What was odd about the Fry's case was that many of the companies that got that business were actually lower-cost suppliers, like ECS. Right after that case broke, Frys stopped doing the really good CPU/Motherboard deals. So customers actually ended up worse off when they caught the guy.

Speaking of which, automatic firearms are already banned, unless you go through a rigorous screening process. Nearly all handguns today, and many rifles, are semi-automatic (one trigger pull per shot). It's "semi" because although the gun automatically loads the next round, it will not automatically fire that next round.

It's fairly well understood that the sound of racking (that's the proper term, I believe) a shotgun actually will not scare away an intruder. I wish it did--I'd much rather have the bad guy run away than have to shoot him.
Secondly, if you want a larger spread, you don't get a larger barrel--it's 12gauge (or 40, or whatever) all the way down. You can get barrels with different chokes, which constrict the opening at the end of the barrel to various degrees.

The problem is that it wasn't exactly a private free enterprise. They received a $17.1m loan guarantee from the federal government, without which their plant would not have been built. Investors saw them as a bad risk, and appropriately declined to invest in them.

For perspective, the tax breaks given to oil companies amounts to about $2.4 billion/year (in the form tax breaks which are similar to the same tax breaks that every other industry gets for investing in expansion). Loan guarantees like the one A123 got totalled $90 billion in the "stimulus" bill passed in 2009.

Government sticking its thumb on the scales of the economy is always a bad idea--whether it be bailing out banks or perpetual ethanol subsidies + ethanol mandates + import tariffs.

I'm afraid the data doesn't match up with your perceptions. The rich already pay a higher effective tax rate than those in lower income brackets on average (about 24%), while the bottom 50% pay an average of less than 2%. Yes, by all means, let's let the wealthy pay their proportionate share of taxes, by reducing their tax rates!

The current projections are for the Social Security Trust Fund to be depleted around 2037, last I checked. At that point, assuming the government only pays out what it brings in, benefits will be reduced by about 25%. I would assume with current demographics, the payroll taxes will pay for an ever-shrinking percentage of the original benefits, until the baby boomers die off in significant numbers.

I don't know anybody under the age of 55 who is planning on receiving benefits from SS when they retire.

You can find Bic Clic Stic pens on amazon and ebay. They're my wife's favorite as well.

Good point. It also sounds like at least some of the folks at Fox were trying to prevent the footage from going live, and they apologized immediately afterward. Buzzfeed, on the other hand, deliberately posted the footage with full knowledge of its contents.

I think Fox has the moral (relative) high ground here.

Malthus, perhaps. Hari Seldon, probably not.

If the title of this post isn't reason enough to reform the English language, I don't know what is. At first I though it had something to do with homeowners refinancing.

Cash-Poor (adj) Sharp (adj/noun) Mortgages (verb/noun) Display (verb/adj/noun) Factories (noun)

There are plenty of other places to list ads, though none are as big. My preference is Bookoo, which *does* do some sort of radius searching (I forget how exactly it works), but still has individual local sites.

Yes, PV=nRT (or some more accurate version of it). However, for this application, the volume is so huge that the air doesn't actually heat up all that much as it's compressed. Similar methods have been used for storing natural gas in salt domes for decades.

This smacks me as being a bit odd and inefficient. Given the volume being produced, wouldn't a pipeline make more sense? It'd be safer and cheaper in the long run. Of course, given the troubles the Keystone XL pipeline is having, maybe it's more economic to truck it than to try and get through all the red tape for a pipeline.

I used to travel abroad at my previous job, and I had similar, though often worse, experiences in other countries. For example, when leaving Luanda, Angola, here was the process:

1. Arrive at airport, get in line
2. Go through metal detector, have your itinerary checked against your passport
3. Get in line for the check-in desk. Start filling out a passenger information sheet
4. Get interviewed for a few minutes by a security person who again checks your itinerary against your passport
5. Airline checks your itinerary against the passport and the passenger information sheet
6. Move to the next line to actually check in
7. Stand in another security line, bags get xrayed, you go through the metal detector
8. Go into a small room to be interviewed to make sure you're not carrying any Angolan currency out
9. Go wait in waiting area (not by the gate) until it's about time to board
10. Go through another check of boarding pass vs. passport
11. Bag search to *really* make sure you're not carrying currency
12. Pat-down to *really* *really* make sure you're not carrying currency
13. Another check of boarding pass against passport (by airport security)
14. Another check of boarding pass against passport (by the airline)
15. Go out the door to board a bus which takes you to the airplane