The minivan suffers a stigma in America today.... It's viewed as a vehicle for moms who need to shuttle the kids and their things around. That hurts sales because even many of the moms who squarely fit into that category don't want to feel like they're defined by that part of their life. They don't want to drive a vehicle around that tells everyone that's what their purpose is on the planet -- especially when so many families are dual-income and they'd like to look more "professional".

It seems it's unavoidable though? As soon as enough people buy a functional alternative to avoid the stigma, they begin putting the same stigma on the alternative choice. Not that long ago, the station wagon held this distinction, and yet now -- driving a station wagon is viewed as trendy in a hipster way!

Honestly though, I think the minivan could enjoy a resurgence in popularity if it was approached from a slightly different angle. Make it *really* easy for all of the seats to fold flat (like "push a button and they all retract into the floor" easy), and market it to the homeowners who currently shop for light trucks! I know I've owned a couple of pickups because they were so darn functional and useful for things like hauling away yard waste or picking up a furniture or appliance purchase, or just helping a buddy move. But their big downside is the lack of any protection from the weather for the cargo, while driving. For 99% of the things I ever hauled around in my truck, I could have used a minivan just as well, if it didn't have seats in the way.

Can't really speak for the poster you're chastising .... but perhaps at least some of his anger is perfectly justified? IMO, the core issue is that our government is still very much caught up in the idea that we want it to legislate our safety, even when it costs us our personal freedom.

Many U.S. citizens really aren't on-board with that. Some of us actually dare to question why, for example, we should receive citations from police for not wearing a helmet while riding a motorcycle, or for choosing not to fasten a seat-belt in a vehicle. (Heck, a cop on a motorcycle that has no seat belts might be the one to issue you that seat belt violation when you get pulled over! +1 Irony.)

By the same token, I think many of us (myself included) view the FAA's real reason for existence having to do with commercial aircraft. Letting them waste time and energy on drone aircraft, flying at low altitudes and operated for entertainment, hobby or other such purposes seems pretty far out of that scope of authority. The whole argument that, "A drone might crash land and injure somebody it falls on!" or "It might collide with someone's property and damage it!" strikes me as something we already have plenty of laws in place to handle. What happens when you drive your car off the road and damage someone's front yard and fence? What happens if you throw something heavy out an upstairs window and it hits some passer-by on the head as he walks down the sidewalk? Substitute a drone as the object engaged in the impact -- and you'll realize it can be handled without ANY advance regulation by the FAA.

I agree with you about the tech companies and the lack of flexibility with training. Even if you're not a programmer, but simply want a job related to the I.T. infrastructure (network engineer, systems administrator, etc.) -- you run across the same mentality. There's typically a belief, internally, that nobody has time to train a person to get them up to speed on what they're doing. Better to be REALLY specific about what you need, and let the H.R. drones find you a good match.

Then whenever that comes up short, the larger companies especially will go to the H1B VISA idea, because "Hey... if you can't find a great match, at least find someone who says they'll work here for less money, so we can cost justify the extra time it will probably take us to get that guy up to speed."

About nursing specifically, though? My mom was a registered nurse and taught nursing for most of her life. As long as I can remember, she *always* advised people that jobs in the nursing homes or "long term care facilities" were the bottom of the barrel. Those are the jobs nursing professionals accept as "first jobs" when trying to get a career started, or quite frankly, for those who never did very well in nursing school and lack the motivation to do what it takes to go further in the field.

The elderly care situation in this country is in really bad shape, all the way around, though. Complaining that nursing homes are looking at foreign labor to save money amounts to complaining about only one symptom of the problem.... Nursing care facilities are chock-full of corruption; often charging very large fees to residents but basically leaving the people to lie in bed and die after that. I'm pretty sure if you followed the money, you'd find a massive amount of it that's not going back into the business at all.

Let me preface this by saying I think Limbaugh has become a self-important blowhard, who spends hours saying nothing, just to hear himself talk on the radio. I'm also no fan of the vast majority of idiots signed up as members of the Republican party.

But let's not try to cherry-pick historical events to make conclusions that just aren't there..... The Great Depression might have shown signs of going away before WWII, but you'd have to be kind of crazy to back the idea that America's prosperous period after WWII had nothing to do with winning the war! Essentially, on this one, Rush actually *is* right. Heck, if nothing else, one could make a strong argument that the war put America in an advantageous place in the world market simply because other major competitors were knocked out for a while. (It's easy to look good when the other players are still rebuilding decimated manufacturing capabilities and so on.)

