I can never remember the decision's name, but the TL;DR is that the US Supreme Court decided that the union fails in it's duty to represent if they don't go to bat for everyone in the union. There are exceptions for criminal activity, but essentially this results in an extremely adversarial relationship between unions and management. It would be far better if the law allowed unions the ability to clean their own house. Not saying they would, but it could go a long way towards moving to the German model of union-management relations.

Even with socialized medicine, it's still more expensive to hire 2 30 hour/week people. First off, there's a non-zero overhead for each worker. Two computer accounts, two home directories, two desks, two phones, etc. etc. If you go the European route and grant each worker 25 days off, there's 50 days of vacation being paid for a given amount of hours. I'm down with the argument that some people are getting the short end, but you don't do anyone any favors by saying things that aren't true.

That's a pretty stunning display of cognitive dissonance you've got going there.

doesn't jive with

The Sierra Club is a corporation. The ACLU is a corporation. The NRA is a corporation.

A corporation is nothing more than one or more people pooling resources to establish a common goal.

Remember, folks, Iran's apparently nuclear weapon program, while not illegal in any sense

Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Under that treaty, they are legally restricted from developing nuclear weapons and legally required to allow the IAEA to monitor any nuclear program that they did have.

If they're pursuing nuclear weaponry, it's clearly illegal.

One of the problems that we have to face is that CAFE moved people out of relatively efficient cars and into inefficient trucks. GM and Ford drastically cut back large car production and directed those resources into trucks due to some quirks* of CAFE. The upshot is that if you need a car that holds more than 2 adults and 2 kids, it's easier (and cheaper) to find what you want on the SUV side of the house. I'm totally behind increasing the gas tax. At the same time, we should repeal CAFE and let GM and Ford build what they can build where they can build it. *I can elaborate, but I'll abstain unless asked.

I thought HughesNet used the satellite for the download side and POTS for the upload side. If that's the case, you're still screwed when the phone line is down.

Yes. The trite summary is that a blind moron with a Celsius room temperature IQ could have seen that the US federal government was going to helicopter cash out to states to pay for voting "upgrades" following the fiasco in Florida during the 2000 election.

Diebold had a (small) division in South America that did voting machines, but they felt it was better to buy a local company. That company is the fucked up one, with the Microsoft Access, and the antivirus* and the glavens.

*Yes, Randall is a smart guy, but the antivirus in question wasn't running on the voting machines, it was running on the central server. ISTR that in that particular instance, the votes had actually been cast on Scantron style paper ballots.

This assumes that all new tactics are 100% effective. You can cherrypick examples where new tactics triumphed over old, but there's also a shitload of dead people out there who died because people tried new tactics that didn't work. Bringing the parent back to the real world, this means that Iran has crunched the rules of war and come up with a working strategy. What would have happened if the rules had changed in the middle of the game? In the Eurisko case, that doesn't make sense. But what if, in a USN vs. Iran tangle, the USN decides they've had enough and change the rules to target a refinery or shipping port or two and then withdraw.

As I understand it, the sanctions are used to punish violations of international law. Yes, Iran is allowed to pursue civilian nuclear power under the NPT. At the same time, the NPT places obligations on them that they have been shirking.

Nuclear weapons are good for Iran in that they give the regime the power you're suggesting WRT brinksmanship. However, they're bad for Iran in that actually possessing them will touch off a nuclear arms race in the region as other powers will want the same guarantees in dealing with Iran. That would be a massive blow to stability not just in the region, but world-wide.

Their primary naval weapon is a missile that can get into ballistic mode before a ship's countermeasure can intercept it. I'm not sure what you're after there. A ballistic missile is one that follows a suborbital path (shitloads of power in the boost phase, and gravity and minor steering after). Even leaving that aside, AFAIK, the only serious countermeasure that the USN has for unguided missiles is Phalanx. I would think that relatively slow, small, unguided missiles* would be meat for the Phalanx. You could probably overwhelm the system, but that assumes the USN has no way to deal with said speedboats *cough* artillery *cough* Hell, you don't even have to hit the boats -- just throw up enough of a barrage that they don't get a stable platform long enough to take a shot. *The kind of MLRS that fits on a single engine fiberglass boat doesn't lend itself to having large munitions.

Wasn't it George Carlin that had the bit about adding dart guns to cars? When some guy did something wrong, you'd shoot a dart at his car, and when he got to 3 darts, the cops would pull him over for being an asshole.

Fishing in the Western Central Pacific is highly governed. The WCPFC, which is a treaty organization that includes Japan*, regulates what can and cannot be done in this part of the Pacific.

AFAIK, the WCPFC does limit whaling (and catch of other mammals).

*Japan is nice enough to send a lot of money to WCPFC

The transcontinental railroad and the interstate highway system were built by the WPA?

Cassandra can do it but it doesn't have the ability to deal with arbitrarily large binary objects.