I shop at a coop, so yes, I do keep shopping at it even when I'm unhappy with it. I vote in every annual election, and feel free to contact the board when I have concerns. It works the same way with public schools - don't completely disinvest in them, but use the power of the ballot box and communication with publicly-accountable boards.

The analogy with privately-held grocery stores doesn't really apply here, since their board is accountable only for the profit of their shareholders.

The rate at which 16-year-olds are getting driver's licenses is dropping quickly, so it makes sense that anything attached to the car industry is going to be in its end days (see WNYC report). Look at who's buying cars, too - baby boomers are far more likely than young adults to be buying cars (see NBC Business report). They have the money, plus they've had decades of conditioning that a car is a necessity of life. Young folk haven't been brainwashed, and are far more likely to structure their lives to use more efficient and enjoyable modes of transportation (walking, biking, public transit). Once the baby boomers are too old to drive, I bet this entire sector of the economy will shrink rapidly.

What's the point of having 10GbE if disk performance hasn't gotten much better and, at least in the US, average speed for Internet connectivity has stalled over the past decade? At $WORK we use 10GbE almost exclusively on the backbone, and a few hot-spot servers like tape backup systems. Gigabit speeds (and less) for other systems are completely adequate.

I only emit "noxious virulant chemicals" when I've had that three-day-old left over burrito that's sitting in the fridge. Otherwise I'm quite pleasant to be around.

I live within walking distance to three grocery stores. I'll keep using my own two feet, thank you very much. 100% reduction over even the truck delivery method. There's still have greenhouse emissions getting the food to the store, but that's unavoidable.

That assumes you're going to re-read every byte you send. With backups, the likelihood of that happening is (hopefully) fairly low. That said, modern tape technology offers throughput several times greater than spinning hard drives. A single LTO5 tape drive (top-of-the-line commodity drive) has a maximum streaming rate (MSR) of 140MBps with no compression (2:1 compression would double the MSR). That's several times faster than a hard drive, and its bit-error rate (BER) is about 100x less than SAS drives and 1000x less than SATA drives. Oracle Storagetek drives are proprietary but have a MSR of 252MBps uncompressed, and a bit-error rate about 100x less than LTO5. If you did have to re-read that data, you could do it much faster than you could if you were reading it off disk, as long as you obey sequential access rules at the media level. You also probably could do it for many times less money than a fat pipe and spinning disk.

As a government employee (work for a state university) my salary has always been a matter of public record. This doesn't change anything for me, although I guess it centralizes searches of salary history.

Nope, not my first job, but for my last job I again lived close enough that I could walk or bike to work (transit kind of sucked though).

I am happy where I am, so I haven't changed jobs in years. There's a lot more to life than money - I make more than enough to be happy, put food on the table, and pay the rent. I don't have to waste hours of my life being miserable in a car. What more is there to want?

If I really need a car, there's plenty of car sharing programs around. If I need to move across the country, I can rent a UHaul or (even better) get my new employer to arrange the move.

I think it's far more likely that I'd change jobs within the same city, or move to another city with good walking, transit, and biking. I think (and hope) the days of metastatized suburbs are over.

I feel true pity there - I've never owned a car, but it means I live close enough to work, grocery stores, and parks that I have the freedom to walk, bike, or bus. I never have to worry about the price of gas or where to park.

I work in Seattle and 65 percent of people bus, carpool, walk, or bike to downtown Seattle. I actually work at University of Washington (a few miles north of downtown), but of the people I know, only around half drive alone to work. It wasn't too long ago when driving was a luxury, and most people either walked or took public transit. Skylar

As long as it's not GOTO. That's harmful.

In Washington, many health providers are barely regulated (see Seattle Time's report Seniors for Sale). The state regular, DSHS, is notoriously incompetent and hasn't been nationally accredited since at least 2001. I imagine most of the oversight comes from the feds, who are pretty overworked. Skylar

I'm sure the thing you want to be dealing with when closing down a loved one's estate is finding out that someone's opened up a bunch of credit cards and gone to town.

What about the $2.4 billion that the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation received from BP as part of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill? That will have a direct, tangible benefit to the Gulf States. Skylar

That's federal *income* taxes, not total federal taxes paid. If anyone in the bottom 50% has a job, they're paying 7.65% of their income (if they have an employer), or 15.3% (if they're self-employed). Payroll taxes are a burden the rich don't have - earned income above $100k is exempt, as is any non-earned income (dividends, interest, capital gains, rent payments, etc.).

There are many of the social "sciences" that don't live up to the name. That doesn't mean all of them fall into that boat, or that all practitioners of the social "scienes" are not actually scientists, but anyone who approaches their field without placing the scientific method front and center doesn't deserve to be called a scientist.