Some years ago I took the NH tax burden and compared it to CA and tried to come up with an explanation. NH has no income tax or sales tax, most of its revenue comes from business taxes. NH property taxes fund local, not state, budgets.

I couldn't figure out why the numbers were so different. I've just now redone that calculation, and here's the results:

NH spends $5640 per person on state services, CA spends $12,500. More than double.

NH spends $850,000 per square mile, CA spends $1,960,000. More than double.

(California has 28x the population of NH, and about 17x the land area.)

About 1/3 of California state budget comes from the federal government, about 1/3 of NH state budget comes from the federal government.

California has a long seacoast with ports of entry for shipping, a warm, sunny environment, the biggest tech sector in the US, and lots of worldwide industry such as the movie industry, Disneyland, vinyards, and tourism. When I originally did the calculation it had Spacex, Tesla, and Oracle and a number of others.

New Hampshire has skiing and hiking.

California should be swimming in money, but it's not. It periodically skirts with bankruptcy, and everyone complains that you can't get anything done due to regulations. Despite having oil wells and refineries in state, energy prices are through the roof. (CA electricity prices are about 2x the prices in FL.)

I'm totally not seeing the difference. How does a podunk little state like NH have such a high quality lifestyle, while CA has opportunity, variety, culture, but at high cost and stress.

I'd be interested in any explanation people have.

More drag means their orbits will decay faster if they become inert junk.

I did, in fact, specifically mention that scenario. That would be due process for a criminal infraction which is the known (and once again, acknowledged by me) exception to the human right in question. The post I was replying to, however, did not mention due process or indeed anything that would normally be a criminal infraction. Also, seizing a foreigners passport issued by their own country is extremely unusual for non-criminal cases and even many criminal ones in most countries. In any case, please refer to article 13 of the universal declaration of human rights for what I was talking about.

Let's be clear here. I am very, very much against littering. I was also on an organ transplant waiting list and almost certainly would have died during the nearly decade long wait I would have had to go through if I didn't end up getting one without the waiting list. So, from a selfish utilitarian perspective, organ banks that remove the organs of litterers to provide to transplant patients would have been of great benefit to me. So understand where I am coming from when I say that is a morally repugnant idea.

All that is what you would expect, and your answer is a fine answer to the original poster. My post though, was in response to Bert64 and was to remind them of what the original poster was actually asking. I personally have not been to London in forever.

OK. So we'll just ignore the fact that the time frame up for discussion was 5 years ago, but somehow I'm the one being "revisionist" when you move it to 10-15 years ago? OK, let's go back three times longer.

15 years ago, we already had things like Siri and Watson. Various kinds of computer generated art had been around for decades and "filters" and other "intelligent" tools were all over the place in all kinds of graphics software, editing video live, etc. Sure, turning your face into Shrek, or an anime character, or aging or de-aging it live was still a couple of years away at that point, but the writing on the wall was clear from what was available that such things were right around the corner. So, yeah, I am very confident saying that the Slashdot crowd would not have been poo-pooing things that largely already existed at that time and were clearly being improved on constantly.

I will add the caveat that I suppose I am being a bit of a snob when I talk about the Slashdot crowd. I mean the actual, real, tech types here. I am excluding the ones who were posting serialized porn, ASCII nudes, thousand page posts of nothing but swastikas, etc. Or just people I consider not really worth considering. Sturgeon's Law applies here.

As for the product being terrible. I call it that because it is. Once it stops constantly giving me answers that make very basic errors, giving replies that contradict themselves, telling me at the start that "no, X is not the case", then giving all the facts that show that X is the case, etc. then maybe I won't find it to be so terrible. As it is, we keep seeing, over and over and over again articles about lawyers getting in trouble for submitting briefs citing cases that don't exist. How hard is it to not cite something that doesn't exist? Sure, it's improving. The fact that it may be good in the future does not make it good now, however.

Because of context. The AC said he was MAGA and he is not. I pointed out that he is not. It matters because that was what was being discussed.

I believe the standard on that the courts have normally upheld is that you have no requirement to provide an ID, but you do have to provide your name and address even without probable cause.

Yeah, I think that's one where they're going to find that a lot of members of their MAGA "big tent" are not going to be so super enthusiastic.

The reasons not to cover both the free speech parts and establishment of religion parts of the first amendment. Some object just because it is forced speech and it's creepy and forcing it is exactly counter to the fundamental principles of the country. Some object because they follow a religion that has prohibitions against idolatry and it counts as idolatry. If you look at the history (or at least claims about the history) of Christianity in Roman times, one of the causes of conflict between Christianity and the pre-Christian Roman empire was exactly that sort of conflict. The Christians would not pray to the Emperor or the Roman state, and they would not take the out that Jews in the Roman Empire supposedly did, which was to include a prayer for (rather than to) the emperor/state in their services. Supposedly, those early Christians refused to do either. A more general religious objection is, of course, the "under god" part which basically makes it a forced prayer by some perspectives. If not a forced prayer, it still forces a religious position.

To be fair, plenty of US schools have been having children do those in the morning for decades. Technically, they don't have to. Except, for some reason, kids who don't still keep getting illegally punished for it and it has to keep going back to the Supreme Court.

I really only remember one of those parties making a big deal about being the "party of small government".

It goes beyond the clock though. It's all analog displays (or digital simulations of analog displays, for that matter). They don't just give you a reading, they convey some since of the rate and help put the measurement into proportion with the scale of the display (which, when well designed is highly useful information).

Consider a dipstick (the one under the hood, not the one seated next to you). You're low on oil, but are you OMG pull into that convieniance store and get some oil now, just top it off when you get home, or you're getting an oil change in 2 weeks, it'll be fine. A quick glance will tell you, IF you can read an analog scale.

You seem to be entirely missing the point. I will spell it out for you: You argued that income inequality is not bad and, by extension, that those on the low end of the equation actually have it just as good as those on the high end. So, if that's the case, then those on the high end should have no problem giving up their wealth. Obviously that's not happening and the obvious reason why is because it's not actually so great being on the low end of extreme wealth inequality.

Alas, how are they to know when the minute has passed?

If only that round thing on the wall could talk...

To be fair, for clip shows, the SG-1 clip shows were usually fairly well done recaps and there weren't really that many compared to other episodes. They even did episode 200 as a clip show that wasn't really a clip show.