How long would it take you to make a Pentium by hand?

That seems like a reasonable hypothesis. Recall that we're talking about Switzerland specifically and not Europe as a whole though. This article indicates that the Swiss welfare system is rather unique. There are other aspects that feed into this situation like immigration and drug policies too.

I think they're about as relevant as national health care is to the issue of gun violence. And chocolate would be tastier, too, though I suppose that works against the obesity angle.

If I'm going to speculate wildly, I would guess that mandatory military training is probably the biggest contributor to safe gun ownership in Switzerland. Ethnic and cultural homogeneity may play a role too.

What country other than Switzerland has lots of guns and low gun crime? Wouldn't it be just as valid to mention chocolate and cuckoo clocks as correlating with lots of guns and low gun crime?

I wasn't singling you out. I was mostly responding to the statement 3 levels up:

The follow-on comments (including yours) seemed supportive of that thesis. Your desire to emphasize Fox's faults and no one else's certainly didn't sound like you were disagreeing.

So someone points out five examples of serious bias by non-Fox networks, only two of which apparently ended in apologies... and the response isn't "yea, they're all biased", but rather "Fox doesn't apologize"?

Simply googling "fox network apology" show's that it isn't entirely true that Fox never apologizes: here's one example, and another.

I never watch Fox News or MSNBC or any other TV news show, and I'm not defending Fox. But it seems like if your vehement argument for superiority boils down to "my partisan biased news show is somewhat more likely to apologize for its excesses when it gets caught than yours", you might want to be a little less proud of that.

And yet, the original comment gets modded flamebait, and both of the retorts get modded up...

Yes, this has been true for a long time. Moynihan pointed out in 1992 that "proximity to the Canadian border" correlated much more strongly with educational achievement than spending. So the solution to poor test scores is to move your school as far north as possible. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/03/opinion/north-dakota-math-country.html

Exactly... how is Dish Network going to fare better than ReplayTV did?

I sure hope they find a way... I clung to our 5000-series model for years because of automatic commercial skip. One of the best purchases I ever made, and the highest WAF score ever for an electronic device. (Note that the 5000s also have commercial skip, as I believe ReplayTV started building them before they lost the lawsuit. The 5500 series then came out, which is basically the 5000 series without commercial skip.)

Finally when we got a 55-inch TV I decided that I needed something with hi-def output and switched to Dish. I'd be thrilled if commercial skip came back and I didn't have to grab for the remote and start pounding the 30-second skip button every time a commercial came on.

As opposed to the current bill, which is a Democratic sham specifically designed for Republicans to kill.

This. Mod parent up.

Huh? Where did you get that from? Everything I've read says that the financial industry mostly cares that (1) we don't default in the short term and (2) we have a plan to avoid unending long-term increases in debt. A short-term debt ceiling increase addresses (1) just as well as a long-term increase, and whether the increase is short- or long-term has no direct impact on (2). No one who's not running for re-election in 2012 cares whether we have another vote on the debt ceiling next spring, as long as that one passes too so that we can continue to avoid default.

I don't really feel that calling people you disagree with politically "anti-american traitors" and accusing them of "trying to end America" is in line with anyone's concept of "noble", unless you have concrete evidence that they're working with a foreign power to overthrow the federal government.

The table at the bottom of this article shows that as of April 1995, CBO projections were that deficits would stay roughly flat through 1998... not going up much, but not going down either. This was after the 1993 tax hike (assuming that's what you're referring to).

The article itself has a particular point of view that I won't defend (though if you do read it, read far enough to see that the author does not spare Republicans from criticism), but I see no reason to doubt the figures in that table.

Yea, your independent nature shines through in your willingness to call people "traitors" and "anti-american".

Note that the Republicans aren't the only ones that care more about getting re-elected than avoiding default: Obama's statement that he will veto any debt ceiling increase that doesn't carry us past the 2012 elections makes it very clear where his priorities are.

According to Wikipedia, the only presidents to actually cut spending on a year-to-year basis in inflation-adjusted dollars were Reagan and Bush Sr. (though they both more than made up for that by large increases in other years). The same page shows that the smallest spending increases in the Clinton years were after the Republican congressional takeover of 1994.

Anyway, I never claimed that having a Republican congress was the key; the problem with (recent) Republicans is that they want to cut taxes rather than pay down the debt. It's really the split control that helps: I think part of the key to the Clinton years was having Democrats that didn't want to cut taxes combined with Republicans that didn't want to increase spending. Even then, all this would have done absent the Internet bubble was keep a lid on deficits; the bubble was the thing that actually swung this to a surplus.

Sadly now we seem to be getting the worst of split control: Democrats that don't want to cut spending (at least not enough to matter) and Republicans that don't want to increase taxes.