JudgeHolden

That's totally fair. Although I'm not sure how you figure that the Portland area isn't a big part of the PNW.

Hold my beer...

Burgerville is pretty good if you live in the PNW. It's downsides are that it's overpriced for what you get and it's had some labor issues that don't put ownership in a good light.

I think my old man had much the same, or at least somewhat similar thoughts, when he came home from Vietnam. He was a UH1 door-gunner/crew-chief with the 4th ID in the Central Highlands, survived being shot down, was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross, a purple heart, a fistful of air medals and came home with a giant chip on his shoulder.

Well, I'm in my 50s and I still haven't figured it all out. That said, I'm pretty content, so I must be doing something at least somewhat right.

In the first movie he is searching for The Ark of the Covenant, but otherwise you are correct.

Windows is emphatically not the same thing as Android. They're two entirely different OS's. No doubt you know this, it just seems like you momentarily lost the plot and made it about Windows vs Mac, when what we're really talking about is iOS vs Android.

Also Columbia owns brands like Prana and Mountain Hardware, so if you want higher quality stuff that's still basically Columbia, you have plenty of options.

The same is true of many other companies.

I think it's a case of the tyranny of minor differences and what people are used to. My personal phone is an android and I'm used to it and like it, while my work phone is an iPhone and I use it for entirely different work-related reasons that it's great for.

Never shall the two meet! I actually like having my work and private lives segregated into two separate OS's that have little if any overlap.

I have at least a nodding acquaintance with that work and while I think it's worth considering and talking about, I don't find it to be at all the most convincing explanation for conservatism and am far more persuaded by conservatism as being motivated by a desire for the preservation of hierarchy that manifests itself through said psychological traits, but that is the ultimate prior that informs them. Otherwise we would expect to see liberalism and conservatism more evenly distributed throughout our population, as with other psychological traits, but we don't, to the contrary, they are very geographically dependent.

So while I don't think that psychology has nothing to say about the issue, I definitely don't think that its the most important factor.

Not really. The real answer is that different parts of the federal government are underfunded or overfunded according to political ideology and expedience. This is a great example; the SSA is underfunded while the military is overfunded which results in clear performance differences.

You'll never hear a conservative bitch about the US military saying that it can't do anything right, and it's like, yeah, duh, because it has a huge fucking budget and basically gets anything it asks for.

Social safety net programs? Not so much.

There's a relevant and oft' cited Churchill quote to the effect that while democracy isn't great, it's better than any other governing system we know of.

In other words, leave us not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

As for why democracy is the best system, it's simple; in theory democracy gives everyone a stake in governance. While it rarely if ever works out that way, Churchill was correct that it's better than any other system we know of.