Similar to the suckiness of the Stratosphere and Stratosphere 2 that I was subjected to before this one, the phone's shortcomings actually raise more interesting questions â€" about why the free-market system rewards companies for pulling off miracles at the hardware level, but not for fixing software bugs that should be easy to catch.

The free market is working. You paid for a cheap phone, and you got one.
If you want a good phone, don't buy a cheap one. This doesn't mean, "don't buy a low-feature phone"-- it means, don't buy a smart phone for a dumb-phone price and expect it to work well.

You aren't accredited to be following PCI because nobody is. There is no certificate. There is no special seal of approval. You provided security information to your acquiring bank(s) and you were allowed to process credit card transactions. There's no such thing as certification or accreditation for PCI.

What you have said implies that people can just declare they are PCI DSS compliant. This is not quite the case, except perhaps for very small vendors who self-assess (I am not one of these, and therefore have no experience). A QSA must be employed for the audit, and the QSA indeed must undergo approved training and certification. They sign off on the Report of Compliance (ROC).

In attempts to clarify that a little more, we found out we should not compliment a woman on her appearance or perfume, and that statements like "I like your earrings" were very dangerous.

Great. Now you'll have people from the transgender community suing your for your sexual harassment program.

The gap would have been much smaller in 1992, when the fuel in the Metro didn't contain 10% ethanol. My 2004 Olds doesn't hit its EPA rated MPG even on highway trips with little traffic and no stops now-- the engine runs perfectly but gets 1-2 MPG fewer.

I don't know whether the new EPA rating methods take this into account. Note that for the Metro, there's a link for "view original EPA MPG". it says 47, although I do believe there was a model year when it was rated for 49.

As far as Amtrak losing money on food service, despite it becoming a right-wing meme that this true, it's dubious at best.

It's not a truthiness issue-- they really do lose money on food service. You contradicted yourself later in your own post! I understand that food service may have long been a "loss leader" in the industry, but the fact is THEY LOSE MONEY ON FOOD SERVICE.

The science is undebatable.

And that's a political statement.

Frankly, this is an incredibly misogynist move.

It says, "we can't create any strong female superheroes, so we'll just change the sex of one." It's really just like Supergirl or Batgirl, which were pretty much wannabes of the "real" superheroes, as opposed to female Green Lanterns or even a female Robin where it's more about the values and principles of the uniform. For example, a female Iron (wo)Man would make far more sense (alternate universes aside).