"I learned my lesson well. You see, you can't please everyone, so you got to please yourself". - John Fogerty

It's sounds like the AC's problem to me, if the "vast majority" of his bosses are 'vindictive arseholes' then either he's really unlucky, or there's something about him that brings out the 'vindictive arsehole' in people. My guess is that the AC is a young male and as such will generally have problems with any authority figure. OTOH he has a point, I'm not going to light up a joint in the bosses office any day soon.

I've had enough of the NSA. I'm going to unplug from the Internet. I'll just yank this cord from my keyb

Consider the doctrine: Death is actual beginning. "Life" we have now, is like life of the foetus in the womb. Wanting to live forever is as vain a wish - and non-sensical - as wishing eternal gestation.

Yup.

I meant like XX for Beer, XXX for whiskey. ;-)

A: Ex-Wife's Bedroom

That is basically the GP's point, a snow covered data centre is like an igloo, the heat generated by the servers/people inside can't escape so it becomes a lot warmer that the surrounding ice, but due to the large amount of ice it's thermal inertia ensures the walls don't melt. You need to get past the ice to dissipate the heat effectively. Old English pubs with 3 foot thick stone walls don't need heaters when full for exactly the same reason.

It doesn't matter what you call the system, if the gap between rich and poor is small (say a factor of 10) then people are generally happier. Obscene disparities in wealth do nothing but fuel revolutions. The "American dream" boils down to wanting to be mega-rich, they want the wealth gap because they believe they are "exceptional" and will one day leap across it in a single bound. The US would probably work a lot better for everyone if it simply stopped arguing with itself about money.

One of the major reasons why an American can pay up to 10X as much as an Australian for inferior health care, is that the American system is obsessed with finding and eliminating people who are "getting something for nothing". Not just the government but also the hospitals and private insurance companies. There's a veritable army of government and private accountants all spending $5 to save $0.50. Here in Oz the doctor bills the government directly. It's the doctors and hospital admins who are monitored for fraud by cheap automated statistical analysis.

I preferred him in the Ghostbusters movies.

The convection currents around deep sea volcanic "vents" do the same job. Panspermia and abiogenesis are not mutually exclusive, despite the "either or" argument manufactured by the mass media.

I think panspermia is a long shot, but given the length of time and the size of the universe it's almost certainly happened somewhere at sometime. Volcanos could also be a mechanism for single celled life to leave a planet. It's said that rocks as large as a houses were blasted into obit by Krakatoa and some types of lichen have survived on the outside of the ISS for more than a year. The landing on such an interplanetary flight would be very difficult to survive since the rock is likely to vaporise on impact. Even if it survived and landed on a habitable planet, the locally evolved life forms would more than likely out-compete it by simply eating it.

That's a better way to state my #2. :-)

Benghazi was a CIA contact station and transfer point to route radical jihadists with arms and Saudi funding into Syria, as "Anti-Assad Freedom Fighters".

Something went sideways, and rather than expose the operation, the Embassy was sacrificed.

Clever! And of course, quite literal, literally in the literal sense.

Devil's advocate: If there were no Devil then there would be no need for the ten commandments.