Youâ(TM)re thinking of the âoeincelsâ, who are mostly right-wingers. The correct term, though, is âoevolcelâ since theyâ(TM)re to lazy to make themselves better people do they can get a date.

It seems you think that "Affirmative Action and Diversity hiring" means that any minority or female that applies for a job will get the job, regardless of their qualifications. In reality, it's usually used to help minorities/females get an interview and may be used as a tie breaker amongst similarly qualified candidates.

In this case, it is much more likely that if she's drastically under-qualified it was more of a political decision.

The "punitive tax" you mention is simply charging commercial operators according to the damage that they do to public facilities. If an over-height truck hits a bridge, the trucking company is liable for the damage. We can charge by axle-weight to recoup damages to the roadway. Any regulations they currently face (max driving hours per day, max weight, etc.) are for public safety.

"Trucking companies would just service the last few (or dozen) miles from the rail hub to the source/destination." about covers the Last Mile problem.

We wouldn't need the thousands of self-driving trucks if the rail freight system could compete with trucking, but the deck is stacked against them.

Rail companies maintain their own "roads" and rights of way. Trucking companies buy trucks, hire drivers as cheap as possible, then turn it all loose on roads built with your tax dollars. One of my Civil Engineering prof's told us that one truck does the damage of 10,000 cars. As a highway engineer, I saw that first-hand. Then trucking companies have the gall to put stickers on the back of the trucks that say, "This truck pays an average of $5,123 dollars per year in over the road taxes." Yet they probably do 50 times that in damage.

It's time we cut off the trucking company fat cats and charged them to use the interstate roads. That would bring the rail companies up to parity. Trucking companies would just service the last few (or dozen) miles from the rail hub to the source/destination. And we all get lower taxes and less highway construction.

Where? You might get that with a tech company in the San Francisco area where they're trying to soften the blow of housing costs. In the rest of the country, you're working a corporate job with two weeks to start and a max of 4-5 after 10 years.

"AR"...that's what a pirate says. Get it? It's a joke!! Have another cup of coffee (or you've already had a few too many).

Trump supporters spent the latter part of the campaign complaining about how Clinton didn't understand their concerns (lost jobs, etc.). All this crying about how the dem's just don't understand the problems faced by REAL Americans(tm). So now the shoe is on the other foot and the REAL Americans(tm) show that they don't care about anyone but themselves. They now comfortably embrace and espouse that which they whinged about just a few months ago.

This is why dem's hate Trump supporters: "We won, so I can do and say whatever I please."

I re-read your post a few times and couldn't figure out exactly what you're proposing as an alternative to banning them.

How does higher minimum wage make jobs disappear?

Salaries are a cost of doing business, just like heat, electricity, computers, etc. If a company cannot afford to pay its employees a living wage with health care, then that company should not survive. We as a country need to stop accepting this BS situation where companies make huge profits and their workers need foodstamps to survive.

This as a great side effect: many conservatives who say "illegal" immigrants are stealing jobs from US citizens because they're willing to work for less. If we raise the minimum wage, more US citizens will take those jobs that formerly didn't pay enough, so the undocumented workers will have trouble finding work and be less likely to come here.

I thought the purpose of prison was deterrence? Give the guy a heavy fine and criminal record to make an example of him. The damages were low--why should my tax dollars support this guy while he's in jail?

Reminds me of Quark from 1978 http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0077...

Even if Trump could throw a magic switch and have Apple decide in Februrary 2017 to produce all of the iPhones in the US, have you given any thought to how long it would take to tool up something like an iPhone factory in the US? Foxconn has literally thousands of engineers just to design the production process and around 1 million employees. I'm sure you're thinking, "Great! That's a million new jobs for the US." How long will it take to interview and hire a million people? How long will it take to design the assembly lines? How long would it take to build a factory where those people work? You're probably thinking that we could use all of those closed factories all around the country, but I think most of those probably had a few thousand workers, so you'd probably need around a hundred of those. That's not great for scaling to the production volume of the iPhones. You're probably looking at 5-10 years before something like this is even possible. All in all, getting Apple to make the iPhones in the US makes a great sound byte, but 5-10 years is not a practical timeframe for a competitive market segment.

There's been a lot of speculation here about reducing thermal expansion. One of the reasons roads in Wisconsin need to be paved so frequently is that they have to be designed to handle a temperature range of -20F to 100F. This means that asphalt roads here have a lot more asphalt. When you look at a southern state, they handle a much narrower temperature range of say 50F to 130F. They can get away with lower asphalt content, which means the roads are more durable. Northern roads also have to content with frost heave, beneath the pavement, which also reduces lifespan. To reduce thermal expansion of the roadway, you'll need to keep the temperature above 50F. Will the solar panels produce enough energy to do that when the air temperature is below 20? Heating the road surface might prevent the soil below it from freezing at the centerline, but along the shoulders you'll still get a lot of frost. That means you have the center of the road behaving very differently from the edges, which will likely lead to much more frequent maintenance.

As a highway designer, this concept scares me. To get the optimal solar efficiency, you need a perfectly smooth surface to transmit as much light as possible. However, to provide a safe driving surface, especially in wet conditions, you need a decent amount of friction. How do you add friction? Make the surface rough. Even a small amount of roughness will greatly decrease the solar efficiency.

Don't forget the diamond trade. Lucrative and no guild, so who wouldn't want to get into that? Beyond that, the stereotype of the old Jew with a cart that collected scrap metal and fabric prior to the industrial revolution left those individuals in a unique situation with better connections for raw materials when factories were being built. Jews persevered in the areas that the "good" Christians forced them into. Then they are persecuted for prospering.