Freeze your credit.

I was the victim of identity theft. Someone got access to my name, address, SSN, and DOB and used it to open up a credit card account in my name. (Thank you, Capital One, for not caring that the Mother's Maiden name was wrong! And for stonewalling both me and the police every step of the way in the name of YOUR liability.)

The credit agencies will recommend fraud alerts but these have two major flaws: 1) They are optional. Credit Card Company A *should* check for a fraud alert before issuing a credit card in your name, but doesn't *have* to. (You can bet that the ID thieves know which companies check and which don't.) 2) They expire after 90 days. Your information isn't going to magically disappear from the ID thieves after three months. It's out there for good now. So why should the check against ID theft expire?

If you freeze your credit then nobody (you or anyone else) can open a new line of credit on the account. If you actually do want to open a new line of credit (or get a loan or have a background check performed), you thaw your credit report for a set period of time. The downsides are that you have to pay for each thaw and you can't sign up for credit on the spot. (We actually consider the latter to be a perk. "Would you like to save 10% by getting our store card?" "No thanks. Credit frozen thanks to ID theft.")

Of course, the credit agencies HATE credit freezes because they make money by offering your credit file to anyone and everyone to send you offers for credit cards and the like. A frozen credit card file takes away that income opportunity.

Come to think of it, that's another bonus to freezing your credit file.

This site has some good information on Credit Freezes including links/phone numbers to freeze your credit file: http://www.clarkhoward.com/news/clark-howard/personal-finance-credit/credit-freeze-and-thaw-guide/nFbL/

To be fair, they're not saying you can opt out of medical care, just "opt out" of getting prescription drugs.

Of course, try telling that to someone who needs to take a prescription to live (e.g. insulin) or to be functional in society (e.g. anti-anxiety medicine). Try telling them that it's "optional" for them to take that medicine. I'm sure they'll have a very different opinion than the DEA has.

Of course, the DEA would argue against Orangutan rights. The DEA's run by a bunch of baboons!

functional equivalent of pouring gasoline on trillions of taxpayer dollars and burning them

At least that would have the advantage of keeping people warm during the winter. We could cut the DEA, ship billions of "burning dollars" to homeless shelters (to burn, not spend) and still come out ahead.

Time and money mean nothing to them. Power means everything. If they try to grab this power and lose, nothing bad will happen. Sure they'll have wasted time and money, but that's the tax payers' stuff. Who cares, really? However, if they try this power grab and succeed, then they've got a shiny new weapon in the fight against drugs (where "fight against drugs" is a code name for "get more power for ourselves").

There are many reports that the NSA weakened encryption to aid their spying efforts. Even putting aside the NSA's spying, weakened encryption means greater likelihood of a hacker cracking your encryption which weakens the security of the Internet. Even if I were crazy enough to support the NSA spying, I'd still see weakened encryption as a threat to everyone.

Sadly, it looks like we're headed towards no public schools (at least here in NY) and not in a way that is even remotely good. After a round of developmentally inappropriate testing pushed by big businesses (and the politicians they contribute to) to "evaluate" teachers, they found that only 30% of kids passed. So the Governor suggested using the "death penalty" against public schools that didn't pass.

The only schools that would be left? Private schools and charter schools. The former are fine, but the latter are run by corporations which treat the school like a business. They take public funds but are exempt from the testing and can refuse any student they want to for any reason. (For example, if the student would need special services and so would constitute a "financial burden".) So the governor would turn our state into a system where kids were either taught by businesses or had to pay to get into an expensive private school. If you aren't rich and have a child who requires special services, too bad. (Maybe they'll keep one underfunded public school open to house these kids and so they can point to it as being so horrible and proof that the charter schools are so wonderful.)

Whatever your opinion of government-run public schools is, surely a business-run public school has got to be worse!

Why not let the RIAA and MPAA write curriculum? Thanks to Common Core and Race to the Top, we are already paying big businesses such as Pearson tons of money to write curriculum that teachers aren't allowed to veer from. Then we pay these companies more to administer tons of non-developmentally-appropriate tests which parents and teachers are forbidden from seeing. Then, when the kids inevitably fail (in New York, only 30% of kids passed the tests... many of these kids were straight A students who were now considered failures), these companies "helpfully" have textbooks, teacher seminars, extra help sessions for students, instruction for administrators, etc all designed to improve the students' scores on the tests the companies wrote. And all available for a price, of course.

Don't even get me started on our education commissioner who was looking into taking legal action against parents who refused to let their kids take these tests.

Then there's the fact that charter schools are being pushed hard. These are schools which take public school funds, but are run by businesses, don't need to take any of the tests, don't require their teachers to have any sort of training in education, can pick and choose which students are allowed in. (Bad grades? You're out. Need special services? You're out.) Politicians seem to love charter schools so much and push them whenever they can. Governor Andrew Cuomo has already suggested using the "death penalty" for public schools that don't pass the overly hard tests. Of course, you can guess what he would replace them with. (No comments from him on what would happen to the kids that the charter schools refused to serve. Would a K-12 education become only for the select few that businesses decide can have it?)

