Reasonable people can disagree on this. Oil and gas released by fracking is driving huge reductions in coal use for power generation. Personally, I really like the unknown but apparently small costs from fracking against the known and enormous cost of mining and burning coal.

Did you read TFA? (This is Slashdot, why did I waste electrons asking?) It says the chemical concentration is well below safety limits. There is no reason to believe the water is unsafe.

If you put that aside, I do tend to agree, if the water used to be safe and now it's not and it is reasonably clear the drilling had something to do with it, the drillers have an ethical responsibility to make the well owners right.

That's an interesting point. Ronald Coase won a Nobel prize for the Coase Theorem which says that's not always the economically sensible way to think about it. Ethically and morally, most people assume whoever got there first should win. If I dug the well first, I have a right to clean water. If the frackers got there first, I have to deal with whatever water they left behind. The Coase theorem says it really doesn't matter who got there first, as long as we can strike a bargain, we'll arrive at the optimal (greatest good, lowest cost) solution. That might be supplying filters to wells, paying well owners off, changing drilling techniques, buying the mineral rights and putting them in a land trust, or something you and I can't envision.

TFA points out that the levels detected are well within safety limits. Apparently no lives are actually at risk. Also these chemicals are used for other things so it's likely but not entirely certain they came from a well.

If it were my well and my house, I'd shrug and worry about more significant risks like the hockey game I played Sunday night.

It's actually a bit more complicated than that. We have a winner-take-all election system (and first-to-the-finish electoral college). There has been analysis which shows this tends to hit an stable equilibrium with two major parties. Once it becomes clear one of two parties is the only one with a viable chance of winning, people rationally don't pay attention to (or vote for) the minor party candidates.

There are many other voting systems which yield much better results. The problem is, they are much harder to explain and they don't "feel" as right. Americans are just never exposed to anything other than "you vote for one person, the creep who gets the most votes wins".

I'd love to see us try proportional representation, instant run offs, preference voting, or pretty much any other system. I just don't expect it to happen in any sort of scale in my lifetime. I certainly don't expect our elected officials to try changing it--they like the current system because they won using it.

*Sigh*. I've voted against her in every single election and she keeps coming back. Arnold might have been the Governator but DiFi is the one who really can't be killed.

I have no idea who keeps voting for her and why they're allowed to hold sharp objects.

I remember listening to an EconTalk podcast about when this was tried somewhere in Latin America. There was a bustling trade in fake license plates so you could swap them out and the number of cars people owned spiked up. In the end it was not very effective.

Obviously,the Paris experiment might have a different outcome but I suspect the Parisians will find ways to drive on the prohibited days. Uber/Lyft/Sidecar have to be giggling in glee. (I can't remember, did Paris ban ride sharing?)

Wait, I'll be at liberty to get ISP service from a provider who guarantees Netflix streams don't hiccup and preload at blazing speeds?

I'm at liberty to accept a job for $3 an hour if I value the experience?

Regulation, pretty much by definition, must constrain liberty. It prevents people (working in corporation and without) from behaving in the way they would prefer. I think what you believe is it doesn't impact liberty in a way you think is valuable. Problem is, I might not agree.

This again? Businesses have rights because from a legal perspective, a business is a group of people and people don't give up their rights by joining a group. So a business has a right to free speech because the people constituting the business each have an individual right to free speech. Legally treating a business as a person is just shorthand to make things easier.

"Do space alien radio signals cause cancer? We report, you decide!"

Deal. Let's start building a Ringworld.

Precisely. Just undercutting someone's price isn't unfair. Even selling at a loss to get market share isn't unfair. Using political clout to get your competitors banned sure seems unfair.

I've always wondered what makes some competition fair and other not fair. Bribing officials and fraud seem unfair (although "illegal" seems more accurate). You could claim Uber, Lyft, and the like evade problematic laws and that is unfair to law abiding competitors. If, for example, ride-sharing rides don't pay a tax on commercial rides, well that doesn't seem right. I might not like the tax but that's a different story, you still need to pay it until the law changes. Just offering lower prices, even loss-leading prices, would be tough for the guy on the receiving end but that's not unfair.

Then by all means, ask for it. Better yet, start your own software firm offering that deal and poach all the good programmers. If the money is just sitting on the table, why aren't you out grabbing it?

The answer is, of course, that salaries are generally at equilibrium. Employees negotiate for as much as they can (I certainly do each time I change jobs), employers push back equally hard. Everyone arrives at the best deal they can. It's extremely unlikely there's a ton of extra salary just sitting there because IT pros forgot to ask for it or were all such pushovers they didn't get it.

Depends on your definition of "common". I don't think 10 deaths and 1000 injuries a year is common at all, that sounds quite rare.

Sure, just as soon as this bright spark also puts some money into getting more men into nursing, human resources, and primary education, all fields as dominated by women as IT is by men. Maybe more so. I don't think my kids' elementary school had a single man on the staff other than the janitor.