And no... "massive govt. spending and growth" from WWII wasn't the magic ticket to prosperity.... Fools like GWB seemed to believe this, and America found out the hard way that you can't just dump a ton of money into having a war and expect automatic prosperity to result.

In reality, if America had some way to win WWII without all of the military expenditures, we would have been that much MORE well-off, post war, than we were.

Now, arguing about banking regulations, specifically? Yes, I think it's pretty widely understood that the deregulation in the Reagan era (and let's be honest here ... much of that had more to do with Reagan's economic advisers than Reagan himself) turned out pretty bad. If you had to put a face and a name to those ideas, you'd probably pin most of it on Alan Greenspan, who eventually admitted himself that he was wrong. (Essentially, he felt he did the right thing, philosophically speaking -- but didn't think the people put in charge of banking would be so short-sighted and irresponsible to do some of the things they were ABLE to do with the regulations lifted. Basically, he was guilty of believing too much in some of the people who supposedly could make wise business decisions.)

If you want to talk fundamental change that would actually help America's situation today? We've GOT to get rid of the Corporatism. Big businesses can NOT be allowed to infiltrate government and effectively become another arm of it! Too many people, today, have this simplistic notion that big businesses are evil/bad/wrong, and need to be forcibly dismantled -- or forced to give up a portion of their wealth to "everyone else". Big business, itself, is not the problem. A big business is just one of those small businesses people like to cheer for that did well enough, it got bigger and hired a lot more people. The PROBLEM comes in when government accepts financial gifts from said businesses for favors, or allows people with direct ties to the businesses to take key positions inside government itself and proceeds to get new legislation made/approved that only benefits those businesses.

IMO, Obama is just as guilty of perpetuating this as any of our last few presidents -- and the results are like a snowball rolling downhill. For example:

http://www.newyorker.com/onlin...

Umm.... Are you confusing the store with Harbor Freight, perhaps?

Seriously, I've had no problem with Home Depot's product line, all in all. Like most stores, they do sell at least a few different grades of tools or items -- and buying the cheapest version is likely to lead to long-term disappointment. But other than the fact they seem to be catering a bit more towards residential customers (while Lowe's leans the other direction, offering more products the contractors want to buy), they're ok.

As has been pointed out already, the "How many employees does MS need?" question is ridiculous, as there's no way ANY of us here is qualified to give even an approximate answer that's not just a complete guess.

That said, it *is* possible to talk specifics and point out areas where improvement is needed.

The last I heard, Microsoft had an internal structure where those developing new applications weren't the ones responsible for debugging them. They just spit out the code, and another team would have to fix/clean it up. To me, that makes absolutely NO sense, as the people best qualified to get a program running right are the ones who wrote it in the first place! I've heard that's one of the things that's going to change to improve efficiency, and if true -- I sure hope so, even if it means laying some people off.

I also understand that finally, the Mac and the Windows Office developers have been instructed to work as a team -- vs. treating the Mac Office developers as an isolated group in the company. (That *may* have been originally done based on a silly interpretation of the financials, vs. any true benefit to the development of the code? I remember the Mac division of Microsoft once bragging that it earned the highest profit margin of any division in the company, per employee hired -- simply because it was such a small team.)

I will say I find it telling that even Intel corporation has over 20,000 fewer employees than Microsoft does, right now. I can't really imagine that chip development and sales by the world leader in that area would require less manpower than Microsoft needs to sell and support some of the code people can run on those chips?

You'd think/hope that a company like Microsoft would have hired a pool of pretty intelligent and talented people. The brand name alone means they can advertise a new opening and get the "cream of the crop" chomping at the bit to work for them and submitting resumes.

Now they're essentially saying, "We've got at least 18,000 hires here who we can't figure out a way to do anything useful with that would earn us enough money to keep paying them, so we've got to let them all go."

What does that say about the company's vision and management abilities?

The suggestion by the service rep. that the 105 mbit speeds were "guaranteed" is insanity!

Even in cases where a customer pays about 2x the normal price for Comcast's business class service, the speeds are absolutely NOT guaranteed! My workplace uses Comcast in a couple of our offices (pulled it out of others, where better options were available), and we suffer fairly regular service interruptions/outages which are very disruptive because our internal phone system runs over VoIP. Comcast never credits us a dime for the time the service is down, and even when it's simply under-performing, they'll remind us that "cable broadband is a best-effort delivery mechanism; not a guaranteed level of service".