I have a fifth grader and first grader who are dealing with all of this now so, yes, I might be a bit bitter.

Those who insist they can text while driving safely sound (to me) just like those people who argue that they can safely drive while drunk. Yes, you might have done it once or twice before without incident. You might have even done it a dozen times. Congrats. However, the next time might be the time that your streak of luck ends and you wind up killing or seriously injuring someone.

I know that the lure of the incoming message can be tough to fight. I've heard my phone buzz and had the "I'll be fine if I just check it quickly" thought pop into my head. I resist it though until I reach a spot where I can pull over (if I'm expecting an important message) or until I reach my destination. There is no text message so important that it can't wait.

While speeding, drunk driving, and texting while driving might not cause harm directly, they increase the risk to the point that nobody can seriously claim to be "driving safely" while doing this. (For these purposes, I'm not defining "speeding" as going 5mph over the speed limit but instead going WAY over the speed limit. For example, doing 60mph in a 30mph zone.)

Accidents can be caused by many factors. You could encounter bad weather and find yourself unable to stop. You could make a bad driving decision. Or you could engage in activities that are well-known to decrease your driving abilities and which should not be done while driving. If the accident wasn't the fault of the driver (e.g. caused by weather and not the driver's behavior), no penalty should be issued. If a bad driving decision was made, a penalty should be issued, but not severe. (At least not the first time. repeat offenders should quickly get their license taken away at the very least.) If, however, you got drunk and decided to drive or thought that it would be harmless to text your friends while going down the highway at 60mph, then you have no sympathy from me when you get into an accident. If you are drunk, take a cab home or have someone sober drive you. If you *really* need to text someone, find a spot to stop, text your friend, and then drive off again.

This kind of thing has been going on for as long as there have been online comments about products. One of the first sites I ran was an infomercial product review site. I got some great reviews saying how good or awful products were (tip: don't buy Epil-Stop). I would also get a sudden flood of positive reviews on a product. At that time, the fake reviewers weren't too sophisticated so you could tell that the 100 positive reviews from 100 "different people" were coming from the same IP address. I'd junk them but even at the time it was a lot of effort for what was a one man operation. I can sympathize with the comments moderation teams at Yelp, Amazon, and any other place that accepts user comments on products but tries to weed out fake ones.

So seven years ago, the Mythbusters defeated a high end alarm system using simple techniques. Now you can buy a smartphone for much less that contains that technology - still able to be defeated by the same methods. The march of technology!

I said this too when the "fingerprint scanner" broke. The response I got was that the Mythbusters episode was from 2006 and this technology obviously read subdermal layers, etc, etc, etc. Imagine my surprise (by which I mean the lack thereof) that the device can be beaten with techniques the Mythbusters employed seven years ago.

Having gone to an Orthodox temple for awhile* where the rabbi was a staunch Creationist (Young Earth, not less) and very anti-science, I can attest that one big reason is that science is scary to these people. You see, they like the comfort of "knowing" what is going on in the world. How was the world created? Read Genesis and find out. Genesis hasn't changed in a thousand years and likely won't change in the next thousand. Meanwhile, science is saying one thing today and then something different tomorrow. Science changes with every new discovery.

Now, you and I might say "but that's science's greatest strength" and we would be right. But to creationists, a "how did it happen" story that changes isn't comforting. Instead, the certainty of "In the beginning...." is touted as a strength and the changing nature of science is put forward as a weakness. (Much in the same way that a politician who changes his view when new information is brought to light might be painted as "flip flopping" for daring to change positions.)

So the answer to "Why do they keep pushing Intelligent Design" is that they want to prevent science by all means necessary and return to a world where the answer to everything was just "pray harder**."

* I went to that temple only because I was living with my parents at the time and they were members there so I got membership for free. My tongue paid for the membership, though, every time I bit it when the rabbi went on a "science is weak for changing" rant. That wasn't the time or place for an argument... especially since many of the congregants believed the same thing. I'd have a better chance of changing a person's mind by posting "Why Windows is superior to Linux" on Slashdot!

** Note that they also believe that "pray harder" only works if you adopt THEIR religion's god. And not just their religion's god, but the particular sect of their religion's god. Any variation, no matter how slight, will render "pray harder" ineffective (in their minds). Of course, this can be applied after the fact. You tried to pray away your sickness and you got worse so obviously that means that you didn't accept their god properly and fully. Shame on you!

Well, it's sort of like this XKCD cartoon: http://xkcd.com/149/

Except instead of "Sudo make me a sandwich", the response is "Make me a sandwich or the terrorists win." Then give knowledge of this to lawmakers and others in positions of power who want certain legislation passed. As long as they can "elevate permissions" via the "terrorist command", this will continue.