Yes, they do work just fine for the 99%.

Thing is, aside from the pure utilitarian perspective ("99% is good enough"), we also have this thing called fairness, which is important on a symbolic level. If you can effectively be above the law by paying it off in a way that 99% cannot afford, that's not fair, and people do see it as such. That it also increases 99% to maybe 99.9% is a nice bonus, but that's not really why people want it.

Is there any law that will ensure that those poor people doing community service won't find themselves out of a job on account of being unable to show up at work for so long?

Fine, we'll nab you on your capital gains then. It's income too.

Not at all. If I miss a couple of days at work, it's no big deal - I will just retroactively take it as vacation. If a guy who works at McDonald's misses a couple of days at work (and his only explanation was that he was doing community service for speeding), he'll likely get fired. For people living paycheck to paycheck, the cost of that time in terms of immediate effect on their life is far greater than the rich, for whom it's just an annoyance. The cost of "an hour of one's life" is not actually a major factor there at all, few people think in such terms in the first place (unless they have a terminal illness and know they have a few months left to live or something like that).

Only if you insist on maintaining the current (utterly broken) scheme of financing police, and other municipal expenses, from traffic fines.

The other guy in the comments here has the right idea. Pool all the money from the tickets, and pay it back to all the citizens who do not have any violations on record for the year, in equal proportion. Thus it's revenue neutral, you actually stimulate people to drive safely, and police etc is funded from taxes, as it should be.

Well, maybe they shouldn't be doing something as stupid as that in the first place?

Yes, but the wrongness doesn't necessarily come from the proportionality requirement. I would dare say it rather comes from the notion of jail terms as a meaningful punishment.

People don't speed because they're "intent on breaking the law", they speed because they think they can get away with it. Raise the fines and a lot of speeders do go away.

And no, it's not just theory. It's very visible among immigrants from my own country who move into US and other Western countries. First they drive recklessly, because they're used to the notion that fines are small, and you can usually bribe the officer anyway. This continues until they get slapped with several hundred dollars for speeding, and then they become much more cautious. I've seen it happen many times.

All I'm saying is that you're engaging in sophistry to muddy up the simple fact that party positions on foreign policy today are what they are, and what they are is patently clear from reading the news for a couple days.

The same question is applicable to all forms of assisted suicide. Basically, if the system has enough checks for regular people, it should also be good enough for criminals - we're simply treating life sentence as a terminal illness that causes suffering (which is not really all that far fetched).

They are quite willing to work hard if necessary (they wouldn't have lived long enough to immigrate if that were not the case). You just don't give them incentives to do so. Why bother, if they can live better than where they came from without lifting a finger?

There is no evidence that abandonment of Buran had anything to do with its practicality. A far more likely explanation, given the dates, is that it was all about the country being in a financial shithole where it simply couldn't afford the program.

Win8 does the same, except the removal gesture is less than obvious - you have to swipe it to the right (as if you were opening it), and then keep swiping to the bottom of the screen.

Of course, with a mouse, it's all much easier since 8.1, since you can just click on the close button in the title bar.

You do realize that this design has already been changed significantly in Win10, right?

Republicans are not a single block. Isolationists abound on the fringes of the party - most notably, Rand Paul, and his libertarian followers. But party mainstream is not isolationist at all.

And I do not dispute that were Democrats in power during 9/11, there would probably still be war (I do think it would be confined to Afghanistan though - Iraq was very much a thing of Bush and his "New American Century" administration). And perhaps then they would be the party of war today. But it happened the way it did, and so Republicans are the party of war today.

I don't think it makes much sense to look back at WW2 in this context. The parties have radically rearranged themselves since then. In the past decade, mainstream Republicans have been unabashedly warmongering. This isn't to say that Democrats don't have their hawks, or that Republicans don't have their isolationists, but the grand total for both parties is that Republicans are a party of war right now. And Democrats... well, I wouldn't exactly call them a party of peace, either, but a party of "less war" would be apt.