Any of what shit? Poor? So, a person who drops out of high school, or even graduates high school is entitled $20-30k a year job? Most of them have no marketable job skills. Life sucks when you're just starting out, the vast majority of poor people are not people with degrees, or 20 years experience in their field. When I was in college, I lived on a $10 a week food budget because that's all there was. Now, almost 20 years later I have a fairly comfortable life with a reasonable wage. I'm far from wealthy, but it's pretty rare that I eat PB&J because I have to.

And yes, I agree... being poor does royally suck, just it sucks less here than in other places. We spend just shy of a trillion dollars a year on means tested assistance programs, outside of medicare/medicaid.

Spending is currently around 23-25% of GDP, so 4.7% of GDP is in now way shape or form more than 50% of the budget. Yes, it's a lot. Yes, probably room to trim that back some.

Currently, we in the USA spending about 4.7% of our GDP on defense. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures Historically fairly low. IN fact, we spend over 200 billion MORE on aid for the disadvantaged than we do on defense. The poorest households in the US have a pretty good life when compared to most of the world. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkebmhTQN-4

Unless of course one uses the lasers to kill the beetles. I live on about 9 acres of property in Colorado (outside of Estes Park) and was lucky this year that the beetles seem to like my neighbors trees better.

What part of CO are you in?

3% is not 1/3 of my finger. And if your reading skills were better than your math skills, you'd notice that it's 0.003675% of total atmosphere. So, that's about the same amount of my finger that probably wore off while typing this response. God why am I feeding the trolls?

And, of that 17% increase, how much is attributed strictly to humans? Even if all of it can be, we're still talking about thousands of a percent.

By a LOT you mean about 3% of all CO2 found in the atmosphere? Which is like ~0.003675% of all the atmosphere?

You can count me in the group using smart phones in the bathroom, ever since I first discovered an ebook reader... back on CE 5 or 6. Now my news reader is on my phone too :-)

I think the GP was referring to those who gain a majority of their subsistence through some sort of government payout rather than those who are working to better their lot in life and might need occasional help. With the per median income of that area above $70k per year, I don't think that's the group that was being referred to. The term "productive" is rather broad, and I think you're probably using it in a different way than the GP. For example if we asked "How much wealth does a bus boy generate as compared to a CEO?" compared to "Who does more physical labor, the bus boy or the CEO?". Or am I misunderstanding your statement?

Why only one day a week? If we gave some sort of incentive for companies to let their people work from home more often, then they save on office space and we save on transportation costs.

I used to be 100% remote for a large company, then they spend millions renovating 2 floors of office space and required everyone within 50 miles to be on site every day. Those who were more than 50 miles were let go shortly after. Now workers spend hours driving to work, only to be less productive because it's too damn noisy. The only answer I've ever gotten for this is "because they said so". I'm not sure who came up with the idea, how it got approved but I'm willing to put money on Power Point being used in it. Some of the worst decisions in business history have been made to look good with that damn program.

Do the math, I live an hour away. That's 10 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. That's 520 hours a year. 13 work weeks each year spend driving to and from a job that has been proven successful when done from home office. 20,000 miles at a cost of over 9,000 (at $0.45 per mile) each year.

Oh, and they already issue laptops and require employees to have high speed broadband for on call duty.