Imagine if the North Sea was actually landmass... and if you have trouble imagining, use this map.

I don't know that most people are actually concerned about VA hospitals, but you could easily justify it to a court as part of the whole "maintaining an army" thing, which is definitely something the Constitution provides for.

More of the usual bitching I've come to expect from taxes computers. Big complainers, them.

Well, yeah. Everything's bigger in Taxes.

Out of the Silent Planet sure; it's an okay little homage to From The Earth To The Moon in its own way, and also interesting as a cultural artifact of the genre just a moment before the launch of the Space Age, which would forever alter the way such works would be written (as did also the atomic age). I can, in fact, recommend Silent Planet as obscure, forgotten sci-fi novel worth reading.

But Perelandra ... well, it isn't really sci-fi or fantasy, except as a really thin veneer of that on top of some religious ruminations on matters such as: the creation of man, the Garden of Eden, the problem of Evil, and spiritual warfare. It is of some interest to the reader who is interested in Christian thought (either as a Christian or an outsider interested in how Christians think about things), but aside from some clever floating islands, its offerings to the genre of science fiction (or fantasy for that matter) are sorely limited. It has more in common with the likes of The Screwtape Letters than science fiction proper.

That Hideous Strength. It's obscure - obscure for a reason; it combines dystopian sci-fi with Christian allegory and British academic politics, so there's not a large natural audience. But it's culturally significant as one of George Orwell's inspirations for 1984, and Orwell himself thought reasonably well of it ("by the standards of books today", at least). It's also an interesting little moment before the atomic bomb but still within the realm of dystopian WWII-inspired science fiction.

Next, a government agency dedicated to monitoring body fat content for all employees of media companies. It will "create" 50,000 jobs in the federal bureaucracy. When an editor for the New York Times cheats on her diet, it will be a federal offense punishable by a fine of $50,000 or up to 5 years imprisonment. Lawsuits and lobbyists will fight over whether Twitter and Facebook qualify as a "media" company and thus whether said legislation applies to all users who have created an account on those services. The Department of Health and Human Services will decline a waiver for employees of organizations affiliated with religious groups who have religious dietary restrictions.

That's not really a terrible idea for a cash register. It seems like it would make things less error-prone, even for people who are good at counting cash. When they switched from manual price stickers to UPC barcodes, fat-finger errors in the "here let me type that price in" process became a thing of the past.

Of course, at the local Safeways, the cashier gives you back change in bills and an automatic device dispenses all the coins. This is faster than handling the coins. The self-checkout stands can dispense bills as well.

I trust Steam with my games... at least, I trust them to keep the games around longer on average than I can be trusted to keep the discs operational. There are also an operating-system lifetime issues, too.

It helps that Steam wrecking my games like this would totally demolish their primary business model (not so much with Sony).

The era of cheap gas has a few miles on it left, if the current Iran situation calms itself a little. Sure, $4 a gallon is higher than historical norms... but not by all that much, if you adjust for inflation (which is what really makes the current prices bad). Check it out. It may not be getting massively better, but there's still a long way to go before it's really panicking time for the average driver.

(Cutting back on extra trips? Sure. Looking for a more fuel-efficient car? Probably. Bicycles, high speed trains and mass transit takes over? Don't count on it, even if you like trains as much as I do.)

You should ask Japan how effective the "economic stimulus" from their earthquake/tsunami has been working out for them. Or ask Thailand about their floods. Or ask Florida about how much good old Hurricane Andrew pumped up their economy.

I mean, if your post were modded Funny instead of Insightful that would be one thing...

Maybe, but there are plenty of people who walk around working for TLAs all the time and not really trying to hide it. Perhaps they'd still like to encrypt their conversations?

Google and Facebook are more about renting your personal information - as in, here, let us send this ad to someone whose personal information matches your desired profile. No way they're going to sell their core business. :)

Look, the 1% are jerks, honestly - but if you want to use the 1% as tools to grow the economy, or even just to generate tax revenue, you have to understand that they are independent people with their own incentives. You can't just expect them to not care and do nothing when you tell them you're going to take their money.

The US tax on repatriating foreign profits is a great way to keep companies spending more of their money overseas and less in America - and, in case you don't know any recent college graduates who remain woefully unemployed, and haven't noticed - we really don't need that to be any harder than it already is.

(That said, the 80% figure cited above is too high, it's true.)

You leave out the role of WWII-era wage controls in the formation of the current system - when a maximum wage was capped at $N, a company could still compete for the best workers on health care and other related benefits.

Thanks again, FDR!

You miss the obvious question of why do we have this nonsensical tax treatment for employer healthcare, let alone these ridiculous employer-oriented health-care coverage mandates? What we should have done all along is to remove the special tax treatment, let individuals buy their own healthcare, and then have an meaningful honest debate about whether or not we want to be more or less socialist about directing federal funds towards covering people who still can't afford it. Then you don't have to strong-arm anyone into doing anything (at least not any more than taxes in general), and exempt religious organizations remain exempt, and can do whatever the heck they want, in compliance with the likes of the First Amendment, the 1999 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and Hosanna-Tabor vs EEOC.

But no, this is really about waging the culture wars, pleasing the Planned Parenthood lobby and rubbing it in the face of the Catholic Church.