That's idiotic.
If companies could really get away with paying women less than men, WHY ARE ANY MEN EVER EMPLOYED?

Seriously, you can't assert that companies are both
1) soulless money machines interested in NOTHING more than profit no matter what the consequence, AND
2) chummy old-boy clubs where they'll cheerfully pay 20-50% more because a worker happens to have testes.

The concept's completely nonsensical...but then you're probably a woman, logic isn't your strong suit.
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(That was a joke by the way, you humorless bitch.)
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(So was that.)

...is the fact that there is clearly nobody - Democrat or Republican - who is competent enough to play a serious game of brinksmanship WITHIN our government without fucking it up. I can't imagine that they're going to be any more competent with the Chinese, and the consequences here are far more serious than the US budget for the year or Obamacare.

Seriously: did The Onion write this?

aka:
"Studying the Kardashians to understand humility" or "Studying Congress to understand bipartisan cooperation and fiscal prudence"

Really?

The politically-correct bullshit has to stop - do people REALLY believe there's a concerted effort to keep women out of coding? It must be so, because that's the only situation in which this sort of thing would matter.

What you've just told CS instructors is to MAKE SURE every last woman in their course passes, and there's a financial reward for it.

Why does it matter what chromosomes your coder bears?

Here's a tip: you come off as far more reasonable and less of a tinfoil-hat whacko if you even moderately edit your post to correct gross an obvious misspellings, unfinished sentences/thoughts, etc.

As it is, this post seems so frenzied it's hard to take seriously.

OK I'll bite:
1) the first example: I'd cheerfully point to the current president and his punch-board mother as a great negative example. He both got his student-aid based on a lie, and was handed political opportunities based on his delightfully appealing-to-liberals coffee-colored skin (black enough to assuage white guilt, but not "scary black") and ability to deliver a speech. Do you think he'd be president if he was white? He was handed everything else in life, the fact that escalator took him all the way to the presidency is more a comment on political correctness and the dysfunction of society, than the confirmation it's "working as intended".

2) John Carmack, Steve Jobs, even Ashton Kutcher: remember, we're talking about the GOVERNMENT enforcing a 'fairness regime' to help these poor devils who've made bad choices. Your examples are perfect: how many of them needed the government running interference for them so that they could succeed? Perhaps my earlier post wasn't clear: People MAKE mistakes, that's human. By god I'm a clear example of that. But nobody learns from a cost-free error, and the examples you gave are perfect choices to show that one can fight free of ones' choices and succeed.

Obviously, it's not the first-step remedy, but yes, completely. Oh I wouldn't put them in COMBAT (our military has too ably proved that draftees are nearly worthless compared to motivated volunteers) but they can do lots of other shitty tasks that need lots of strong backs.

I want to be clear where I come from on this, and it's a little convoluted, but it comes from my position on abortion: I *don't* believe it's just a "woman's right to choose" - that's bullshit feminist propaganda. There are TWO people involved in the creation of a baby, and thus two people need to have a say.

BUT as long as men are irresponsible scum* and shirk their absolute moral and ethical responsibility (because they CAN walk away, she cannot), then the choice DOES fall practically on women's shoulders. So the consequences of impregnating-and-walking-away need to consistently be worse than sticking around.

*and please don't give me the 'condom breaks' or 'she said she was on the pill' nonsense: if you can't/don't trust her, maybe you shouldn't be using her as a masturbatory tool? Because at that point, that's all she is, right?

The funniest part of this post?

The "anonymous" bit.

ROFLMAO.

-The NSA.

Really? Because contrary to current dogma, the bulk of human history has had "haves" and "have nots" - and the disparity between the two has been STAGGERING.

The fact is that neo-socialists (and people who derive political power from such positions - let's not forget the original mission of the AFL-CIO quoted in the OP) have as just an illusionary utopianist view of "what society should be" with as much rationale as do the Tea-Partiers.

The fact is that some people are capable, some aren't.
Take a mythical cross-section community of the population, say 100 people, give them all $50,000.
At the end of a year, there's going to be a bell curve of results.
A small proportion are going to hold most of the money.
The bulk middle of the population, the majority, will have more or less held onto theirs.
A small proportion will have blown it all and have nothing.
Witness: the bulk of lottery winners are eventually poorer than when they started. This is PROOF that simply throwing money at poor people is truly a stupid idea - it doesn't help.

You cannot legislate away people's inherently bad choices, and I would argue it's IMMORAL* to do so. The US has, in my view, a larger and more visible poor underclass because there are indeed fewer protections against peoples' bad decisions. I agree there is a need for a social safety net to help the unfortunate - that's what a society does. But ultimately, people need to face the consequences of their own bad choices or someone else will have to bear that cost.

Had a baby at 14? You're an idiot, and get to work in a crappy minimum-skill job forever. Fathered that baby? You NEED to be responsible for the financial well-being of that mother and child until the kids' 18, or the state should drag that value out of you in a workhouse or penal battalion. Committed a crime? You're a selfish idiot who gets to work in low-wage jobs because you've proven you don't have fundamental self control that most people are able to display.

