The reason we don't see health insurance competition across state lines is the concept of a race to the bottom like the one that happened when credit cards deregulated. There's a reason all of the credit card companies are in South Dakota and Delaware now: those are the places with the weakest consumer protection laws. The same will happen with safeguards on health insurance.

In other words, if your state thinks it makes sense for every woman to have access to birth control on a basic health plan and passes a law to that effect, it'll only govern insurers based in that state. So much for states' rights, eh?

Ah, I see now. So you're discounting WWII (and to a lesser extent the WPA and other Depression-era spending pre-1937; you know, when the economy crashed again due to ZOMG-it's-a-deficit budget balancing) as Keynesian stimuli. Which, you know, worked.

And you're discounting the success of Iceland (the un-Austerian country) as compared to the austerity-driven remainder of the world? Or the comparative success of the US relative to Britain (which would be stronger if it weren't for all the states with Republican governors laying off thousands of workers)?

For every case you can give me of purported failure of stimulus, I can provide a broader context; largely, what you would call a failure is because either a) deficit spending was misapplied (it's only necessary in a liquidity trap) or b) it was insufficient to propel a full recovery.

So, in sum, my one-sided tiny mental bubble is comprised of largely evidence-based assessments of global financial track records in previous periods of liquidity-trap crisis. Is yours?

And ad-hominem does wonders for your point.

You don't read much Krugman, do you? Like the part where he predicted the stimulus would fail because it was entirely inadequate, or how the current austerity push would cause a self-reinforcing cycle of lack-of-growth followed by more austerity? Let alone the predictions he made in the Bush years about things like the Iraq war (but that's admittedly political commentary moreso than economic prediction).

Well, my girlfriend has gone through two iPhones (the 3GS stopped working so she got the 4, which broke within 6 months). She's got a replacement iPhone4 now, and she's taken to calling it her lemon (hurr hurr apple, lemon, hurr hurr) and has fallen in love with her Xoom so she's planning on an Android phone next go'round.

Meanwhile, my 1.5+ year old Droid X is happily humming along next to my brand new shiny Galaxy Nexus, having never had an issue despite several cringe-inducing drops (once into a glass of water). Though the 3G -> 4G upgrade is totally worth it.

$ First they came for Gnome,
$ but I didn't speak out because I wasn't a n00b.
$ Then they came for X,
$ but I didn't speak out because it kind of sucked.
$ Then they came for apt-get,
$ but I didn't speak out because I didn't have root.
$ Then they came for me, and
-bash: /bin/echo: No such file or directory
$

Despite being killed over and over again, somehow this myth that Fannie and Freddie and the CRA were responsible persists. Here's just one instance of it being killed.

If they're responsible, why, then, did the same housing bubble happen in other countries?

I believe so, as the alternative, "asshare," is read by my internal monologue as "ass-hare" which, while it sounds like "ass hair," is spelled like a cousin of "ass rabbit" and that just seems to me like a couple steps up from a gerbil, and neither of those is something I want to contemplate in the context of smartphones.

Am I the only one imagining 3G gerbils now?

1. That's an awful lot of creationist textbook stickers.
2. Why do we care what CowboyNeal thinks of them?

Which is ironic, since New England is arguably the *least* puritanical area of the country, or perhaps second to the area immediately around San Francisco.

And it would be epic on XBOX Live Arcade. :)

While I agree on principle, there is a problem with this point:

The entire developed world (G8ish, or G20 excluding India and China, for the sake of argument) is in a minority compared to the undeveloped world. This does not imply that the developed world should move backward.

That said, within the developed world, US laws have rarely conformed to what the rest of the world has deemed sensible, and when they have, they've been on a several decade time lag in most cases (e.g., universal healthcare, gay rights, social safety net).

If email is the only requirement, why not suggest a company-provided blackberry for work?

This is slashdot. Our effort is minimized when the car analogy is already in the summary.

I think you a word.

My workstation is an elitebook and I get a couple of bluescreens a day(!). On the other hand, my Dell Precision M70 from 5 years ago runs as good as new... although that may just be the benefit of running Ubuntu at home versus XP at work. But even with XP on my M70, I never had the same kind of issues I have now with the HP.

That's not to say that the EliteBooks (and enterprise-grade systems in general) aren't worlds better than their consumer-grade trash, but still, there are far better options.