doesn't allow the kind of actions that make checking out fast.

All self-checkouts have a separate bagging area which is a large scale or set of scales which weigh the items that you put in the bags after you scan them. This means that you have to scan a single item then bag that item, wait for the scale to notice and acknowledge the change in weight, then you can go on to the next item. Scales typically don't register small changes in weight very well, and with 50 lbs. of stuff on a scale adding a typical item changes the weight by only 1%. That might not be enough to even cause movement of the scale for it to notice the weight change. When that happens, the automated checkout complains and the human cashier who is watching all of the automated checkouts has to intervene.

A regular cashier has no such inhibitions and simply scans each item as fast as he can with an audible beep to confirm that the item has been scanned. A good cashier will have items in both hands and run them over the scanner as fast as he can and simply rescan anything that causes no beep. This system allows the regular cashier to be around 10 times as fast - possibly even faster - than the self checkout.

If people could be trusted better, self checkouts could be made far better. In their current form they're borderline unusable for more than 2 or 3 items. In our local Walmart they removed them after the first year due to rampant theft around them, so it's a real problem.

People often think it's a problem similar to an ATM. When I was a kid and I wanted to deposit or withdraw money from my bank account I actually went into the bank with my savings book and saw a teller. The ATM actually sped this process up for the most part, but what it does is far simpler than the automated checkout and the user has far less control over the transaction. Think about it - it's not like you get a big bundle of cash and then tell the ATM how much you're taking. The ATM is more akin to a vending machine.

At Harris Teeter here and now Publix they're moving to "online ordering". At Harris Teeter you order online and later come by the store and they bring your stuff to your car. In time (yes, it's coming) someone will move to a warehouse setup with robots to pick most of the orders. Expect it. Self checkouts have reached their limit but the future is automation.

Wrong. Only in poorly regulated capitalism do entities deemed "too big to fail" by the government get propped up and continue doing the exact same stuff that caused them to fail in the first place while generously giving "campaign donations" back from the money given to the by the government.

In a true free market, GM went bankrupt and the pieces were bought by their smarter competitors. In a true free market, the big banks who had a bunch of failed mortgages went bankrupt and the pieces were bought by their smarter competitors.

Crony capitalism isn't the same as capitalism.

But, before hitting Silicon Valley, why not make a stop by the NBA?

I mean, asians and whites are dramatically underrepresented there. I'm sure you see this as a big problem, too.

Right, Jesse?

Um, Jesse?

It's the crappy software. Free isn't cheap enough, especially when you're 5 years too late to the party and a million apps behind.

Or, better yet, raise enough money to fix a real problem.

Right wing affiliation? Are you kidding? That gets you audited these days - look at Dr. Ben Carson as an example.

Actually, some parts of it have been upheld by the Supreme Court. Barely. But it's not a tyranny of the majority because the majority of the people in this country are against it. One party pushed it through and now they're delaying parts of it to help stave off losing a lot of elections later this year.

Talking points? I'm not part of the looney left - I have a substitute for "talking points" known as "reality". I would take anything from the whitehouse with a grain of salt.

The federal government has been spending ever more money in order to prop up the GDP (remember that gov't spending is part of the GDP). In reality, the economy has been shrinking for some time except in Washington DC. And, no, we can't continue this forever or even much longer.

Forbes and WSJ pointed this out a couple of years ago:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/re...

If you actually look at how much work is done and actual years worked (not just age) etc. the gap disappears. Actually, according to the summary here there *is* a gap as women get paid more. I'm sure the feminists and looney lefters will want to fix this new problem. Not.

Even the summary brushes on this. We find that the two things that get some people riled up are creationism and climate change denial. Actually, those are things that tend to get left-wingers riled up. A lot of folks also get riled up about, oh, anti-vaccination nuttery, anti-economic-reality nuttery (denying basic market principles), climate change extremism (we have to all give up our cars now to save the planet), green quackery (we have to destroy our nuclear power plants and replace them with wind farms!), etc.

There are plenty of religions in the world and many of them have nothing to do with God or gods.

You've got questions?

Hey, so do we!

Don't sweat it - if there were such a list I'd be the first name on it. They don't seem to pay any attention to me at the airport.