Even better, use the phone number (321) 123-4567. Hundreds of people do. It's in the loyalty card databases of almost all the big retailers, and if it's not fill out a card with that number. Since the cashiers sometimes say, "Thank you Mr. Orwell" I have to assume that the first name on some of them must be George.

Minneapolis is the headquarters for the Target chain, and target area for initial roll out of new programs/procedures. If this happened during the initial testing of the program it would be VERY important to get as much information about an incident like this as possible before expanding the program nationwide and seeing thousands of irate parents show up, sucking up thousands of hours of Customer Service desk time. In the Minneapolis area I'd be more surprised it the manager hadn't called. In Cleveland the opposite would be true, of course.

Actually I think that the reason that it's broken **IS** the move towards libertarianism and decentralization. Uncle Bob's Dry Cleaning is likely to get the advantage in decentralized situations, where manipulation can be personal. It's an order of magnitude cheaper to buy an entire county board of directors than it is to purchase a single senator, this is why the mega-corps LOVE the "state's rights" groups. If they only have to control the local governments where they operate rather than the entire Federal infrastructure they're practically home free. A properly-corrupted county commissioner will agree to the damnedest things, things that would embarrass even a state senator into resignation. Besides, why would a corporation want to have to buy off the congressment from Alaska or Arizona when they only operate on the East Coast?

I agree that we're doing it wrong now, but I don't think that the answer is to do it even more extremely wrong.

Had a friend who went to college with Howard Shultz, CEO of Starbucks during its rise. A bunch of them were sitting in a boat on Puget Sound, getting stoned and talking about what they were going to do after graduation. Howard said, "I want to find a legal, addictive drug and market it to the world." Truly a man with a plan.

The conclusion is that if there is a regulatory framework in place that sets allowable levels of specific contaminants there's a lot less wiggle room for the judge and the expensive lawyers to work against the neighbor.

It's bizarre to me that libertarians believe that courtrooms full of dueling lawyers will cure all ills. How is substituting herds of lawyers in place of elected representatives and scientists going to improve the situation? I really don't get it. We'll have to convert every office in the land currently occupied with bureaucrats into courtrooms occupied by judges. In what way is this an improvement?

At least today if Al's Drycleaning dumps waste chemicals out the back door there is a framework in place that says "No one is allowed to contaminate ground water above X-many parts per million." Over the allowable limit? A fine and you pay for cleanup, end of story. Under Libertarianism if Judge Joe grew up sucking down malathion spray on the cherry farm he may well conclude that as long as the water's the right color it's still safe, while Judge Fred's mom died of cancer from BPA exposure and may think that any measurable residue at all should entitle the plaintiff to massive damages. Soon you'd have every polluter trying to steer cases to Judge Joe, and every plaintiff lining up for Judge Fred. This is somehow supposed to be an improvement?

It's not hard to see why people call it "Libertardianism".

Oh, I've worked retail many times, and even worse grew up in northern Michigan, and yet I'm still amazed by how little intelligence is needed to survive in our society.

A POTS line can work with analog switches that are 80 years old, or even with humans providing a connection (my mom's aunt did that for a living for many years). Good luck replacing your Cisco backbone router with, well, anything else.

VOIP is great . . . until your Internet connection goes down. Our land line has gone down once, for a couple of hours, since 1997. We've lost Internet connectivity for days at times.

I notice that there is no sign of stopping congresscritters, or the survey-takers in their employ, from robocalling. Since that's the vast majority of robocalls that I get I doubt that this is going to make any change in my life.

FYI, it's not enough to tell a phone caller to take you off their list. You need to say, "Put me on your Do Not Call List." They're required by law to do so, and any time they sell or rent their phone list the DNC list is required to go with it. If they tell you they're not required to have a DNC List because they work for some slimeball pretend non-profit that does political work I've found that the following technique works. Say, "If I were to cuss and swear at you then you would put our number on a list of people not to call again. Please put our number on that list." Those two simple changes changed the number of calls that an acquaintence got from 7-8 a night to 7-8 a week.

If you're ever required to put down a phone number, for store discount cards or something, use the same number that I (and a hundred other people do). (321) 123-4567. You'll be amazed at the number of cashiers that think it's really your phone number.

Non-Stop? You mean the Tandem Non-Stop Kernel that they inherited from Compaq and then abandoned for most of a decade? I'm surprised that it didn't go the way of the Alpha chip, sacrificed in the name of higher executive bonuses.