I'm sure the wife comment was made in jest. However, my wife - whom I love dearly and would not trade for anything - is not great at managing money, for a variety of reasons. She therefore manages to commit us to spending most of my paycheck, which, being in a very low-cost area, is probably comparable to the OP's. I have tried in vain to explain to her that a salary that's twice as much as most of our employed friends' (leaving aside the fact that many of them are unemployed) should go a lot further than it does, and would, if not for all the stupid iPad games and restaurant meals and expensive gifts and parties and the like. If it were up to me, I'd pay off our debts first, live frugally until then, save several YEARS' cushion, and *then* start being more willing to spend on things that are not true necessities. But, like me, not everyone is able to do that without causing serious difficulty in their marriages.

NO. That will not happen. Power equals voltage times current. To deliver the same power load at a lower voltage would require higher current, and household wiring is already designed to carry as much current as it safely can. Lowering voltage would thus require new, much bulkier wiring, which can't easily be retrofitted in older structures. Conduits would be able to carry far less of it, so those two would have to be overhauled. Last but not least, wireless charging and better batteries will eliminate much of the need for the lower-power wiring in the first place. There are very few things that I can confidently predict about the future, but one of those things is that mains (110-220v) voltage is not going to change drastically anytime soon. I'd be willing to bet every single powered appliance in my home on it.

How hard can ore processing be? We already have word processors. Just fork one and make whatever minor mods are necessary to process ores instead.

If you don't have any meetings, how do you know what your coworkers are doing?

Most of the time they are orking cows.

Some of the "actual cities" in the U.S. span dozens or even hundreds of kilometers (e.g., Houston, Atlanta, LA, even Chicago). Even some of the urban areas near Cleveland, Ohio, an older and more compact city than most in the U.S., are 100km or more apart. (E.g.: Oberlin to Mentor). These areas are simply not navigable without a car, no matter how fast you manage to get in or out of whatever you consider to be the "central area." Part the reason is not just suburban sprawl but the fact that originally many of these areas were once collections of separate, distant smaller towns that eventually grew together.

Agreed. I'm very impressed with the efforts Detroiters (of all races, in case that matters, which IMO it shouldn't) have made to take back their city from the scumbag politicians who ran it into the ground. There is still a mismatch between the skills of the populace and the skills needed in the job market, but that's a problem throughout the U.S., hardly limited to the Detroit area. I am very happy where I am (Lakewood, Ohio, about 6 miles from downtown Cleveland), but if I had to relocate for whatever reason, then Detroit, owing partly to its proximity and reasonable cost of living, would be on my short list of places I would actually prefer.

The only ways to prevent data corruption upon improper shutdown come at a massive cost in performance. Essentially, a filesystem wishing to pose such a guarantee must block until it can confirm that data is physically written to the device - NOT just cached in that device's RAM. I think you will find that this is many orders of magnitude slower than normal writes, and still dependent on proper behavior of the hardware. Having said that, most filesystems have options that will enable that tradeoff for you, in cases where it is sufficiently important. Or you can use a production-quality relational database, which, in most cases, can be configured in such a way that the loss of a single filesystem will not cause irreparable damage beyond the last few seconds of data entry.

Very possibly worse. Glyphosate is believed to harm gut bacteria. Bt is *known* to do so, and to a much greater degree.

Stop, take some probiotics, and start altering your diet to include yogurt, sauerkraut, and other fermented foods. Most of the known mechanisms of glyphosate's toxicity in humans revolve around its propensity to kill beneficial gut bacteria, with which we are symbiotic. Do your best to take care of them, from this point forward, and you should be fine.

Very misleading summary of the current evidence. Consumption of fructose in the form of fruit, bound together with fiber, reduces morbidity and mortality. In the form in which most of it is consumed, however - HFCS and sucrose - it is among the leading causes of death. It is now known to trigger most of the incidence of metabolic syndrome among adults and even children in the developed world, and much of it in parts of the developing world as well. Other refined carbs are partly to blame, but if we could even halve the consumption of refined sugars it would be a HUGE public health win, comparable to eliminating tobacco and alcohol combined.

They are indeed not comparable. The U.S. government has murdered hundreds of thousands of Arab and Muslim civilians over the past few decades. ISIS? A relative handful.

A shipment from San Francisco to Dallas for example, that takes a detour to Boson...

Didn't they only just recently discover that?

I've listened to only a little so far, but it sounds extremely promising, with the phrasing, tempo, and ornamentation all being superb. Ms. Ishizaka also does an outstanding job of using the dynamic range of the piano in harmony with the music. This is perhaps among the hardest and most subjective elements of interpreting Bach's keyboard work, since, as other commenters here have noted, most of it predates the widespread adoption of the piano, and was written without its greater dynamic range and expressiveness in mind. So far, this is becoming my favorite recording of this work.

Agreed. It is my policy to report any nontrivial income no matter whether I think they will find out about it or not. Not because I think honesty requires it . . . I view government in its present form as little more than an extortion racket . . . but because frankly it is easier not to have to live with the constant fear of "what if the IRS finds out . . . ".

I think the point was that there is no way for even a fairly powerful state to know that he fixed your car and you mowed his lawn, unless unless one of you decides to rat on the other, and it is in both your interests not to do so. In fact, the IRS considers barter to constitute taxable income but this is so difficult to enforce that I've never heard of a case of it happening.