Have your wife create a corporation.

Or, do what musicians do under similar circumstances: work under an assumed name.

Ask yourself: would the corporation that put you in this box hesitate to stretch the truth for their own benefit? You are under no moral obligation not to do what you don't think is wrong.

I'm going to start a fundraising campaign to assassinate every world leader.

Rep. Paul, I think you're taking your defeat in the CPAC straw poll a little too hard.

Ah, the Aeroquad looks like exactly what I had in mind, since my purpose is survey and cinematography (not to mention "fun"). I do some work with a group involved in very large-scale art installation. We hired a guy who had a pretty sophisticated RC fixed wing airframe, but it was too expensive and couldn't be stationary. We've got a budget, and I've got access to everything but aviation experience in one or another member of the group or friend. So, I figure we might as well try some commercially-available rigs. I definitely don't want anything controlled by a phone.

Thank you, friend.

I fly RC Helicopters and..

Hey friend, you know of any not-too-expensive quadrlcopters you would recommend for someone just getting started in RC 'copters?

You know anything about something called a "Parrot"?

How much of your income are you prepared to give up because the value of your work is overpriced? I can't speak to this question personally because I retired in 2007 on my 50th birthday. I made my money and I figured I'd make room for someone else. I couldn't really make a case for working just to make my pile bigger.

Many of the points you make about the value of Chinese labor vs the value of US labor would be true if there were anything like a "free market" at work. There is not. There never was. There are distortions created by the fact that Chinese workers are not free. Nick Kristof over at the New York Times has written extensively about how Chinese technology workers are not just wage slaves, but actual slaves. As in "held against their will". And he presents significant evidence that the suicide rate at Foxconn is much much higher than the rate of the general population. Like over 300% higher. And that's just the officially admitted suicides (which only became publicly known because there happened to be foreign journalists and activists around at an inopportune time for the Chinese/Corporatist regime. That story is not a dead letter, it is just now unfolding. Kristof's work is not at all hard to find online, by the way.

Oh, and I've yet to find any data that shows unemployed urban blacks "lost out to minimum wage laws". I've seen the assertion made by right-wing think tanks, but never any connection. Just as you don't find any significant benefit to the low end of the economic scale in the so-called "Right to Work" states. All the "right to work" laws do is make corporations richer and depress wages. No net gain in employment rates or family incomes or any of the measurements we make to measure social success. Income inequality actually increases in such states. And there is a whole lot of data that shows greater income inequality always means greater (and costlier) social problems.

Le neutralite de reseau est mort; vive le neutralite de reseau.

Let me translate for those non-French speaking readers:

"My buddy Mort refused to buy a beige sofa. He tried to smother his wife with a cushion, but those meddling EMT's revived her."

I'm still trying to figure out what that has to do with this story. Google translation can only take me so far, I guess.

But someone might take a chance on him for a couple dollars an hour in a job that doesn't require much trust.

So the employer gets someone to work for almost nothing and the rest of us get another person who requires government support to live.

No. The argument is the same with child labor and ultimately slave labor. You could say that as long as slaves worked on the plantation, they were fed, which is probably better than starving, so slavery was a worthwhile institution. You could say "well, slaves didn't have a choice", but we know that having a choice between working for $3 per day and starvation is no choice at all. We have seen a surprising number of workers in Chinese factories who have decided that working for $3 day under horrible conditions is not different enough from starving to death to want to stay alive.

The fact that in 2011, after 30 years of family incomes declining, we actually have right-wing politicians trying to repeal child labor laws, should tell you everything you need to know about the agenda that is behind the effort to reduce the minimum wage. Let's see...1) Get rid of safety regulations, 2) get rid of laws forbidding child labor, 3) attack unions, 4) do away with minimum wages. It's all part of a whole.

Raising the minimum wage has a multiplying effect for every dollar by which the minimum goes up. That money is always immediately spent in the economy, which makes it more likely that other people who might fall below the threshold for desirable employee will get a chance to work.

When you raise the minimum wage, it does not only raise the standard of living for the worker. It raises the standard of living for the community. More people get jobs when the minimum wage goes up, not fewer.

The first minimum wage law in the US came in 1938. It was part of the milieu of the New Deal. the following decades were the years of greatest growth, greatest prosperity, social advances, growing middle class, improved education, more social mobility and more equitable income distributions. I'm not saying that minimum wage was responsible for all or even any of those outcomes, but they were part of it. The minimum wage contributed to the best economic years in this country's history, along with the rest of the New Deal policies. That's why they are so amazingly popular, even today, even in the face of Fox News 24/7 in peoples' homes.

When the minimum wage goes away or goes down, it is not to accommodate the "low-value" worker, it is to lower the wages of all workers. When the minimum wage goes down, it's not just the pay of the lowest part of the employment scale that goes down, it's everyone right up to middle-management. It is you. Without a minimum wage, you would make less money, too.

Let's give an example of regulation that wasn't necessary, minimum wage laws.

The thing is, every serious study that was not done by the Cato Foundation shows that raising the minimum wage actually does allow workers to make more collectively, and leads to more workers working.

When you hear someone criticizing minimum wage, they are using faulty research or lying outright. Here's an additional data point. Places that have no minimum wage always have fewer people working and lower household incomes. Collectively.

So rather than having low value people at least doing something that they can get paid for, we now have people who can't get work at all.

"..low value people.."?

We're done here.

Everybody agrees regulations are necessary.

If only this were so.

There are twenty thousand goofballs who are right this minute acting like their hair's on fire at a place called "CPAC" that would absolutely, positively disagree with you.

Further, just for suggesting that "regulations are necessary" they would call you and your immediate family among other things, "statists, fascists, marxists, kenyans, athiests, socialists, stalinists, and seriously and dangerously mentally ill". Of course, they would be calling you these things while their eyes spin around in their heads like pinballs and spittle flies from their slack lips, but their certainty would be absolute. They would then tell you that for suggesting "regulations are necessary" , and I'm quoting one of their better-known members, a congressman from Florida, that you should "get out of the USA".

And if you really, honestly don't believe me, I'll once again start the tedious process of posting links to quotes where they say and do exactly as I have described. Although I have to tell you, I have noticed that the people who are most likely to demand I produce such links are also the least likely to be the ones willing to have a good - faith discussion and are just trying to further bait me.

This would not be the first time I've had to disabuse someone, here on this website in fact, that everyone does not, in fact, agree that "regulations are necessary". There are those who are actually so deranged as to believe that there is something called a "free market" that makes regulations unnecessary (no, I'm not kidding). Even more ridiculous, they believe (and I swear this is true) that these "free markets" are naturally-occurring phenomena.

I'm betting that right now you're saying, "No way, that's got to be hyperbole". As I said at the start, I wish it were so.

If a quick sniff won't tell you the difference between grass and oregano, you are probably way too high already....

I'b cot a code and my nose is stupped up.