Well, if they're different species, then by definition they don't mate. That means that releasing the modified mosquitos of the dangerous species won't affect the harmless ones, and hopefully as you suggest the benign ones will take over.

Meh, I abandoned it when it started refusing to run because there was a symlink in the path to its binary. It was less work to just move to virt-manager, which is just a wrapper around KVM which means I'm now running on a fully stock kernel as a bonus. Took a bit of effort to get networking working right, but it wasn't a big deal and the same setup works well for containers also.

If people can't afford the price of things they need to live, then they should receive public assistance. The solution isn't to try to manipulate the market (unless it is subject to monopolistic behavior, or externalities, neither of which was the case here). Just mail everybody affected by the hurricane a check for $1000, and then let the price of gas be what it needs to be. Let the market operate efficiently, and don't try to use it as some kind of meals on wheels program.

That stuff isn't the result of the free market so much as the fact that we rely on the free market to address everybody's needs.

The free market is NEVER going to take care of a mentally retarded quadriplegic. That isn't a problem with the free market. The problem is with idiots who expect it to do so.

The solution is to just give everybody a basic income, or other social safety net. Leave the market alone. If people want to work for 5 cents an hour, let them. But, if they don't work they should still have food and shelter. Companies would quickly find that it is hard to hire people who are well-fed for the wages they offer the desperate.

The last Galaxy Nexus update was made available on July 24th, 2013. But, whatever, if you bought the phone in Oct 2012 (when it was last available for purchase) you'd have gotten updates for 9 months, or maybe a year if you want to argue that a phone that it was still supported until Oct 2013.

Oh, they're rather good at marketing and processing credit card payments too.

The whole point of a free market sale is that you're both doing each other a favor. You'd rather have a trip home than the money in your pocket, and I'd rather have the money in your pocket than the time/expense it takes me to give you a lift. It is a service industry even if it isn't charity.

How can a buyer choose to pay more if the government regulates the maximum cost of a ride?

Tips are just part of the price if they're negotiated in advance. If they aren't negotiated in advance then they have no impact on the availability of the service. Nobody is going to go out in a storm hoping that somebody is going to be nice and give them a big tip.

Tipping after a service is rendered really doesn't make that much sense economically unless you're a regular customer (in which case you're really just tipping way before the next service is rendered, which is why it works). Having payment based on performance certainly makes sense economically, but only if both parties are bound by the agreement.

And the Nexus 4 would still be under contract if you bought it on a 2 year contract on the last day that it was sold. Let's see if it gets the next update.

That said, Google has been getting better. The Nexus 4 is the longest-supported Nexus phone to date. The previous ones didn't get any updates after about 1.5 years from their first sale.

Not being able to afford something doesn't mean that there is a shortage.

And I'm not suggesting people that can't afford a cab should die in a blizzard. Free markets and socialism are orthogonal. You can have either with or without the other.

If you're going to die in a blizzard, then call the police. They won't charge you to respond, and if we're talking a really big issue then the national guard should be bussing people out of dodge.

There is also no need to have poor people in a free market. You can give people a basic income so that they can afford food, and then let the prices reflect scarcity, so if there is a big chicken shortage the poor people can just switch to eating hamburger. You don't have to keep the price of chicken cheap and then watch as every store runs out of it anyway.

I'm not suggesting that they're motivated by anything other than making a buck (though the reality is somewhere in-between - workers are motivated by more than money).

The thing is, I bet that even with the price caps Uber drove a whole lot more people home than the local police department did. I bet that if prices were higher they'd have driven more people home (after all, the goal of the algorithm is to charge the highest price possible while utilizing drivers 100%).

So, if you want to feel good then donate money to the police. If you want to get home, then offer to pay a driver whatever they feel the ride is worth.

I won't argue that governments created the cable monopolies, but network effects tend to create many others. What government action prevented anybody from buying an alternative OS pre-installed on their home PC without paying a fee to Microsoft in the process?

If you want to believe that monopolies are harmless you can do so. It really doesn't matter - corruption like the one in this article will ensure we never get rid of the government-sponsored monopolies let alone get rid of the ones I'd want to see go away.

Yup. If it is THAT important to protect the president's life, then he shouldn't be anywhere near a window or wall that isn't armored.

If this were literally a matter of life and death then the national guard should be herding people onto trucks to get them out of danger, and shooting looters in the street.

Since the national guard wasn't around to give people a lift, maybe we should offer additional compensation to the folks who take the risk of getting into an accident so that you don't have to.

What a surprise that during hurricane Sandy there were huge lines in NJ and it was impossible to buy gas there. Maybe if they allowed prices to float people would have reconsidered the importance of their trip, but anybody with a need to drive could pay the $20/gallon to drive, or at least easily obtain enough gas to drive to someplace where it was cheaper (you only need a few gallons to get to an area not impacted by the storm). Also, if prices were higher you'd see everybody with a tanker truck driving east to fill up and offering the gas for sale at a street stand, which would provide far more gas to the region.

Instead it worked a bit like the USSR. If you knew somebody you could go buy cheap gas from FEMA, and if not you either stood in line all day long, drove 150 miles yourself for gas, or went without.

Free market pricing is desirable BECAUSE it ensures that there aren't shortages. That doesn't mean that this is the primary motivation of the participants in a market.

When you buy a smartphone you're not doing it to reward some kid for studying hard to become an engineer, but that is the result of your actions all the same. The smart kid isn't building the phone so that you personally can have one, but that is the result of his actions all the same.

All the benefits of a free market tend to be side-effects, but they're benefits all the same.

What is the alternative, capping prices and watching everybody stay home, so that you're stuck freezing on the side of the street when nobody wants to go pick you up?