The government still eventually needs to tax money from its citizens in order to pay back the people who bought the war bonds.

Take that liberals! Justify your crazy behavior in this imaginary scenario I just completely made up!

True, there aren't that many airlines, but they're still clearly competing with each other on price and service. I can fly just about anywhere in the country for a few hundred bucks these days, which is a pretty good sign that things are working. It's also worth noting that Southwest is such a huge player exactly because it squeezes costs down so low and passes savings on to the consumer.

The cell phone market is similarly ologopolistic, but that hasn't prevented the few big competitors that exist from driving prices down and service quality up at a pretty impressive rate. Everybody hates them, but we all remember when talk time was rationed and text messages were $1 a piece. Now talk and text is unlimited and a gig of data costs less every year. We're even seeing the old "bend over and take it" contract model start to show cracks.

As long as they're legitimately competing on a level playing field, you only really need 2 sellers doing battle for customers to keep monopolistic assholery in check.

So what's the solution on the ISP side? Or a better question, who owns the pipes in your deregulated power and gas scheme, and is that entity in any way tied to or regulated by the government? In my neighborhood, Comcast owns the pipes and any deregulation scheme is going to have to deal with that problem.

In a perfect world, cities would all have conduit running underneath them and would simply lease conduit space to the highest bidders to run their cables. Rerun the auction ever few years to keep things fresh and let the market sort it out. Outcomes would be amazing. Unfortunately, a city with empty conduit ready for cables from many competitors is exactly what we don't have.

The important difference here is that airlines are a market with competition, so there's really no reason to think that regulation is likely to make things better. If one airline does a crappy job serving a particular route or customer set, another one is perfectly free to jump in and do a better job. In that sense, air travel is no different from shoes or cheeseburgers.

Broadband Internet is a tougher problem. In terms of infrastructure, it's hard for a region to have robust competition. It's not as extreme as, say, sewage (where it's basically impossible to have two competing sewage systems under a city), but it's closer to that model than to a healthy market. So you're stuck dealing with pain-in-the-ass monopolies that don't innovate and don't compete on price.

Why should they? Why should anyone? Telecommunications hardware is not free and does not maintain itself. Whichever companies/individuals use it more should be paying more.

That's fine. Charge more for more bandwidth. But don't charge different amounts for different types of content. I don't think "net neutrality" means "unlimited bits for everybody for $0" in the mind of any sensible preson.

Lobbying involves talking and bribery involves illegal money.

Half of the lobbying transaction is talking. The other half is listening because the person doing the talking is a good source of campaign money.

Also, there are more definitions of bribery than the legal definition used to describe the crime.

Exactly this. I want to keep Google, the company that knows everything about me and then some, totally separate from social media, a thing whose default beahvior seems to be to share whatever it knows about me with anybody I've ever met. Kept separate, both of those things have value. But let's be honest--Google has my email, records of most of my purchases, my web search history, and everything on my smart phone including GPS location stamps and call records. Why would I ever want to connect all that shit to a public data spew with constantly changing policies and behaviors? No good can come of it.

Unlike most other taxes, the energy tax does not reduce differences in disposable income, but it merely leaves them constant (when electricity use is equal).

The problem is that the things the rich give up to pay an additional flat tax are different from the things the poor give up. A flat tax of $1000 may cause a rich person to buy $1000 less in nice clothes and electronic toys, an average family to cancel a vacation, and a poor family to drop their health insurance. So the tax is flat in a dollar sense, but a much heavier burden on the poor in a standard of living sense.

They seem to have no real evidence for casaution, and so they just spew out correlations and hope most people wont notice.

A mechanism for causation + correlation is evidence of causation.

Interesting idea though could create situations where a potential licensee may come along and be faced with potentially bolstering a patent that could be free for them to use in a few months if they don't.

That's an issue that exists in all time-limited systems, though. It's currently hard to license a patent that will expire in a few months. The trick is setting the expiration time long enough that there's an incentive for the licensee to license rather than running down the clock but short enough that there's some urgency to get the damn thing to market.

Several related companies could easily license each other's patents in exchange for licensing eachother's patents just to keep them current.

