They also consume the oxygen from the water to help that process, so when these oil spills happen a lot of times you have rampant bacteria growth that hurts other marine life that needs that oxygen.

Probably still better than having the oil in the water though.

I know this is going to be emotionally unpopular but do you really think responsible population management and driving smaller cars are bad things?

Forcing people to do these things would be unconstitutional but you don't have to force people to affect a change.
Proper education of the issues, tax incentives, etc can do it just as easily.

The only hard thing would be doing it in a fair way so that it doesn't become only the rich can possibly have a large family or own a large car (aka the tax incentive has to be enough to make you think about it but not so much as to actually affect your ability to live your life).

If I remember the statistics correctly most of the U.S population growth is immigration so things certainly aren't in a bad place population wise.
I do think it would be nice to protect our future from having a population explosion by helping people to think a little before having babies.
Helping curb oil usage alone by encouraging people to think before buying a car would be worth it, global warming or no global warming.

It'd be really interesting to see what a Bethesda QA person says the game looks like BEFORE release...

While what you said is objectively true it's easier just to have some arbitrary cutoff.

People have a lot of emotional investment in babies and there's no good reason that one can't decide to abort within a reasonable time period and make it easier on everyone (outside of a medical condition endangering the life of the mother).

Wait, how does an M.D. or Ph. D get to default on a loan without penalty.

This is relevant to my interests.

My state is a solid republican/red state.
All of my state's electoral votes go to the majority winner.
If a candidate wins just eleven other states my state doesn't even matter.

Explain to me why I should vote for anything that's not local.

"Our problem, why so many customers are out, this one damaged over 50 large transmission lines and 70 substations." - http://wvgazette.com/News/201207010139

http://www.dailymail.com/News/201207020077 for pretty picture

While burying lines helps I can tell you that if millions are without power for a week it's more likely something to do with transmission towers (those big metal things with high voltage lines that you can't really bury) going splat than trees taking out lines.

They are apparently not that easy to fix. Though I imagine those could also be made to better handle heavy wind.

I form this opinion from living in a hurricane prone area.

In the states you may be able to drink alcohol at any age (depending on state).

The federal law is 21 to purchase alcohol. State and other local laws cover consumption and possession with associated permission (parents) and location (private property) exemptions.

Or at least that's my understanding of the situation, IANAL, etc.

I'm not sure I agree with this soda ban but it's LOCAL GOVERNMENT so I can't really get upset about Nanny State or the government being too large or anything.

And people being dumb and getting fat IN MASS does harm other people. They drain money and time from society for healthcare costs which has all sorts of side effects (how long you wait for an appointment, availability of appointments, insurance prices, etc).

And it's a nudge, not a prevention. I'm actually kind of ok with this kind of law if it is done right. Do a study beforehand that shows that large servings impact how much people eat, try a law to help people not eat as much, and then do another study to see if the law is actually helping and if not let it expire.

Would you rather they did what they typically do when they don't like when people do something: tax it more?

The perfect world scenario would probably be to educate parents and children but then again in a perfect world people would all have perfect self-control.

Some of the above is bullshit.

Historically, as in over the past 100 years, there were periods when women were more encouraged to go into computer and periods where men were.

You have the obvious documented big names in early computing. I couldn't find any historical statistics before the late 60s though.

In the late 60s to 70s you get a rather wide range of (guesses?) that from 20% to 50% of IT workers were women.
There were popular magazine articles that featured the female programmer (though they seem pretty sexist, it still shows that women in computing was probably a social norm).

In the 80s something like 40% of IT workers were women (I see various statistics on this, from 37% of comp sci degrees in 1984 to 42% of developers in 1987).

It's only in the last 20 years that there has been this huge drop.
More women get bachelor's AND master's degrees than men, they're just going elsewhere and honestly that should be fine with society because that indicates to me that it's mostly a matter of personal choice.

More likely you'd see companies hiring and training gladiator teams and the companies with the best and most popular teams (read: most money) would go about decimating all competition.

And nothing changes.

Honestly, headers could be taken out of soccer and the sport wouldn't lose that much.