People shouldn't necessarily work on what they want, they should work on what others value (whether that's a want or a need). Obviously it good when you can find an overlap between the two, but there's really a sharp limit to the number of professional masturbators, bong-hitters, and video-game players needed in an community.

Those who invented modern science actually spent much of their time working on projects for their patrons, just as artists did at the time. It's every adults duty, at least until retirement, to discover something that others value enough to pay for, that they won't hate doing, and get trained as needed to do that, then make that contribution to the community.

There's just no other way for the goods and services we all want and need to spring into existence. Not tax structure causes food to grow, nor houses to be constructed, nor the trash to be hauled. People doing what others value so that they can have the things they value makes all that happen.

The post-show ads I'm OK with, for Netflix, as it's nice to know what Netflix is working on and they're trivially skippable.

You know github can also host the binaries, right?

Ahh, so you want to force people to make the goods and service you think are important, rather than leaving it up to individual producers and consumers. Will your central committee produce a five-year plan? Will you blame 70 consecutive years of poor harvests on "a cold winter", as Obama just did for America's GDP this year?

Historical technological peacetime advancement was driven almost entirely by capitalism. So many inventions languished for centuries before the industrial revolution simply because there wasn't sufficient reward for doing something useful with them (except where there was a wartime use).

Any reason you're not using GitHub?

How is that relevant? Oppose totalitarianism in any and all forms!

Can you really not understand "making" as "providing needed goods and services"? Are you just being pedantic? Or did you really not understand that all the goods and services we collectively have available are all the goods and services we collectively provide?

Same percentage of income would work just as well to ensure everyone has some skin in the game. Also, the bum living under the bridge likely has a net work between $0-10, making him wealthier than a huge portion of America, who is in net debt. Sobering thought.

Well, OK, by your "infrastructure" definition sure - if only out government could spend more than 20% or so of it's budget on stuff like that (it mostly just takes money from group A and mails it to group B, under the excuse of "taxing the wealthy", which never happens).

But personal wealth, the ability to reach financial independence before retirement age, that's always going to require individual choice and sacrifice of fun today for independence tomorrow, a rare enough trait.

We are collectively a democracy. I'm content with any taxing/sending level agreed on by the democracy, as long as everyone pays. Everyone must have skin in the game - no "robbing individual Peters to pay collective Paul".

You confuse income with wealth, I think. No amount of income redistribution will achieve wealth redistribution. No matter how much water you pour from my bucking into your colander, you'll still be dry.

Progressives in America are totalitarian, use whatever label you prefer. Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. No intrusion into daily life by government is forbidden, as long as it's for the common good.

"We're going to have to take things away from you for the common good"

"The problem with letting the people decide is that they often make the wrong choice."

"It should be illegal to broadcast false claims relating to a political debate."

"I'm all for free speech, but hate speech isn't protected."

"I don't want my neighbor to be able to own a firearm - he's more dangerous, if just by accident, than any criminals."

"It's not right to make a rape victim testify to the cops or a court, or to make her face her accuser - it's just too emotionally traumatizing"

More and more this is the stuff of the mainstream American left, not just the progressive extreme.

Sorry, dude, you have to put down the pipe and work for a living. There's no escaping the working for a living part, long-term. All we have is all we make, and so the fewer people work, the less we have - no games with money can change that. The best thing the government can do is provide incentives for people to work hard and be successful, by not punishing that. Tax everyone the same; don't create a special hated class of people who are taxed more. We shouldn't be spending more that we're all willing to pay in taxes, whether that's less or more than today - this game of "spend more and tax him over there" cannot survive much longer.

Physics is "the study of reality", so sure it can have a frontier: the borders of our knowledge. Or, as I like to think of it, the shore -- the bigger the island of knowledge, the bigger the shore of uncertainty.

Metaphysics, rumor has it, was the title Aristotle chose for his book on the subject because "there not a word to summarize all this stuff, but it's after my book on physics, so I'll just call my book AfterPhysics". Typical sequel quality, if you ask me.

Well, (D) and (R) often represent different corporations. There's only a few, like the investment banks and cable companies who bribe everyone.

The skill: "willingness to accept the system, even when it's wrong, and game it for your benefit" is central to engineering, accounting, law, and finance. Almost all of the goof jobs outside of medicine.

Children expect life to be fair. Adults accept that the world is imperfect, and work for success within it (not to say it's not also worth trying to change the bad parts, but in the mean time do something useful with your life).

Very true. The rational man realizes this, and doesn't hold strong political opinions on the rest of it. We're all going to be ignorant of most science in the modern world - the time has long passed when the educated man could know all of the scientific knowledge there was. It's important to therefore set arrogance aside, and not try to tell others they're idiots, or force your uneducated opinion on others by law, unless you actually care enough to do the diligence first.

Far too many people mistake fashion for education. If you're going to call others fools for trying to stop the teaching of "evolution" in schools, call them fools because you took the time to understand the science, the counter-arguments, and why a smart, ration person could somehow not believe in evolution. Until you understand the other side, and why it's wrong, stay out of the argument. For the evolution case: if you had a solid biology class, this takes just a few days of reading the talk.origins site. It's not an undue burden, and otherwise arrogance about your uninformed opinion is just idiocy.

For newer fields like the climate change debate, it will take longer to dig up the details, as there isn't a handy website that collects all the pro and con arguments. For climate change, can read through the pro and con sites and understand where they're coming from, understand the Vostok ice core data for perspective, spend time pondering the satellite temperature data, and so on.

For any such issue, treat both sides as intelligent people who are in earnest in their beliefs and not trolling, and read enough to understand how this can be true. When you understand how intelligent people can disagree on the issue, and see where both sides are coming from, then you can act out of knowledge instead of arrogance, and stop polluting the debate with idiocy. If your only basis for argument is "everyone knows the smart people believe X, and the losers believe not-X", well, that's fashion, not knowledge. This pretty much applies to anything being debated politically, BTW, not just the science stuff.