Let me give the experience of my best friend. He's probably in upper half of what one would call the Middle Class in the USA. I work for The Man so I've always had health insurance via my job. He is a small business owner. His business employees his wife and between 1 and 3 other employees at any given time, depending on a variety of factors. He does not offer health insurance to his employees. As a small business owner, he's had to get insurance on his own for himself, his wife and one child. He is a Republican voter who almost never votes Democratic. He's not a wing nut, but he is relatively conservative politically. He originally completely opposed "Obamacare", saying the usual Republican stuff about how it was going to be the worst thing ever, destroying the country once it got implemented. He admitted to me that now that he can use the state health exchange that his insurance payments per month have dropped about $300 over what he previously paid and he thinks he has better coverage now. He no longer complains about "Obamacare" although he's still going to vote Republican.

Nooooo!!! Who would flip the hamburgers then? :-)

This. And I say this as a Christian rather than the typical rabid atheist Slashdot poster, but I have zero interest in watching those channels. Plus, OTA reception where I live is absolutely awful except for religious and Spanish channels and Fox. Oh yes - the CW, which I never watch, comes in very well too. The other major networks (CBS, NBC, ABC) either can't be viewed reliably or not at all where I live. Plenty of people actually know about OTA TV, but it's not a realistic option for everybody.

I think Netflix's streaming options are horrifically bad in general, but I seem to hold a minority opinion on that one. All I can say is that they consistently fail to have what I'm interested in watching with very few exceptions.

Since the person in question lived in Las Vegas, not Smalltown USA, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that an ambulance was a viable option in terms of availability. Since she had to get a predatory loan to get a car, it's also reasonable to assume that she has money problems and either didn't have insurance that would cover the cost of using it or covered very little of that cost. Saying she didn't want to pay the cost of an ambulance, and for those who don't know, this can easily be $1000 in the USA, is really a different argument than suggesting that she had no other choice because ambulance service didn't exist where she lived.

Tax evasions are possible with the so called "Fair Tax" or "Sales Tax" as you call it. Rich people may find it much cheaper to buy expensive items overseas or in Canada or Mexico and ship them to the USA. That's not something that the average person can afford to do. It may also cause a black market to form where people can buy things on the sly, like electronics, where they pay cash and the sales aren't reported. I have no doubt at all that the rich people in the USA have already thought of ways to avoid this kind of sales tax that we've never considered. I've also read that in such a system businesses may pay less than individuals and in such cases the rich may simply shunt their purchases through businesses, perhaps created only to serve as a front for saving taxes on purchases. Dream on, but your idea won't work.

In a vague way, one of my hobbies is learning foreign languages. I really don't want to oversell that, but I studied 2 languages after turning 30 and while I wouldn't say I'm fluent in either (I could eventually be with a lot more practice and a real reason to use them though) this goes along with another language I studied in college and am close to fluent in. Additionally I know enough to get by of a 4th language, particularly when reading. What I found is that I could still learn another language after 30, I just had to work somewhat harder at it than when I was younger, but it was still doable. So if you are really interested in learning astronomy and physics after age 30, I think you can. The key thing is not to give up. I know of a lot of language learning failures in older (30 and above) students because they just gave up, not really because they weren't capable of learning it. It definitely gets easier to find excuses for not studying when you get older and while I did have to study a little bit more after age 30, it wasn't like three times as much or even twice as much, but it did require somewhat more work.

I was not familiar with the name coffea canephora so I looked it up. This is what I have heard in the past called coffea robusta. Maybe the name got changed to disguise what it is. A lot of people know what robusta coffee is. For those who don't know, robusta is considered an inferior species of coffee. Ever heard of coffees that say that they are 100% arabica? This is because just about everybody considers arabica to be superior to robusta. Robusta is used in blends because it is is very bitter. Robusta is more disease resistant and has higher crop yields than arabica, but I've never heard of it being used in concentrations of more than maybe 1o to 15% in blends. Usually the amount used is less than 10%. This is great, I guess, and I suppose if there were 100% robusta blends some crazy people would love it. Currently in the USA there's a big interest in making craft beers as bitter as possible. Those kind of people, who are in the minority, would probably love large robusta blends. But until they sequence and maybe talk about doing things to protect arabica from disease, this is mildly interesting and no more.

My best friend is an attorney and we've known each other for years. He has taught me a lot about how the law really works in the USA (I live in the US too by the way). Literally anything can happen in court. You may be right in that the odds may be good that he'll be able to sue and win, but it all depends on factors we can't control or predict. The judge the case gets is important. If it's a jury trial, the outcome may have more to do with the abilities of the lawyers involved than the actual merits of the case. Then if you don't like the verdict and appeal it, you go back to square one because some appellate judges tend to favor one side over the other. You get a really conservative appellate male judge in the Scalia mold and you could find that he'll basically allow the government to do anything if they feel that public safety was potentially at risk. Keep in mind too that the author may be greatly exaggerating what happened to him and what really happened may be a lot less sensational than the news report.

