In my experience, the closer you are to action the more swearing (sales, press, front-line dev) and the polite stuff is more for the office bureaucrats who aren't critical to the success of the organization. There's something refreshingly blunt and urgent about the 2nd case.
(Edit: My experience includes Fortune 100 in consumer tech and finance)
The "family farm" defense of agricultural subsidies is dead wrong. In fact, most programs are price subsidies, so the more you produce, the more you benefit, and as a result most of the subsidies go to the largest producers-- we actually subsidize agribusiness over family farmers, relatively speaking. Further, the value of the subsidies gets capitalized into the land and makes it impossible for young farmers to get started in the business.
That's right, HFCS is slightly cheaper than raw sugar in the US because the government has extremely protective import quotas against world priced sugar. The invention of HFCS in the 1980s is a direct result of the U.S. sugar program. But if you allowed a free market for sugar in the U.S. the U.S. raw sugar price would equalize at the world sugar price, and it is likely that HFCS would disappear.
It is a human condition to have endless wants. The genius of the American experiment was that the Founders understood this, and created institutional checks on the size and power of government-- after all, governments are made up of people. The problem is that these institutional checks are crumbling under the twin weight of the military industrial complex and the entitlement state.
The Netherlands doesn't have a sizeable auto industry with politically powerful unions in key political states. Unfortunately, the American auto industry bends government at all levels to its will...cars own the road and everything is designed around the auto here.
Yeah, this study is a joke-- Berea is really atypical, I've visited. The town is charming with a serious mountain artistic vibe. The school has a religious mission and outreach to non-traditional students in Appalachia.
So true. There was another plane crash that killed ten people in Alaska over the weekend...even though it was more deadly it hasn't gotten the same coverage, in some measure because there's no video of the accident.
>people who only counted as 3/5ths of a person for the sake >of increasing the slave states' representation in Congress.
You have this backwards, please read the history. The 3/5's compromise was an initiative by northern states to REDUCE the electoral influence of southern states, who argued for 1/1 ratio.
These decisions are being made in the Oval Office-- President Obama is directly supervising the manhunt. He's even talked publicly about his approach in a press conference.
"The real Reagan record on AIDS is different. AIDS funding skyrocketed in the 1980s, almost doubling each year from 1983 - when the media started blaring headlines - from $44 million to $103 million, $205 million, $508 million, $922 million, and then $1.6 billion in 1988. Reagan's secretary of Health and Human Services in 1983, Margaret Heckler, declared AIDS her department's "number one priority." While the House of Representatives was Democrat-dominated throughout the 1980s, which Democrats would quickly explain was the source of that skyrocketing AIDS funding, Reagan clearly signed the spending bills that funded the war on AIDS.
It's also wrong that Reagan didn't utter the word "AIDS" until 1987. Any reporter who bothered to check facts would find that Reagan discussed AIDS funding in a 1985 press conference, just for starters. But let's turn that around on the rest of Washington. Does that mean no reporter asked Reagan about AIDS in the 1984 presidential debates? And that every interview President Reagan granted to a national or local media outlet failed to solicit Reagan's opinions on AIDS until 1985? Using this phony-baloney spin line - that federal policy hinges exclusively on the presidential bully pulpit - is an exercise in liberal hyperbole over hard data."
You should learn more about the FDA. It kills many Americans by slowing down the adoption of new drugs, and by adding serious cost to the development of new drugs. In other areas, the FDA is "captured" by industry and offers no protection. For example, the FDA has no rule or standard on arsenic in food, despite evidence that the carcinogen is commonly in US brown rice. Placing your faith in a government agency is foolish-- we'd be better off without the FDA because people would take the threats more seriously and you'd have more effective private certification programs fill in the gap.
To be fair, in the case of the Tea Party they delayed applications through the election, and there's also evidence the IRS handed donor information to outside groups.
I don't think Snowden is going to make it out of Moscow as a free man, but if he does, the US will orchestrate political change in Ecuador and eventually get him that way. America is Ecuador's biggest and most important trading partner, and relations are usually friendlier-- the current President is an exception to the rule. The US also tolerates a little bit of Yankee-bashing from Latin America as political posturing, but this is different-- harboring Snowden is a serious issue for the Obama Administration.
It isn't that simple. The government's programs are kept secret, even from most of Congress and most of the courts, and certainly from the public. It is very hard to square the sweeping NSA programs with the plain language of the 4th Amendment, which is the highest law of the land.
From Wikipedia: "philistinism describes the social attitude of anti-intellectualism that undervalues and despises art, beauty, spirituality, and intellect; ‘the manners, habits, and character, or mode of thinking of a philistine’.[1] A philistine person is the man or woman who is smugly narrow of mind and of conventional morality whose materialistic views and tastes indicate a lack of and indifference to cultural and æsthetic values.[2]"
This dead zone is, in large measure, the result of US agriculture and ethanol subsidies, which encourage expanded and more intensive production than would otherwise exist.
The performance differences between all of the major scripting languages -- Ruby, Python, PHP -- are insignificant, unless you are operating at Facebook scale (and Facebook, which still uses PHP, supports the HipHop project). Your web app bottleneck is not going to be PHP. Plus the PHP community is coalescing around Symfony2, which is a best-of-breed framework. Things have never been better in PHP land.
Indeed, many of the "homeless" may have access to shelter-- it is more of a vagrancy problem. Vagrancy is an issue with any free public service or public space, from parks to libraries to train stations to free buses. You'd have to enforce limits to time on the buses and rules against sleeping and eating and that sort of thing.
You obviously don't live a region that's at risk for Lyme disease. The disease is seriously bad news if it is left untreated, as the bacteria invade the nervous system.
The problem is that insurance companies and governments stand between health care and consumers. So the incentives aren't as strong as other markets. Purely market-based health care, like eye lasic or breast implants, have seen remarkable improvements in safety and lower costs.
Just do the antibiotics and don't worry about it, it will kill the bacteria if it exists. The standard lyme test looks for the antibodies, which won't exist if you take the antibiotics within a few days of the bite.
Do you still have the tick? You can send it to a lab for analysis, it costs just $60. The human lyme tests are very inaccurate, especially within two weeks of the bite-- you might not have formed antibodies yet.
The right to bear arms is also, explicitly, a protection against tyranny BY the government. Thomas Jefferson: ""When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
Your speculation about the GOP primaries is mis-informed. In 2010, Rand was an insurgent "tea party" republican, as was Rubio -- both men were officially opposed by the party in their primaries and defeated the "generic" GOP candidate. In both the GOP and Democrat parties, generic candidates often struggle in primaries if there is a non-crazy candidate who can appeal to the base. Rand has a safe path back to the GOP nomination -- his biggest risk is doing too much "national" work and losing to an establishment Democrat in battleground Kentucky.