Why limit the supply? What goes wrong if there are too many taxis?

Does this nanny state have a nanny license, I wonder?

Does anybody do anything at their own risk any more?

I'm not saying the US's universities are better than those anywhere else. (They're not.) I'm saying they're not, as great-grandparent insinuated, bad.

Then why do so many foreigners come to the USA to study?

That certainly is a pathology, and I'm not going to defend it one bit. You do something risky with someone else's money that they gave you? You lose your money, and if you deceived them about what you were going to do, you go to jail for fraud.

I don't see why the hell we bailed out the banks -- there's no shortage of people who'd like to earn interest making loans. If Bank of America went bust someone else more responsible would take its place.

Politicians like narratives, not statistics. Solid statistics, especially if they don't support banning things or passing rules that make you look more important, don't tend to advance your career.

Demonstrate first that driving talking using a wireless headset is significantly more dangerous than other things which are legal (driving with kids in the car, say) and then we'll talk. Believe it or not, it is possible (and common) to talk on the phone while driving and not drive like a dick. It is also possible (and common) to drive like a dick without a cellphone.

What I'll do about it is live in a state where citizens tend to push back against abuse of authority by their government. Soap, ballot, jury, ammo; use the boxes in that order. (It got to that last one in Phoenix, where someone put a few rounds into an automated speed camera. There are no more speed cameras on the I-10 in Phoenix. I'd rather people use LIDAR jammers than bullets, but I condone the use of both if other options have been exhausted.)

People who are good at thinking clearly about statistics don't often find their way into the telling-other-people-what-to-do business, sadly.

What fraction of driving time do people spend on the phone? If people are on the phone 25% of the time (which seems reasonable, looking at folks on the Beltway) then this statistic is expected.

These safety trolls need to do a proper study: "what fraction of drivers who crash were on the phone" compared to "what fraction of drivers who didn't crash were on the phone". Talking with a headset on is less distracting than talking to someone in the passenger seat, as there is no other person to look at.

At the very least they should ban driving with an attractive lady in the car, by their logic. Or maybe they should stop banning things and instead get rid of speed traps and fix potholes, both things that make people slam on their brakes and swerve suddenly -- things that are real safety hazards.

Mine is in Evince, or in Okular on my laptop. Am I doing something wrong?

Some places do this already. There's a chain in Pennsylvania (and elsewhere) called Sheetz; they are gas stations + fast food places, and they have little touch screens. You type in what you want, you pay for it, someone makes it and gives it to you. It's very well done; the folks are friendly and the food not bad for what it is. Other places have little paper tickets: you write down what you want (ticking boxes for things like "no cheese") and give it to someone, who takes three seconds to clip it to a rail where the preparers will see it and make your food. Then you take your ticket and pay.

I see a lot of government-encouraged monopolies. Small players are trying to enter the transportation market by setting up bus services, and are getting hounded out of the market by the government. Uber and the like are fighting against the taxi cartels. New players in telecom are having to fight against old government-established monopolies.

Small players are doing just fine in many markets. There are small credit unions all over the place. I lived for years in Tucson on groceries bought from a local chain (which tended to stock either fresh produce or canned goods prepared by someone other than the big players), plus fruit sold by an old guy and his wife out of a rickety stand and a truck. I bought computer parts from a one-off shop, outdoor equipment from a one-off shop, got auto glasswork done by a garage run by Mexican immigrants (who were professional as hell), etc.

Some things are more efficiently done by big players. There are about seven companies in the world that make cameras (Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, Pentax, plus some boutique players like Leica and Hasselblad), because the engineering required is specialized and the equipment expensive. Not that many people make CPU's, because it's so hard to do. But even in the virtual duopoly of computer chips (AMD/Intel), I can pay about $100 for a fast-enough quad core CPU with an integrated GPU that performs very well. We live in a world where if you want something, someone will make it for you for a pretty fair price.

Consider that a middle-class person (wage $20/hour or $40k/year) can, by working ten hours, buy a handheld computer, and with three hours per month of labor, pay for a cellular connection that will let her access essentially any information known to humanity, or communicate with nearly anyone on the planet in realtime. It wasn't that long ago that my father only called his father on Sundays when long-distance rates were cheaper. Now I can have a video call in 720p with someone in Japan or Germany at the drop of a hat. We are doing pretty well.

The market system, overall, does a very good job at enriching folks -- and not just wealthy folks. Mexico has made huge gains in the last few decades by making stuff and selling it to folks who want it. Brazil was once a third-world country; now they make airplanes.

Do people sometimes game the system and get things through ways other than mutually beneficial trades? Sure. But that doesn't mean the system's broken.

Your hope, it seems, is that Snowden would receive a trial in which he would be acquitted because what he did was ultimately moral. I don't know if that sort of thing still happens, but it once did.

My ancestors arrived in this country in the 19th century and took a job with a railroad cutting wood for the boilers. None spoke English, and the railroad took advantage of this and didn't pay them. So they robbed a train, taking no money from the passengers and only what they were owed from the railroad. They were eventually caught and put on trial, where their attorney argued that they should be acquitted because, even though robbery is a crime, they were just trying to recover in the only way they had from a greater crime: that of cheating vulnerable immigrants, which he argued was completely un-American.

They were acquitted.

Would this sort of thing happen today? It's unlikely.

Because everyone, rich or poor, East or West, has wound up waiting on hold with Comcast Customer Service for an hour to get told for the Nth time to reboot their router.