Being a complete pedant, I have to observe that the Royal Air Force does not have "air marines". That is because (a) it has the RAF Regiment and (b) the founders of the RAF were literate and so knew that "marine" derives from the Latin mare - the sea. They at one point considered naming ranks after Latin terms associated with flight, but then decided to stick with the words "flight","air" and "wing". Space marines are a category error. Assuming that in the future it is found necessary to have a body on a military space ship under separate command so that in the event of mutiny they can fight the mutineers - one of the original uses of the Marines and why their quarters on a sailing ship are between other ranks quarters and the officers - they would, very obviously, be space soldiers. Heinlein's "Starship troopers" isn't bad, though they weren't strictly cavalry.

Yes I am grumpy and pedantic today, but this whole storm in a teacup is the result of lazy thinking by a number of authors.

Someone who worked in the New Yorker office remembered a stand up row between the editor and James Thurber about the placement of a comma. Because English is not a strictly constructed language, short, of, complete, comma, illiteracy, like, this, there is no wrong or right; only what is aesthetically pleasing to the writer.

Anyway, nobody should ever be criticised for seeking to improve their prose style.

Developed world economies are as Keynesian as mainland China is Marxist.

English is my native language and I have a humanities degree from Cambridge. That doesn't mean I know anything, it does mean my literary style has been criticised twice a week over nine academic terms. Although your English has a very slightly Teutonic ring to it, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it and, to my mind, the post from PPalmgren is completely out of order.

Comma use in English is greatly disputed; even in lists we have the Oxford comma (one, two, three, and four) versus the Cambridge comma (one, two, three and four). We have the adherents of comma minimalism and the adherents of strict comma use in any short pause, leading to the story of the writer who visited her editor to discover that all the commas had been marked for exclusion in her latest piece, and spent the next hour going through the document putting stet against every single one. She knew there were too many but it was now a matter of principle.

In English (i.e. England and Wales) legalese commas are avoided, because of the fear that a flaw in the paper or a fly mark will be read as a comma and affect the meaning of something. My father, a retired lawyer, often gets through an entire page of a letter without a single comma.

That noise in Highgate Cemetery is Karl Marx shouting "You see? Everything I predicted about capitalism has come true. It's a pity nobody ever tried socialism, but give it time."

We need lawyers, because the alternative is blood feuds and Mafia business. Why else do Russians and Somalis want to live in the UK, where we have laws and strict control of guns?

As you say, everything is high stakes gambling when you get down to it. Life is. I threw up a well paid job to be with a girl and a few years later was in a much better career, but I hardly knew that would be the outcome.

however, I disagree on one point: because greed and the propensity to violence exist, governments must be dirigiste to a degree if there is to be a stable society. Since economics is not much use for forecasting the effects of policy, they should forget economics and concentrate on policies designed to protect assets and encourage social cohesion, relying on human self-interest to mitigate any economic effects.

No, his analogy (high speed trading) is exactly correct. The stock market is not out of business because most people understand card sharping, but they do not understand how bank traders work. If they actually did and understood the implications, people would be hanging from lamp posts.

Exactly this. We have Soviet economics and we have Capitalist economics. We also have the odd Nobel-winning economist that demonstrates that, say, the so-called Free Market isn't, and the day after the awards ceremony the Capitalist economists carry on believing that the Free Market will solve everything*. Imagine if physics worked like that? "OK, Schroedinger, electron behaviour is determined by a probability function. But we're going to go right on believing that electrons travel in little circles round the nucleus".

Most economics isn't even astrology: it is a cargo cult (act as if something is true and this will somehow make it so).

*To be fair to Gorbachev, he did actually point out that Soviet economics didn't work before 1990, whereas governments are still able to be in denial about Capitalist economics - till the resources start to run out.

That is an almost incredibly American-centric view and shows what is wrong with the thinking of many people. Why would a prosecutor seek the maximum sentence? Because he's getting a kickback from the private prison industry? Because his annual bonus is based on total years incarceration for all his convictions?

The job of the prosecutor is to prepare and present the prosecution case. The prosecutor should have NO input into sentencing at all. It should entirely be down to the judge, who should be guided by criminological opinion and research. That after all is the function of a judge: having heard the evidence and the decision of the jury, to pronounce sentence.

It's the Department of Justice, supposedly, not the Department of Staying Just Inside the Boundaries of the Law.

The "just obeying orders" card was played at Nürnberg and by Eichmann. Didn't work. For the system to work, prosecutors must first and foremost pursue justice, or they will fall into disrepute. Right now I wouldn't trust Ms. Ortiz in charge of a pebble on a highway intersection. That does nothing to encourage people to obey the laws.

Laws are drafted by human beings and there will always be bad laws. This is not fixable; at least, never in human history has it been shown to be fixable. But the effect of bad laws can be undone by judges, juries and prosecutors who work in the interests of justice - not of the letter of the law.

People are giving Ortiz the "Just obeying orders" get out of jail free card. Wasn't accepted at Nuernberg. Wasn't accepted at the Eichmann trial.

If public sector worker unions should be illegal, then centralised government should be disbanded because it has a monopoly on providing public sector work.

You view, in fact, is that of the slave owners; we are allowed to combine to enforce slavery, the slaves cannot combine to better their conditions.

It's funny how some Americans bang on about liberty, but want to confine it to corporations and officials.

The Mac was truly revolutionary. When I pointed out to my then boss that we could replace our Motorola workstations (at $20000 a go) with Macs at a quarter of the price fully loaded, he decided it was better to keep quiet so nobody got into trouble for spending too much on hardware. MacWrite, MacPaint and Excel may not have been the first of a kind, but they were the first of a kind you could put on someone's desk and have him be productive with them fairly quickly.

This reminds me of someone I know who is a former officer on nuclear submarines and now works in IT. His CV on Linkedin includes "strategic nuclear deterrence". I've speculated that he's hoping for a job offer from Iran.