If you're on a residential connection? Good luck with even reaching a live person to voice a service complaint! Unlike the business customers, residential users typically get tossed into a call queue that requires a 45 minute to 60 minute hold time to speak with someone.

I'm using Comcast broadband at home, myself (again, because no other options exist where I live except for Verizon's 6 mbit DSL - which IMO, hardly even qualifies as an option). I've found that the service is reasonably good at delivering what they promise (although I'd say it averages about one outage per month), but everything from customer service to sales is lousy. They've changed around programming packages so often, it can be difficult to even figure out which high speed options are offered in your area. (I initially wanted something at least comparable to the 85 mbit FiOS service I used to have at my old address, but the Comcast literature all claimed my options were getting 50 mbits with a "Blast" package, or paying somewhere close to $200 per month for some kind of 150 mbit "Extreme" package. Gritting my teeth, I decided to just pay the high cost and try the 150 mbit service, only to be told I wasn't even able to buy it if I was doing a "self install" (using my own cable modem), which I was trying to do. Comcast wanted to charge me $250 or so for a guy to come out here and do the installation, which there was NO WAY I'd pay for since the place was pre-wired from the previous homeowner and I had the best-in-class Motorola modem ready to use.

So THEN I found out if I just went with that 50 mbit Blast package, I'd actually get 100 mbits with it because Comcast "recently doubled the speeds, for free, in most of the Northeastern U.S.". Great, I guess?! But what lousy marketing to hide that from people and trick some people into paying far more to get the overpriced 150 mbit service they might not have even really wanted.

Seriously, the release of the W9100 means the 2013 Mac Pro no longer has the latest FirePro chipset in it ... making it a great opportunity to see if Apple will actually release video card upgrades for this machine, or if it's true that owners will just be stuck with whatever was ordered with it.

This study's findings simply say the same thing MANY of us have been repeating for decades now about such "intellectual property" as movies, music or computer games. If you're talking about content created for entertainment purposes, the fact that people have the ability to make duplicate copies of it and share it with others (bypassing your centralized, for-pay distribution system for it) doesn't mean you'll really lose much, if any, potential profit.

The #1 factor is convenience. When people want to be entertained, they typically have a limited time window they're able to use for it. (EG. You finally get a chance to get together with your friends on a weekend, when nobody has to go in to work, and your plan is to go watch a new movie that all of you want to see. If you aren't able to see it during THAT narrow time slot? Then chances are you're not going to see it at all.)

The theaters are ready to take your money and show you that movie, at one of a number of convenient, published time slots. All you have to do is show up.

That's always going to trump someone's plan to reproduce the same experience by downloading a pirated copy of the movie (probably having to screw around with it multiple times to find a copy encoded with the right language, no annoying subtitles, and in good enough quality), and THEN having to provide an enjoyable enough viewing experience for it. Even in the era of home theaters, how many of us really have such a setup at home where we'd be proud to show downloaded movies to our friends, knowing they'd enjoy it just as much as going out to the movie with us? I *used* to have a half way decent approximation at my old house, but since I moved, I don't anymore. I'd have to spend many thousands of dollars finishing part of our basement to even consider replicating it again.....

Truthfully though, the airlines themselves are also doing a good job of it.

The last couple of times my pre-teen daughter had to get on a plane to fly to visit relatives/family, I had her fly as an unaccompanied minor. What a friggin' hassle! First off, you're typically charged an extra $150 or so for the "service", but even more inconveniently? Airline web sites are poorly designed to handle this extra detail, so the process often screws you out of frequent flyer miles you should really have earned for purchasing your kid's flight (name on the boarding pass doesn't match name of the ticket purchaser), and you often have to re-enter some information twice on the web site to place the ticket order properly.

Then they have all of the hoops you have to jump through as part of the boarding process. You have to accompany your kid to the gate, so you've got to go through the security checkpoint yourself, even though you're not the one getting on the plane. You've got to wait behind after your kid is on the plane until the plane actually leaves the runway, too. And it seems like every time, people working at the ticket counter manage to screw up the whole check-in process. (Someone always fails to understand the procedure and neglects to issue you your pass saying you're accompanying someone else but not boarding the plane, or they don't have ANY of the information you provided in detail when buying your kid's ticket, such as names and numbers of who will be picking them up at their destination.)

