It's easy to call someone stupid. To paraphrase the queen of hearts, we can do that on the Internet at least 100 times before breakfast.

One item you ignore is the same thing Egypt ignored at its peril, until there was a color revolution for it. These people are sufficiently broke that this was their best option. There's no one to sell their truck to, because there's no new truckers (and a lot of old trucks are grandfathered on emissions standards, etc.). Give them a million dollars in tickets, they don't have the money to pay $1000, what's $1m to them.

Strikes are always a "dumb" option, because you have to basically quit your job and go to $0 income to have a chance to have your demands met. However, they are still making a rational economic decision, because the alternative is tolerating a sub-optimal pre-strike condition. If these people legitimately can't live under current conditions (and I have to assume not, because they're obviously going on $0 now), then striking is a legitimate, rational decision.

Of course. Let's take people on strike because they can't make enough money to afford to do their work, and revoke their license to do the work. That will teach them. Furrfu.

One item to consider: both the US and Canada don't have enough CDL (and Canadian equivalent) trained people to drive the trucks we need on the road now. Taking thousands of people out of the system through arrests, harassment, or violent retribution will just make the problem worse.

You can complain about short sellers all you want, but they provide one very necessary function for the market: they guarantee someone will buy when everyone else is selling. You run off the short sellers, and all of the sudden you have a bear market, and there are no buyers, and the market grinds to a halt.

Every private owner who ever wants to sell their stock ever had better take the cash today, if this is a buyout offer. If he has written an "investment fund" plan that keeps people from being able to sue him for failing to perform a fiduciary responsibility, then you've pretty much signed away any right to get your money back if he feels like keeping it.

Unless this also includes a significant cash infusion via an ownership dilution, it won't help Tesla's cash burn rate either.

A few months ago, our CEO lost badge access to our main data center. That was his pride and joy, and now he needs an escort in, because his job doesn't involve any requirement to work inside the room.

If you are a content provider, you probably need one or two people who are capable of editing any post, so that you can fix problems. However, there is no way that the CEO should have that kind of power. The fact that the CEO can just randomly edit content anywhere on the site, without auditing or accountability means that there is a culture out of control.

If the Founding Fathers had intended citizens to be able to overthrow the government, maybe they wouldn't have made it a treasonous offense right in the Constitution.

Practically every person at the Constitutional Convention participated in the Revolutionary War either as a shooting soldier or as part of the political infrastructure. Every one of them had committed treason once in their life already. Under the Articles of Confederation, the writing of the Constitution was a treasonous act as well, which is why there was such care taken to prevent leaks and rumors. They knew that treason had to be an offense, but that it also was occasionally necessary.

Most of the Founding Fathers spoke in their own writing positively about private gun ownership, either for health reasons (Jefferson and Washington especially), or as a check against government power (the more radical Anti-Federalists).

Practically every state constitution of the time guaranteed private ownership of firearms, and there were no practical bans on the personal ownership of firearms, cannon, or any other instrument of war, excluding laws excluding ownership by blacks or concealed carry (and even these were generally ignored when "good people" did it.) As late as the late 1840s, Cassius Marcellus Clay (a famous abolitionist from Kentucky) used small cannon to defend his newspapers, and became notorious in his dementia for using these same cannon to scare off tax collectors. US v Miller technically still stands as saying that the only guns that can legally be regulated under the Second Amendment are those that do NOT have military function (a decision conveniently ignored by courts and politicians alike).

To put it in blunt terms, the concept that the Second Amendment does NOT protect private firearms ownership is a modern invention. Modern gun control laws were designed to disarm the Irish, the Italians, and the black, and were always meant to target "that kind of person". Being one of those kind of people myself (the dark kind of white that doesn't come from Scots/Germanic bloodstock), I find your racism disturbing.

Can't give the phone to Apple, that breaks the chain of evidence.

Apple has to give the FBI the keys to their kingdom and then trust they're used the right way.

get a degree in something plus training as teachers

Again, the dirty little secret of US education: no they didn't. Math teachers take less math than Arts and Science students. Math education at most colleges don't have a single class in common with math majors. I have a relative who has a post-doctorate in high school education in history; not a single class he has taken will apply to a history bachelor's degree, much less a history masters.

Education classes are about teaching classes, not the subjects.

I'm going to make an amazing recommendation: go find some local homeschoolers, and look at their curriculums. Watch them teach their kids a day.

The most important thing to find for a homeschooler is a local co-operative. Lexington, Kentucky has 6 different groups that I know about, and I am pretty sure I don't know them all. A couple are primarily social, two of them are more rigorous than the local private schools (and the public school had to open a STEM magnet with UK's help to compete).

