"that taxpayer-funded projects are barriers to future infrastructure investment."
 
Yes everyone can compete in the free market,
except for groups of geographically related people cooperating with their tax dollars. Can't have them competing.
 
That's the last thing we want for our infrastructure. People cooperating with their votes and tax dollars.

> People who have to use their own money / satisfy investors / secure a loan tend to plan ahead and think about how much they need and why.
People who have their hand out tend to ask for whatever they can get and think about how to spend it later.

Sure. Clever phrasing. The first group is satisfying self interests. The second is hoping to do something charitable or somehow beneficial to others, and still be able to buy groceries. We have different spreadsheets. For instance everyone who's not Levar Burton of TV fame.

They could totally turn themselves around if they offered exactly what just about everybody wants..
 
A ROCK SOLID home multifunction office machine. Rock Solid meaning slick bomb-proof drivers as well as a machine that didn't crap out on a black and white report because the yellow ink was low. This machine would also need a paper feed that didn't require the moon to be in proper alignment during a squirrel sacrifice in order to feed mostly whatever you put it in.
 
Then, offer them like cell phones. Charge less up front but only a bit less. Quit selling junk and hoping to cheat everybody on ink. Let me sign up for a quality service and ink renewal plan that works like a cheaper version of a smart phone. Make it as trouble free and pain free as your average smart phone. I'll sign up tomorrow.

Our roads need to be repaired almost constantly. How does this improve the situation? How about a dumb road that does it's job for 80 years straight?

+1 Amen

The Stigma and Social Effects scare me. Yes ideally I'd like to dismiss all that as trivial or superficial; shallow, or beside the point. But parents are weighing real effects, of real life, on our very real children. You can't teach a 6 year old to Be Yourself and Fuckitall.

How does one vet home schooling?

How is Prime not better than Netflix? Unless you're an old kung fu and anime buff Prime is in a tie with Netflix. They're pretty close with the free streaming. But Amazon lets you rent all those new On Demand Titles that your cable company sells you, but in HD for a doller less.

Netflix seems beneficial if you have b-sides and/or foreign or specifically eclectic tastes. Otherwise if you're an On Demand User then Amazon Prime pays for itself. 8 dollars / movies per month plus free shipping easily buys the membership. And the delivery is beautiful and with a seemingly un-compressed 1080 stream. Something not even Verizon Fios seems to be able to deliver lately.

What if the gold-plated ones actually sounded much better because they were better made, and more expensive, and didn't rust sitting on the warehouse shelves. What if they also didn't destroy as much groundwater in the making and the workers we're happer and better treated?
The gold/organic doesn't matter, it just makes things easier to find.

If we all demanded organic Orange Juice from Florida, the reduction in fertilizer alone could solve a lot of problems:
 
    https://www.fit.edu/research/p...
http://unclematts.com/dev/conv...
  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04...

That's just orange juice, in one state. There are thousands of examples.

It often tastes better too, which is a bonus.

So you grabbed whatever was in their little geek bins in the back that worked for you and told us the details. Sure ok.

You could open a Pinball themed shop selling pinball machine parts too. But the front 98% of it better be a brew pub with working pinball machines, good food, and hot waitresses.

To be clear: Drones and Secrets instead of Troops on the Ground... That doesn't mean we shrank our war machine.

Spending the money on killing machines doesn't win you anti-bloat points.
 
Shrink the budget. Shrink the percentage of budget based on adjusted GDP. We're becoming all brawn and no brain.

We've had carefully selected Golden Retrievers in our extended family for 30 years. For a point of reference this is a breed that's ranked #5 in intelligence compared to all breeds. Our family dog is amazingly human-like, even after carefully trying not to anthropomorphize him and our feelings about him.
 
He has a vocabulary of about 50 words. He understands short sentences, or at least enough words in them to understand what we mean. "Go upstairs and find your ball", "Hey I put food in your bowl", "Go see your mom" (since he's an adopted pet we're his adoptive parents, dogs are not things to own). He responds like a human. He can practically tell you a whole story with his facial expressions. He can roll his eyes sort of by looking at the ceiling and making a face when he thinks we're being ridiculous, and it's different than a similar face when he thinks we're being obtuse. He even has a favorite movie, Snow Dogs. He pays close attention to the dogs and has done the eyeroll to the ceiling thing when the humans start making out. He cracks us up daily.
 
We've all seen a dog lift an eyebrow and tilt their head to say "what the heck are you talking about?" Tip of the iceberg. When you have a really smart one for a decade it's like having a furry kid in the family. A very well behaved one, but there you go.
 
I sort of feel sorry for people who never get to be "dog people", call a dog "it" and think the rest of us are crazy and just anthropomorphizing our pet. Most of us "dog people" don't need these studies to tell us anything. But I'm still glad they're studying.

What I see is way too many people bending over backwards in order to get bent over forwards in return. Just because you have a smart phone and a laptop doesn't mean you have to reply instantly. It doesn't mean you have to give an ETA on a project or task that requires you to get it done with 60 hours in a week or 14 hours in a day.
 
    And once you start doing that everyone starts expecting it. Don't start! If you do work at home wait until the morning to send it out. Don't reply to email at 8pm. When your boss says "Where were you last night?" You say "Did we have an after hours appointment?" and make a show of looking at your calendar. The next time you say "Taking my son to xyz." Say it like it was wonderful and not like it's an excuse. Don't for a second feel guilty. Do this publicly as much as possible. Nobody else there wants to work 14 hour days either.

It's like an idiotic prisoners' dilemna. We all do it because everybody else is. Even your boss is sick of it, and has wife who is sick of it too.

The only way to win is not to play. If that means moving on to another job so be it. Keep moving until the tide around you moves with you.

What if I could get to all the boring places much faster, and also have a car for "getting away"?

"It started to go downhill with the whole "lifehacker" meme."

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