I don't think that's the answer this time. This time it appears that only one adequate proposal was received.

This doesn't mean that just any proposal that mentions the magic words should get the nod. This seems to be a case where only ONE adequate project was proposed.

No, that was McCain and Palin. If people has seen a better choice they might have gone with it.

FWIW, I may have voted for Obama, I can't recall, but if so it was only as the lesser of two evils. He probably was that. This isn't much as praise, but it's the best I've got in stock.

If that was a joke, possible, it was a rather poor one. I think it was probably also tasteless, but as I can't identify where the joke lies, I'm not certain.

You don't need a specific law for it to be regulation of the market. Yes, it's fraud. But if you want an unregulated market, you want one in which fraud is permissible.

P.S.: Adam Smith appeared to believe that a free market implied that there would be sufficiently good information about rival goods to enable a potential customer to evaluate which was better, and probably even whether any of them were desireable. This, however, can only be (partially) achieved in a regulated market.

Please Note: That can you bought which say it contains 3 servings and 0 grams of sodium per serving may well contian more sodium that some heart patients could safely consume. And it may be more common for one person to consume the entire can at one time than for it to be divied into 3 separate servings (for either separate people or separate episodes of consumption).

I had this strange dream where I lived in a country that valued freedom and liberty. Then I woke up to this dystopian nightmare police state that serves the interests of landlords, banking cabals and oligarchical collectivists. It was a nice dream.

The idea that all contracts are somehow sacred is BS - you cant ask people to pay for things then renege on critical details. Its more or less fraud in legalese.

Bring these cases to a jury. Any BS trickery in legalese should be shot down.

Banning AirBnB is generally BS, there are a few cases where the rental leads to an issue and those should be handled case by case. To ban the activity which is an activity in the private home of consenting adults is a joke.

Funny, didn't we hear arguments about what consenting adults can do with each other in private from these same folks on another issue?

True. Maxtor infected seagate, and their reliability is generally horrific.

http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

25% of seagate drives die within 3 years. Its utterly horrific.

A President will be allowed to increase the power of the loose confederacy of those really in charge. Never to decrease. You think Presidents run the US? They're just executives, not kings.

Don't let those five smug-n-stupid white men rule on any - ANY - matter until one of them dies and we can fix the Reagan/Bush stacking. Wait. Don't let them set precedents. Avoid engagement. They can wreck the future of the human race, as the US is pretty much ruling the world.

Actually, a free market would be an unregulated market, were such a thing to exist. This doesn't make it desireable, and, in fact, no such thing has ever existed. The closest that I can think of are various blackmarkets, where all sorts of competition are allowed, including killing off the competition. Those are still officially regulated, but in practice are frequently only minimally regulated. (Killing off you competitors will often lead to a serious investigation by the police.)

N.B.: All laws against deceptive marketing or mislabeling of what you are vending are infringements on the free market, as are any regulations against killing your custiomers.

The really amazing thing is that people think a free market is desireable. This is because they are usually only considering certain degrees of freedom. (Which ones tend to vary in an unexpressed way between individual proponents.)

HOWEVER: Once you accept that the market will not be free, you run smack up against "Who will watch the watchmen?". Regulatory capture is so frequent that to ignore it is foolish, but no currently used approach has proven effective in the long term.

God help us all from people like you.

We can't pay poor people a few bucks to eat, but we've infinite cash for surveillance and war. Who the hell is threatening us with chemicals? The US had THE stockpiles of nerve toxins on this planet. We still haven't gotten rid of it all. And for what did we make enough poison to wipe out all life on earth a million times? We seem to be the biggest threat on the planet, by far.

Or don't pay your condo association fees for a month. Or homeowners association fees. They can confiscate.

There's no place in the world you can live where a bastard can't figure out a legal way to steal your home. Never was. Government or private. Remember the hundreds of thousands of faked refinance agreements that banks and capital groups used to steal people's homes in the last ten years? Got clean away with it. Kept the houses, too. We can't touch them anymore. Red handed, and they walked away with tiny fines.

The only defense against thieves? Live somewhere they don't want to live, or where they can't figure a way to rent your property for a good price. This is the new Gilded Age, and the bastards are just getting warmed up. We're gonna see what supercapital trillionaires are capable of in our lifetimes.

Nope. They won't. Renters are peons. No leverage. The leverage is money. Too many rich people, too many trust funds. Better for the landlords (capital funds will buy up the good units very soon now) to evict and replace with more affluent renters - or even better, write some new laws so the landlords can rent the units out at AirBnB prices themselves. Why not?

Really. Can't rent an apartment there, can't rent a hotel room there, can't breath the air there without a trust fund. Godz forbid we should find a way not to pay the rapacious owners of San Francisco even more money. No, this is not the way the free market goes, Rand Fans. This market will never be "free". It's monopoly of space. Space is limited. There's too much money in the city. Prices go up. Eventually the place is full of empty apartments owned by capital funds and by Saudi and Colombian investors, as London has shown us. Free for whom? No the people who live there, damn it. They're peons now.

Capital funds are now rolling up the apartments into securities now, and selling them on Wall Street as investments. Of course, surrounded by derivative bets. No chance of a crash there, eventually. And the complaints of a reduction if not elimination of maintenance are of course rolling in, 'cause that's what an unfree market does: charge you more for less and less.

Don't care about the laws. Laws are bought by the owners of the city, and we duck around them as best we can. If you are rich enough, you ignore the laws and pay the fines if they catch you. Or just buy a new law, just for you. The law is a joke. Contracts are a joke. We have no power to negotiate a better deal, so the hell with it.

Don't see an end to the hoovering up of the peon army's piggy banks any time soon. Students now owe a trillion dollars in student loans that most can never repay in their lifetimes, and additionally they'll have to live in cars or trucks when the rentiers start enforcing the limits on the number of people living in a single unit. Don't want those poor people in your neighborhood. And "poor" is a relative term. The middle class are starting to understand that they are the new "poor" now, in some places.

Where the hell are people gonna live? This is amusing. SF might become a true Randian paradise. A lost cause for 95+ per cent of the population. New York used to have rent control, and that might have saved SF from the upcoming years of rage; but "free" markets are the rule now. Let's see what happens. Vomit on the buses? That's the beginning. We're replaying the 1930's. Gonna have to start getting those private security forces, rich people. (Odd thing: if you've money, you tell your private police what to do. If you don't have capital, public police tell *you* what to do)

End result, less money from tourists, visitors and job seekers looking for a place to crash while finding their bearings. The rentiers don't care; they're rich anyway. Also, the people paying 4000 - FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS A MONTH for their two bedroom can't make a little cash back. They can't buy the appropriate laws. Shrug. Lost cause here.