At the post office?

Your internet service is all 4G and random WiFi?

You use the NFL -- a viciously protective, extortionate tax-exempt monopoly -- as the standard for celebrating raw, unbridled competition? In a way, I totally agree. That IS the American ideal end-game of "free-market" "competition."

"My point is that One World Government is a horrible idea. Alternatives are good. Being able to vote with your feet is the last refuge."

An excellent point, but that last bit ended with WWI.

And sapience is pretty much the only thing we can point to when trying to claim humans are "better" than other animals. Take away that yardstick and we may as well be experimenting directly on humans.

Rather telling that the same vanity is used to both support and oppose the act in question...

No, but short of standing in the middle of the street, most places people think of as "public" are in fact private property and the owners are well within rights to demand you turn that shit off and put it away or go play in traffic.

The household survey on which unemployment figures are based has nothing whatsoever to do with benefit claims.

Please stop.

Warren Buffet is the son of a four-term congressman who owned a stock brokerage and gave him his first job. He graduated high school in Washington, DC while his father was a sitting member of congress, then was promptly enrolled at U. Penn to study business.

Please stop spreading this "started from nothing" bullshit. It is a myth.

No, no, no, you let your tedious "DBAs" think they're right and do all that "normalization" and "tuning" shit they keep yammering on about (whatevs), then get the new shiny so you can blob the whole fucker up and never have to worry about anything but said "SELECT * FROM FOO." It's great because our developers no longer have to talk to our DBAs about "optimizing" all that dynamic SQL our webforms were generating. The DBAs are now screaming about resource utilization, but, HELLO, they're the ones who insisted on building all those freakin tables in the first place when everyone knows you just need one to throw in all the XML. Idiots.

The fact that he nearly single-handedly got the entire world to stop calling people "con-men" and start referring to them as enviable "social engineers" is his most staggeringly astounding accomplishment. That he now seems to have parlayed that into /actual/ social engineering is frightful.

Get elected, actually READ legislation before voting on it, actually WRITE legislation you submit, abstain from or vote no on anything where neither of the above are possible.

The "horse and buggy" model isn't just because of distance. It is because even the most well-informed voter cannot possibly have the time to comprehend every piece of legislation that comes up, so they vote for someone who generally aligns with their interests who's f'ing JOB it is to know how to analyze and vote accordingly WITHOUT a f'ing poll of the consituents, who honestly might as well be your cats. You risk voting "NO" on necessary, well thought legislation and "YES" on outright insanity at the whim of easily manipulated ignoramuses responding not to measured reason, but irrational frenzy.

This sort of crap is NOT being responsive to your constituents, it's being willfully lazy, actively incompetent and easily used.

Okay, now I know you're full of shit. I did computer programming for rather large multinationals in college and I have a social sciences degree, ffs. If you were going CS/EE with any level of actual skill at a school of the slightest repute, "Pizza Guy" is the job you'd get to pay for beer while on scholarship or trust fund (I'd even find it eyebrow-raising then), not what you'd get if you were actually paying for school as you went. Apart from only paying enough for living expenses, it would just be a bizzare move as you could get absolute crap IT work paying several times as much, with less stress (that sort of food service is fucking maddening and exhausting) even as dumb-college-kid-#5546778.

As for astroturf, it's perceived because your examples are rife with convenient stereotypes. Community college in precisely two years with precisely the transferable courses to your chosen university in precisely the right order with not a single failed wait-list? You know how I know you've never taken a single course at community college? Because that's NIGH FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE.

I actually might suspect you ARE a North Korean spy with the oh-so-humble "Pizza Guy" story and the glorious advantages of our wonderful COMMUNity colleges. It's a caricature that just doesn't add up.

Bullshit. I don't know what you are leaving out of this equation, but, ignoring the schedule conflicts of working full time and going to school full-time, an $8/hr job paying just FICA will net about $15k assuming ZERO income tax. Minimal rent (as in A ROOM) is about $6k/yr, FOOD STAMPS for one person are about $3k per year. Right there, you've got a whopping $500/month left For EVERYTHING else: transport, utilities, insurance, clothes, household supplies etc. Even most state schools ring in at about $9k/yr just in tuition, so you're already in the hole $2k and you haven't bought a single book or so much as washed a sock.

Unless you're riding on a pile of grant money or have free housing, food etc. ("without a penny from my parents" is a lie if they're housing and feeding you) -- your scenario just doesn't stand up to basic arithmetic.

Of course, then there's the obvious problem of attending 15-18 hours of classes scattered between 8am and 7pm M-F and somehow still finding the same contiguous 8-hr per day slot in which to fit "work" and to maintain your 4.0, at least another 30 hours for "study."

In short, you are full of shit. Either you made a LOT more than $8/hr, at a magical job with no set schedule to boot, paid NOTHING for housing and food, and/or were heavily subsidized by other means public or private, or you're just flatly lying.

Railroad to nowhere? Are you kidding? Do you realize the size of the economies and amount of existing commuter rail in LA and SFO? MetroLink in LA removes about 250 Million annual highway miles from the roads -- at a cost of about $0.28 per mile, oddly enough, less than the federal mileage deduction. In 20 years it has grown to 512 miles of track, about the same as from LA-SFO, but the vast majority is in heavily populated areas. Yes, the trackbeds were almost all already there (as, indeed they are or could be selected at least for this route), but damn near 100% of it has been replaced (and much of it doubled or quadrupled in parallel tracks from the existing freight lines) explicitly for increased Amtrak and Metrolink traffic. Flying between LA-SFO is a serious pain in the ass and at the end of it is not that much faster than driving. Sure, it's only 2-3 hours curb to curb (people have a silly tendency to not count the time milling around terminals, sitting on tarmacs etc. as if "flight time" is it). But, unless you live in El Segundo and are going to Burlingame, you only save maybe an hour flying from what it takes to drive door-to-door. I recall one trip where, having driven the exact same route less than a year prior, and despite living less than three miles from the airport with a destination fifty yards from a BART station, flying saved me a grand total of fifteen minutes over driving. You can't reasonably add any more flights between LA and SFO/OAK -- or hell, add a lane to I-5 -- without a comparatively huge infrastructure investment and the possibility of expanding surface traffic on either end is about nil. Given the timeframe involved, the fact that flight is for the foreseeable future pegged to the cost of kerosene, which ain't going DOWN in price, barring depopulation, something will have to be there that is economically scalable.

Yes, the budget and timeframe given the landscape of the route are both wildly eyebrow-raising, but the idea is hardly a "railroad to nowhere."

California is most definitely an at-will employment state.

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab&group=02001-03000&file=2920-2929