Without knowing the scale you can't tell ANYTHING about it. This might as well be a granite countertop (they are about 10x more radioactive than the surrounding items).

The truth is: getting a radiation sickness is HARD. Even when you work near the actual radioactive materials. Getting a heightened cancer risk is easier, but even that risk is too small to worry about. And given the amounts of radioactivity that has escaped from Fukushima I have exactly ZERO worries about it.

I don't use my gas stove, yet I have to pay a connection fee (multi-apartment building). I don't roads much, yet I pay for their upkeep.

Sorry, but "pay for what you get" doesn't work with lots of essential stuff.

No. You don't get it. The cost of fiber optics is basically a $lotsofmoney to dig trenches and lay the backbone fiber. Then it's a couple hundreds of bucks to connect your apartment/home to the nearest point of presence. That's why most of the subscriber fee will go towards repayment of the initial $lotsofmoney lump. Once it's repaid the subscriber fee can go down a lot. Should the newcomers pay the low fee?

This is a local council. The decision was made by majority of representatives on the council, so it's the _will_ _of_ _the_ _people_. If you don't like then feel free to relocate or lobby your council.

Besides, it's the only reasonable way to do a municipal-scale project where initial construction costs overwhelm the incremental costs of adding new subscribers. So if I decline to pay now and then wait 5 years until the infrastructure is built and paid for by the first subscribers then should I pay the whole share or just the connection fee?

"Competing private entities"? Do you mean Comcast or AT&T? LOL!

Nobody stops Tim Cook from opening Apple Singapore or something like it and transferring IP properties to it. It won't be an inversion.

If these cars are not American then they are not produced in America and so taxation change doesn't cause any issues. If they ARE produced in America then they should pay taxes here. And competitiveness argument is bogus - it won't affect cars exported from the US and for the domestic market it will simply level the playing field.

You might not be familiar, but there's such a thing called "dilution". This contaminants have been diluted to levels that are not even detectable. Also, radiation burns after 170mSv? I smell a bullshit.

The amount of escaped radioactivity is nowhere fucking near even a kilo of plutonium, all the core material is still there. And yes, I'd stand in the water near the reactor without any worries. I would even drink it (after regular purification) and eat seafood captured nearby.

For your information, I actually worked for several months at the former Chernobyl power plant (we were installing ultrasonic monitoring devices to prepare for eventual construction of the new sarcophagus).

40 trillion Becquerels sounds like it's a lot - but remember, 1 Bq simply means one disintegration per second. My tritium keychain contains 74 gigabecquerels of radioactive material (2Ci)! So the total amount of the escaped radioactive material in Fukushima is equal to about 500 of those keychains: http://www.amazon.com/Titanium...

That's an absolutely utterly stupidly trivial amount.

Yes, however the US also gives you a tax credit on all the taxes paid abroad, on top of many deductions available to expats. So if you live in Sweden and pay 50% then you won't owe anything to the US (of course, these credits are non-refundable). The global taxation only becomes a serious issue if you earn more than $400k a year and live in a country with low tax rate (like Russia with flat 13% personal income tax).

I think that's a fair deal.

Nobody forces Apple to stay in the US. They can very well pack up their belongings and move to Ireland or Canada. Or maybe Somalia.

The thing is, the US market is still the biggest single market in the world and the US workforce is still the best on the planet. And companies simply abuse this.

So they become even shittier _and_ more expensive? Seriously, I can't remember a single case where privatization of a shitty service caused it to become better (at least without prices going up 10x).

What? Are there any sanctions? Perhaps all major newspapers wrote articles condemning Latvia's actions?

Nope. These Nazi wannabes at most get silence from the official Europe, if not outright support. And yes, they really _are_ Nazi wannabes - there are official parades of Waffen SS veterans there (not joking, http://rt.com/news/latvia-demo... ). And just recently the official Latvia blocked a genocide exhibition in UNESCO: http://www.jta.org/2015/01/21/... because it might have damaged Latvia's image (Holodomor exhibition a couple of months earlier was welcomed). Very freedom-of-speechy, I know.

So yes, I think that Europe should shut the hell up and first fix its own affairs first. There's nothing worse than outright hypocrisy.

I lived in Mountain View and was paying $1500 for a 1-bedroom apartment in a nice (well insulated walls, washing machine, fast Internet) apartment complex, within 5 minute walk from a Caltrain station. I could have gotten a 2-bedroom apartment in the same complex for $2000.

Yeah, SV is pretty expensive compared with middle-of-nowhere states, but it's definitely worth it.

Ok, I'll bite.

I'm in that 'wealthy' category and being single I probably pay more taxes than a married couple with children. All of the taxes apply gradually, so there's no difference whether you earn $249999.99 or $250000.01. And my tax lawyer ($5000 for all the consultations and paperwork) helped me to optimize my tax by quite a bit. So in the end, my effective total tax rate (including state taxes) is a little bit less than 30%, this year it'll be close to 28% because I moved much of my income into capital gains.

Apparently, quite a lot. On the very same day when millions chanted "Je suis Charlie" on streets, several Russian TV channels were banned in Latvia. Because of their "one-sided" view on certain events.

So yeah, I'm starting to think that European insistence on the 'freedom of speech' works only one way.