Not trying to argue, but at least for the OP's case I don't think all of your conclusions apply. Education is a weakness, but:
*High work hours are easy to fix - don't work there; find a project with good funding and do 40/week. You can easily feel this out in an interview.
*Health care is not an issue with health insurance (salaried IT worker). US physician skill level, medical equipment, drugs, and access/availability of care are top notch. US health care system is ridiculously expensive without insurance, but with insurance it will work well for the OP.
*I saw significantly more racism/hate of specific foreign cultures/immigrants when living in areas of Finland (2 years, spoke the language) than most of the US; my parents had the same experience comparing their time in Germany to the US ( ~3 years, did not speak the language).
*On education prior to college, I agree completely - the US public education system on the main is lousy right now unless you are very careful in selecting where you live so your children attend a specific 'good' school (or pay for a private school). Universities are generally good and can make up for lost time, but they're often expensive.

Usually my classes are taught by an instructor with a whiteboard.

I pay attention to and interact on the discussion, then periodically snap a photo of the whiteboard now and then with my cameraphone. With an 8MP or so typical smartphone, I can pretty much always crop the photo and read the board easily. The date and time are embedded in the image, so I can easily filter them by lecture (and cross check syllabus for topics) without doing any work. I usually review the image notes before an exam and that's about it. And I never have paper notes to file or dump at the end of the semester.

I find this enables me to pay more attention and interact more during the lecture, which is where I learn the best. Others learn well from transcribing the information; I don't and never have. YMMV.

I don't have one, but a large part of the fetish for tube amplifiers is the equalizer curve they naturally produce during amplification. Many find the inaccuracy to be a pleasing 'warm' EQ curve, so in that case doing it wrong feels better because of a desirable equalizer overlay.

I live in Salt Lake City, Utah, and I can name 2 cases in the last 10 years that were within one mile of my apartment.

One was an off duty policeman in Trolley Square who took down a killer intent on a major massacre. Another was at the grocery store across the street from my apartment in the last year or so, where a civilian used a gun to restrain a nutjob (I don't think he fired a shot) who had stabbed a random man in the head with a knife, puncturing his skull. We don't know what his further intentions were; rumor was the guy wanted to go back to jail. I only know that happened because of family working in the hospital to help the poor victim. Now since no shot was fired, the gun acting as protection will probably get no significant fanfare in the news. That, and the fact that the locals don't need to hear how guns can help--after Trolley Square, there's little real local debate.

A lot of gun owners here are guys in the military or police that want to have a gun on their person when off duty. And if a soldier or policeman saves the day, sometimes it's actually less newsworthy since that's 'their job' anyway. My brother and two borthers in law, soldier/veterans and a policeman, all carry guns and know how to use them responsibly. Each of the three would view it as their moral duty to risk their own lives to put down a guy like Breivik. Two of them have already stopped an assault or murder with the aid or threat of using a firearm, but only in the line of duty.

And I don't own a gun or care to.

Why not take this the other direction and have the government get it legal with the courts or whoever and then provide eBay a list of welfare payees or addresses they want to cross check? All the government needs to do is figure out what data they actually need before making the request and get it stamped--nothing hard there. Then privacy is protected, and the government gets only the data they intend to investigate.

I didn't understand this until I learned about my wife. Her ACT score was only ~+1 standard deviation above the norm--nothing special really--but she graduated cum laude in college and then top 15% in medical school (AOA). She has OCD, and it inhibits her on any question presented using the paradox of choice.

I think a lot of people have analogous problems--they may fully understand the concept being tested but remain unable to demonstrate that in their test score or other metric for whatever reason. I think language and terminology are common culprits.

This is inaccurate. Remember, like the label "Muslim," the label "Christian" is a blanket category encompassing a host of specific religions that are united by a common thread.

The reason for the necessity of a redemption is independent of the origins of humanity - if we choose to simply assume a conservation law for ethics exists, clearly some balancing force is needed to counter the simple fact that humans screw up and do some nasty things, then get away clean. For Christians, the assumption of that conservation law is termed faith, and further, the balancing force is attributed to the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. Further development of the framework defines a religion that falls under the "Christian" label.

