After 20 years of Karl Rove and Fox News a sizable number of Americans are opposed to any regulation. Rand Paul (or maybe his dad) argued that instead of govt regs you let the folks who own the contaminated land Sue for damages. If it's international waters I guess you'd have to prove your land was contaminated...

but can't let this slide. A _good_ Uber driver makes about $15/hr after accounting for the cost of driving. That's not even $30k/year. Dude, they're not anywhere near the level's your thinking about, nor will they ever be. If they worked 80 hours a week (which would be incredibly dangerous) they _might_ clear $60k... You've spent too much time in cushy Computer Science and/or engineering gigs. These folks don't have anything to save. The best of the best barely qualify as "Working Poor"...

Uber will drop you. Also you have to have an Uber phone. Calling it a "lease" does change a thing.

Uber just wants to get out of paying the employer expenses everyone else has to. As a society we've built our entire quality of life around our employers, so I can't see that ending well. Plus without trashing their employees quality of life their business model doesn't really work.

I3 with 4gb and 500 gigs? I can get that here for $300. $600 if it's "business class"...

Um.. So what you're saying is you have so little faith in the police that when they show up and nobody dies it's a"miracle "? I think we've got bigger problems than a few socially maladjusted teens

That only counts if they're not using deceptive and immoral tricks to bring in more cash. There's two really nasty things the investor class is doing that invalidates your argument.

First, they pump, dump and then get bailed out as too big to fail. They've been doing this for at least a hundred years, maybe longer. Please read this and maybe even the book it references.

Then there's the more recent phenomenon called getting "Bained". Remember Kay-B-Toys? Mervyns? They weren't failed companies. They were doing just fine. They got bought out by venture capitalists who used their good name & credit to borrow a tonne of money, pay themselves huge bonuses, and then shut the whole thing down. Ever wonder what happened to all those cool Sci-Fi anthologies from the 70s? Issac Asimov's Stories and what not. Folks didn't stop reading them, their distributor was sitting on a mountain of valuable property they weren't keeping track of. Some wealthy asshat noticed, bought them up and liquidated them. Suddenly no distributor and being small but successful they collapsed before they could get another one.

So even if I ignore the fact that just about every rich person relied on the gov't directly to make their fortune, even if I ignore the fact that they're wealth is largely build on the infrastructure and education system of our civilization, even if I ignore the commons and the meaning of natural resources. Even if I ignore _all_ that, you're still left with a bunch of dirty thieves who couldn't survive in the imaginary "real" world of capitalism that's never existed anyway.

We've been cutting taxes on the 1% while cutting wages for the only folks left to tax for 40 years. We're running out of money. Not because it isn't there but because we can't seem to give it to the rich fast enough.

It's practically free. Run the program, wait a bit and your done. A child or a well trained monkey could do it. You OTOH, cost dollars per hour. Seriously, is anyone else scared shirtless that something so abstract and complex as this can be automated? Is any job safe (outside of being a member of the ruling class)?

sorry, I wasn't clear. It's not just sitting around doing nothing. The ultra wealthy are hording wealth in order to create artificial scarcity so they can use their control of society's wealth to bend it to their whims. There's more too it than that in order for them to stay in power, but the basic element is conservationism. e.g. making sure _nothing_ changes. Controlling all of society's wealth is a very effective way to achieve that. The constant desperation brought on by artificially induced poverty makes everyone else very conservative and very opposed to change out of fear that things will get worse; that you'll lose what little you have. The 1% use this to keep folks from questioning why they have so little when the top guys have so much. It's also very important that no one ever notices that if the 1% didn't exist we could all live pretty well. This isn't me pulling $h!t out of my proverbial back side. We're already producing enough food to feed the world's population. And giving poor folks access to birth control & education has shown to control population perfectly (maybe even a bit too much). We can do it, but not when we've got 1% of the world consuming 60% of the resources.

Sorry, again it's complicated. I don't know how to boil it down to sound bites that work. I've got a few (e.g. "I don't want insurance, I want health care") but if I was as good as Karl Rove I'd probably use those skills for the other side. With everything in the world so horrible it takes a saint to use that kind of power for good... :(

but I'm not clever enough to explain why. Please read this. Also follow the link in the article to "This Time is Different" and read that too. We've been doing this little song and dance where banks screw up and blame the public for centuries...

Greece is getting thrown under the bus, "austerity". Aka lower living standards for the working class. It's already " live within your means " with you people. The Greeks weren't living the high life. A bunch of Rick asshats were passing bad debt around during the housing boom and Greece got caught holding the bag. If a big country like Germany had done it no harm no foul. It was too much for Greece though. And the powers that be are gonna use this to steal a bunch of old v folks pensions.

_after_ gov't subsidies. It's also a tiny little car that does poorly in crashes. Why in hells name would I spend that kind of money? I could buy a Versa or an egg (excuse me, the Yaris) for $10k less and get the same features. There's no way in hell that car is going to save me $10k over the course of it's life. It doesn't help that it's a Chevy...

it's that wages aren't coming close to matching real inflation. By "real" I mean inflation of necessities (food, shelter and in this case transportation). It's a fact that wages have been declining for 40 years. Also when I was a kid I could get a pretty nice beater for a grand. Work part time over a summer and you had a car you could putz around in. That same kind of beater is $3-$5k now...

Seriously. I've got to see this.

Sure, it's dog slow, but it's hit the asphalt at least twice now and it's still kickin'. Hell, if they'd stop putting a heavy piece of glass on them to make them feel less like the cheap toys they are my kid's iPhone would stop breaking when she drops it.