This is a more interesting problem, but the first regulatory question should be, "So, Mr. Licensee, what product are you using that patent you licensed in?" If somebody tries to sue you over a patent they've been sitting on for 15 years, the first thing you ask is if the patent has been exercised enough to still be valid, and you check to see if the licensees have actually brought it to market in a meaningful way. If not, that's a strong argument that the patent should have been invalidated. It doesn't eliminate the need for courts to deal with the issue, but it does create more of a burden on the patent holder to create a track record of getting the ideas to market. If companies cross-license patents and bring real products to market in order to keep their patents active, I'd argue that it's a win as long as the functionality is actually there and not a sham.

I'd rather see the expiration for patents depend on whether they're actually being implemented or not. Coming up with a new idea is great, but only if something actually comes out of it. If you can't get somebody to license and build it in a reasonable number of years, all the patent is really doing is cluttering up the idea space for companies that are inventing things in-house with the actual intent of building them.

Right now, every time a company comes up with a cool new invention, they have to search through mountains of patents to see if somebody, somewhere has done it before and is just sitting on the patent. A system that puts a greater burden on inventors who bring things to market than on inventors who don't is not balanced correctly. Maintaining a patent monopoly should require continuous effort to put that idea to work in something useful.

Invading a country that doesn't like you if there's a military reason to do it is one thing. Trying to install a friendly government and hoping that everybody just rolls with it is another.

Given that the title of the article is, "Could Tech have stopped ISIS From Using Our Own Heavy Weapons Against Us?" it's a little bit rich to get upset when somebody poses another "what if" scenario. It's not like damn_registrar's suggestions are useless but all of the opinions on kill switches we "should have" added are pure gold for our current situation.

Is there any chance that you can spot the nonsense there?

I am starting to detect a whiff of nonsense, now that you mention it. Maybe it's the fact that you're conflating "not doing exactly what cold fjord would do" with "taking no action" or just total bullshit like this:

Refusing to capture and interrogate terrorists provides just as much information as capturing and interrogating them.

I must have missed the announcement that President Obama had decided to stop all capture and interrogation of terrorists. Or wait, did you really mean that there was a case when you disagreed with him on a particular policy about capturing and interrogating a certain set of people under certain circumstances? Because that would sound a lot more like a rational argument and a lot less like ridiculous hyperbole and demonization of people who don't agree with your policy preferences. But we can't have that.

Pentagon Set to Slash Military to Pre-World War II Levels

OK, so since this is what you posted in response to my "what should we be doing" question, I assume that you think that the best use of resources to fight small groups of well-hidden off-the-grid terrorists is to increase the size of our standing army (measured in "number of troops" and not some other metric), build more amphibious assault vehicles, keep the A-10, upgrade the F-18, buy an extra 20 littoral combat ships, etc. The implication being that without those sorts of tools, we're going to have a hard time fighting these guys. This is what I mean by "stupid policy reaction" to scary bad guys. Buying a bunch of big iron weapons and building up the size of the standing army to root out terrorists seems like one of the least efficient and most knee-jerk ways of spending money to stop terrorists.

A giant ass military is great if your goal is to destroy the war fighting infrastructure of an enemy nation or to convince the median citizen of that country that waging war against us is a bad idea. But a giant ass military has historically proved to be not a particularly great tool at convincing the tail members of the political distribution to stop fighting a guerrilla war. In fact, it also seems like it has historically not been a great tool even for fighting those remaining stragglers. Unless you're going to do it Roman style and starting exterminating citizens and sowing their fields with salt until the terrorists stop, I don't think that more combat ships and armored fighting vehicles are going to do us much good on this one.

DOD is great for the 1% of Americans involved with the military. Unfortunately that doesn't do much for the other 99%.

So your position is that even though we've known about plague as a weapon for centuries, and even though we saw it used in World War II by the Japanese, and even though we put tons of R&D money into germ warfare scenarios throughout the Cold War, the government never bothered to come up with any sort of mitigation plan for a bio attack on the US that did anything other than take care of the military? And now that we know about this Laptop of Doom, Obama is derelict in not correcting that colossal oversight? That's a multi-generational failure of epic proportions. Surely the only thing that will fix this is more boots on the ground.

There are plenty of groups associated with al Qaida and ISIS. The fact that one is doing that says nothing about what another has been able to do.

Indeed. And if only we had the budget to build a few more submarines and armored fighting vehicles, we might know so much more. Damn you Obama!