If you had actually bothered to read the article you linked to, you would have noticed that Congress is preventing them from taking cost savings measures the USPS wishes to implement. Congress controls the prices they can charge. Congress mandates six day deliveries. Congress prevents them instituting their own health insurance plan (which an organization the size of the USPS can easily do). Congress mandates pre-paying health and pension benefits many decades into the future (the only case of this occurring in the U.S. government, and also all but unknown in the private sector).

And then there all the Constitutionally-derived mandates for keeping unprofitable rural branch offices open, and delivering mail to every household everywhere, every mail-day. Things no private business will do.

When Congress's package of restrictions and controls essentially requires an organization to run a deficit, efficiency alone cannot turn the situation around.

Let's look at an "evil government" index to determine the "evilness" of Cuba among authoritarian regimes. A good one is the Democracy Index put out by the Conservative economics journal "The Economist".

Cuba ranks at 124, which puts it in the top 20% of authoritarian regimes, so 80% of them are "more evil". We certainly don't do any business with those 80% do we? Near the bottom of that list is our old friend Saudi Arabia, a regime we absolutely should not support right? Others in the "evil 80%" are Nigeria, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Tunisia, China, Qatar, Oman, Vietnam, and the UAE. No way we do we have diplomatic relations, do any business, or offer any support to any of those guys!

Of course six of these Evil Nations have oil, which makes everything good, correct? Well, it turns out that Cuba has useful offshore oil as well, so geology automatically promotes them to Tolerable Oil Nation, even if their much higher democracy ranking does not.

No, I don't think he did. He was suggesting that browsers truly act on that option selection in a useful way. You misunderstood his post.

Rather that being a display of "good intentions" the message appears to me to be just an ad for Greenpeace. It is one thing to promote a message, and then take credit/blame for it - this just looks like advertising pure and simple.

Even to many who generally support the same causes as Greenpeace, they are often full of self-importance and recklessness. A very flawed messenger.

Eastasia, not Eurasia.

If he believes that it does then that would be ready explanation for harassment.

Because Earth has very unusual moon. Some good models exist to explain how it came it existence, and how the present system evolved, and can explain the isotope and elemental composition data we have for the Moon, and explain all currently discernible features of the system rather well. But they start with a massive planetoid collision on the early Earth that lofted enough material (combined from Earth and the impactor) to create that little twin planet of the Earth called Moon. Available evidence favors this model much more strongly than any contenders, and this collision event would have driven off the volatiles. It is a very difficult conclusion to escape from, and requires later acquisition of material.

Seems far-fetched? "Fetch distance" is not generally a useful tool to judge a theories plausibiity.

No, it isn't. Watson proved himself incapable, after a good 39 years as Chancellor of the Cold Harbor Laboratory, a publicly funded scientific research institution, to continue to successfully function in that position. Like it or not, carrying out such a prominent, highly-paid job puts demands on a person to act and speak responsibly, with the object of maintaining the image of the institution who trusts him to represent it.

A programmer who can no longer the job he is paid to perform gets fired.

A scientist who can no longer the job he is paid to perform gets fired.

A Chancellor who who can no longer the job he is paid to perform, well, he becomes Chancellor Emeritus with a $375,000 salary.

NB: The claim that it is up to everyone else to debunk Watson is incorrect. As a man of science he had the responsibility of being able to support his assertion.

Sorry, affirmative action for influential wealthy white men does not wash. Nothing unfair here.

And in the words of the article he "draws a $375,000 base salary as chancellor emeritus" which according to this calculator puts him in the top 2% of Americans. This is assuming that he had no other academic income which we do not know to be the case. Heck, The Double Helix is available right now in five different formats, and so must being in some income.

Efforts to pain Watson as beleaguered and impoverished are bizarre to say the least.

Odd. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire seems to correlate far more closely in time with the adoption of a homophobic religion.

You don't have to go back in history at all. Consider present day Saudi Arabia. Its society is quite alien to the experience of modern Americans, and the status of women right now is as bad, or worse, than any historical examples given here, and quasi-slavery (various forms of trafficking and forced servitude) are still practiced.

1990s of course.

Here, here!

For nearly 40 years I have read TNR off and on, trying to divine why it was regarded as a thought leader among Liberal/Left/Progressives. All I could conjecture was that is was a combination of their culture writing, and left-over reputation from an earlier era before I was old enough to read it, which it was gliding on. It's articles about economics, and social and foreign policy were fairly consistently disturbing and decidedly right-wing.

If only that were a fact, rather than that staple of the right, a lie made up on the spot. In fact the available evidence shows that not is the truly rich heavily Republican, that they even more heavily favor Republican economic and policy prescriptions than party ID would indicate.