If the state of California was honest with its residents, it would tell you that they want two bites at this delicious tax apple. Once on the "sale" of the phone (which isn't..) and then each month for taxes based on your invoiced service fees, which include Verizon's margin to pay for the "free" phone.
But thats no surprise to me. CA has some of the highest taxes at all levels, and they still can't fund a government.
Well.. firstly.. I didn't assume you suggested something to spend the money on. Nor did I assume, or state, that you had all the solutions.
You said "we do what we can"
If we spend money doing what we can and didn't need to
I wouldn't have thought that I would need to explain the downsides of wasteful spending, or as you so eloquently called it spending "more money than we had to"
Yeah.. I guess. If car insurance cost billions of dollars a day and there was a good chance that the insurance carrier wouldn't pay out in the event of an accident. (Oh wait, the second part is true)
Retooling the entire planet's infrastructure won't be cheap, isn't guaranteed to prevent a catastrophe (and a catastrophe isn't even guaranteed to occur), and while we only "spent more money that we had to" we're consuming funds and resources that could've been applied to other human endeavors. Like health care, so people don't die of disease. Or energy efficiency so that people who currently can't afford electrical infrastructure may be able to afford power so that they don't freeze to death in winter or heat stroke in summer. Or maybe we spend some money on cleaning up manufacturing processes (or just spending it on proper post-manufacture disposal of waste) so that they don't require so many nasty toxic chemicals which get dumped into waterways and seep into aquifers, poisoning people.
But yeah, you're right. Its only money.
They're called Blackberries. And the job that pays for your car, home, and pizza will give you one.
Not all that interesting.. each side kills the extreme, stupid ideas of the other (they're both full of 'em) and what we're left with is a least shitty, won't-make-anybody-happy medium. That's a republic at work.
Thats because a century or so ago it was very valuable to have currency that wasn't easy to fake, didn't grow on trees, and was easy to exchange in many different countries.
These days, those qualities aren't so much valuable. There are other ways to make currency that is difficult to fake, aren't easy to come by, and easily exchanged in other countries. Gold is still valuable because it has acquired new uses even as its old uses disappeared.
The presence of a government does not in itself limit the freedom of a market, especially if the market wouldn't exist without the government.
All governments limit the freedom of markets. Always. They need not limit all markets, and indeed the US government has done a wonderfully expensive job of not limiting the black market for drugs, but the very existence of a government limits some market.
A government has a monopoly on making laws. That is an extremely limited market. And there is no real competition. I can only change governments by uprooting my whole life, which is pretty much the opposite of changing soft drinks or PC vendors, and it is bloody expensive. Not to mention that your new government is only going to be marginally less shitty than the old one. The marginal cost required to obtain marginal benefits (pun intended) is insane.
Then, governments generally have a monopoly on enforcing those laws. If they can't enforce the laws they pass, they're don't really exist as a government. Enforcement of laws requires even more resources than creating laws. So.. governments must tax you in order to provide this service. I suppose they could collect an at-least-cost fee for doing their job, but that would create all kinds of incentive for corruption. So either they tax you to provide the monopoly service (market distortion x2) or they create a corrupted monopoly service (market distortion x2).
We also don't know the costs of not doing it.
Say.. we don't develop an alternative energy source to provide baseload power. Or that can be effectively used in vehicles. Or, at least, we don't develop it in a timely fashion. In those situations not using sun shades could be a catastrophically bad choice that kills humankind.
Or say we do it, and the climate changes in such a way that even most of the deserts become breadbaskets. Not all unintended or unexpected consequences are bad.
Any time you face a decision of this complex and grand a scale, there will be unexpected, unintended consequences. Regardless of the choice you make. Arguing for not doing something because of those unintended consequences is self defeating. Anyone could argue right back that not doing has unintended consequences and thus we shouldn't go along with the not doers.
The AH is a MAJOR issue. Player-player exchanges are really important to facilitate in MMOs. FFXI had one of the better ones. Although, still distant second to the EVE market. But they had one, and it was pretty good. How the hell can they at all justify shipping without one now?
There could be great content waiting for you, but if you can't find the gear to help you get ready for it then what good is it? If you have to offload your junk to the NPC vendors at their depressed prices so you have to farm 3x the drops to afford the gear you need, what good is that great content just waiting out of reach? None.
At the very least there should be no retainers you interact with individually to buy. Just show up at the bazaar and interact with an object (or.. just have some in-town menu, preferably) that opens a window with all items available for sale. Filterable by categories, searchable. If you're selling, drop your stuff off with your retainer, and it shows up in that available list. It should also allow for putting out a purchase order, instead of just the sell orders.
And lastly.. bad UI is bad UI. It may not be literally unusable, but it can be ridiculously more painful than it needs to be which is almost the same thing. It is hardly like Square has no idea what good UI is. They have games with really sensible UI. But what they don't have is consistently good UI, and I can't figure that out. Its almost like they strive to discard the bits that work every time they develop a game.
Either of those issues (AH, needlessly terrible UI design) would be enough to kill my interest. I don't care how great the content may be.. without a worthwhile player economy, its just even more grind to get to that great content. Without a reasonable UI, it isn't fun to get to that great content.
No.. but law enforcement that claim they are law enforcement while they're wiring your vehicle aren't really effective. They've just told you to go have that shit ripped off and kicked into a water treatment plant's holding tank or something.
If you're looking at them through the sights of a firearm, you had better be justified in using lethal force. Because if you are not, you're already guilty of another crime.
Just because lethal force is legally justified does not mean that the defender must shoot. But if you present a firearm when it isn't justified, you got some splainin to do.
You may have a hard time with it, but there are relatively few jurisdictions (actually.. none that I'm aware of, although that doesn't mean there are none) that require verbal warnings when lethal force is justified. For much the same reason that they don't require "wounding shots" or other such nonsense that does nothing but make bad situations worse.
If I were a mutant, and the non-mutants were out for blood, I'd be hard pressed to side against Magneto..
On the other hand, Xavier has some seriously smoking mutants working for him.
Tough choice..
Exactly what would condoms solve?
Its called living with reality, instead of say.. confusing it with the fiction that humans don't need sex. Or the fiction that all people with HIV/AIDS know they have it. Go ahead. Tell someone they just can never again have sex. Watch their face fill with joy. Wait for it.. Yeah. Thats why abstinence works so well..
As for what problems they solve.. well.. the same problems they solve in the industrialized world. Fewer unwanted pregnancies, lowered disease transmission. But yeah.. what good could that do for a populace more prone to starvation and STD.
40 grains of powder... 7.62? out of an evil black rifle?
Force needed to accelerate 2.2lbs of cookies = 1 Fig-newton to 1 meter per second
