There's a difference between having "just one beer" in the sense of "I swear I had one just beer, ossifer," and having "just one beer" in the sense of having just one beer. To my knowledge, this causes no material impairment. If you're tired at the end of a long day of work, do you call a cab and leave your car at work? In the absence of such behavior being the social norm, I see no reason to expect such risk-averse behavior by people with a BAC of 0.02% or whatever.

This is an artifact of using a linear scale, so that a 10% fluctation when the index is 10,000 is much larger than when it is 2,000, and the fact that the market has, in retrospect, stagnated for the past decade.

Here is linear plot of the DJIA for the past 30 years: 1980 to 2010 linear
Here is a linear plot of the DJIA for 1949 to 1979: 1949 to 1979 linear
I don't think that algo trading started in the 1970s, ceased from 1980 to 2000, and then resumed. Of course, there is still more contrast between the 2000s and the previous two decades than between the 1970s and the previous two decades. This is because in the latter case the market increased about 4 or 5 times to get to the level where it stagnated, while in the former it increased 10 times, so the effect of earlier years being muted in a linear scale is stronger. In particular see the market lose and regain 40% of its value from 1973 to 1976. The past decade is not unprecedented.

The correct way to look at this is with a logarithmic scale. Unfortunately, the graphs I have are vertically compressed in a log scale, but you can still compare the fluctuations in the last ten years of the graph to the fluctuations in the first twenty years of the same graph. Coincidentally, in each graph there is a large dip at or near the end, due to actual recessions.
Here is a log plot of the DJIA for the past 30 years: 1980 to 2010 log
Here is a log plot of the DJIA for 1949 to 1979: 1949 to 1979 log

You seem to be under the impression that every fully saturated color is a spectral color, but this is false. If "hue" only includes the pure visible spectrum, then HSB will not include magenta (or, actually, the whole triangle defined by white, red, and violet, on CIE chromaticity diagram). Look in particular at the color wheel and the visible spectrum on the magenta page. People do use HSB, but the range of the hue must include a non-spectral "line of purples" to wrap around.

Assuming this is even legal (as you're not only requiring employees to bring their own tools, but to spend their time maintaining said tools for free), this works great until potential employees wise up and you have to pay higher base wages to compensate for the inevitable docked pay (or spare computers or parts to avoid it). Since it's obviously much cheaper on average to keep a handful of spare computers or spare parts for the whole company, for use while dealing with the manufacturer for warranty repair or replacement, etc., than to keep one spare computer for every employee, this probably saves money mostly if you dupe your employees into eating the loss.

First off, you have passengers, including passengers of buses and so forth. I want policies that encourage multiple people to a vehicle.

Second, there is just no way that we have maps that are accurate enough. I gather that motorway is a British term corresponding to the American term freeway, a road that has no stops and is limited to motor vehicle traffic, so you don't have the problem of sidewalks (aka pavement, I believe). Even so, there are apartment buildings in my city that I can clearly see on Google maps to be less than 40 feet from the edge of the freeway, and so I doubt the map data is accurate enough.

Yes, I was referring to debits from the personal accounts of human beings.

Are you serious???! An ACH transaction can be reversed up to 60 days after the next bank statement, if the customer reports it as an unauthorized electronic transfer. This is as it should be, since an account number is not a proof of identity. In theory, if you can show that the actual account holder did authorize the transaction, you're fine, but even in the best possible case the verification is all on you. Of course, in a case like the check case in the article where the business was transacted by mail, anyone can send you a bunch of phony authorization paperwork that isn't going to mean jack.

It lets you verify that it's either Visa or a man-in-the-middle attack...

Jesus fucking Christ. Why not just pass a law that, "It shall be an offense against the United States to bind oxygen to hemoglobin, punishable by imprisonment for up to ten years," and rely on prosecutorial discretion to only punish those who deserve it for some actual reason?

Gravitational potential energy on Earth is limited in roughly the same sense as solar energy. The universe of course has limited total energy resources...

This is exactly correct. Not only are individuals not their customers, lenders actively profit when credit reports are worse than they should be, and these profits support the reporting agencies directly.

