I think he's saying that a restaurant reviewer who goes into a burger joint and shits all over it in his review because they didn't have sushi is probably not adding much useful information to the review-o-sphere.

I don't like most childrens movies because I'm an adult and I find them childish. But if somebody was paying me to write informative reviews and I had to review a kids' movie, I wouldn't spend a lot of time bemoaning the simplistic plot line, limited charater development or overly bright color pallette. Complaining that the latest Disney Princess movie didn't have the same set of elements that made No Country for Old Men appealing sort of misses the point. It's not even sensible enough to be considered wrong.

As somebody living in one of the expensive tech commute areas, I feel ya on the expensive house thing, but let's be realistic. Telling people, "Sure, I make a lot of money, but after I spend it on expensive things that you can't have like a house in a nice neighborhood and a car to commute with, you and I have about the same amount of money," is a bit tone deaf. It's like eating a hearty dinner and then saying to the guy eating scraps, "See, my plate is empty too. Solidarity!"

Yes, the story of the heavily unionized car sales businesses turning the screws on the plucky non-union auto manufacturers certainly rings true to me.

Alas, in the USA, we vote for a candidate, NOT A PARTY!

And the best part about it is that once we're finished voting for those individual candidates, they go off to the legislature and join up with their parties and vote in lockstep anyway. Strict party discipline has kind of made the whole "I'm a trustworthy and wise leader with good ideas" schtick kind of irrelevant.

Most of everything that involves people happens in the cities.

It's also not so great for employers who have to weed through piles of trash applicants with shiny fake resumes in order to find people who can actually do the job. The cost of even a phone screening interview is nonzero.

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.