Like I mentioned in another post, I think that this bit of nationalism is simply a short term response to the economy, once growth and employment returns that will largely subside. A European federal state wouldn't start out as a superstate, more as a creeping institution. Banking union is a must and largely supported…

I was thinking more like 50 years, when the children today are in power, but I'd say even 25 years is doable (think back to how different 1989 was from today). Yes, nationalism is on the rise and people are euro-skeptic, but I'd say the forces/inertia for european integration are almost insurmountable. I would be…

Why stop there? Forget about saying German since it's just a collection of states assembled by Bismark, the Bavarians hate the fish heads in the north and let's not even start with how different the former East German provinces are. Paris is a different world than Avignon and the rest of France, you can't generalize…

Heh, I forgot about the stalling. Growing up I just thought that's what cars did.

My dad also swore off Chrysler after this car (we had a Volare station wagon). Water swishing around in the tailights, the side view mirror rusted out and was hanging by a cable, the floorboard rusted out so you could see the road underneath, etc etc. What a piece of shit. I wanted to buy one for sentimental/ironic…

Lily sings about somebody being hateful while the song itself is nothing but 3 minutes of hating on somebody. I like her quite a bit, but this song is awful. It's almost like she's being intentionally idiotic like in "he wasn't there" (which is a good track).

I love lily Allen but I hate this particular song. She comes off as an epic hypocrite.

So they've made $400,000 on bullshit snake oil. Sad.

You could have spared me a few seconds by putting "GMO" in the first thread. Anti-GMO is nothing but anti-science superstition. You may as well line up with the creationists.

Isn't it racist to say all "Chinese and Japanese hate each other's guts"? Also, it's idiotic to think you can't celebrate culture with some generalizations. Clearly there's a huge variation in European culture - is it racist to generalize as German the Oktoberfest festival because it's really a Bavarian thing? After…

Meh...people were beating up on Ireland long before Cromwell. The Plantation of Ulster began 50 years or so prior, which itself was a response for chronic Irish civil wars.

I would support a higher minimum wage, like $15/hour or so. The problem is that it would likely increase inflation, and result in fewer jobs. But at some level we need to raise the bar to increase incentives to work. Basically it's financially just as attractive to not work as it is to work.

I recently switched from onenote to Evernote because I could never manage to sync notebooks on multiple devices in a reasonable way (ended up with several different notebooks). Also, for taking call notes in onenote how can you get it to automatically add a time stamp? Or even have a view with notes sorted by date? I…

It's always been about shock value and sticking a finger in the eye of the sensible public. To say Madonna's was some sort of social commentary is ridiculous - whether it's Ozzy biting the head off a bat, Madonna nude, or Miley's twerking, it's all for shock/outrage PR. There will likely be a day when Victorian…

No. I have quad core Ivy Bridge, 16GB RAM, 2x SSD RAID, and iTunes always feels like it's on the verge of crashing. Pauses and delays, ghosted screens, etc. I only use it when I absolutely have to, which is to organize music and playlists. The cynic in me thinks Apple does this on purpose to try and make Windows look…

This is the internet. You're not supposed to agree with me.

Yes, that's bad, not denying it. But "danger of radiation" versus "over 2000 horrible deaths by chemical exposure"? If you happened to be on scene looking at the stacks of bodies I'm sure you'd rate Bhopal worse.

To further reinforce the point, how is Fukushima worse than Banqiao, or even Deepwater Horizon and Bhopal? Exactly one person was killed in the initial explosion in Fukushima, and not a single death from radiation. Yes, it's a clean up mess and very very bad situation, but I would much rather have lived through that…

Well, the problem in California is not the funds or getting Californians to like the idea, it is that the vested interests that have been involved in the high speed rail project over the past years will assassinate it. I'm sure there's untold thousands of lobbyists, unions, promised votes in the legislature for…

Certainly I wouldn't be offended if Asians came up with funny meanings in Mandarin for English names. I'd just laugh.