It is the exact same scam as the ratings agencies passing off sub-prime mortgages as AAA. And it is completely due to the fact that the entire industry is supported by taxpayer money; financial institutions that fail to assess risk correctly are prevented from failing.

Actually, it's extremely different. In the mortgage case, risk was assessed as lower than it actually is when making loans. The normal market mechanism for correction is that such lenders lose money and eventually go bankrupt, so it's perfectly coherent to claim that being backstopped by the taxpayers distorts the correction. Note that this correction doesn't rely on the lenders having competition -- if the entire industry is making loans below the cost of risk it will still lose money. Also note that the loss of money was absolute. They loans were not merely less profitable than they could be, they lost money on net.

In contrast, if you assess risk as higher than it actually is, you still make profit, albeit perhaps less than otherwise. The normal market mechanism for correction is not bankruptcy, but competition. There are no losses for taxpayers to backstop. Of course, in theory lenders could eventually lose all their customers to other lenders using a more accurate model of consumers, but that isn't happening; and if it is due to government distortion it's not the same mechanism at all as propping up failing institutions.

I suspect the real situation is this:

Credit reporting agencies provide mostly accurate information. If I'm a lender, I want accurate information. If agency A offers "lender-friendly" bad credit reports and agency B offers accurate reports, I can steal from lenders using agency A all the customers who have have falsely bad reports from agency A. Your claim that providing bad credit reports helps lenders is only true if the interest rate for any given credit rating is fixed by law or something.

Nevertheless, "mostly accurate" could easily allow for a lot of anecdotes of inaccuracy. The natural barriers to entry for a CRA are extremely high, so a tiny fraction of consumers with inaccurate accounts will not cause a competitor to spring up, but a tiny fraction could still be a large absolute number of consumers.

Dude, 90% of the humor is the fact that this overused quote actually applies (or comes as close to applying as it ever will) with its original referent, rather than "I, for one, welcome our new hamster overlords" or whatever. Hell, the BBC headline was "Ant mega-colony takes over world." If some religious cult built a computer to determine the answer to a philosophical question, HHGTTG jokes would be kind of funny in reference to such a story (although that's not the best example on my part because more applicable and less overused would be a reference to the stars, one by one, winking out).

One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

Well, this reporter was...possibly a little hasty earlier and would like to...reaffirm his allegiance to this country and its human president. May not be perfect, but it's still the best government we have. For now.

There are plenty of jobs where a single incident of teasing a person under your care about their suicide attempt could get you fired. If he lacks the interpersonal skills to, at the very least, become embarrassed and apologize immediately after letting that comment slip, maybe teaching isn't the right profession. As for my assumption that no justifying context occurred, keep in mind that I'm not serving on an administrative or judicial body in this case, I'm merely trusting the LA Times to have found a handful of legitimate anecdotes. Your apparent inability to accept that a teacher anywhere in LA county did something quite wrong is what made me accuse you of a tribal mentality like police officers who never testify against each other.

Thinking that it should be easier to fire teachers is not the same as thinking that that will solve all the problems with education or that all teachers are bad.

However, I did realize later that firing might be particularly severe for LA county teachers if it renders them unable to be employed by any public school in the county. In most occupations, you have to be fired a number of times in succession before you become so unemployable. Perhaps such a degree of centralization is bad.

The article does not kick off by describing anything remotely resembling your speculation. It does not describe the evidence against the teacher at the beginning, but later in the article. The teacher's behavior is testified to by his own teaching assistant, among others:

People such as yourself are apparently part of the problem. Through some primitive tribal mentality, you assume people who are part of your group can do no wrong, although they are humans, just as capable of wrong as the parents and students you bash. Frankly, if your first reaction to reading about an attempt to fire a teacher for insulting a student about his suicide attempt is to stop reading and rant about how much parents and students suck, you should find another line of work, because you're either burnt out or an adversarial nutjob. I say this as someone who believes that an entitlement attitude is a problem -- but not one that is limited to parents and students.

Fortunately, I have no doubt that most teachers would be in favor of firing that asshole.