My wife has taught our kids all kinds of subjects, all the way through high school. She had to learn several subjects, but had little trouble in helping our kids excel academically (one just missed National Merit Semifinalist by a point or two, the second is on track to be competitive despite being an art major track). If you don't know a subject, purchase a full-service curriculum or take it at a co-op. And field trips are easy: one woman asked us about them, and my kids asked if seeing the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, the Intrepid, and Gettysburg in a week counted as a field trip....

The number one advantage (and problem) with homeschooling is freedom. We've had a couple of spectacular curriculum failures, but we also were able to get different materials and start over.

The dirty little secret of colleges is that education isn't that hard a subject. The only subject in college easier is social work, and teachers' IQ averages are 20 points lower than the STEM fields. The college classes aren't about learning the subjects (Arts and Sciences students learn more math than math teachers), they're about teaching groups of kids in a subject. If you can teach your kid a subject, you can always teach your child better than a teacher can, because you have 30 times the amount of time a teacher has for your child.

My brother in law had cancer so bad that it had spread into his sternum (which was so rotted with cancer that it would flex with every breath). The doctor gave him a prescription for morphine in pill form, and told him exactly how much to take, and that something between 4x to 6x of the regular dose was right out because it would be fatal. Had said brother-in-law been so inclined, he then knew how much morphine to take to overdose (he wasn't). He instead passed away in relative comfort in the care of Hospice.

My father didn't arrange for Hospice for my grandmother, and her death was harder because of the breathing issues. My father complained after her death, and I had to resist reaching over and throttling him for his lack of insight.

If the elder Mr. Adams truly was suffering while dying, then Scott should have arranged for Hospice care. Failure to do so would have been Scott's fault.

Now, the younger Mr. Adams may be suffering from a category error: "death with dignity". We don't come into the world with dignity; we come in naked, ugly, and screaming. The concept that birth, life, or death should be sterile, peaceful, and risk-free is a fallacy of our modern selfish world. The concept that the process of death itself is suffering or "subhuman" is absurd; dying is just a part of living.

I respect the man who was paralyzed in bed and on a vent who asked for the vent to be turned off; he couldn't do so himself. If you are conscious, you have the right to refuse any medical treatment. If you are unconscious, you have the right to have written your desires out in advance. However, no person has the right to demand that another end his life for him; that is manslaughter. If you wish to choose your own time of life, then pick a time and a method, and then follow through with it. I won't think it's right, but at least it is respectable.

Most people demanding euthanasia on demand simply want someone else to do the deed so that they don't have to do the dirty work themselves.

In the early 90s, an older couple in Eastern Kentucky decided to break down and pay for a landline telephone. GTE offered to drag them a line for $5000 or so (I forget the exact amount). Outraged, they appealed to the Kentucky Service Commission. The Commission discovered that GTE was going to have to pay almost $25k to get the line to them, and was already eating much more of the cost than could be demanded under the law. The couple chose not to get their phone line.

A friend of my father ran a lucrative contracting business that bid on GTE contracts. He kept mule drivers under contract, because they were often the only way to drag poles around certain parts of the Appalachians.

These days, this exact same couple would be able to pay $40 to $80 a month to get a cell phone. The tower will be a couple of hills over, with a microwave feed back to the home network and a small diesel generator on-site. For the cost of one phone line, an entire area can get phone and internet service.

The same economics are working in India and Africa. Excluding possibly power, there will be significant portions of the world that will never, ever be wired.

For any parent, guardian, or patient to make an informed decision, we have to have two pieces of information: how well a medicine generally works, and what risks there are to take it. Number One Son does this with several medicines: Colcrys controls the symptoms of his Familial Mediteranian Fever, at the risk of messing with his liver. He takes the flu shot because of the risk to the 1 and a half lung he has left are higher than the risks of the vaccine itself.

A vaccine that doesn't work, or doesn't work well, means that vaccinated patients are accepting the vaccine risk for no significant reward.

I am not anti-vaccine, I am just against unneeded risk. My kids got a round of the Salk vaccine, because the Sabin vaccine might wear out. We also did the chicken pox vaccine, to try to prevent shingles later in life (both families have had extreme shingles outbreaks later in life). OTOH, my daughter will NOT get the cervical cancer vaccine, because HPV is preventable in behavior and the real side-effect rate to the vaccine is a lot higher than the manufacturer is reporting.

