Anyone that has a Taxpayer Identification number(read social security number) is required to report. The banks ask you at the time of creation of an account if you have one, and if you do then you have to fill out a special form and they report all your assets to the US government, despite you know, the government not needing to know any of this. If we get married then she gets a TIN and then has to report all this shit. And of course the ironic thing is that this is going to cost way more than it is going to bring in. So the US is pissing people off and fucking over it's citizens all in the name of losing money......

The biggest kick in the pants though is that this act has got me siding with the Republicans. I've officially renounced my membership in the democratic party over this turd of a law. Not insane enough to become a Republican but.

Um, are you aware of FATCA? It is basically the financial version of this verdict. It forces any financial institution anywhere in the world. It even demands that US citizens who have signing powers on bank accounts for their companies report the balance to the US government. And it's not only US citizens, it's everyone who is of "US interest". As a US citizen abroad let me tell you this sucks, this sucks hard. It's now harder for me to get a bank account, I'm engaged to a national of the country I'm residing in, and as soon as I get married she is going to have to report all her bank balances to the US government. I've never thought about renouncing my US citizenship until now, the US government has no business sticking its nose in when it doesn't belong. This has been a pattern of late, and Obama in some regards is worse than Bush. The US government needs to realize it's not 1950 anymore and they don't have economic hegemony anymore...

There is a non-trivial fee associated with cash too. Cash requires labor to move/protect it, can go "missing" much more easily than credit card transactions etc. Cards are probably still more expensive, but not by as much as you may think.

When someone is shooting at you with a rifle, do you not take cover if the bullet will not hit you? How would you even know that the bullet will not hit you?

You duck, duh! Haven't you ever played Contra, bullets are easy to dodge! If you can't duck, jump over the bullet.

No, "publish or perish" really dis-incentivizes novel research because guess what, often times really novel research fails. All "publish or perish" really does is incentivize either cheating or the lowest risk research imaginable. There are other mechanisms for making sure a researcher is actually doing their work, punishing them for taking risks shouldn't be among them.

Homestarrunner I think works better as a part time project. While the updates over the past few years have been sparse, they have also been very inspired and incredibly hilarious. I can't say the same about the cartoons they were making towards the end when they were doing it every week. They still may kickstart, but I would much rather see sporadic but absolutely hilarious updates to h*runner than lots of bland ones.

Damnit Microsoft, when are you going to finally include a Plutonium macro in Excel!

Jobs family, while not poor, certainly was nowhere near as wealthy as Gates'.

There is evidence that China's one child policy is what enabled it to grow far faster than India did(though there are people that argue that India's younger population will eventually be an economic asset rather than a drag on the economy). In 1980 China and India's economies were at about the same size, but China has grown far faster than India, and many argue that the one child policy was what allowed this to happen. By limiting the # of children people could have they could invest more capital per student, and measures like the literacy rate show that this effort paid off.

You should read "Player Piano" by Vonnegut if you haven't already. While some things like really rich engineers and of course the obligatory 50's reference to a computer with a massive # of vacuum tubes didn't come to pass, his depiction of what we do with the "excess" people is spot on. The basics are that they either go into the Army or join the "Reaks and Recs", basically a gang of workers that isn't needed, but gets employed by the government to do meaningless jobs so they can "earn" a paycheck. Honestly it's the most accurate prediction of modern society I have seen in any book that was written more than 50 years ago.

You really think that this kind of shit doesn't go on in other countries? The biggest difference between them and the NSA is that they either a) openly admit to spying on their own citizens(China) or b) Are much better at covering their ass.

You are ignoring things like asymmetric risk. If I buy a kit and cannot sell it for more than I paid for it, I can return it*. If Oculus Rift builds more dev kits than people are willing to buy, they can't just go back to the component manufacturers and say, "I bought too many of these, please give me back my money". So no, it's not "capitalism", if it were pure capitalism then we wouldn't have any consumer protection laws and they couldn't return any un-used merchandise(which would probably put the kibosh on these kinds of shenanigans but at a cost that isn't worth it).

I'm assuming there is a return policy, laws in most countries would probably support the consumer if they tried to return an unopened product in a reasonable time window.

I give you an 8.7, your argument is logical and you made it passionately, but your posture is terrible and you didn't sell it with your body language. Improve on those points and you might qualify for the state championship!

By your logic then this morning what I saw rummaging through my garbage was a black dinosaur. However it wasn't nearly as scary as those dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. For starters it's roar sounded more like a "caw caw", and it was afraid of a broom....

For a lot of reasons really. First of all, the article doesn't say where in Chiba prefecture this find was made, while there is a small part of Chiba prefecture that is close to Tokyo(including the part that is home to Tokyo Disney), the prefecture itself is quite large and includes a large peninsula that is quite a long distance from Tokyo.

Secondly, even in Tokyo proper if you travel to any point in the city that is more than a 10-15 minute walk from a station(and there are plenty of them) you will find plenty of run-down and abandoned buildings. Property in Tokyo seems to follow an inverse square law, the value is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the closest station.