Except for Southwest, it seems like pretty much all of the airlines are charging you at least $25 per bag for each piece of luggage you bring along, too. And at the same time? They just reduced the max. allowable dimensions of carry-on luggage by 1 lousy inch ... just enough to make a bunch of expensive luggage obsolete.

I know a couple of people who work for the TSA too, and sadly, they view all of this stuff as amusing ways to irritate the general public, who they regard as generally stupid and annoying in the first place.

If you corner them on any of the security policies, they'll readily admit they don't necessarily enhance security or serve a useful purpose. They just feel like all of that is unimportant, vs. the expectation that travelers just "follow the orders and instructions". If you don't cooperate, you're one of those "stupid and annoying people who can't follow directions" - so they ridicule you and enjoy your suffering as they put you through extra screening, detain you, or what-not.

It's funny how you can take practically anyone, dress them up in a uniform and a badge, and give them some sort of arbitrary control or power over others, and they suddenly feel superior.

Yeah.... like most things, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Comcast, to their credit, did boost speeds for most broadband customers, across the board, without raising prices for it. Last year in the DC area, one of our offices was given a speed boost from 80mbit to 100mbit service at no charge -- and I recently discovered I was able to order residential 100mbit Comcast service in Maryland at the price I was initially told was for 50mbits.

On the flip-side, there are SO many outstanding examples of these companies NOT doing obviously needed upgrades. In Frederick, MD, for example, the cellular network is still basically on a 2G/EDGE type network, due to a lack of upgrading the cell towers. AT&T works well with 4G data speeds there now, but they seem to be the only carrier who bothered to put newer infrastructure in place to cover the area. Sprint and T-Mobile are nearly useless, and Verizon is spotty at best.

As another example, look at Verizon FiOS. After they took big payments from the government to deploy broadband to more places, they wound up only cherry picking a relative few cities, with a "long term plan" of simply filling out gaps in service in those areas. There really aren't any future plans to expand FiOS to new cities or states that never had it. Didn't stop upper management from taking big pay increases though.

There is no "trust issue" using a service like Uber, at least here in the U.S.

To be honest, I'm far less trusting of the established taxi services.

Let me give you just one example:

Here in the Washington D.C. area, you'll have a really difficult time if you live in Maryland or Virginia and you need to catch a cab back home from D.C. Why? Because cabbies realize they're not allowed to pick up new fares from those adjacent states. If they have to drive you back to MD or VA, then they're stuck driving back to D.C. again before they can make more money. The law says they're not allowed to refuse you once you're in the cab and the vehicle is in motion ... but it presents an awkward situation where those "in the know" are often forced to hail a cab, and then purposely stall when the driver asks "Where to?", until he/she begins moving. Then they spring the news that they need to go back to an address in VA or MD.

With the online competitors, everything is up-front and clear, before you ever have to interact at all with a driver. I know I'd feel much better with an online confirmation that my ride is one the service accepted and the driver won't have any hard feelings about the arrangement once I'm in the vehicle.

Furthermore, I don't see why there's any real reason to believe a cab driver working for the established taxi services will be a more honest, straight-forward guy than someone working for a service like Uber? Many of Uber's drivers come from the industry in the first place. (It's a popular way for limo drivers to earn some extra money in their downtime, for example. With limos, people often pay to be taken someplace where the driver then has to wait HOURS for them to come back out to go to the next place. Why not take an Uber fare or two, nearby, during that time instead?) Cab drivers, by contrast, often feel entitled in a sense.... working for a powerful unionized group. They regularly play games like claiming a credit card machine in the cab is broken, because they'd rather take the cash .....

Each and every time I watch a city get into this "cabs vs. Uber" war, it plays out pretty much the same way. Every single potential user/customer of the services I hear voice an opinion is happy to see the competition and often has something positive to say about Uber, specifically.

Everyone who speaks out against it is some kind of government official or union member of the protected cab cartel.

Oh, you *might* get some talking head on the TV news who claims to take an interest in "public safety", telling you how unsafe it is to get in some stranger's vehicle when he/she isn't a licensed cab driver ... but at the end of the day, I think we all know they're just shills for the establishment.

I've tried Uber myself and frankly, I was amazed at how much more organized the experience was than hailing a cab. Among other benefits, I immediately received an email receipt documenting the trip's total mileage with start and end points, and even how much fuel was used. Regarding safety? Uber's app even showed me a photo of the person who would be picking us up as soon as the ride was ordered, making sure I wasn't getting in the wrong person's vehicle. No cab service I've seen can do that.

A better mousetrap has been built!