I recently interviewed six candidates from Europe for a position that would be managed from the US. None of their CVs had an age or marital status. Perhaps they don't specify it for US based jobs. They all had graduation dates, so it wasn't hard to estimate their ages.

Once he selected NY as his state he was presented with a link to the NY site. That happened at the beginning of the federal site, before he started entering registration data. Once he got onto the NY site he had to enter registration data before he could compare plans.

My son just applied for insurance for his family through the NY exchange. I sat with him through the process just to see what it was like. The process was pretty painless and he found a plan that offered the same coverage as his current one for about $250 per month less. What I didn't like about the process is that you had to officially register in order to comparison shop.

It's not so much that they are throwing more bodies, but that for such a high profile web site they are just now bringing in the best and the brightest. Why weren't these people working on this project from the beginning? I don't know that it would have mattered though, as the main problem seems to have been that too much of the requirements were not well defined until too late in t he development cycle. Software projects get delayed all the time, but this one seems to have been pushed out before it was thoroughly tested. My guess is that plenty of people knew this thing was half baked, but that the release date couldn't slip for political reasons.

Without funding from a continuing resolution, how would Obama keep these facilities, national parks, monuments, etc. funded and running?

Doesn't it depend on whether the apps are considered to be something that is purchased at retail by the general consumer? Things like mechanical and powered wheelchairs, portable oxygen concentrators, glucose monitors and personal heart rate monitors are not taxed. NMR and x-ray machines are taxed.

Sea level rise is not uniform around the world. It can vary due to ocean currents and the prevailing wind patterns. The San Francisco Bay's level may also be affected by water flowing into it. Compare the graph you linked to to the following locations. They all have different rates of change. Atlantic City, NJ looks to have twice rate of increase of San Francisco. Galveston is increasing at three times the rate of San Francisco. There may be natural forces holding back the sea level rise at San Francisco, but even those can hold back the sea for only so long.

http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8534720
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8771450
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8724580
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=9410170

I live in upstate NY, in the Finger Lakes region. Our power is pretty reliable. There are outages, but nothing like a couple of hours monthly. Two or three times per year we lose power briefly. We lost power for several hours once in the last year. All of our power outages seem to happen during high wind events that cause trees to fall on power lines.

You don't seem to be saying that pension plans aren't underfunded, but that companies adequately funded their pension plans based on generally accepted guidelines. That may be the case, but it could be argued that those guidelines were inadequate or had so much wiggle room that it permitted companies to underfund their pension plans year after year and still say they were meeting their obligations. Many pension plans have assumed an unrealistic rate of return, which permitted them to contribute less than was needed to insure their pension plans were adequately funded. Many corporations, despite record profits, have underfunded their pension plans. Since it wasn't an immediate problems corporate boards just avoided the problem by generally ignoring it. Take IBM, for example. IBM's pension plan has obligations of $106.1 billion, it has assets of $91.7 billion. IBM could have put more into its pension plan to insure that it didn't have a $14 billion gap, but it would rather use that money towards its goal of an EPS of $20 in 2015.

Private pension plans have reached a record level of underfunding. As reported here, companies in Standard & Poor’s 500 collectively reported that at the end of their most recent fiscal years, their pension plans had obligations of $1.68 trillion and assets of just $1.32 trillion. General Electric's pensions are underfunded by over $20 billion. AT&T, Boeing, Exxon Mobil, Ford Motor, I.B.M. and Lockheed Martin all have pension plans that are underfunded by over $10 billion. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which insures pensions, has a deficit of over $30 billion. The PBGC attributes its shortfall to its inability to charge private employers adequate premiums for insuring pensions. When a private pension plan goes bust there's no guarantee that workers will get anywhere near what they had been promised. The PBGC ensures a maximum of $45,000 a year in benefits for those who retired at 65, but considerably less for those who retired younger. The PBGC's maximum coverage for those who retire at 60 is $28,000. It's not too hard to find instances of retirees seeing their pensions falling by 50% when the company funding them goes bankrupt.

My Thinkpad W530 has 32GB of RAM. Maybe you need a new PC.

Is there any evidence that roundup ready crops are less nutritious?

It would be interesting to see what what China's numbers would look like without its impoverished rural population.

You can't compare the entire US to France, and that wasn't my point, but France is a huge piece of Europe. I don't think you can find a similarly large portion of the US that is as dependent on nuclear. And while climate does give an advantage to Europe, I have noticed that Europeans tend to be more conservative in they ways that they use energy. I think this is a result of the US historically having such vast stores of fossil fuel and Europe being impoverished after WWII. If energy is relatively more expensive you are going to be more frugal in your use of it. The US is making progress, but it has a long way to go before it's on a par with Western Europe.

A lot of the reason there is more forest in the US is that areas like the northeast US have seen a drastic drop off in small farms. This has resulted in a lot of land reverting to forest. I live in rural upstate NY and when I hike through the woods it is not uncommon to come across the foundations of buildings or the remnants of apple orchards. A lot of fields are no longer used for grazing and are starting to revert to forest. When cities do expand it's frequently not at the expense of forests but farmland, so there is no contradiction in saying that a region's population has grown tremendously but its forest have not declined very much.