And I've stated clearly why.

I guess you've gone about as far as you're will to go for now. Till next time.

First, note you are saying that the ban didn't actually improve China's fundamental problem. I've been saying that all along.

And I already outlined a strategy of legalization and creation of a local opium industry that didn't require China to be militarily superior to the UK.

I don't imply that an entirely free market is the goal. I just point out that the problem here has nothing to do with the market, regulated or not. Instead, it has everything to do with the regulators.

I'm all for the cleaving. But instead, there seem to be people obsessed over imaginary free markets rather than stunted real ones. Fixing the latter will do more to cleave corporate and political power, since it'll provide non-political alternatives to gaming the political system.

The Kansas ISP market also didn't cure my acne or upgrade my basement-dwelling lifestyle. Use the right tool for the right job.

I'll just note that if they aren't allowed to fuck with you, moral pretext or not, then that constraint is far more effective than obligation. And if they don't exist at all, then that's even more effective than an effective constraint.

The Enron crisis was not in itself significant. A business committed fraud and it fell. By mentioning California, you indicate you are actually speaking of the California electricity crisis which was far more than just a out of control business. There the California state government forced the three private electricity utilities to lose huge sums of money in a rigged market (where the utilities were forced to buy very expensive power well above the price that they were selling to their customers) while providing hugely profitable opportunities to Enron and other electricity traders.

It was a straightforward transfer of wealth from the private utilities to certain generators and electricity traders by the California government. This only stopped when the second of the three electricity utilities was about to go bankrupt. It wasn't a deregulated environment else California would not have been able to force the utilities to make such adverse and destructive choices.

The California electricity crisis is a demonstration that you can screw up deregulation in a really bad way. But it's not a demonstration that deregulation is inherently bad or problematic.

And of course, this pathetic attempt at deregulation happened in California. Maybe we ought to consider that aspect of things.

Someone developing for the web platform can use any language he likes as long as it compile to JavaScript. Much of the JS actually running in browsers was generated from one sort of framework or another.

I've heard rumors that software exists that takes code written in one language and transforms it, or "compiles" it if you will, into another language. But maybe that's just an unworkable academic idea.

I'd agree that's normal. What's more, this "passionate" is without a doubt a code for "exploitable".

Here's why: for various cultural reasons, self-taught geeks who code from the love of coding are a far higher percentage of American-born coders, than of e.g. India or China, simply because "software developer" has a far higher social status (and relative pay) in other countries, such that parents push their children to become developers there in the way that some American children are pushed to become doctors or lawyers. Therefore, if you actually filtered on "loves to code" instead of "good at coding", you'd be illegally discriminating against a protected class, in a way that's not-at-all subtle to anyone who spends time on hiring in the field.

The goal of this "passionate" business isn't crypto-racism (it would be too obvious, if nothing else), but simply trying to find people who are not only good, but willing to work far longer than a professional work week at management insistence, and those qualities can be found in young and/or desperate people from anywhere.

While this case does sound particularly bad—I would say 50 cents is on the steep side for a 17-mile stretch of toll road, much less $6—it still amazes me how anyone could expect a toll road to compete on a level playing field with tax-funded roads. If you choose to take the toll road, you have to pay the tolls plus the fuel taxes and other costs associated with the public roads, and yet none of that goes to fund the construction or maintenance of the toll road.

If the public roads were funded with precise user fees, charged to each user in proportion to how much they used the roads, then toll roads might have a chance. You would have a choice between paying for the privately-operated toll road or the public road. As it stands, the only way a toll road can work is if there is no reasonable route via public roads to the same destinations—and even if that is the case when the road is built, the circumstances can always change.

The same problem can exist with municipal Internet service. In general I have no problem with community-driven Internet providers, but I do have a problem with municipalities funding such ventures out of tax receipts or tax-backed municipal bonds, or favoring their own system with special permits or the like which other providers don't have access to. I would prefer a strict division between the organization providing the Internet service (on a self-funded basis) and the municipality setting the terms and conditions which any provider must meet, with a fair bidding process open to all.

Not students: graduates.

Here's one dead simple way it could be true: every student at the end of the course gets a job interview from Google/Adobe/etc in some sort of pool. Doing well in the interview is a requirement for graduating. Thus, trivially, almost all graduates will get job offers. (Most of the big firms are just looking for the smartest few% who have any kind of coding ability at all to work with, so if you're smart enough going in, a few months of full-time training would work for you.)

No clue what's really going on there, but it's not surprising if good vocational training leads to a high placement rate (still not believing the 99% without a pre-established deal with the companies, but that's not all that far-fetched).

I agree with you completely for easy problems. In fact, that's a good definition of an easy problem: one for which any expert knows the answer, and every expert gives the same answer, and it's just a matter of the size of the check needed to get the work done. But every state and city will get the same answers from their local experts for such problems, no?

Hard problems are different. They're not "well solved". Experts argue about what the best answer is, and often insist that those on the other side aren't actually experts at all - there's not even agreement as to who the experts are. Doesn't that sound like all the interesting problems in modern politics?

Plus there are issues that are simply geographic in nature. What's the right amount of earthquake hardening to pass code? What's the highest winds a building should survive to pass code? How important is it to conserve water, and separately to limit water in storm sewers?

Compared to what? Certainly there are worse governments. But the more powerful the government, the more corruption matters. This nation was founded on the idea that government shouldn't grow too powerful because we can't trust it. And corruption doesn't have to take the form of a glowing eye atop a tower - or even money pocketed by the boss - corruption simply means that projects don't get completed satisfactorily. Panama's government tried to maintain the Panama Canal with local companies and local supervision, and failed; the problem wasn't that hard, but there was too much corruption to get the job done. America's government tried to create a website to allow people to shop for health insurance, and failed; the problem wasn't that hard, but there was too much corruption to get the job done.

Small organizations are more efficient than large at many tasks, that's hardly controversial. Some tasks can only be done by large organizations, or only done optimally. Solving each problem with a smaller organization where that works for that problem is a better plan than throwing one giant blob at everything.

I think for most problems, the important role for a central authority is to provide standards. To incorporate "lessons learned" wherever experts do agree that problems have been well solved, and insist on that as a minimum. Do you need the government to grow all the food, or does the FDA work well enough for the government's role? Do you need all electrical work done by the government, or does the national electric code suffice?

Ohh, you're one of those. Well, glad you had your Two Minutes Hate against Trotsky, err, Goldstein, err, right wing extremists, and can go back to obeying those causing the problems.