Translated for us 'Mericans

"In the US at least the middle class is the hardest hit by taxes, increasing prices, increased transport costs - everything. Those on low wages get generous benefits while the middle class get taxed. The conservatives give the truly wealthy tax breaks that others cannot take advantage of. If this will help people move out of the middle class to either of the opposite ends its doing them a favor. I'm sick of explaining to the kids that I cannot afford a PS4 for their Christmas because travel costs to work are going up and tax allowances being reduced, at the same time that kids of a single mother who works in Wal-Mart part time can easily afford it - and then tell us how a charity is giving them a vacation in the Bahamas in the summer. I'll be lucky if we can afford a week in Atlantic City."

That and it's a jobs bill. Hard to consolidate your data centers out of country if that's illegal. Need in-country monkeys to run those boxes!

This strikes me just like the cops back in college that would pull over TAXIS leaving bars in order to ticket the kids leaving the bar with public intoxication. Technically doing their job. Definitely adding incentive to the wrong behavior. It was "safer" to leave certain bars in your own car rather than in a cab ... I kid you not. This type of enforcement is making it "safer" for the texters to do it while driving ... harder for this asshat to catch them.

The incentive is certainly going to encourage the greater of the two evils ... and it could get someone hurt/killed. All the while this clown get's his name in the paper though for writing a bunch of tickets to non-violent scofflaws ... adding incentive to stopping minor offenders rather than actual criminals.

Beats the hell out of burying a bunch of landmines if you ask me. Lots easier to just go pickup the kill bots after you're done with the area.

Oh I get where you were going with that line of reasoning. Official inflation numbers are BS for a myriad of reasons and your 40x is likely more accurate. I was simply adding the GP's citation for him as I ran across the same number on wikipedia.

from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States)

The minimum wage was re-established in the United States in 1938 (pursuant to the Fair Labor Standards Act), once again at $0.25 per hour ($4.10 in 2012 dollars[63]).

That's my issue with the whole thing. What I really want is selective autopilot. I'd love to have the option of putting my car in autopilot on the interstate and just taking a nap or playing with my kids int he back. We do lots of 500 mile 1-way trips back to grandma's house ... it would be great to just fill up the family truckster the night before and head off at midnight, everybody sleeping along the way. It'd kind of be like hibernation during interstellar travel ... except mundane and boring :)

So sick you wish to do them violent harm perhaps? :)

Agreed in principal. But when the gov't defines terrorism ... anything they do will not fit that definition. I'd wager that massacre was "officially" a gov't sanctioned rezoning initiative.

Nah. The new Lumia and Nexus 4 can do wireless charging. Those happen to be Microsoft and Google's flagship phones. Apple's phones don't do it yet, so they want to sue this competitive disadvantage out of existence. I guess they are unable to compete otherwise ...

If you own AAPL ... it may be time to start selling it off and taking your gains.

They can buy it from those of us with water. Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee and Chicago will become the richest places in America after winning the war with Canada over the Great Lakes :)

I mean, they are removing OIL and adding WATER. The WATER is lubricating the rocks and causing them to move ... more than the OIL was?

I think I'll run out and replace the oil in my Jeep with some good old H2O!! 20 mpg here I come!!!

/sarcasm

When you figure out how to feed people oil we'll be 10x as efficient! Only mildly sarcastic there. Just how many "calories" of solar energy are used to grow that 1 calorie of food?

(From wikipedia) The approximate average value cited,[4] 1.361 kW/m, is equivalent to 1.952 calories per minute per square centimeter, or 1.952 langleys (Ly)—or, in SI units— about 81.672 kJ/m per minute.

So for any plant that produces 1 calorie of nutritional value, every square centimeter of leaf area "wastes" the VAST majority of 1.952 calories a minute!

Bottom line, conversion losses exist. Solar energy is no more useful to our bodies as direct nourishment than crude oil. Energy is lost converting either oil (as fertilizer) or sunlight into a potato ... but without that potato you'll starve.

I wouldn't say it's the statists burning our food, or at least in my limited experience it wasn't the case. I grew up in a rural Indiana town and outside of a single factory, the largest portion of its economy is corn. When I was in HS in the 90's there were a couple years when the farmers had absolutely huge yields ... so much so in fact the price of corn went through the floor. Having family members that own large farms, it literally cost them more to drag the corn to the grain elevator for sale in gas/time/pay for farmhands than it was worth. End result? Pile it up and hope the price increases. When the price didn't increase and it started to rot, burn it and take the loss.

At first I was a bit disgusted. After all, we were just talking about starving kids in Africa and Susanne Sommers makes a great pitch! But then I realized that in order to get that corn to the folks that need it, someone has to pay the farmer or HIS FAMILY will be the ones starving. (Maybe not literally starving, but they'd certainly lose the farm.)

Makes the ethanol mandates and their timing make more sense now that I think about it. A politician (or group there of) would be very likely to make the mistake "Corn is too cheap! Let's artificially create demand by using it in gasoline!" ... without taking into account the fact that not all harvests are nearly as good.

To be fair, many (most?) Chinese see Taiwan as a part of China (if the news is to be believed).