I'm not claiming that the way the economy of the US is managed is good. It's not. It's massively mismanaged. I'm just saying that backing it against a dense yellow metal alone makes no sense versus backing it against all assets. Yes, actually figuring out the worth of all that stuff is a difficult, probably intractable problem. Of course, the same thing is true of gold, which has little rational basis for its value. The fact is, all money is just a shared fiction that we take part in to make trade easier, even the stuff backed by a vault full of dense yellow metal.

Well, as long as it's not blood-thirst and only soulless, cold-hearted pragmatism.

Otherwise impossible... except by death. Got it. Glad you've really thought this through.

Got it. You live in happy fantasyland and think that your imaginary picture of the real world is actually how it works. Chalk one up for ignorance and naiveté.

Optimally? You can't think of any better outcome than this? To be sure, I'm amazed that New York City cops didn't manage to shoot bystanders on this one but, for all that you seem to think his life had negative worth, a human being did die.

That article pretty much does say that the plans are very similar at their core, just that the heritage foundation plan had a bunch of other details to it that would have been much worse that the ACA. Basically, the ACA is bad, but it could have been worse. It could have been better, as well.

The US government still keeps gold at Fort Knox. There's about 1/4 as much gold in the vault there now as there was at its peak. At modern gold prices and in modern dollars the largest quantity of gold ever stored there would have been worth about $840 billion dollars. That's less than a quarter of what the government spends in a year. It's 5.35% of the GDP. It's less than $2700 per person. And that's going by current gold prices, which would take a major dive if anyone ever actually tried to sell even 10% of it. Gold by itself, or even in combination with a few other precious metals just doesn't make any sense as the basis for a currency. It just sits there doing absolutely nothing in a vault where no-one even gets to look at it (and therefore verify its existence) except for a few select people. I've always found it hilarious that people declare non-gold backed currencies "fiat money" when you consider the massive amount of government fiat required to actually have a gold-backed currency in the first place. As another poster pointed out, the actual assets that back the currency are all the assets the country has. The other assets possessed by the US absolutely dwarf the relatively paltry amount of gold.

Neutrinos? Surely you mean neutrons. Has anyone on Earth ever even conceived of a realistic man-made device that could produce enough neutrinos that be dangerous to a human being?

Why even bother breaking in. Traditional POTS service generally has an easy to break into box on the outside of the house. Let's also not forget that pretty much everyone with home telephone service now uses convenient wireless DECT 6.0 handsets that are also convenentily completely insecure (they have encryption, but it's already been completely broken).

I think I finally understand what you're trying to say here, although I'm not sure you understand it. I think you're talking about how Netflix, in response to Comcast's complaints that Netflix was using their network as it is meant to be used, proposed local cachiing at various physical locations, connected to Comcasts network(s). And, since that would greatly diminish the supposed horrible network load that Comcast was complaining about, Netflix didn't think they owed Comcast anything to address Comcast's complaints. But that was just a proposed solution. They didn't send out an army of linemine to forcibly wire themselves into Comcast networks the way your posts seem to imply.

"Unreasonable" probably wasn't strong enough a word. And it certainly is a civil rights issue in the sense that many of the "drug war" standard policies are complete violations of civil rights. Civil forfeiture, for example.

I was actually going to post replying to the GP that, while the drug war policies are unreasonable in many ways, it's not really a civil rights issue. Then I read your post with its de-humanizing of drug users (well, some drug users since I'm sure you don't have an issue with caffeine users and alcohol drinkers) and rabid, vitreolic response to someone defending them from persecution... To make a long story short, thanks to you, I'm reconsidering the GP's position.

A kickback is taking money that you control, but don't own, paying it out to a third party, who funnels some of it back to you. So that is a form of embezzlement.

Ok. That one definitely calls for:

Sure, if it's a connection with really low bandwidth to begin with. The kind of broadband connection that _should_ be typical in homes should be capable of, in the realm of video, matching a truck full of discs for all practical purposes. Then there's latency.

I've heard that supposedly the humans were actually supposed to be part of a giant computer, actually running the matrix and functioning as a data center for the AIs to live on in earlier versions of the story, but they changed it to batteries because it was too deep an idea for most people to understand. That may be mythical, of course. I've never understood why they didn't just make it a three laws situation (our programming forbids us to kill off humanity, but we can work around it and stuff you all in tubes and give you simulated lives) or even sentimentality on the part of the AIs with the Matrix basically being a national park with the Agents as park rangers who euthenize any dangerous animals.