I currently believe the Creation story is metaphorical and evolution is real. My views will further evolve in time as I continue to learn. Being related to a monkey isn't scary. I like my cat pretty well; maybe we're 10^7th cousins. The creation account in Genesis closely parallels the prevalent Babylonian creation accounts of the era, and that account contains metaphors useful for teaching ethical concepts to the ignorant, recently freed slaves who made up the original Jewish culture back when it happened. Is Santa an evil lie or a nice story? That's today, not 4000+ years ago.

My coworker, an aero engineer, was mayor of his city for decades. One time I asked him how intelligent politicians typically are. He felt the norm was probably around a 100-ish IQ but the standard deviation was extremely high.

Unintellgent politicians can do extremely well with a good team supporting them. They can offer charisma, guts, know how to deal, and know when to listen and when to talk. The intellectual piece can be covered by their team, and they can serve as the public face and negotiator. And while the best ideas in the world won't overthrow a sufficiently stubborn opponent, charisma or a bribe might make short work of him.

Thinking from another angle, a clever political team can be extremely effective at getting results by rallying behind a convincing, argumentative, simpleton (puppet) lawyer who feels the team's ideas are worth arguing tooth and nail. He won't back down because he can't - he doesn't know where to go on his own, and that's part of the power in that political team structure.

Agreed. In the US and the first world, being poor has transitioned into the much more benign problem of limited socioeconomic mobility. It's a legitimate problem that we need to work to address, but poverty in first world nations is nothing like poverty in third world nations.

“Why are you so eager to come to America?”
“Because I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.”
- from Dinesh D'Souza, probably elsewhere

I didn't have it as hard, but was getting pretty frustrated seeing the same trends starting to happen in my own life. If I didn't beat it, I at least made some improvements. I did two things at once - changed jobs to get a fresh start and started working on an advanced degree (part time). I also was able to lean on student loans to float through an unexpected financial challenge.

I finish my MS at the end of this year, and I have to say the two changes really helped me. I was so busy I couldn't despair about life for a while, and the stimulation from learning in school helps offset for the (slightly improved but still) unfulfilling parts of work. Summer is relaxing. The newer job is only a little more fulfilling but does offer a lot more mobility and therefore will open doors for me--it's already started to do that in a significant way, and the doors are a direct result of the MS program. Now that I'm starting to see results and opportunities are opening up, I feel happier and fulfillment is starting to come again--it's not here yet, but I can see it again.

You may want to look into something like that yourself. Worst thing you get is you advance your career.

TOR will be quickly broken if it gains widespread usage. The FBI has already demonstrated the ability to trace its 'anonymous' users when it's serious about a crime (such as controlled substance distribution centers as linked in Anubis's post).

The methods they've developed so far will get a lot more development if TOR is perceived as a real threat to somebody with political power.

I was with Comcast and had a 15 mbps connection but typically 150-200 ms ping in our apartment building. They advertised the crap out of the download rate, but I felt like I was on a satellite sometimes with the ping.

We moved to a home in a new neighborhood that's only serviced by Qwest. I was initially disappointed by the drop to 7 mbps and really lousy upload speed, but I do take comfort in a very consistent = 60 ms ping.

For many practical purposes, cutting the ping from the really lousy 1/5th-1/7th of a second down to 1/15th made this an overall upgrade.

Wikipedia lists 29 active and licensed civilian reactors; the majority of them belong to universities. Most were built in the 60's, most are General Atomics TRIGA reactors, and the power outputs range from 1 W to 10 MW. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors

A few other civilian groups are licensed to have nuclear material, and of course other sectors and nations have lots of the stuff. It's really pretty common.

jackass?

The line is much harder to draw with vertical monopolies than with horizontal ones. Microsoft was more horizontal in nature than Apple, and IIRC they had on the order of 90% of the market in hand for a few years before getting slapped. Apple's system is more vertical, so distilling how they capture the market down to one useful and realistic number is a lot harder.

I don't know of a good modern model to look to as a precedent for when the (US) government steps in, but today I think Android is keeping Apple safe.