I didn't know a soul at my current employer when I got the job. Nor at the last employer. Come to think of it, I haven't known anyone at any of my employers until after I started working there.

Did you not notice my reference to a "road right into massive surveillance hell"?

See, still putting the cart before the horse.

Also, your characterization of illegal immigrants as criminals is factually incorrect in most cases. It isn't a crime to enter the United States without permission (there is one illegal immigration-related criminal statute, but it doesn't apply to the vast majority of illegal immigrants).

Reading the comments I eventually got enough context to track down the Wikipedia entry, which says: "drag racing tires perform better at higher temperatures, and a burnout is the quickest way to raise tire temperature immediately prior to a race. They also clean the tire of any debris and lay down a layer of rubber by the starting line for better traction."

So... is this just for drag racing? Or is there some other point to this?

I'm 57, the Ex is 54, the youngest child is 29, and we have been divorced for 8 years and 9 months, (and having a great time dating each other for 8 years, 8 months, and 19 days.) (It's complicated).

Right now, I have some Christians telling me we are going to Hell for not getting remarried, other Christians telling me we cannot ever remarry in their church, others telling me we should stop having sex because we are past reproductive age, and still others telling me we should get remarried immediately, but they require a 1 year waiting period, and we should lay off the sex until that expires.

An Islamic friend from one of the smaller branches tells me that if we embrace Islam, she must first be married to someone else and divorce them before she can remarry me - He informed me that couples wishing to reconcile in this way usually have the woman briefly marry one of the man's relatives and then immediately divorce them - it's frequent to avoid gossip by having a very quick turn-around on these ceremonies. I don't know if this means my younger brother would also have to convert, or not.

I'm starting to miss the 'good old days', when these groups would settle it all by yelling "Heretic" and then gouging out each other's eyes, etc. in a Christian manner. Seriously, it says something that the Roman Catholic church, supposedly so uncompromising on their definition of sin, or a splinter Muslem branch, are far from the most restrictive by doctrine. Some of the charismatic, fundamentalist sects are sounding just like the Skoptsy.

Change minds? Nah. But it's fun. Because the paranoid delusion is there whether you feed it or not, and no amount of pandering to them is ever going to make it go away.

This is decidedly not what Gandhi would do, nor MLK. But neither of their opponents were as ravingly delusional as the Oppressed American Christian, who can be neither reasoned with nor shamed. That which cannot be defeated must be borne, which we'll do with laughter, until the declining numbers that power the ferocity of their paranoia make them politically irrelevant. That, and the intermittent sanity of the courts to protect us from the far more real oppression that they want to impose, are the only ways we can cope.

The organized, Anton laVey founded Church of Satan, is basically espousing something very close to Ayn Rand's Objectivism. They preach 'Individual Rights' trumping governmental and social norms more than anything else. A lot of them (probably 80-90%) consider Satan as nothing more than a symbol and use that symbol like training wheels for their Atheist-o-cycles. Many would call themselves 'secular humanists' who want to make their move away from Christian churches and all belief in the Supernatural more emphatic - saying, in effect, "You've threatened me with Hellfire if I leave - I just want you to know that doesn't scare me anymore". If you could somehow get a court to rule that their doctrine was unconstitutional, that decision would also just about have to support burning all copies of "Atlas Shrugged" and arresting the entire Libertarian party as well.
        I'm increasingly a classical Liberal - that is, I will defend the right of libertarians, Athiests, and even those perverts you managed to work into your post. That's making me sad, as I'd really love to put tongue in cheek and say I don't see any downside to such a decision, but I do - a bunch of people I disagree with won't get a fair chance to express their beliefs and just maybe persuade me differently.

True. Though he could also have just substituted "people", which would have fit the grammar without the additional connotation of smug condescension, and the irony of repeating a mantra while pretending to be an independent thinker.

As you say, it's well used, and I do know exactly what it means: that somebody is about to tell me how much better he is than everybody else, with very little justification. In that sense, he was being helpful. And in exactly that sense I was trying to be helpful by pointing out that he might get his intended message (the one about whatever it is we're talking about, rather than the one about his self-superiority) across better if he didn't start out with name-calling that doesn't even have the benefit of originality.

they also know that the most reasonable way to pay $15/hr while still turning a fat profit would be to cut executive pay proportionally.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that McDonald's were a monolithic corporation instead of a bunch of franchises...

Assuming that current staff is all making $7 per hour, and we wish to pay them$15 per hour, with the money coming from executive pay...

There are 14000+ McD's in the USA. Assuming half a dozen people working any given hour of an 18 hour day, then you'll need an extra $276K per store per year, or $3.8B for all McDonald's in the USA.

Reducing the pay of McDonald's executives enough to come up with that $3.8B would pretty much require that the top 3000 or so executives were all making $1M+. If you really believe that McDonald's has that many millionaires at corporate HQ, you're more delusional than usual....

I enjoy imagining you spluttering as you're writing this, gradually realizing that you've got nothing to contribute and finally remembering the caps lock button. Thanks for making my day.

Calling it a "law" is an exaggeration for comic effect. But it gets that name because it's common enough to be a recognized trope, indeed overused: you can make a headline more exciting by hinting that a development is more important or that a trend is more pervasive than it actually is. Stories that are important in and of themselves generally have statements rather than questions in the headline.

Invoking Betteridge's Law may well itself be an over-used trope, but if it is it's only because there's so very, very much call for it. News aggregators like Slashdot serve as concentrators, seeking out the most exciting stories. Ideally, the editors would serve as filters as well, recognizing exaggerated headlines and either ignoring them or putting them back into proper context. Instead, it's usually left to a poster to do that, generally after a lot of excited and/or outraged posting based on the headline. (Because the posters who just read the headline will always get there before people who bothered to RTFA.)

Your parenthetical is presented as support for your assertion, but it isn't. The fact that they were asked many times, whether via lawful orders or otherwise, indicates nothing about whether or not they knew of secret data gathering by the NSA. They've claimed in public statements that they didn't know about it. Most have also claimed that they didn't comply with any requests except where they were obligated by law. I see no evidence to refute either claim. Do you? If so, can you point it out?

A nation of 1.4 billion people, with a gdp of $8 trillion, the largest nation in the world

I assume you're labeling them "largest in the world" because of their population, since the US GDP is almost twice that high, and even Canada is physically larger...

Cite?

Cite?