The House of Representatives is "the people's house". That's why they stand for election every 2 years. And that's why all tax bills must originate in the House. Now, of course, that has been thoroughly subverted both by Gerrymandering and by Senate workflow (amend some House bill to replace all the text with a tax bill - see, it originated in the House!). But still, that was the clear intent.
 

This is the other kneejerk response to any suggestion of reduced government spending that needs to die forever.

1 - How about we cut government spending in some are other than the tiny percentage spent on protecting people against corporate abuse?

2 - We have a system in place for this. The problem with it is not that it's underfunded, but that it's been corrupted by the very corporations it tries to regulate! Arguably, stuff like the DMCA shows that more harm than good is done in some areas, thanks to this. This is perhaps the most serious problem in internal politics in America today but it's not in any way a funding problem.

Both times I lived in areas with high temps and humidities, no one even had a basement. When you're near the coast, and near sea level (typical of high humidity areas), underground anything is right out.

Government, police, etc will always be corrupt. Always. People are people. The only defense is to give them just barely enough resources to do their job, with no excess or space for overreach. It's all about taxes - taxes are the only practical weapon the common voter has against government overreach, and the Constitution was written with this fundamental truth firmly in mind.

Of course, of all of Congress there are but a handful of congresscritters who actually are for less government spending, and usually the voter's choice is merely between which group of supporters the tax money will go to. That's a cultural problem in the US, and we can't begin to fix it until every call for lower taxes stops being dismissed with "you anarchist and probable racist, why do you want 0 government".

Fixing the problem starts with popular acceptance of the idea that one can say we're sending too much without being some extremist calling for the end of government. Less does not mean none - spread the word!

At least they didn't give you the "I don't care, you still have to register" bureaucratic BS.

"Ulysses you old rat bastard, I'm not fallin' for that trick again. Let 'em secede."

But with the usual mess in government records, quite a number of dead souls.

The dead are often a pivotal election demographic.

Never seen an evangelical mega-church? You don't pass 10k members by without a lot of up-with-people let's-celebrate. But then again, they barely mention Jesus, and certainly don't mention sin - wouldn't want to offend anyone in the audience after all. But then, that's exactly why the fundies hate the evangelicals.

There are a couple of big religions that grew during medieval times, and so are very feudal in their structure, with God as the king-of-kings, and humility and suborning one's will to him are the key to salvation - this was after all the fundamental basis of feudal society. But that's just a handful of religions. Pantheistic religions have a different model. Religions without a deity seem to actually focus the most on humility for some reason, and like support your argument the best. But there sure are a variety of religions out there!

Objection: relevance.

These other things are not the topic of discussion. They are just red herrings to distract from the fact that the US appears to have acted in a civilized manner this time.

Civilized behavior should not be swept under the rug because you have a hate-on for some particular country. Your nonsense undermines the positive reinforcement that encourages good behavior and discourages bad behavior.

Doesn't matter if it's the US or Hezbollah.

Wow... reaching way back for the references now. Well done.

No. It was not a "sensible" comment for the time. Anyone with a lick of sense could see where the tech was going and could easily realize that you had to plan for the future.

PCs of the time were stuck in the kind of situation that Tannenbaum described not because of any inherent technical limitation but because Microsoft was a lame monopolistic sandbagger holding back the entire industry.

Even in 1992 there wasn't that much of a gap between the capabilities of proprietary Unix hardware and PCs. Some Unix machines even ran on microprocessors used by competing home computers.

That's why Linus created his own kernel to begin with.