You can't reason your way into religion, it has to touch you personally. Someone in 1700 Europe would not be able to reason his way into belief that such things as elephants existed. He's have had to visit Asia or Africa to believe.

God is only invisible to those who choose to ignore him.

It was used. But it could have been the early 90's.

I was still in college and I graduated in 96 so it had to be pre-1996.

I bought an IDE enclosure and i'm going over my drives...

The oldest- which still spun up was only 8 GB. I had a really hard time throwing it away since it still works. But i looked at the memory sticks on the desk... which cost $4.99 to $15.99 and had the same or higher storage.. and I put it in the trash.

Same for the 80GB drive from 2003.

Debating on the 120GB drive. It might actually be big enough to keep.

My first drive... cost me $88 and held... 88 megabytes. That was sometime in the mid to late 80's I think.

While I mostly agree with you, it's worth considering that comments have a cost as well. Duplication of the same information between the code and the comments, in particular, increases the maintenance burden and makes it more likely that the code and comments will get out of synch in the future—and one incorrect, misleading comment can outweigh a thousand correct ones. For that reason, comments which fail to add any useful information should be pruned away no matter how accurate they may be.

Exactly! Good code will have comments, in moderation, which tell you things you couldn't get simply by reading the code. Well-chosen names are part of those comments, however, and can be significantly more valuable when used appropriately.

Which would you rather read:

Personally, I'd much rather have the latter version, despite the absence of formal comments. The descriptive names more than make up for the lack.

Don't forget the roughly 25% pre-tax subsidy for employer provided insurance.

If they gave the same tax deductions to individuals- it would lower premiums by your highest marginal tax rate. For most people about 20%. For the wealthy by 39.6%.

My silver plan was $373 from BCBS of texas and the drug copay is much lower and my annual deductible is $1500.

It's better than my old corporate plan. And now I can get my drugs from local pharmacies again instead of Medco.

Medco was pretty bad. I would occasionally get bottles with 1 or 2 less pills (never 1 or 2 more). And they sent a lot of mail- if you didnt' read every single one; you might miss a rules procedure and that would cost you 10-15 days of pills while things got straightened out.

I already signed up and paid for my ACA policy, and love what it does for me.

But I recognize the challenge for people with families. They've been subsidized by corporations at the expense of childless couples and single people for years.

I think a better fix would be for people like me to pay $50 more per month so policies for people with kids would be less. We want to encourage people to have children.

I wouldn't count on that subsidy from corporations continuing-- my last corporations had cut benefits every year of the last seven years AND rates for children and spouses had increased for at least the last three years.

In my case; the ACA has allowed me to retire and start several small businesses instead of working another 16 years (despite not needing the money) because of my preexisting conditions. Since I don't think it's likely I would have been able to find employment with insurance all the way- an uncovered period was probably in my future.

There is natural human variation tho.
Some humans can see near infra read and some can see near ultraviolet.
Some humans are super genius's. Not even really measurable on the IQ scale.

It's reasonable that some can hear a little more music.

I used to video game with a guy who could see and was bothered by 58fps vs 60fps.
For most of us 30fps felt glass smooth.

He was an incredible athlete with lightning fast reflexes and did amazing things in sports. Clearly far end of the bell curve.

However, while there are human exceptions like this- for most (the vast majority of) people- what are you saving is completely valid.

n t

Clearly that's why voting was restricted only to the landed gentry, and why the vote became even more decoupled from policy as the franchise was opened to more people.

Read Federalist #10. Do you have any credible evidence that the "minority" they were interested in protecting was any but the aristocracy, other than fairy tales and propaganda? Policies, not pacifiers.

Unfortunately, the general welfare consists of the political class, because any means by which recourse can be exerted against the rich or powerful have been systematically foreclosed. Why should an elected official represent any but their new friends if they can just move to Washington after screwing their beard-constitutents?

Also, rhetoric is meant to persuade, not inform.

Go follow @WilliamHogeland on Twitter. He'll put paid to your religion.

Why shouldn't they get more than they paid in? Why is only Wall Street allowed to be paid for not doing anything?

after the market cultists running either party ship all that cash off to Wall Street.

Well, actually, it already has been, but the mulligan on repaying it has yet to be given.