How do you as a consumer prove conclusively it was turned off when AT&T will say "Nuh uh. He was using it the whole time!". Then it just gets into "He said/She said" territory and I can assure you that judges hate that kind of stuff. Plus, we had another poster make the good point that even if you try to go after AT&T, they'll use their army of highly paid lawyers to argue "Change of venue" or try to show how your contract allows them to get summary dismissal. A lot of companies now have clauses that state that you agree to arbitration, which means you can't go to small claims court against them. And they can ask for the arbitration in a location as far away from you as possible so unless you're insane and willing to spend thousands of dollars to maybe win a few hundred back, it's just not worth it. I am having a hard time understanding how this is a constant problem for the original poster though unless he's trying to run a business via what is supposed to be a residential connection or he's the king of torrents. I've had AT&T for years and I've never exceeded my limits even once. Going to Uverse, as suggested in another post, is also a good idea as AT&T is known to deliberately degrade their DSL service anyway. Uverse is so much better than the old DSL service they had, I really don't think it's rational to stay with DSL if you can possibly get Uverse where you live.

The Butler case is not exactly what you claim. First of all, the scientist in question called in the FBI in a panic because he couldn't account for 30 missing vials of plague vaccine and assumed they were stolen. The FBI found no evidence of a break in and then Butler officially signed a document stating that he was in error and he destroyed the vials himself and he claimed they were missing to cover it up. That got him arrested. Then he said that he doesn't know what happened, whether he destroyed the vials or not. He claims that the FBI pressured him into signing the document admitting he destroyed them and he was probably led to believe that if he signed it they would close the case when it fact it was used against him as "proof" that he caused an FBI investigation for nothing. Let's not kid ourselves here - this is not at all a case as you suggest where the FBI came fishing out of nowhere. Had Butler not contacted them to begin with in a panic, they would not have bothered him at all. He was probably tricked into "confessing" and not told he'd be prosecuted for doing so and that's a valid complaint against the FBI, but they certainly didn't come to him out of the blue and invent a reason for going after him.

Thanks for providing the always obligatory "Christians are much worse than this" post. Yes, for sure they are because the fact that they actually believe in God is oh so terrible to you personally. And don't forget to mention all those family members of yours that church down the street killed in a blood ritual.

What people like you don't get is the following.
1) Some people will always be religious. This crazy idea that one day all religions will go away is never going to happen.
2) When Christianity shrinks, you know what religion is uniquely positioned to grab the people in category #1? That's right - radical Islam. Why? It's messages of "All of your problems are being caused by non-believers" and "You can get a huge reward in the afterlife by doing a whole lot of killing here now" resonate with poor people who have no hope of improvement.

You fail to grasp that if radical Islam does one day show up at your door then they're going to do a lot worse to you as a non-believer than knocking on your door and asking to leave a pamphlet.

It's actually possible to both "pay above the prevailing wage for the position and region" and seriously underpay H1B workers at the same time. All you have to do is define the job in the right way to drive down the "prevailing wage" for it and then hire someone into the job but have their duties be different. Congratulations on being the exception to the rule. My employer, who I deliberately refuse to name, is actually pretty good, but we hire a lot more H1B workers than Americans for certain jobs and it's not logical to conclude that they are "better" than Americans. Cheaper? Yes. I also briefly dated an H1B worker at another company. I'm pretty sure she makes $20,000 to $30,000 less than an American would at her job, but her company is really small so they somehow get away with it, maybe by defining her job differently than what her actual duties are.

Corrections from above.

I work for a Fortune 500 company. Our policy is that staff who need to be reachable/available outside of normal business hours have a company provided mobile phone where the bill goes straight to the company. If we purchase that phone with our own money and don't get reimbursed for the purchase cost, then the phone is ours to keep even if we leave the company. Our company does support the use of iPhones (I have one) and it has some kind of special software on it that they claim allows remote wiping. Our tech support people claim that if you leave, your phone gets wiped, but you can restore your non-work related stuff from a backup. I've been told that supposedly this wipes your company email and I think that's all it really does once you restore from a backup. I have limited contact with a few former employees and while I never specifically asked if they had any problems after the wipe job, nobody has explicitly mentioned it either. I do have a few co-workers who have a company phone and their own phone, but I don't really understand the reasoning for it except they just like to do it that way. I have the impression that my company doesn't care at all about the contacts in your phone but they definitely want to stop you from reading work email or connecting to the work networks via your phone once you leave. That reference to having the ability to turn off the business phone is quaint. I don't know of anybody in IT who can actually do that. While we rotate on call where I work through a decent number of employees so that we are on call for a week at a time about once every 2 months, even when not on call we need to be reachable in case of a work emergency.

I agree with you, but I think such a happening is highly unlikely, despite the fact that there are many Chinese citizens who aren't really happy with their government. Here's the reason. Did you know that the Chinese constitution has the PLA swearing to protect the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? Think about that. Their job is to protect the CCP, not the nation or the citizens but the CCP. What this means, in my opinion as an outside observer (I have never lived in China, but I have visited there several times), is that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) is composed of highly brainwashed individuals from the privates all the way up to the top generals who are pledged to save the CCP above all else. I'm a little concerned that the CCP may be losing control of the PLA. Right now they are in control, but I think that they just barely control it. All these decades of brainwashing have caused the entire military to be hair trigger that they are constantly under siege from outside forces, usually the USA, who want to beat the crap out of China and possibly destroy it militarily. It's not difficult for me to foresee a time in the future when the CCP finds it can't control the PLA. I wouldn't even rule out a military coup. But anyway, if there was another major Tienanmen Square protest, the CCP would simply have to tell the PLA to put it down and the PLA would happily kill as many protesters as they could.