Or, you could just walk up to somebody at a stoplight on in a parking lot and put a gun in their face. No need to set up an elaborate system with buying a prepaid credit card (assuming they even work with Uber), creating a fake email address, getting a burner smartphone and activating it, etc. etc.
Firefighting is ALSO not a natural monopoly. If it were, then there would have been a single firefighting company in every city, without any government intervention. The continued existence of multiple competing firefighting companies shows that it wasn't a natural monopoly. "Natural monopoly" and "service the government should provide" aren't synonyms.
That said, no point trying to have a conversation with an irrational ranter like you. Quite apart from your use of the term "retard."
By "largest information gate keeper in the modern world," who do you mean? Last I checked, Google wasn't blocking websites that feature the Confederate Battle Flag, nor was Apple deleting pictures of it from people's laptops or iPhones.
there is no competition in healthcare, it is a *natural monopoly* (look it up, retards).
You should probably take your own medicines, since "natural monopoly" doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. If it did, no city would have more than one hospital.
Uber can estimate before the ride, but the price you actually pay is based on how long it actually takes, and how far you actually travel. I've taken Uber several dozen times on the same trip (home to and from airport), and the fare has been between slightly and substantially different every time, depending on route taken and traffic.
Apples and oranges. People rob taxi drivers because you can just get into the taxi, and they carry cash. Uber drivers are picking up people who have registered with Uber and provided a valid credit card. Now, sure, you could register, give a throwaway email address, create, fund, and provide a throwaway credit card, and then try to rob an Uber driver who might not have a single dollar on them. That implies a criminal who at the same time (a) engages in some reasonably sophisticated planning, and (b) decides to go after a very low-yield target.
"I like the convenience of knowing how much my ride will cost beforehand."
How does this work? Every place I've used Uber, it's been like a taxi, the fare is a combination of distance and time.
The Rainbow flag "offends" you? Once LGBT groups go beyond their current "agenda" calling for crazy things like equal rights, and start a 150+ year long tradition of murder, rape, and oppression of straight people, then your "offense" at the Rainbow flag will be roughly as justified as the "offense" the Confederate Battle Flag causes.
Yes, Dylann Roof is actually a secret agent of the Illuminati, and allied with the Trilateral Commission. Those nine people he murdered because of their race aren't actually dead, they're actually living on a very nice farm, upstate. They like the place, and their neighbors, the people who "died" on Flight 93, have brought over several nice casseroles to welcome them to the area.
THAT outrage should have been over 15 years ago, when the flag was moved from over the capitol building (where it was certainly inappropriate as a symbol of a defeated rebellion) to a war memorial honoring the dead of that state who fought on the side of the rebellion.
By that logic, the Neue Wache (closest thing Germany has to a memorial to its WWII dead) should have a Swastika banner flying above it.
Countless Wehrmacht soldiers fought and died honorably in WWII. That doesn't change the fact that the cause for which they fought (whether or not they truly believed in it) was reprehensible and depraved. We can remember soldiers who died fighting for the Confederacy without in any way honoring or respecting the cause for which they fought.
Out of curiosity, what makes you believe that the TPP would be in any way a violation of the Constitution?
This is a free speech issue. If the Confederate Battle Flag is now a symbol of racism and must be banned, what about the gray soldier's uniform? Do we ban that, too? How about the General Lee, it's got a big flag on the roof? How about the Civil War computer games, ban those, too? Let's go a bit further with this: What about the Swastika? How about the NAZI flag? Stormtrooper uniforms? The German SS ones, not the Star Wars ones. Do I own or want to own any of these items? No. But if a museum wants to display these items, I think it should be allowed to, so long as we are not glorifying the murder of innocent lives. As for the Civil War, I'd argue that we need not to forget it, or we might end up repeating it.
Don't worry, people get to keep their SS uniforms, they can display them on the nice straw man you built.
Nobody is saying that museums wouldn't be able to display Confederate items, or that private collectors wouldn't be able to keep, own, display, wear, etc. them. Nobody's saying that bigots won't be able to wrap themselves in the "glory" of the Confederate Battle Flag. It's just private companies deciding they don't want to sell those flags to them.
All Apple, eBay, Amazon, etc. are saying is that, as private businesses, they don't want to be selling products that are considered to glorify the viciousness of the Confederacy, and that have been used historically as symbols by violent bigots.
While to many, the Confederate Flag represents states rights to have laws allowing slavery, and to force other territories to accept it against the wishes of their citizens, Southern heritage of owning slaves, the right to rebel (against a legitimately elected government which wouldn't commit to force the entire country, and any new territories, to fully support the owning of slaves),
FTFY.
Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election, His name was not even on the ballot in 10 states. There were only 33 states at the time so close to 1/3 of the states did not have him on the ballot and he still won. That was the key that started the whole civil war! An election that even today would cause riots, to have a candidate win when he was not even on the ballot in 1/3 of the states!
The 10 states where Lincoln wasn't on the ballot combined to make up 543k votes in the election. John Breckenridge was the candidate of the Southern Democrats, who had split from the main Democratic party because the larger party wouldn't pass a resolution explicitly supporting the expansion of slavery into new territories even though the residents of that territory voted against it. Breckenridge wasn't on the ballot in four states. Combined, those states cast 1.3 million ballots. So, if we're using "not being on the ballot" as a proxy for "not legitimate," the Southern Democrats were far less legitimate than Lincoln.
Were there other issues that divided the South and North in 1860? Certainly. Would the states that made up the Confederacy have attempted to secede if they had had agricultural economics based on non-slave labor? No way. They seceded because they thought it the only way to, over time, protect their "right" to own other human beings as property.
1. "If the original purchaser sold the gun but didn't keep a record of who they sold it to their in hot water too." No, they're not, since they're not required (in most states) to do a background check or keep any records of a private party sale.
2. While the 4473 records in theory allow for tracing, the way the system is set up makes it both incredibly manual (looking at scanned paper records, in many cases), and is explicitly prohibited from being used to actually track the sources of more than one gun at a time. So, while there's no technical barrier to doing this, ATF is prohibited by law from being able to say "1% of guns sold last year were recovered at crime scenes, but 38% of the guns sold by Joe's Guns were recovered at crime scenes, we need to take a close look at Joe's Guns, since there's something going on there."
The first problem could be easily solved by removing the private sale loophole for background checks, or at least require submission of a scan of the buyer's ID, along with a photo of the buyer. Could be done in an app, would take all of two minutes to do. Zero inconvenience for legit gun owners.
The second problem could also be easily solved, by ending the practice of forcing the ATF to delete the 4473 data, allowing for it to be obtained instantly, and allowing law enforcement to use the data to determine patterns that will allow law enforcement to target the small percentage of dealers who present the biggest problem.
egrep -n '^[a-z].*\(' $ | sort -t':' +2.0
