Looking at all taxes, people getting minimum wage pay quite a lot. The effective federal income tax actually paid by someone in the $13-15K/yr income bracket on their adjusted gross income (that's before exemptions and deductions other than student loan interest - the other adjustments basically don't apply at this income level) is slightly lower than you estimated, about 3- 4% ($600 on $15K is 4%), but they also have to pay 12.4% SS, 2.9% Medicare, about 10% in state taxes and duties including sales tax, fees and so forth. Their total tax burden is around 27%.

After paying the average $2.2K/yr for individual insurance, their taxes are 42% of what's left.
Allowing just $700/month for rent and food and all the the other necessities to keep their shitty job, taxes eat all the rest.
(That's assuming full time with paid vacations and holidays - i.e. about $2.3K more than realistic. $600 is a better estimate)

On the other hand, if they pay the 2.5% penalty rather than buy insurance, their effective tax rate drops from 42% to 29% and they can spend $750 to $900 per month. For many minimum-wage workers, that's the difference between impossible and merely difficult.

It was not handheld. It weighed over 300 hundred pounds, maybe as much as a tonne. The connection between the barrels and the main box must have been structural, though active and flexible - "a wrist-thick bundle of black tubes and cables" is all he says about that.

It made so many holes that it destroyed the structural integrity of the boat, and the unsupported upper bits started collapsing due to their own weight. The rounds are 0.3mm wide and lets say we need 1km of holes - that's 3.33e6 rounds. If the rounds are 2mm long cylinders made out of uranium, that's exactly 9kg of ammo. Over ten kilometers worth of holes would be possible. This thing was like a waterjet, but using uranium moving at a substantial fraction of orbital velocity.

The power is not impossible given that it's nuclear-powered and is using the ocean as a heat sink. If the rounds are moving at 5km/s and firing 27kg per minute, that's 5.6MW.

Given those numbers, the force is 2250N = 506 lbf. There are four guys, some equipment and supplies and this super-weapon on the raft. It's likely an under-estimate, but let's say 1250 lbs. That's 4m/s acceleration, 0.4 gravity. That would get them up to 23 knots in 3 seconds, if there were no drag. But there is a lot of drag, it's a raft. Just like in the book, they'll move away quickly, but the acceleration will fall off quickly, too. When firing stops, they'll slow down quickly.

Yes, it's extreme. That's the whole point. But it isn't physically impossible.

I was slightly skeptical until you mentioned the tweed coat, and the elbow patches really nailed it down. You should really invest in some briar pipes and Balkan Sobranie.

This sentence is ambiguous, though: "And despite one (at least) slightly shoddy episode with a fulsome grad student in the early 80's, I've got a stellar reputation in the field." At least one episode, or at least slightly shoddy? Was the the grad student effusive, generous or simply "full and well developed"? Hmm... perhaps the ambiguity is artful.

I agree though that "biocuration" is a barbarous term. Arthur Clarke had a good put-down of that sort of thing in "Silence Please" in Tales From the White Hart:

"....Sound waves consist of alternate compressions and rarefactions."
"Rare-what?"
"Rarefactions."
"Don't you mean 'rarefications'?"
"I do not. I doubt if such a word exists, and if it does, it shouldn't," retorted Purvis, with the aplomb of Sir Alan Herbert dropping a particularly revolting neologism into his killing-bottle.

From what I have seen the funded Kickstarter project success rate is way higher than VCs, with much less money.

Fidgeting in your chair should be a pretty strong positive signal. Michael Dell came to my Austin boarding school for career night back when he was only worth about $20M. The man simply could not sit still. He fidgeted like a whole third grade class. (He also gave a presentation on managing growth that was not all that useful to anybody there. We need to know how to have some growth before we can manage it.) Steven Weinberg's talk the same night wasn't all that much more helpful, something about how the math in superstring theory was threatening to break his brain. He looked like the results of thirty years of all-nighters. The twelve or so of us who showed up were impressed, but it didn't really help with the career thing. I doubt a VC would have shelled out money to either of them based on that night's performance though.

Where Dell really shone was in salesmanship. My family visited him back when he was selling refurbished computers out of a 2nd floor apartment (not a dorm room). Most people don't know he sold Apple gear in the early days. He had an Apple III there which was apparently just so he could advise people against getting one. This obviously raised the trust level (and if the customer wouldn't take the advice, well, at least Dell could unload the POS.) I think we ended up getting our 2nd hand Lisa from his company later, but it might have been CompuAdd.

I don't think Dell ever needed VC money - he was profitable from day one, and when he had cash flow issues, his loans mostly came from unwitting suppliers, or so I have heard. There's no doubt that he could have gotten VC money, he was just too smart to accept the loss of equity and control he would have had to take.

The owner of the equipment says it's OK, the user is an employee with no right to privacy on the employers' machine.

What lack of recoil? p.337-8:

Hiro's feet go out from under him as the raft moves suddenly; he can see Eliot falling down next to him.

He looks up at Bruce Lee's ship and flinches involuntarily as he sees what looks like a dark wave cresting over the rail, washing over the row of standing pirates, starting at the stern of the trawler and working its way forward. But this is just some kind of optical illusion. It is not really a wave at all. Suddenly, they are fifty feet away from the trawler, not twenty feet. ...
"Fucking recoil pushed us halfway to China," Fisheye says appreciatively.

Since I'm on that page, here's the best line:

"I didn't mean to blow it all up. I guess the little bullets just go through everything."
"Sharp thinking, Fisheye," Hiro says

You're right and should get an "insightful" mod.