My own anecdote is that the reporting on pertussis is off by at least half to two-thirds. Little Miss fought a persistent cough (with antibiotics) for weeks until her allergist said "oh, you have whooping cough. You sound exactly like I did last week." There was no use testing her, because she'd been on antibiotics. Milady and I both caught it from her. The nurse ruined my test by doing it wrong, and Milady's doctor flat-out wouldn't test her (she just got antibiotics, because she was #3 in the house to catch it). The scuttlebutt in the health profession was that the Health Department was desperately trying to keep their numbers down, by hook or by crook.

With my kids' various lung-related issues, they needed a vaccine that actually helps prevent whooping cough. The current one isn't it.

If the NRA is willing to sponsor a program like this one, I fail to see why they'd be protesting a gun buyback program in Tucson

The NRA doesn't sponsor video buybacks either. If they did, they'd be stupid. If someone did this trick in my neck of the woods, I'd do exactly what other posters suggested:
* Go to WalMart, GameStop, etc. and clean the $5 bin out.
* Get my $25 gift certificate for each.
* Repeat.

Gun buyback programs accomplish three goals:
1: They allow criminals to destroy evidence by safely ditching a "hot" gun.
2: They allow people to get above-retail value for broken or low-value firearms worth significantly less value than the turn-in amount.
3: Sucker owners of $200+ firearms into getting a feel-good coupon.

Numbers 1 and 3 are inherently immoral. The first destroys chains of evidence, because you can't prove that the defendant ever used a certain gun. If done outside the color of the law, people would be going to jail as "accessories after the fact".

Number 3 is theft as well: most people who turn guns in at gun buybacks are poor, and they could use the full value (usually $200 to $1000, or more) of the gun for their regular budget. Instead, they are convinced to take a token so that others feel good.

Number 2 is theft if public money is used too. Private citizens come in, selling crap and getting $100 back, money taken from their fellow citizens. To take the Tuscon buyback as an example: a woman tried to sell four rifles, but got no takers. I've sold into this environment; gun stores in Kentucky were buying .303 Enfields (in very poor, but working, shape) for $75 a year ago (now that same gun would be $125 wholesale, at least). If she couldn't walk into a gun store and get $50 each, then those rifles were complete crap, and Tuscon got ripped off.

Buybacks are worthless. Look at LA: the chief of police out there keeps trotting out the same plastic "rocket launcher" trainers and clean AK-47s (sorry, no criminal EVER touched those guns) after every buyback. If he really showed what they got, it's be boxes of broken Davis autoloaders, rusted top-break .32 revolvers, and single-shot shotguns that have bounced around in the back of a pickup since the 40s. All a city gets is boxes of scrap metal, criminals with cash to buy their next gun, and citizens who get the shaft.

As for fighting the Tucson buyback: State law says abandoned and surplus property has to be auctioned. The guns were turned over to the state: they're either abandoned or surplus. Why in the world should a citizen expect the state to do what the law says?

We tried this once. In first grade, the teacher suggested that we teach our son how to beat up the class bully (and later suggested our first homeschool curriculum). The principal looked at me and told me she had made it clear to said bully that eating lunch with her was a punishment. When we made it clear that any more attacks of Number One Son by said bully would result in us calling the lawyers and suing individuals, they put him beside the mainstreamed autistic child (who screamed all day), so that the child's aide could keep the two apart.

The problem was simple. The previous principal had been fired for having a backbone. The current principal was going to retire with her pension, and that meant no waves. A turnip would have been more productive than the superintendent in office at the time.

We have friends and relatives in the local systems. The few that thought we should have stayed originally have changed their minds and told us to stay out at all costs.

The first step is to help your grandson get his reading back in shape. Go Google homeschooler forums for reading programs; there are a lot of problem readers who flourish in homeschooling because they can find the right solution for THEM, not for the particular school district or reading tudor in question. Boys taking longer to read or write "well" is common; just be sure that he doesn't need glasses or doesn't have an undiagnosed reading disorder.

Both of my kids loved Apologia Science. Get your grandson the General Science curriculum (https://apologia.securesites.net/store/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=2), and purchase both the book set and the multimedia CD. The multimedia CD is wonderful for interactive learners on the computer. The experiments include chemistry labs, and use household chemicals.

Most everyone I know taking the class has run it over 2 years, so there's nothing wrong with starting early and taking a while.

Fair warning: Wile is a young-earth creationist, and doesn't hide it. If you consider this position unacceptable, you're going to have to find someone else's book.

OK, I will then.

Also (the second beast) causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. Revelation 13:16-17 ESV

The concept is hardly original to Ms. Moon....