I think of them as mirror Marxist extremists - take standard naive Marxism, go to the opposite, and there are the Libertarians:

Property is theft - Property rights are sacred
Markets should be fully controlled by the government - Markets should be fully independent of all government
Capitalists are baby-eating villains - Capitalists are noble Nietzchean heroes
Organized labor should be the foundation of governance - Organized labor should be banned by the government
The poor are oppressed - The poor are oppressors

And of course, for both, no past failed attempt at realizing their political/economic goals ever counts. There is always the excuse that every historical example wasn't sufficiently ideologically pure. So they turn to even more extremism.

But that's hard to put in a little picture... Maybe a preacher thumping Ayn Rand?

Snob? Strange label, really. Cars give us the bad habit of projecting labels on other people based on their mode of transport. It's akin to judging people by their clothes. Some bike riders might be snobs, some car drivers might be, but holding a prejudice makes it so you treat everyone that way.

This is such a weird "controversy."

1) They show you the phone numbers of your friends that have shared their numbers, which is simplifies finding them if you are looking for them

2) They show you phone numbers from your phone if you've installed the facebook app on your phone and clicked the button that says you agree to synch your phonebook from your phone to facebook.

So a user can see their friends' phone numbers from facebook and their phone on one page. Users don't see anything but what their friends want to show them, and what they explicitly chose to share from their own phone to facebook. It's just a convenience service to consolidate contacts on one page for you.

I don't see why people care about this one.

Facebook collecting tons of demographics data on users to build marketing models that they are apparently selling to online marketers? Crappy.

Facebook collecting tons of information on individual users interests to build marketing models that they are sharing with online marketer to target ads? Evil.

Facebook having giant security holes over and over that leak user data? Utterly horrible.

Showing you some phone numbers you already have access to? Eh, who cares?

It's still only 90% efficient. If I lost 10% of my gas every time I filled up I'd be pretty displeased.

Yeah, so I, um... dang!

I like to see the swords to ploughshares thing in general, though since it's for a gun school it's a little less pleasing.

>How about SELLING the house?

The thing is once the loan is under water it has negative equity. Selling it would be putting oneself under a massive debt. The point of a strategic default is to compare the costs of walking away from the loan to the amount one would be indebted if you sold the house. For expensive houses that have lost a lot of value it often makes more financial sense to walk away. I don't really see any moral element, since financial contracts are not moral relationships. The banks certainly don't act as moral agents (at all, ever), so why should the customer? Business is business.

The reason that we don't let victims decide when criminals have paid their debt to society is because that is not justice. Of course victims will want perpetrators to suffer. The point of a justice system is to decide on matters of justice impartially. Letting victims decide on punishments is hardly different than lynch mobs or vigilantes deciding on matters of justice.

So far as I can tell, prisons are for reformation, for keeping dangerous individuals off the streets, or for punishment. Personally, I think that they are reformed, there's no reason to assume they'd be dangerous, and 35 years is plenty of punishment. At a certain point locking people away forever doesn't do any good, and does do harm. I think this is one of those points, though I also think our society loves throwing people in jail too much and doesn't do enough to forgive or reform.

You could always scribble notes on your arm without the tattoo.

Don't get me wrong, I don't approve of harming sturgeon, let alone poaching them. I just find them terrifying looking.

Sturgeon beautiful?

http://www.google.com/images?&q=sturgeon&oe=UTF-8

The trick with getting items for free is to do combinations of coupons that apply to the same item combining store coupons with manufacturer coupons. You can only use one mf'r coupon per item, but that doesn't apply to store coupons, and some grocery stores do double coupons. CVS and Walgreens also would give out gift cards for store credit when certain items were purchased. If you could do store and mf'r coupons on those items and get the gift cards you could actually make a positive credit on those things and wind up with free items and store credit at the end. My wife used to do this, though CVS caught on and fixed the loophole. It takes a lot of time to do and you mostly wind up with piles of toiletries and other things that you don't actually need a lot of. Just doing normal grocery store coupons when you go shopping works better, wastes less time, and doesn't leave you with a heap of semi-free things that you got because they were needed for a combo coupon but that you didn't actually want.

Okay, it is a nutcracker. It's just a really messy one:

http://www.coolbuzz.org/entry/heavy-metal-nutcracker-let-big-ball-crack-the-nuts/

If it is a bowling ball rack, it's a really bad design. You'd have to lean way over to get the ball, and if you stacked some balls and wanted the bottom one, you'd have to do a lot of work to get it.

It doesn't seem like much of a puzzle either, since at the end of the metal loops there's ought to be enough flex to just force the thing out (assuming that it doesn't slide out freely).

It would be a really messy nutcracker.

I don't know what it is, though.