"p=mv "
Yes, my point exactly. The effective mass is not a constant, it depends on water drag. Bad idea to tattoo it on my ass, though, given your propensity for fucking up things with that equation.

Since you read the article yourself you know that these seeds aren't patented; they haven't been since 2004. Monsanto is owed nothing, the farmers can buy their seed from whomever they like. This isn't about some dodgy farmers "stealing" seeds - or even replanting them without authorization, it's about Brazil's highest court refuting the outrageous lies and misrepresentations of lying corporate lickspittles like yourself.

Another example of such a lie is your bizarre claim that cross-pollination has somehow been "debunked". I suppose that putting in a gene for herbicide resistance somehow wipes out tens of millions of years of plant reproductive processes? Roundup-ready (RR) soybeans must produce pollen or they couldn't self-pollinate and produce soybeans. Maybe you want us to think that Monsanto's superior race of beans are a whole new species that can't fertilize der unter-beans? Ja, anything else must be a conspiracy theory or something.

No, cross- pollination of other types of soy by RR is a fact. A farmer's shipment of beans usually comes from different fields which will have been planted with different seeds in different seasons over the years, some plants among which have self-seeded from prior crops, others of which may adjoin neighbors RR fields and have been pollinated by those plants. Monsanto takes a few to a few-hundred gram sample of this big, mixed bin of beans. This sample has several hundred to a few thousand beans. Even if the fields were entirely seeded this year with non-RR beans, there is a good chance that there is a bean or 10 in that sample with RR genes. The sample is ground up together, they run a PCR on it before doing their single-gene test. Any contamination will read the same as if the whole sample were RR. And why would Monsanto want it any other way?

And then there's your ham-handed attempt to tar everybody who doesn't buy your lies as a "conspiracy nutjob". Oh no! Not that! I guess we have to shut up and agree with this comically inept corporate shill, or he might call us conspiracy theorists again! Dude, corporations by definition are criminal conspiracies if they do anything against the law or even plan to. Every corporation has groups of people working together in secret to get more money for the corporation, and it is common for them to sail as close to the wind as they think they can. In a big corporation with many lawyers and lobbyists, what's merely "close to the wind" for them would sometimes be well over the line for others.

I would enjoy mocking you and your inane sub-literate blatherings further, but upon excessively sober reflection, I believe proceeding past mere elevation and essaying an quasi-asymptotic approach to the crapulous seems like the more salubrious and intellectually engaging option. (Translation: I'm off to the pub.)

No, the yield isn't any better, it just doesn't die when you dump certain kinds of poison on it. Contamination with Monsanto products makes your formerly organic crop worth half as much and may force you to spend a great deal of time and money on lawyers, too.

Well, technically the licensing agreement is what they like to rely on first. There are no laws that directly prohibit re-planting seeds which have a patented component nor planting seeds sold as feed. If they don't actually have privity of contract they have some other dodges, but the inconvenient truth for them is that replanting is a traditional use of seeds, the seeds aren't patented, only the specific engineered improvement (Monsanto has no IP in 99.9999% of any seeds genome, in particular the parts that allow it to reproduce), and absent an agreement to the contrary, a purchaser in the ordinary course of commerce can expect to be able to plant any seeds that he buys. Monsanto's patent rights are exhausted with the sale of the original seeds. As usual the case law is mixed, and the actual results in court will depend not on the law but on the pocketbooks of the parties, so Monsanto figures it has things all sewn up.

Hybrids are not what people are worried about, rather it is an old Monsanto proposal called "terminator seeds", seeds which would grow into sterile harvests. Monsanto backed off on the idea after widespread outrage.

Cross-pollination can be considered pollution if it introduces undesired traits, such as GM traits, to an organic strain or pesticide resistance to weeds. It is an entirely forseeable outcome which Monsanto nevertheless claimed was unlikely.

In every one of the cases you mentioned, and more that you didn't, Monsanto abused and overreached its IP and contractual rights in order to harm farmers. Monsanto should have no right to impose any sort of licensing agreements on seed buyers which restricts the fitness or merchantability of patented products for their traditional purposes, nor in particular to prohibit the use of crops as seed rather than feed.

You also have no clue what you are talking about. Your post verges on gibberish.
Monsanto has not released terminator (sterile) seeds. The restriction on replanting is solely from licensing agreements.
Don't take this as saying in any way that Monsanto is not utterly evil.

Yes, really. I mean ...REALLY. Monsanto wants to be paid both for the seed, then again for the harvest (including harvests which are mostly non-GM with only a small potion of GM contamination, which may be from cross pollination) on seeds whose patents expired in Brazil in 2004. Monsanto should lose - it has collected money to which it has no right. Further, it should be fined for all the contamination of other cultivars by the pollen and stray seed from its roundup-ready variety - liability for pollution does not end with the patent term.

Those patents never should have been issued in the first place - where plants are patentable at all, they are limited to those that propagate by cuttings. This system was set up precisely because the potential abuses of seed patents were foreseen. Utility patents on living organisms should never be allowed. That's not what they are for. If it holds back progress (doubtful) or profit (also doubtful - more likely increases and diffuses it) then new forms of patents need to be legislated rather than judicially jury-rigging utility patents to do the job.

As for releasing infertile seeds being a "prudent ecological measure" - no, limiting IP protection for GM organisms to cutting-propagated plants is a prudent ecological measure. Prohibiting releases of fertile GM seeds or pollen which may have potentially adverse effects into the environment is a prudent ecological measure. Hooking poor 3rd-world farmers on infertile seeds so that the whole world's food supply is dependent on a rapacious corporation is, without exaggeration, a crime against humanity worse than any in history.