Can you imagine the dystopian dictatorship where trekkies come to power? All of the halls of power full of people walking around in spandex and fake ears and brow ridges, the fed directed to work toward the absolution of currency, the military directed to accelerate development of phasers and for all recruits to undergo "Kobayashi Maru" training.... NASA would finally get their proposed $18,5 billion dollar annual budget passed - except that the bill would have the word "annual" crossed out and the word "monthly" written in its place. National anti-bullying legislation would be passed, probably with a name like Spock's Law. And of course they'd insist on referring to the UN as the United Federation of Planets.

This is a really good idea from a resource utilization standpoint. Reminds me a lot of the power grid - you have to have enough hardware to handle the peak load, but idle capacity just costs you money.

No it doesn't. Because there are a lot of high school grads who don't have the skills they need to make $15/hr. When I say "youth" unemployment, I'm talking about people in their 20s.

To believe this meme you see lately that somehow ebil corporations are forcing us to pick up part of the tab for their employees, you'd have to believe nobody would work there if Medicaid and other social services didn't exist. Which is idiotic. No, the problem is there are lots of people who don't produce enough value for their labor to live the minimum lifestyle we consider acceptable.

So apparently the solution is to force them out of their jobs entirely. What do you think the response is going to be from businesses? "Oh well. I guess we just won't make as much money"? Were you born yesterday?

I love seeing this crap in American articles. "Oh Noes! If we pay people more, it will cost businesses more!"

That's not what people are saying. What we're syaing is if we pay people more, the people whose labor isn't worth the new minimum won't have a job at all. The progressives in the US have succeeded in turning the US into a European country. I hope they own it when youth unemployment is at 25% in a normal economy, and minimum wage isn't enough to pay for increases in the cost of living.

I didn't mind interacting with tellers before ATMs, and I don't mind using ATMs. I won't mind when I use automated ordering machines at McDonalds and eat machine-made burgers, either. But I think it's stupid for the government to force people out of their jobs.

From what I can tell, rehab does jack shit. People who want to get clean get clean. The others don't. The best we can do is give them pharmaceutical quality methadone so they don't die before they decide to get clean.

Despite what you hear from nutty ACs, Tea Party groups are based around fiscal conservatism. It's not a true party, and most of them choose not to take positions on issues unrelated to taxes and spending.

Except if you actually read the pages you're linking you see the drugs didn't get shipped to LA as part of the "Iran Contra fiasco". Despite the screeching from Crazy Maxine, the stories directly linking Iran Contra to drugs in the US turned out to be poorly sourced bullshit.

Do you think these places will actually be better off? Seems hard to believe. A big cash infusion like that isn't going to get spend only on guns. Those guys are buying things from legitimate businessmen.

That's what I was thinking. This is definitely one of those genie in the bottle stuffing exercises that's never going to work. Drug cartels have more money than God - either they'll hire their own scientists to reverse engineer the yeast strain, or someone will slip it to them for a suitcase full of cash.

The plan is to put VASIMR on the ISS for station keeping. The station may simply be too large to get decent data from a hall effect thruster.

Then we'll kill them all.

Yeah, bullshit. This is a crime carried out on US soil about US citizens, and you want me to worry about how the punishment is viewed by external criminal organizations? Nope. Don't care.

Seriously though, I don't see the level of cooperation required for this project persisting long enough to pull it off.

Of course given history, there will be disruptions, but it'll work out in the end. They are easily startled - but they'll be back, and in greater numbers.

I've seen this nonsense crop up more often lately. Yes, the price is whatever the market will bear. But assuming the government keeps a lid on cartel behavior the price the market ends up bearing will be lower as costs are reduced. If you don't think that will happen you should invest all your savings in trucking companies as soon as automated trucks clear the last regulatory hurdles.