Radiant: we're a little short on staff -- think you could raise the penalty for jaywalking?
Congressman: can do!
This exact sort of thing is already happening in the U.S. except rather than keeping people in prison to make them work, the prison lobby wants to keep people in prison for the sake of needing to build more prisons. We've got both the prisons' investors and prison guard unions constantly lobbying for harsher punishments for lesser offenses. It's a scary to think that it's profitable for anyone to lock people up and throw away the key...
Unless their matchmaking servers fill my dating needs too.
Blizzard has got you covered: http://us.battle.net/matchmaking.html
Actually, he might be on to something. I just printed this article out and it's a helluva lot funnier in print.
And on paper you can't be modded down.
Yeah, it looks like he's headed for -1 Troll any minute now.
Right, I get hit by my own irony stick.
Don't think of it as getting hit by your own irony stick... think of it as getting hit by your own "we we".
What we really need is transparency is pricing for all medical costs. Force manufacturer's to provide their component costs for everything like eqiupment, drugs, and consumables, so that the consumer can see exactly what kind of markup their paying for.
I agree with the spirit behind this idea in that companies should be required to justify costs to prevent price fixing but I'm sorry, this just wouldn't work in the real world. The companies would make the cost breakdowns nearly impossible to reasonably interpret to hide the $10,000,000 worth of "consultant fees". (For people not familiar with business, a "consultant fee" is the cash that goes into the pockets of the CEOs and their buddies who come and hang out at the office for a few days a year.)
I really don't think we're going to fix problems like this until there's no such thing as greed in society anymore... which isn't going to happen until we achieve a perfect utopia where money is no longer really required anyways.
we here on earth are all alone in the great big dark.
If that's true, it's an awful waste of space.
Not to be disagreeable but saying that it's a "waste of space" implies that space is specifically supposed to be used for something. (Your statement implies that its purpose is to contain life but that's not entirely relevant here.) What you're essentially doing is assigning a meaning to space itself, but "meaning" (not to be confused with cause-and-effect as it so frequently is in philosophical arguments) is a totally human created concept so the "waste of space" argument is unfortunately invalid.
That said, I really, REALLY hope that life is abundant in the universe. I just don't think that much can be said to predict whether or not it is until we get out there and look for it which is exactly what they're doing here.
What practical steps would your readers recommend to prevent this information from hurting me?
Step 1. Don't post the story about what happened to you on Slashdot.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff." -- Dave Enyeart