I am NOT in the US, and have the luxury of having either worked for myself, or hundreds of miles from direct supervision, for 30 years, so I have never had the yoke of supervision be an issue. I have been very lucky, as in my case, I only had to make sales and profit targets - everything else was irrelevant - take as much or as little vacation time as I liked, sick days when I wanted - just make the magic happen... (that said, I also have no corporate or government pensions of any sort, but I suspect many that are the subjects of these discussions do not either)

The stories of giving up vacation for sick time, and losing jobs for time off, are even sadder given that the demographic on this website is likely better off than the average US worker.

Corporations rule only when the populations say that they may. As long as the population will be distracted by cake and circuses (Games, Celebrities, Sports, or other trivial matters), the rape will continue.

It seems that most of the difficulty of visiting Mars is carrying enough supplies and fuel to make it back to Earth. Why aren't we looking at one way trips?

I can't imagine there would be a shortage of volunteers for the one-way trip to Mars (assuming a well thought out, long-term plan), and we could do far more actual science if we were committed to long-term settlement.

I wouldn't volunteer as a 20-year old, but as a 60-year old? Hello Mars! :-)

Watch the first couple of seasons of JAG. If you watch action movies, you'll recognise a lot of the action scenes used to create JAG