What part of "don't you understand" don't you understand? ;)

If one vendor is selling "Atlas Shrugged" for $1 (plus $4) shipping, and the other vendor is selling it for $2 including shipping, which one is cheaper?

Well, since dollar isn't backed by gold and is therefore worthless to the target audience, they're the same price: 5*0 = 2*0 = 0 ;).

Nazism is short for National Socialism. They aren't *like* socialists, they *are* socialists.

Or so they claimed, anyway. Do you also trust the rest of Nazi propaganda, or did you pick this particular item because it happened to make for a nice propaganda piece for you?

Anyway, you answered the summary's question by demonstration: USA can't get anything done right because Americans treat politics like a weird role-playing game where you are the hero and anyone who doesn't agree with you is a nazi communist zombie terrorist. Why would you expect fighting against figments of your own imagination to solve any actual problems, rather than making them worse?

Well, also don't forget that the businessman or doctor that get elected is also in that hated 1%, so half the people don't care what experience or knowledge they can bring to the table.

Doctors and other people who's income comes primarily from their own work aren't in the 1%, that's purely the domain of businessmen. And they don't usually stop being businessmen when they become politicians, which leads to conflicts of interest when talking about economics, which in turn causes problems with trustworthiness.

Let's stop subsidizing nuclear power accident liability costs: either you manage to design it to be safe enough to be privately insureable, or it's not safe enough to get built.

Sure thing. We'll just build a few coal plants instead. They're privately insurable despite killing people and destroying the environment when operating normally, since unlike nuclear no one expects them to pay for their externalities. Or we could build a hundred large solar plants, which together equal about one reactor as long as sun shines from cloudless skies. That shouldn't require any subsidies, and if it does, it's okay because it's not nuclear. Of course, they'll still need those coal plants for backup, but that's okay because dying from microparticle-induced cancer is a lot better than dying from radiation-induced cancer, amirite?

Everyone is missing the point. The space program was done one step at a time, finishing each step before moving on to the next. Yes, this is "waterfall" thinking, but in the space program it was the right way to do it. Properly done, the agile approach could also have been used in the moon program, as long as the result is that the final push is composed of fully-tested and vetted pieces. (Could it be that the agile approach was indeed used? People closer to the facts can answer that.)

The reason to have multiple contractors is to allow development of different parts to be done in parallel. The key to success with broad development is a really, really good architect specing the interfaces, and each people/group showing that their stuff works as specified at the interfaces. Then integration testing becomes a manageable exercise. This includes performance metrics -- at the interfaces. Was that done here? I highly doubt it.

And the Affordable Care Act missed a number of elements that would have made health care affordable. It's isn't about insurance, it's about the total experience. And Congress bungled it. At least, those people in Congress who were allowed to contribute did. What was wrong with stepwise refinement?

We just call those ducks now...

Flip a coin. The coin is now in a super position of heads and tails. Is it possible for it to be heads up when you measure it? Ooooh, spooky quantum bullshit.

Around the 70's we performed several expensive experiments to quantum entangle the Earth with its moon. This way, if the Earth is ever destroyed the moon will instantly create more astronauts.

Let's do a simple experiment to find out:

# echo "Hello... hello... hello" > dev/null
# cat dev/random

It's not destroyed, but it's nothing like what went in. The arrow of time guided by entropy.

And then there's the NSA Fox Acid system by which they purchase exploits from the black market, automatically attach payloads, then deploy them via skiddies reading a flow-chart to determine intelligence cost/benefit analysis; No amount of constitutional rights or encryption will prevent infection from our "cyber army" and its Ferret Cannon: Metasploit + unlimited funds + black-market 0-day exploits + wanna be hackers.

It's basically the ultimate computer nerd version of the school yard bully. Big, brainless, and dangerous. I mean... Just listen to the code names they use. It's like they're actually proud to be thuggish dipshits.

Since childhood I've loved burritos, machines, reading science mags, and was fascinated by the terrifying discovery of black holes. They have Art-Car parades in my town; The cars have to get there somehow. One night, while gazing at the cosmos stopped at a red light, my attention snapped suddenly to my rear view mirror wherein an eight cylinder Jaws was bearing down on me. Shat myself clean, I did.

Hmm. Well, I guess that's why I don't use Facebook. All my friends have different viewpoints on many subjects. Some align and have caveats, others ascribe different reasons. We all care about different things. For instance, as a cyberneticist I'm keenly aware of the degree of suffering my food endures. Unlike my idealist vegan friend who's largely clueless about being an evolved product of our environments, neuronal density of livestock, and the fuzzy complexity threshold of sentience, I simply appreciate my meals more, and try not to be wasteful -- C'est la vie.

I've got religious friends and have studied most major religions somewhat deeply, but I'm an atheist. Along with my philosopher friend we debate philosophy, esp. epistemology (which I have a firm grasp on thanks to information theory) -- This sets me at odds with the others since I can quantify what's knowable within relative degrees of certainty, and even run cybernetic simulations that demonstrate many philosophical and religious concepts, like where free will comes from.

Not every conversation is a debate, we accept each other's viewpoints instead of devolving into flame wars. You see, we try not to make ourselves asses since we're face to face, not on Facebook...

I'm hesitant to label this an "IRL" vs "Online" phenomenon since my experience with offline friends mirrors my IRC friends (think, twitter, but with separate feed-views [rooms], direct file transfers, and no 140 char limitation). Perhaps consider the null hypothesis? Perhaps you just suck at friending?

They don't control word of mouth. Also, the 1st revolution wasn't very well organized, and yet we won.

As a US citizen it makes me sad. Well, once your fearmongering warlords get an atomic bomb dropped on you, and then hold out until another one drops on your other friends and family... Yeah, then you might see why the Japanese don't give in to threat narrative bullshit as easily as the fat scared Americans do. Ironic since heart disease kills 200 times more Americans per year than 9/11. I guess we can add stupid to the list of typical American traits too (yes, I'm talking about you too Canada).