I would go nuts if a "buy it now" button popped up while reading fiction, but this is a newspaper article.

When newspaper articles are written so as to be conducive to advertizing, they are fiction of the worst sort.

Three anonymous racists trolls in one JE. Brown probably had a slashdot account, the kid was a nerd. He'd just graduated high school and was enrolled in college to study engineering. He'd never been in any trouble with the police, and those who knew him said he was a peaceful young man with a good sense of humor.

Now heartless racists, like the Ferguson police chief, are trying to demonize him.

This hits close to home for me, I have family and friends in the St Louis area and grew up in Cahokia. And yes, there are a lot of racists there. Idiots, if you ask me. The Ferguson government was the stupidest of all, they were begging for riots and still are.

It depends on where hemp out performs. If hemp doesn't grow as well where cotton does then you cotton growing land becomes much less valuable.

Isn't that the point of the mage vs. warrior divide? Brawn vs Intellect? Mages sacrifice heavy armor to deal higher damage, but can get murdered by the slightest sneeze. Warriors sacrifice speed for heavy armor and large pointy things.

there's more to it than just Mary Jane. You don't think the cotton lobby has noticed the wonder material that is hemp?...

the truly smart people, you're Eisenstein and what have you, are too busy with the incredibly interesting problems they can comprehend to bother with the sort of wealth gathering that you're thinking of when you say "meritocracy". The ones that we're talking about when we say "inequality" aren't all that brilliant. They're loaded with advantages from generations of accumulated wealth. They're rent seekers. The "Investor Class". People who spend their entire day not solving problems or building things or making new things but just figuring out who to gather wealth.

You'll never have your meritocracy. Eisenstein was too busy with relativity to bother trying to run a county. Now Mitt Romney, he's got plenty of time for it. He's also got a Car Elevator...

I think if you look you'll find most basic research (e.g. the really expensive stuff that's hard to do) is paid for by your gov't (or European gov'ts if you live in the USA, we've been cutting funding left and right since Reagan...).

NASA (along with a lot of German Rocket scientists) got us to the moon and DARPA + the Universities created the communication network we're using now...

I guess Capitalism got us the 99 cent double cheeseburger. Oh wait, it was gov't farm subsidies that make that possible too....

it's a dictatorship and/or kleptocracy that happens to use communist rhetoric. Why this fact escapes so many people is beyond me. Maybe it's the 75+ years of indoctrination and thinly veiled McCarthyism...

Wait? What? You are talking about California? The capital state of the armies of the idiotic.

I highly doubt their thoughts are so benevolent.

This is about money pure and simple.

That's about all they have....and oh half the state is on welfare.

Amen to that.

;)