...and get good at catching up on other work, surreptitiously, when other people are blah-blahing.

People want a chance to speak, even if they have nothing to say, so that they feel they contributed. Don't stand in their way, bring a laptop so you don't get bored.

If you allow the motormouths all to speak and exhaust themselves, you can come in fresh at the end, "sum it all up" and tell people what to do.

If you can actually change the meetings, there's lots you can do.

1. Get everyone to stand up during the meeting. People don't blah blah when they're standing up.

2. Try to get people used to ending meetings early. In the group I was most recently in, I was shocked that we had weekly hourly meetings for a team of about 40 - more than half of which ended in less than 30 minutes. There was a general feeling of "get it out of the way, back to work" so no one blah blahed.

Too young to die.

I'm not that familiar with his work but he had a lot of troubles not all of his own making (third-degree burns! That's something that requires months of excruciating therapy).

He was a clever DJ and apparently a nice guy. RIP.

(And for the anti-social personalities who have nothing better to do than snark on someone's death - don't worry, it'll be your turn soon enough!)

Occam's razor, you know: you'd expect that after a decade of fighting the Americans, they'd get better at it, right? What need is there to postulate an Iran connection (absent concrete information)?

The Afghanis have been reputed to be fearsome fighters for centuries. Afghanistan isn't called The Graveyard of Empires for nothing...

"And the idea that Fama and Lucas are wholesale wrong is ridiculous. Their ideas really do offer a ton of insight into functioning markets for 99% of the time we have them. And we've had massive financial disasters so infrequently (i.e. 1929 and 2008) that literally no one knows what to do when they happen."

Imagine your doctor had a theory of medicine that said, "You can't get sick." The doctor would also be right 99% of the time and also not know what to do when you got sick.

It's worse than that, actually, because the "markets are God" philosophies might even be the cause of these crashes.

It's clear to anyone who's ever worked in or studied the financial markets that they are prone to massive manipulation by a small number of organizations for their own benefit, at the expense of almost everyone else, efficient market hypothesis be damned...

Let me break it to you that the word "communist" actually has a real meaning and isn't a generic term for bad.

How you can consider the pro-war, pro-big-business, anti-union Obama a "communist" is beyond rational understanding. Nixon (Medicare, Medicaid, welfare) was a lot more of a communist than Obama is.

We're all embarrassed for you in the same way that we would be for a 2-year old yelling "Poo poo!" in a church service - and in the same way, we understand that you're simply completely and utterly ignorant.

Wasn't it you conservative Republicans who increased the deficit to record-breaking levels?

Aren't we spending a little over half our tax money now on our inept "Defense" Department - a department that got 0 out of 4 the one time it was tested?

Are you not aware that the US government already spends more per citizen on health care than almost any other country - but most of that money is simply wasted?

Your last conservative Republican government managed to go $5 TRILLION into the hole - that's the cost of running WWII, even accounting for inflation.

HEY! You CONSERVATIVE SCUM - stay out of our wallets!

Your post has nothing - NOTHING - to do with the bland, unassuming plans that Mr. Obama is putting forth in his speech.

That you believe this right-of-center, friend-to-business, conservative President will somehow single-handedly be able to fool everyone and reveal a completely different plan with death camps and crematoria boggles the mind. As if no one would notice. As if people would even participate.

Either you don't believe what you say - or you suffer from paranoid schizophrenia.

I flagged your letter either way and I encourage all other readers to do the same.

"We will do this by creating a new insurance exchange – a marketplace where individuals and small businesses will be able to shop for health insurance at competitive prices. Insurance companies will have an incentive to participate in this exchange because it lets them compete for millions of new customers."

No, insurance companies will have no incentive to complete, because it will bring them millions of expensive, difficult, unprofitable companies.

The whole idea of using market forces to fix the death spiral problem we have that's caused entirely by market forces is madness.

The whole point of the matter is that the insurers see "giving medical care" as a loss for them - each dollar of medical care they give us is a dollar less of profits for them.

This "insurance exchange" is going to do nothing useful. If it did change anything, you can bet Obama'd be against it. (What? Why yes, I am bitter!)

What sort of logic is that?

WHY is this a good thing?

WHAT is wrong with our criticisms?

You can't just define our objections out of the way. And what's wrong with an agenda, like "a non-broken healthcare system", anyway?