whistleridge: He swears the small farmer is intentionally being driven out of business. I'm inclined to at least partly believe him.


A big part of it is the fact that for many (most?  all?) of your commodity crops the agricultural market is structured like an hourglass - where you have many thousands of farmers growing the food, many millions of mouths consuming it, and a handful of massive food traders/processors like Cargill and Con-Agra sitting between the two and skinning them both.  That's a big reason why food prices at the supermarket keep going up while family farmers keep going out of business.

nmemkha: Sendtence patent & copyright trolls to solve the shortage by forcing them to rot in some podunk town.

Like the booming metropolis that is Marshall, Texas?

Magorn: Linux_Yes: 99% of our CONgress are lawyers too.


which explains alot............................

Dead wrong, but a common misperception. Less than 37% are overall and the precentage is shrinking.  If they WERE lawyers they'd write better laws  and the court wouldn't contantly be having to say "WTF did Congress mean by THIS anyway"?

To be honest, I'm not sure that they've actually ever said anything that was factually correct. Engaging them in debate is futile - I've seen people do so before. Even if you "win" you'll only end up being baffled when they repeat the same erroneous thing a few minutes later. It makes about as much sense as taking on faith anything "GAT_00" says as being correct and I imagine the frustration levels are similar. Some folks just seem to have a form of insanity that prevents them from engaging with reality and the real oddity is that they seem to think that they're the ones who are living in reality and that it is the rest of us that are "sheeple," "out of touch," or "agents of the man."

It's amusing to watch though.

Snarfangel: Maybe they can set up remote lawyering. A guy in Sticks, North Dakota (not a real town, I think) teleconferences with a lawyer in Big City, Ohio (not a real city). Maybe set up something like that in the court room too, if they are really desperate. That way, a lawyer could help clients without travelling a thousand miles.

I've been there. It was founded by Eldon St. Bigg in the 1820's. Big City, OH is the second largest village in Stumpwater County, supported mostly by pig iron, charcoal and mining industries. If they could make misery an export, they would since they have plenty.

Contribution Corsair: That would require legalese to go away. As long as leases and contracts are used in many parts of life we can't get rid of them. It is either that or teach people how to properly read legalese or require more common language use in those.

I think that using the 'weights and measures' clause in the constitution, the Congress should empanel a team of senior contract law experts and come up with boiler-plate contracts for, say, the 10 most common legal contracts in America, and then require that in order to be any kind of Bank, Home Broker, or Lawyer, you must agree to offer these products.

Then make kids learn to read them in ninth grade as their social studies / Citizenship / Civics class until they can walk into a bank and say "I want a S-5 Standard loan and a T-7 Credit card."

// and yes, Counties should hire 3 new law school graduates a year every year for three year terms each. House 'em, Feed 'em, and get their school loan payments held up without interest for the period.