Absolutely true. Unfortunately, it's far easier to convince management that the problem is the lack of a shiny tool that shows them pretty graphs than shitty data that they have to pay some consultant an ungodly amount of money to fix. Because, of course, no one in the company has the time to fix the data on which they run their business.

There are a few of them that grew up exactly like that. They show little difference with the rest of the politicians. Why? Because if they got to their position, anyone can, and those who don't become part of the 1% are clearly just lazy moochers.

Being poor in the US is either a temporary embarrassment or proof of being a bad person. It's quite amazing how alive Calvinism is in the US.

Great! That means that Al-Qaeda is not about Islam and instead is just about some base for some people, right? The fact that they constantly talk about Islam, Mohammed, and infidels is just a coincidence.

It's called an election. Not my fault that you can't convince enough people to vote for people who'll rewrite the Constitution.

No. If you want Truth, Philosophy is down the hall. Science is about collecting data, creating models of the world around us, and testing the models for usefulness and accuracy.

How is GMail necessary to the growth of the middle class? There's 1.3 billion people who can pick from any other email provider. Compared to creating an OS from scratch, creating and running an email service is trivial.

The bigger concern is that you may not be able to reach any users of the very popular (and state-supported) Chinese services. If you can't do business with people in China through Gmail (and corporate GMail is a significant portion of GMail), you will switch to a provider who does. Or Google figures out a workaround.

In other words, it's a real concern, but not one I would lose a tremendous amount of sleep over. I'd much rather worry about Chinese hackers absconding with my data than about the Great Firewall blocking my GMail.

Wrong. You said it yourself: radar technology is so sensitive that they have to dial it down, otherwise they're swamped by false positives. If a giant bomb-dropping machine traveling at Mach 2 can pretend to be a sparrow flying over some forest, it's already a win. So it's a huge positive when fighting someone even with that kind of technology. When fighting someone whose AA system is a guy holding an AK-47, it is 100% useless. Until we get to active camouflage.

Is that why the US almost leads the developed world in gun ownership, and blows it away in incarceration rates and gun deaths?

Well, I always like to point people to this incident as a great example of guns and rage really not mixing well: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/michigan-concealed-carry-road-rage-two-dead_n_3956491.html

And it is still far, far more common than in any other western countries that do have strong gun control laws.

Interesting. Just as a heads-up, HOAs are not all the same, and they're certainly not mandated by the state. They're mandated by developers, who love them due to the fact that they give them the ability to control the look of the development while they're still selling lots, all the while providing them with a lowered financial risk. In that sense, they're definitely not a normal free-association community: you want to buy that house, you join the HOA. Kinda like a union for rich people. Furthermore, they frequently end up being controlled by the people with the most free time: house wives whose kids have left the nest. And that leads to some ugly, ugly rules and enforcements.

What I always find fascinating is that the biggest libertarians invariably live in areas with very strong and expensive HOAs - if not outright gated communities.

Here's the thing: you don't live in your own universe. Where your activities impact and intersect with others, you need to come to agreements on how to behave with those others. Zoning laws are just one way to codify those agreements.

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=193060 Here's the link that states pretty clearly that the chicken pox vaccine is certainly not highly likely to actually cause Chicken Pox. It helps to read the actual literature.

What? ahref=http://www.cdc.gov/chickenpox/vaccination.htmlrel=url2html-1107http://www.cdc.gov/chickenpox/...> 98% immunity is pretty fucking good. From the same link: "However, the risk of getting shingles from vaccine-strain VZV after chickenpox vaccination is much lower than getting shingles after natural infection with wild-type VZV. " As far as I can tell, you're wrong on pretty much all counts.