It's simple economics. If the price is raised, then people will buy less of it.

And you know what funds those campaigns? taxes on cigarettes.

Soo you say the taxes don't discourage smoking.. and then cite those HUGE prices as one of the reasons for the decline in smoking? Makes perfect sense.

This "nanny state" talk is nonsense. They aren't banning the sale of soda; they're taxing it. And it SHOULD be taxed if it helps discourage stupid parents from pouring sugar-water down their kids' throats 24/7. And even if it doesn't lead to a decline, guess what? More tax revenues. It's still a win.

...what? I don't recall any job listings with the description "at least 5 years' experience in gun maintenance." I don't think you can compare something as mind-numbingly simple as that to an educational subject, but then again, the types of people who think homeschooling is good are generally the same types of people who would probably find gun maintenance to be mentally stimulating, too.

And no, a kid's future career possibilities should not be based on his parents' preferences. I hope you read over your own post tomorrow to see just how absurd you sound.

You're probably better off just training the programmers, or hiring people with programming experience. Salespeople (and business majors in general) tend to go into those fields specifically to get the highest pay/work ratio they can find.

For every "useful" thing you think a kid might learn being homeschooled, they're missing out on 10 ACTUALLY useful things they'd learn at school, where they have access to people specifically trained to teach each subject. Sure, different public schools have their own quality issues, but you know what inherently has 100x more? Homeschooling done by dumb people who think they know more about every subject that people educated specifically in those respective subjects.

And just because YOU haven't used chemistry since high school, that means your grandkid wouldn't be interested? I guess you'll never know, since his parents are stealing that choice away from him.

It doesn't sound like you or his parents are suited to school him, then. Send him to school before you ruin his life. You and/or his parents should be ashamed.

I might find a use for it later!

Mobile service is irrelevant. Nobody actually WORKS from their phone or tablet.

And bandwidth caps in most countries are still higher than what most people in America could get by downloading movies for most of the month. One of Japan's largest ISP's (NTT), for example, received alot of bad publicity when they started a policy to slow down service to anyone downloading 30GB a day. That's almost 1TB a month. Australia, one of the most notorious countries for bandwidth restrictions, has ISP's that charge anywhere from $60 (unlimited DSL) to $130 (1TB monthly).

And the US has almost no overlap in high-speed internet networks, either. In fact, 98% of Americans have only ONE choice for broadband speeds. Everything you just complained about with the Netherlands applies to the US as well. The funny thing is that, while AT&T and Comcast both call it socialist when anyone says we should take the infrastructure back and let ISP's compete over it, they campaigned FOR that very thing in the UK because THEY were the small ISP's there.

I don't know, the lighting is usually pretty good on those sets.

What exactly is our $600+ billion military budget protecting us (or other countries) from? No other governments want to attack us because their countries are too busy selling stuff to us. A few terrorists (which will ALWAYS be around, ESPECIALLY when you spend $600 billion annually on new explosives to destroy their communities and take their resources) don't qualify as a threat to an entire country's national security. Even if they did (and there would need to be A LOT of sporadic attacks to argue that), how exactly do gigantic fleets of warships, nuclear submarines, fighter jets, rocket launchers, tanks, and all other sorts of things (which have together ended a grand total of 0 extremist ideologies) "secure" us?

And anyway, it's fairly obvious that I meant "free" in the same way that a pre-college education is free. And substantially cheaper per capita than private alternatives. It's astounding how much public services can provide when they're actually made to service the public instead of a few rich people.

If the government REALLY "got in the middle", this wouldn't be a problem in the first place since public colleges and universities would be dirt cheap or even free, as they are in most other OECD countries.

In fact if you look at tuition, aside from Australia, the US government is less-involved in college education than any other developed country in the world.

I don't know about that. I know it's only anecdotal, but most of the people I used to play WoW with have quit for the same reasons I did (because it got irredeemably bland, repetitive, and unimaginative). And they're not the only people who feel that way; WoW's usership has gone from 11.5 million (May 2011) to 10 million. The Elder Scrolls games are insanely popular for their RPG gameplay, and while BioWare is too, SW:TOR is sci-fi and and comes from developers who already made single-player games with similar combat styles to WoW; so even though SW:TOR's active combat system (no auto-attack, strategic use of energy/force regeneration, etc.) is a huge step up from BioWare's previous gameplay mechanics, many people assumed it would just be a WoW clone.

The Elder Scrolls don't have that same reputation to disprove. And since it's in the same fantasy genre as WoW (whose developers seem to do remarkably little fantasizing for fantasy game developers), it's probably going to appeal more directly to bored WoW subscribers than SW:TOR did.

And on a side note, the space combat missions in SW:TOR are great. If you've played SWG, you should know how boring open-ended space exploration gets after, oh, about 5 minutes of... empty space. It really could use some more races though, seeing as there are like 100 different spacefaring races in the Star Wars universe.

I think only Radeon cards support it.

you're assuming that the average business grad has the mental capacity for critical thinking or planning, seeing as 90% of them go into business school in the first place as a lazy get-rich-quick scheme. You just have to look at most tv commercials to see that the only place the average business marketer is manipulative is in their own head (and the South).

At least some are funny, though. Just look at the allstate commercials.

You must not follow American politics.