The US is allegedly a rich country, that your government chooses not to help is the problem.

We choose not to have the government help much, because government is inherently wasteful.

Instead many Americans donate money to charitable organizations that waste far less of the money, so more people obtain help... America by far has the highest rate of donation to charity.

I've always wondered how god-fearing republicans can choose to not the help poor people

That's where you are utterly, terribly wrong - I am an independent, and do not attend church. But I know a lot of "god-fearing republicans" that donate a large amount of charity, plus every church I've every know has lots of missionary work they do to help the poor.

In fact if you look at statistics you'll find that Republicans donate quite a lot more (on average thousands more) than Democrats do - because like you they don't really care about helping the poor, they just want to feel like they are.

If the work is done for the agency, then it's public record.
This is why I don't use my personal devices for any government business.

did you just allow an AC to bait you?
Yes, yes you did.

with modern design.
What about the issue of getting the electricity to shore.
Remember, when these reactors were design. plate tectonics was new.

Actually, the best way to force prices for grain downwards is to *remove* government subsidies, since most of them go towards paying farmers to limit their harvest output, thereby keeping per-bushel prices high.

Same with any other non-processed food item - dump the subsidies, and farmers will have to increase production to make up for it. This in turn will force prices down for those food items.

First of all, sorry about your not closing the quoting tag you used. I do that sometimes, and it's so sad to see all your hard work obscured under an italic fog... so I thought I would at least respond in detail to help make up for it.

The charging point you make is a great one. There are some powered mounts that you can plug a phone into, but they require more work to fit... I prefer a general mount you can use with separate power so that as I change phones I can maintain the same mount.

A really excellent non powered mount is the FlexPod, if a model exists for your car... it's very sturdy and is not obtrusive when not in use.

If notifications are an issue you can usually set the phone to something like Do Not Disturb mode. But I've never had that really cause issues.

Now about the Garmin device giving great directions - that may be true, dedicated devices have had a while to build good nav systems. I personally use Apple Maps and find the navigation for that works pretty well, it also gives land guidance... (it was better than Google Maps for navigation from Day One).

But, there also exists a Garmin dedicated app with offline maps. You get all of the Garmin benefits you detailed, only it's easier to update,

And you can switch to Waze when not needing navigation (I totally agree with you about Waze navigation not working very well). As you say, nothing beats the Waze Police/Hazard alerts.

I fond not using facebook has worked best.

A) It hasn't.
B) Prior expectations.

I suspect things work a bit more linearly than you might surmise. Maybe I just read your post wrong, but let me re-word it to see if I got it right, with a few changes:

Right now, we (as a human civilization) have pumped out radio signals that currently are racing out past the 100+ light year mark. This is stuff we sent long ago (e.g. Titanic's SOS call has reached the 102-light-year-mark, other early Marconi radio broadcasts in Morse code, stuff like that.)

The initial contact is the bitch - you send something out to a planet 50 ly away, hope someone is there and is capable of listening at that moment, along the frequency band you sent, has his antenna pointed at the same vector from which your signal is originating, has sufficient technology and skill to discern it as a intelligent/sentient message created intentionally. Oh, and you'd better hope something in-between doesn't obliterate the signal on its way there, and that it was powerful enough to not be diffused too much.

Meanwhile, your alien recipient not only has to receive it, but he needs to be capable of sending something in return. If he can decode what you sent and then send a suitable reply - bonus! If he sends something with the same pattern back, okay.

Now we get to wait another 50 years before the reply gets back here, we still have to be around as a civilization (with the right equipment!) to hear it, have someone interested in listening for it (what, 100 years after his grandpappy sent the original signal?), and again, hope the alien dude didn't decide that maybe a different and random (to you) frequency band would have been better to send the reply with... and toss in the same hazards experienced when sending the original request signal.

(...and you thought postal service was slow...)

yeah, that will stand up in court. Really the people who put that in there should be fired. It will only end with a lawsuit and bad PR

I got one
"lets skip the prison rape ones."
oh, never mind.

They supply steering wheels for the Model S.

I still don't understand why he went to Russia. Iceland is a much more liberal, democratic country and welcomes whistle-blowers. He would be fairly safe from the US there.

I wanted compatibility. Microsoft office is availble for OSX also, but it isn't really compatible between the two. Before people jump on that, build a complex Powerpoint document, and open it in The Mac version - just as one example.

So I installed OO on all of the machines. It made them compatible. Microsoft Office is becoming the outlier now.

Of course it is. Mercedes missed the boat, despite trying to be cutting edge (e.g. with the F1 engines). Tesla came out of nowhere and made the best car in Mercedes' traditional market, the luxury sedan class. They are so far ahead Mercedes are years away from even producing something comparable to the Model S.