"20 years of stagnant wages, longer hours and fewer benefits with more taxes" is mostly why the damned market is so high (that and corporate welfare). Companies are squeezing what workers that remain for every tiny bit of efficiency and free time they can get.

It's an international race to the bottom. And, you're right that the GOP thinks no one pays attention....or cares.

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Murdoch in partnership with Sinclair Broadcasting and other evil hard-right media outlets.

It's vast, well moneyed and powerful. Creators of thousands of alternate realities.

There always seemed to be a code of silence - spoken or not - among former presidents. My suspicion is that's because these people have tremendous amounts of top secret information in their heads, and so are hell-bent to not get caught compromising the intelligence agencies, or perhaps national security - with a slip of the tongue. We may never know.

One thing is for certain - tRump can not be trusted in the future to honor this code.

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Bearded Guy: Not even a handicap room? I can pay in goat's milk.

Clerk: Nope, Syrian fellow from the war with no legs and an AK47 got that last one. Want me to call the homeless shelter?

Bearded Guy: Yes, please - just any place my wife can rest and perhaps deliver her baby.

Clerk: Sorry, I called and shelter is full too. Trump is coming to town for the party, cops cleared the streets of homeless, so shelter is full.

Bearded Guy: Please, do you know of any place we can just rest a while?

Clerk: I do have a friend that has a barn.....

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Rayovac - I buy from them direct because it's fast delivery and the batteries are always fresh:
http://www.rayovac.com/products/batteries.aspx
(free shipping on orders over $25)

We've also had very good success with Rite Aid's alkalines and they run special sales on them often. Their alkalines have been highly rated by a number of testing organizations through the years.

Seriously, I'm having one hell of a time seeing a way out of the mess we're in, and it's a global problem. Republicans and other conservative-party people around the globe (along with a big sack full of dictators and other despots) control far too much of the world's capital, and hence a disproportionate amount of the media. Not speaking of politicians so much as I am the wealthy class that buy our pols. If we get two steps forward in 2018 and 2020, they will pour huge amounts of money into reversing those gains....and they will.

These are some of the basic big-picture questions I struggle with:
* How do we un-Walmartize our communities?
* How do we reverse the vast economic inequality across the globe?
* How do we deprogram the millions of people who have been brain-washed by evil media moguls like the Murdochs?
* How do we return to a predominantly loving, sharing, unselfish society?
* How do we get more people to start loving and protecting the Earth?

And, it hurts to know I'm now too damn old to make much of a difference!

I understand what they did in a fundamental sense and it appears to be a practical solution at face value. They can detect when a battery is getting aged (electrically soft) and the software revision forces the processor to slow down to prevent the phone from crashing.

Where I would fault Apple is in not clearly notifying customers as to exactly what their updates do, and what options are available to users (such as battery replacement). I'm not an Apple user (and never will be) but from what I've seen in friend's phones, the upgrades just start installing with no more than a simple yes/no window without any technical explanation.

My experiences with Apple customer service (helping friends) has not been good and their web site sucks. They assume everyone has an Apple-brain, LOL.

Maybe the law suits will get their attention and force them to be more informative and straightforward with customers.

we have to somehow work our way out of that viscous cycle, and I feel the Repugs are playing us (and the Nation) with that game. Each time we go through that up/down cycle, we loose a chunk of those hard-earned government functions and protections that may never be recovered.

This will never end until we somehow no longer allow money to equate to the right to power, and the right to buy or inordinately affect votes. Although there are dozens I'm sure you're aware of, for me there's no better example than the Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch.

What right does an Australian that made much of his original fortune selling trashy tabloids in Britain and Australia have to strongly influence America's political thinking and dialog, and our voting? In my book, absolutely none.

So, I fear we are trapped in that viscous cycle until we a.) arrest the exponential flow of working people's capital into corporate coffers and the pockets of the wealthy, and b.) outlaw unlimited funding of political campaigns. Our campaigns need to return to the days when they were very boring and politicians had to pound the streets every day to win.

which it ultimately will be after one factors in the long-term effects. We must also emphasize the huge budget cuts that will be coming and the net public costs of those cuts.

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Due to a number of factors (feel free to add to my list):
1. Deaths due to increasing crime caused by rising poverty and emotional stress.
2. More heart related deaths along with suicides due to a more divided and economically stressed society.
3. Reduced support for healthcare in general, and particularly for women, children and the poor.
4. Rising healthcare costs and insurance premium increases, resulting in less preventative care.
5. Increases in job-related deaths due to deregulation of workplace safety rules.
6. Increases in pollution-related deaths due to deregulation of the EPA.
7. More deaths due to natural disasters cause by defunding of emergency support systems (see Puerto Rico).
8. More drug-related deaths due to defunding of our already inadequate prevention and recovery systems now in place.

And, the voices of most of those dying will not be heard.

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