Hahaha. Trust me, if you think Chicago is bad you should see New York and LA.

Hollywood and New York are the original crony capitalism groups, by definition. Look at the NY judge that made up his own rules just to rule in the NSA's favor yesterday! Those rules and facts that he used don't even exist! If that's not a clear "I am sucking at the government teat" then I don't know what is.

Chicago's corruption is the police force, but not the legal system itself. New York's is 100% regulatory capture.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131230/11062925713/judge-who-ruled-favor-nsa-relied-911-report-that-doesnt-even-mention-what-he-claims-it-does.shtml

What makes you think it takes Chicago to be corrupt? The irony is the second he came in office he started trying to do good things on occasion and mostly tried to not do anything to change, well, anything. Which is a big problem considering some very bad things that have come along in his presidency and continued during it (such as our illegal war camps, fueling more wars, not repealing the patriot act, etc) - obamacare not actually being an illegal thing or entirely terrible concept, although allowing other politicians to have obamacare coverage for free being 100% BS.

That wasn't favoritism, that was corporatism. Apple was a big donor to Obama's campaign and Samsung wasn't as big a donor.

It's no better in any form, but put the blame where the blame is due.

So, is the solution then that consumers themselves need a way to store some of the energy they generate? Or is that (in comparison to generating the electricity) prohibitively expensive?

Unfortunately I don't have a good way to not put you on the spot, but I'm curious - what are your thoughts for how to make this more fair? Are you saying the utility shouldn't be paying the consumer for the electricity? Or just that consumers + utility need to meet in the middle regarding fees, etc? I don't really know anything about the real cost to benefit ratios of solar myself.

I said county, not country. Reading fail.

Guess which of those locations is more likely to house fires?

That should sum up the potential of whether it's likely the Tesla was faulted or not. Whether that's idle speculation or not at this point, the fact that the county appears ready to speculate with no confirmed facts is actually very concerning.

So that you have to replace your entire phone if you have a bad sim.

I'm not sure how that's a good thing, but I'm guessing the carriers didn't think about that.

Not only that, but imagine what happens when they refuse to assist you in switching?

When you have a physical sim you can swap it yourself. You have no such choice if you don't have control over the sim.

This is actually a very large loss to phone users unless you can reprogram it yourself.

Techdirt covers a lot of the shit that is going on from a strongly unbiased (and fact driven) perspective. I strongly suggest reading their articles in coverage of the NSA, Apple, and really anything technology. That is the true informed US view which some people share, not this kind of blatant propaganda. Some, not all. Lawrence Lessig's rootstrikers is a movement focused on fixing the whole american politics problem at it's source - lobbying money.

I do unfortunately agree that misinformed inflammatory coverage does always pull in far more views, but then again it's the same as the politicians below and for the same reason: The politicians do compromise, but only to their constituents - which have shifted from those who vote to those who write their effectively larger paycheck via lobbying. So unless there is significant outrage the politicians don't tend to do anything.

Follow the money. All of broadcast news comes from 1 or 2 sources, so the rest is just posturing for funding.

So let me get this straight, you're asking me to prove a negative but taking his own anecdotes at face value? Do you realize the idiocy in such a claim? Corn subsidies are why we have such ethanol production.

I do not need to waste my time digging up studies, a single google search will find evidence as it's been discussed throughout the fucking thread. Waste of my fucking time to even post this reply.