Bomb squads don't "investigate" items that might be bombs. They safely dispose of them. Are you seriously going to value a $30 pressure cooker over someone's life? If the authorities were wrong they should (and usually do, FYI) reimburse the property owner. No piece of property is worth taking a chance on someone's life.
don't have a magical fix. My latest pet theory is that, at a Federal level, there should be a specified number of politicians. Rather than state-by-state, gerrymandered-district-by-gerrymandered-district, shit should be direct. Is there 3% of the US population who are pot-smoking tree-humping eco-dweebs? Then 3% of the politicians should be from the Nature Molestin' Party. Sure, we wouldn't have the 'hope and change' of meaningless party swaps over individual seats. We might get locked into some terrible shit if the majority of the country are, in fact, clueless assholes. But it'd be better representation.
A much "simpler" change (in terms of concept, not ease of execution) would be to go re-learn the concept of Federalism and take a bunch of power away from the Federal government and give it to state and local ones. The less the Federal government has responsibility over, the less harm unaccountable Congresscritters can do.
Hey, at least I, for one, had learned my lesson by 2012.
This car had been purchased with the "Find and Acquire Parking Space" (FAPS) option which, upon activation, locates any open parking space nearby and seeks to claim it as quickly as possible. The car simply noticed a space a couple hundred feet away and dove for it.
In other unrelated news, Volvo lawyers are recommending to the marketing department that the FAPS option only be available in conjunction with the Pedestrian Detection option.
Nah, I'm not nearly rad enough to drive an AMC Pacer. My car is just a nice, low-miles Miata.
Also, these days, Vanilla Ice is a general contractor / house-flipper. Not a bad gig, to be honest -- once I'm making enough money I'm maxing my tax-deferred investments, I indeed might try acting like him.
You poor, naive fool! A Charter merger with Time Warner would inevitably degrade Charter's customer service to Time Warner's level, not the other way around.
My 25-year-old Mazda* has a tape deck, and I'm perfectly happy with that. (Okay, I do have a minor quibble that there's no line-in port, but that's no big deal. At least it doesn't have a CD player instead; if that were the case then I'd actually have to get an aftermarket stereo.)
(*Don't knock it; it's very much on the "classic sports car" end of the spectrum, not the "old junky econobox" end.)
Perhaps the municipal governments having control of the infrastructure
My municipal government can't even keep the streets in good shape. Ever seen this meme? It's an accurate reflection of the condition of the roadways here. They don't even have the hard freeze excuse that my municipality in the northeast had. You want them running the last mile? Thanks, but no thanks.
There's probably merit to someone owning the last mile infrastructure and leasing it out to ISPs; there's definitely merit to separating the TV side of the house from the ISP side.
See it's not a conspiracy involving the "taxi lobby", in fact it's to protect us from them.
Let's be honest here: there's no reason why it can't be a little from column A and a little from column B.
It was mentioned in the CNN article I linked earlier. I also watched them carry it out of the car on NBC Nightly News last night. Feel free to find the footage on NBC's website if you wish.
As to comedians being better at the news... no. Comedians are as good at science as they are at reporting the news. They talk about what they think is funny and what will get the crowd on their side.
In medieval Europe, it was only the court jester who could, without [much] fear, speak uncomfortable truths to the king.
You've sadly fallen into the trap of thinking the daily show is an actual news program.
You misunderstand me: I'm well aware that it's not. The problem is that the "real" news programs are much, much worse!
2) IRL it's very complex to value sprawling cul de sacs of suburban development. When first built they're great because the people who live there are the kind of people who almost never need the government, and have a fairly good income. If they weren't both they wouldn't be able to afford to buy into a suburb. This means a miniscule tax rate is enough to run the city. Then life happens, and 50 years later you've got houses designed to standards nobody wants, owned by people who were too poor to move out, which means that a) they need lots of government services, and b) they can't pay for those services with the miniscule tax rate, leading to c) the City Manager scrambling around to save the city while the long-time residents are convinced that it's still an upper-income enclave. Quite a few very smart people have pointed out that it's much easier to build new suburbs then build a new Brooklyn because of the way the Feds give out grants.
You missed out on (arguably) the most important factor, which is that suburban sprawl is a gigantic pyramid scheme.
When a developer builds a new subdivision, he not only pays to construct the infrastructure for it, but also spends a bunch of money on building permits and (theoretically) impact fees, which go into the city's coffers. (I say "theoretically" because some particularly short-sighted, pro-development cities might undercharge on the impact fees.)
Those fees are supposed to go towards maintaining and upgrading the rest of the city's infrastructure to pay for the development's impact, but they don't. Instead they get used to balance the budget this year. In a couple of decades when that subdivision's infrastructure needs to be repaired or replaced, where does the money come from? If the city is lucky, it comes from the impact fees of whatever new neighborhood is being built then. If not, then the city is screwed.
The growth of the suburbs really exploded around WWII, so we're just now really starting to see the consequences of Ponzi development. If you think older, inner-ring suburbs are in a bad state now (except for the ones that managed to gentrify, and have all those mid-century ranches torn out and replaced with McMansions), just wait. It'll get worse before it gets better.
Oh yeah, they are highly regulated, which leads a rational mind to believe that is why they are significantly rare in crime.
Bullshit. They're not rare in crime because they're highly regulated; they're rare in crime because they're the wrong tool for the job. After all, WTF does a criminal care if he breaks the law by carrying a "regulated" gun? He's planning to commit a bunch of other crimes anyway!
Moreover, when automatic weapons are the right tool for the job, then criminals will have them. The Mexican drug cartels, for example, recently shot down a helicopter with a goddamn RPG! I have no doubt that owning an RPG is illegal in Mexico, but do you think they gave a flying fuck?
It is for ease of use, people don't want to set up a base station or server, it's just another thing then need to have.
Exactly: "it's just another thing [they] need to have." It's an entire extra product that these companies could be selling them (and profiting from!), but aren't. The question you should be asking yourself is "why are they foregoing that profit?"
The answer, of course, is "they aren't." The violation of privacy is more valuable!
Then there's the other side of it, if you're using a thermostat connected to Google then the data about when you use and don't use energy could be used to recommend an energy company that gives you the best rate for those times. How is that a bad thing?
"May your future be limited only by your dreams." -- Christa McAuliffe
