I think if anyone is serious about building a nuke plant they really should consider providing discounted power to some N mile radius around the plant.

This would get them political support at the local and state levels, providing leverage for the federal approvals.

How much suffering is the DEA willing to inflict for the, pardon the metaphor, pipe dream of a drug-free America?

You can't swing a dead cat without hearing about under-medicating pain and how that one of the primary drivers of that is physician fear of a DEA investigation or worse, losing their license to prescribe.

Now it's this -- and while I'm sure there's some pharma holdback for brand-name drugs, that wouldn't matter if the DEA wasn't so restrictive of the chemistry.

So now we have another group of people at minimum inconvenienced at at maximum with negative health consequences because of the relentless pursuit of an unobtainable moral goal.

Thanks, DEA.

What the doctors should do is require the parents who refuse immunizations is to sit down with the doctor and review and sign off on a worst case treatment and care plan for their children for every specific disease their children might get when they refuse the vaccine.

Ask them if their house is multi-level and will they be able to convert a lower-level room to a bedroom if their child needs a wheel chair? Have the parents discussed the care needs should their child develop a more severe form of polio which may leave them a quadriplegic? Will their insurance cover the cost and use of a ventilator?

I think for a lot of these parents the realities of caring for their children -- in many cases, forever -- would be enough to convince them that whatever risk they believe they are avoiding by refusing a vaccine just isn't as bad as the disease itself.

I frankly don't blame the doctors for doing this and I would not be opposed to insurance carriers refusing to reimburse parents for dependent care caused by their refusal to immunize their children (I would, however, require parents to seek treatment and hospitals to treat them).

I agree.

I work for a small SMB IT consulting company and this is a tough argument to make to the owners.

We have recurring service plans for most regular customers -- this works out best for most people as they get a discount, lose most trip charges and consistent support from the same person. We get familiar with their systems and people and can head off most problems before they become problems.

What's maddening, though, are a handful of clients who only use our services as a last-minute emergency service when they screw something up themselves. A couple of these clients don't even buy hardware from us -- they buy online, used or whatever. Yet management wants us to prioritize their calls, often over other scheduled work that our better customers participate in.

I've suggested a seperate pricing tier for short notice service requests from non-plan customers, but the owners believe they will "lose" the business yet don't acknowledge the opportunity cost from chasing after bad customers and the potential damage to relationships from good customers who are put aside to serve the bad customers.

Since the risk of car accidents generally is pretty high, was the Pinto really a risk, or was it more media perception?

Clearly they're taking a bunch of effort to play classical music at that station because there are no problems and they want to alleviate the concerns of rich, white suburbanites who never ride light rail.

Or, maybe, just maybe, "it hasn't happened to me" means that it hasn't happened to you, not "it isn't happening."

At the Lake Street station in Minneapolis, there are few "law abiding" youth. It's the usual urban despair.

Someone (perhaps plural) will write some kick-ass theses on this Republican primary and the role of the media.

It's been a unique situation since for most of the primary/caucus "season" dating back to last fall, Obama has had high negative numbers and little media focus, so the Republicans have been the only show in town.

My sense is that the modern media doesn't handle multi-player competition well. At the start of the primary season, there were as many as 8 candidates with similar ideologies -- that doesn't work in an era of 30 second sound bites, but a horse race between two people does, and the media began -- with the scantest of evidence -- to promote individual candidates to "contender" status so that they could have a race between them and Romney and thus frame the contest in quick and easy to digest soundbites.

But as each candidate's actual popularity and viability was exposed through increased scrutiny, they fell away, to be replaced by the next in line. Pawlenty, Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Paul, Gingrich, and now Santorum.

Paul is an anomaly in more than one way -- he ran before, so he has familiarity. He also has a sort of hard floor as to how low his support goes due to his previous campaign and dedicated following. Because of this he tends to bob a little in the media, and they never quite write him off like the others.

Santorum I think is the one of the least electable of all of them, but since he's the last man standing Romney has to wrap up the nomination to get rid of him permanently, and the media likes the story of Romney's lack of conservatism and Santorum plays into this beautifully (for the media -- I find him terribly shrill).

At the end of it all, though, it will be Romney v. Obama for president. If the economy keeps pace, Obama will probably win, but only because of Romney's persistent crisis of charisma and many of the born-again bloc voters rejecting him on the grounds he's a Mormon. I don't think it will be any kind of Obama "mandate".

I don't see myself necessarily accepting the statistical insight of our business entities as quite as readily as I once did.

How is that "middle class" defined?

It's great PR and a neat concept, but what statistical construct do they use to define them?

Given that the per capita GDP is on the same level as any other third world country, is a middle class as defined by some poverty-skewed average, or is based on something more comparable, such as disposable income (income after food, clothing, housing & utilities)?

And given that the half-billion people in the US and Europe traded control over their lives for iPhones and big screen TV, I'm not sure that the CPC's materialism plan won't keep working, although the rural poor in Western China may give them pause, especially if there are enough bodies and sympathy within the military leadership.