I believe second-chances are earned; nobody's entitled to them.

*this will of course only make sense to people who treat every human equally; much is made of people 'dehumanizing' the poor, but in my experience there is an equal segment of the population who don't consider the wealthy worthy of any sort of moral consideration, solely because of their wealth.

You're right that motherboards won't post without memory sticks, but I don't see a good technical reason about why that should be. UEFI could be written so that it posts by using only the resources of the processor and its cache, if it detects no usable memory. I mean, never mind 128MB of L4. Even the 6MB of L3 that modern processors have is larger than the entire system memory of our parents' first computers. It should be more than enough to run something as simple as UEFI.

It would also be rather useful. Instead of issuing you beeps as it fails to boot, a motherboard with a correctly written UEFI implementation could post without working ram and run diagnostics on exactly which systems are working and which are not, and what exactly is going wrong. I really think this would increase everyone's system-building confidence and give the manufacturers who make it happen a leg up in the market.

"Surveys show drivers are interested in electric cars--and that they love them once they drive them. "

Yeah, except the real-world has considerations outside the scope a 30-second commercial or magazine ad, or that marketers are 'uncomfortable' to address (and we're not *quite* to the point of Idiocracy where we simply do what the market-wonks tell us we should):
- range: most people seem to drive 20-30 miles to work, with commutes of approximately 20-45 minutes. Can I drive this (to AND from), plus run and get groceries, and maybe go out to a movie without being nervous about being UTTERLY out of power
- where am I supposed to charge the stupid thing? The 'spin' notwithstanding, nobody has the time to dawdle while these recharge on 220v plugs, much less the 110v-overnight-option.
- cost: contrary to popular belief, a lot of people can't afford a $30k car, particularly one that smells like it might need a new $10k battery pack after 100k miles.

Mark me -1, callous, but ....where's the problem?

7 billion is a ridiculously high number of people on this planet anyway.

I'd guess frankly (as much as this might make people squirm) that most of the deaths are going to come in the bottom 50%ile of people - the ones doing most of the breeding, btw, and who frankly contribute little or nothing to humanity. Oh no, Kolkata (Calcutta) only has TWO million people mostly living in squalor in 2050? Is that really a tragedy?

FWIW I'm not intending anything racist or classist about this - the fact is that I'd be PERFECTLY FINE if a 50% cull took place in the US and Europe as well. If it's me that's culled, and I know that the next generation gets to live in a world with 50% fewer people, I'd be fine with that too.

Sorry if this offends your "every life is a precious snowflake" sensibilities, but when there are too many snowflakes around here, we call a snowplow.

That is the 'percent complete' the IT folks who made the Obamacare site estimate that it was when it launched.

Some people, including Obama, say the site had 'bugs'. It didn't have bugs. It was not complete and had never been tested.

So at $600 Million and change, we got 30% of a website that is central for people getting the healthcare that the government mandates that they get.

Furthermore, part of the 60%-70% that is unfinished are the parts that pay the insurance companies.

Let that one sink in. The companies that will be shelling out money to pay your doctor at this very moment have no way to get any money from the website.

Here's another one:

Site launched with NO SECURITY. Not 'flawed' or 'incomplete' security, NONE. During senate hearings a white hat hacker was texted by a friend that 30 more vulnerabilties were found THAT DAY. I've used companies that, for a fee, will do a full security audit and in about a week recommend all the ways to close the holes. Nobody thought of doing that?

Obama claims he had no idea. No idea. The site that carries the future of his only important work as president is completely non-functional and he had no idea? Never thought to try it? Ask "Does it work?"? The contractors who built it were very open in saying it was not done, they said everyone knew it was not done, but Obama is shocked, SHOCKED, that it 'has bugs'?

Seriously folks, this is the guy you want leading our military? Our economy?

You Democrats are ****ing idiots.

(note, not my comment, but I couldn't have said it better. Thanks Armand.)

The 'weak federal, strong corp' model in my example is the US where - notwithstanding genuine concerns about the growth of federal power - it's still relatively weak.

The strong state micromanaging what size bananas can be sold, my model would be the EU.

Both suck.

FWIW, at reaching my mid 40's, I now recognize that I simply don't have enough lifetime left to waste on nostalgia.

If you add the time-commitment of the:
- stack of books I want to read
- computer games I want to play
- movies I want to see ....and add that to my current age, it EASILY exceeds my allotted three-score-and-some, even were I to sleep nothing more than 3 hours a night and have no gainful employment.

I rarely give a book more than 5 chapters, or a movie more than a half hour. If I don't actively enjoy it (or at least see promise/value in the writing, acting, what-have-you) I tend to drop it and move on. Life's too short to be bored, or waste it watching Twilight.

PS: I am willing to spend some of those precious minutes on a naked Natalie Portman, please add me to the subscription.